Solaris (13 page)

Concealed at first beneath the ocean surface, a large flattened
disc appears, ragged, with a tar-like coating. After a few hours,
it begins to separate into flat sheets which rise slowly. The
observer now becomes a spectator at what looks like a fight to the
death, as massed ranks of waves converge from all directions like
contorted, fleshy mouths which snap greedily around the tattered,
fluttering leaf, then plunge into the depths. As each ring of waves
breaks and sinks, the fall of this mass of hundreds of thousands of
tons is accompanied for an instant by a viscous rumbling, an
immense thunderclap. The tarry leaf is overwhelmed, battered and
torn apart; with every fresh assault, circular fragments scatter
and drift like feebly fluttering wings below the ocean surface.
They bunch into pear-shaped clusters or long strings, merge and
rise again, and drag with them an undertow of coagulated shreds of
the base of the primal disc. The encircling waves continue to break
around the steadily expanding crater. This phenomenon may persist
for a day or linger on for a month, and sometimes there are no
further developments. The conscientious Giese dubbed this first
variation a 'stillbirth,' convinced that each of these upheavals
aspired towards an ultimate condition, the 'major mimoid,' like a
polyp colony (only covering an area greater than a town) of pale
outcroppings with the faculty of imitating foreign bodies. Uyvens,
on the other hand, saw this final stage as constituting a
degeneration or necrosis: according to him, the appearance of the
'copies' corresponded to a localized dissipation of the life
energies of the ocean, which was no longer in control of the
original forms it created.

Giese would not abandon his account of the various phases of the
process as a sustained progression towards perfection, with a
conviction which is particularly surprising coming from a man of
such a moderate, cautious turn of mind in advancing the most
trivial hypothesis on the other creations of the ocean. Normally he
had all the boldness of an ant crawling up a glacier.

Viewed from above, the mimoid resembles a town, an illusion
produced by our compulsion to superimpose analogies with what we
know. When the sky is clear, a shimmering heat-haze covers the
pliant structures of the clustered polyps surmounted by membranous
palisades. The first cloud passing overhead wakens the mimoid. All
the outcrops suddenly sprout new shoots, then the mass of polyps
ejects a thick tegument which dilates, puffs out, changes color and
in the space of a few minutes has produced an astonishing imitation
of the volutes of a cloud. The enormous 'object' casts a reddish
shadow over the mimoid, whose peaks ripple and bend together,
always in the opposite direction to the movement of the real cloud.
I imagine that Giese would have been ready to give his right hand
to discover what made the mimoids behave in this way, but these
'isolated' productions are nothing in comparison to the frantic
activity the mimoid displays when 'stimulated' by objects of human
origin.

The reproduction process embraces every object inside a radius
of eight or nine miles. Usually the facsimile is an enlargement of
the original, whose forms are sometimes only roughly copied. The
reproduction of machines, in particular, elicits simplifications
that might be considered grotesque—practically caricatures.
The copy is always modelled in the same colorless tegument, which
hovers above the outcrops, linked to its base by flimsy umbilical
cords; it slides, creeps, curls back on itself, shrinks or swells
and finally assumes the most complicated forms. An aircraft, a net
or a pole are all reproduced at the same speed. The mimoid is not
stimulated by human beings themselves, and in fact it does not
react to any living matter, and has never copied, for example, the
plants imported for experimental purposes. On the other hand, it
will readily reproduce a puppet or a doll, a carving of a dog, or a
tree sculpted in any material.

The observer must bear in mind that the 'obedience' of the
mimoid does not constitute evidence of cooperation, since it is not
consistent. The most highly evolved mimoid has its off-days, when
it 'lives' in slow-motion, or its pulsation weakens. (This
pulsation is invisible to the naked eye, and was only discovered
after close examination of rapid-motion film of the mimoid, which
revealed that each 'beat' took two hours.)

During these 'off-days,' it is easy to explore the mimoid,
especially if it is old, for the base anchored in the ocean, like
the protuberances growing out of it, is relatively solid, and
provides a firm footing for a man. It is equally possible to remain
inside the mimoid during periods of activity, except that
visibility is close to nil because of the whitish colloidal dust
continually emitted through tears in the tegument above. In any
case, at close range it is impossible to distinguish what forms the
tegument is assuming, on account of their vast size—the
smallest 'copy' is the size of a mountain. In addition, a thick
layer of colloidal snow quickly covers the base of the mimoid: this
spongy carpet takes several hours to solidify (the 'frozen' crust
will take the weight of a man, though its composition is much
lighter than pumice stone). The problem is that without special
equipment there is a risk of being lost in the maze of tangled
structures and crevasses, sometimes reminiscent of jumbled
colonnades, sometimes of petrified geysers. Even in daylight it is
easy to lose one's direction, for the sun's rays cannot pierce the
white ceiling ejected into the atmosphere by the 'imitative
explosions.'

On gala days (for the scientist as well as for the mimoid), an
unforgettable spectacle develops as the mimoid goes into
hyperproduction and performs wild flights of fancy. It plays
variations on the theme of a given object and embroiders 'formal
extensions' that amuse it for hours on end, to the delight of the
non-figurative artist and the despair of the scientist, who is at a
loss to grasp any common theme in the performance. The mimoid can
produce 'primitive' simplifications, but is just as likely to
indulge in 'baroque' deviations, paroxysms of extravagant
brilliance. Old mimoids tend to manufacture extremely comic forms.
Looking at the photographs, I have never been moved to laughter;
the riddle they set is too disquieting to be funny.

During the early years of exploration, the scientists literally
threw themselves upon the mimoids, which were spoken of as open
windows on the ocean and the best opportunity to establish the
hoped-for contact between the two civilizations. They were soon
forced to admit that there was not the slightest prospect of
communication, and that the entire process began and ended with the
reproduction of forms. The mimoids were a dead end.

Giving way to the temptations of a latent anthropomorphism or
zoomorphism, there were many schools of thought which saw various
other oceanic formations as 'sensory organs,' even as 'limbs,'
which was how experts like Maartens and Ekkonai classified Giese's
'vertebrids' and 'agilus' for a time. Anyone who is rash enough to
see protuberances that reach as far as two miles into the
atmosphere as limbs, might just as well claim that earthquakes are
the gymnastics of the Earth's crust!

Three hundred chapters of Giese catalogue the standard
formations which occur on the surface of the living ocean and which
can be seen in dozens, even hundreds, in the course of any day. The
symmetriads—to continue using the terminology and definitions
of the Giese school—are the least 'human' formations, which
is to say that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything on
Earth. By the time, the symmetriads were being investigated, it was
already clear that the ocean was not aggressive, and that its
plasmatic eddies would not swallow any but the most foolhardy
explorer (of course I am not including accidents resulting from
mechanical failures). It is possible to fly in complete safety from
one part to another of the cylindrical body of an extensor, or of
the vertebrids, Jacob's ladders oscillating among the clouds: the
plasma retreats at the speed of sound in the planet's atmosphere to
make way for any foreign body. Deep funnels will open even beneath
the surface of the ocean (at a prodigious expenditure of energy,
calculated by Scriabin at around 10^19 ergs). Nevertheless the
first venture into the interior of a symmetriad was undertaken with
the utmost caution and discipline, and involved a host of what
turned out to be unnecessary safety measures. Every schoolboy on
Earth knows of these pioneers.

It is not their nightmare appearance that makes the gigantic
symmetriad formations dangerous, but the total instability and
capriciousness of their structure, in which even the laws of
physics do not hold. The theory that the living ocean is endowed
with intelligence has found its firmest adherents among those
scientists who have ventured into their unpredictable depths.

The birth of a symmetriad comes like a sudden eruption. About an
hour beforehand, an area of tens of square miles of ocean vitrifies
and begins to shine. It remains fluid, and there is no alteration
in the rhythm of the waves. Occasionally the phenomenon of
vitrification occurs in the neighbourhood of the funnel left by an
agilus. The gleaming sheath of the ocean heaves upwards to form a
vast ball that reflects sky, sun, clouds and the entire horizon in
a medley of changing, variegated images. Diffracted light creates a
kaleidoscopic play of color.

The effects of light on a symmetriad are especially striking
during the blue day and the red sunset. The planet appears to be
giving birth to a twin that increases in volume from one moment to
the next. The immense flaming globe has scarcely reached its
maximum expansion above the ocean when it bursts at the summit and
cracks vertically. It is not breaking up; this is the second phase,
which goes under the clumsy name of the 'floral calyx phase' and
lasts only a few seconds. The membranous arches soaring into the
sky now fold inwards and merge to produce a thick-set trunk
enclosing a scene of teeming activity. At the center of the trunk,
which was explored for the first time by the seventy-man Hamalei
expedition, a process of polycrystallization on a giant scale
erects an axis commonly referred to as the 'backbone,' a term which
I consider ill-chosen. The mind-bending architecture of this
central pillar is held in place by vertical shafts of a gelatinous,
almost liquid consistency, constantly gushing upwards out of wide
crevasses. Meanwhile, the entire trunk is surrounded by a belt of
snow foam, seething with great bubbles of gas, and the whole
process is accompanied by a perpetual dull roar of sound. From the
center towards the periphery, powerful buttresses spin out and are
coated with streams of ductile matter rising out of the ocean
depths Simultaneously the gelatinous geysers are converted into
mobile columns that proceed to extrude tendrils that reach out in
clusters towards points rigorously predetermined by the over-all
dynamics of the entire structure: they call to mind the gills of an
embryo, except that they are revolving at fantastic speed and ooze
trickles of pinkish 'blood' and a dark green secretion.

The symmetriad now begins to display its most exotic
characteristic—the property of 'illustrating,' sometimes
contradicting, various laws of physics. (Bear in mind that no two
symmetriads are alike, and that the geometry of each one is a
unique 'invention' of the living ocean.) The interior of the
symmetriad becomes a factory for the production of 'monumental
machines,' as these constructs are sometimes called, although they
resemble no machine which it is within the power of mankind to
build: the designation is applied because all this activity has
finite ends, and is therefore in some sense 'mechanical.'

When the geysers of oceanic matter have solidified into pillars
or into three-dimensional networks of galleries and passages, and
the 'membranes' are set into an inextricable pattern of storeys,
panels and vaults, the symmetriad justifies its name, for the
entire structure is divided into two segments, each mirroring the
other to the most infinitesimal detail.

After twenty or thirty minutes, when the axis may have tilted as
much as eight to ten degrees from the horizontal, the giant begins
slowly to subside. (Symmetriads vary in size, but as the base
begins to submerge even the smallest reach a height of half a mile,
and are visible from miles away.) At last, the structure stabilizes
itself, and the partly submerged symmetriad ceases its activity. It
is now possible to explore it in complete safety by making an entry
near the summit, through one of the many syphons which emerge from
the dome. The completed symmetriad represents a spatial analogue of
some transcendental equation.

It is a commonplace that any equation can be expressed in the
figurative language of non-Euclidean geometry and represented in
three dimensions. This interpretation relates the symmetriad to
Lobachevsky's cones and Riemann's negative curves, although its
unimaginable complexity makes the relationship highly tenuous. The
eventual form occupies an area of several cubic miles and extends
far beyond our whole system of mathematics. In addition, this
extension is four-dimensional, for the fundamental terms of the
equations use a temporal symbolism expressed in the internal
changes over a given period.

It would be only natural, clearly, to suppose that the
symmetriad is a 'computer' of the living ocean, performing
calculations for a purpose that we are not able to grasp. This was
Fremont's theory, now generally discounted. The hypothesis was a
tempting one, but it proved impossible to sustain the concept that
the living ocean examined problems of matter, the cosmos and
existence through the medium of titanic eruptions, in which every
particle had an indispensable function as a controlled element in
an analytical system of infinite purity. In fact, numerous
phenomena contradict this over-simplified (some say childishly
naïve) concept.