Solaris (19 page)

Misplaced among the thick volumes of the Annual, I discovered a
small calf-bound book, and scanned its scuffed, worn cover for a
moment. It was Muntius's
Introduction to
Solaristics
, published many years before. I had read it in a
single night, after Gibarian had smilingly lent me his personal
copy; and when I had turned the final page the light of a new Earth
dawn was shining through my window. According to Muntius,
Solaristics is the space era's equivalent of religion: faith
disguised as science. Contact, the stated aim of Solaristics, is no
less vague and obscure than the communion of the saints, or the
second coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy using the
language of methodology; the drudgery of the Solarists is carried
out only in the expectation of fulfillment, of an Annunciation, for
there are not and cannot be any bridges between Solaris and Earth.
The comparison is reinforced by obvious parallels: Solarists reject
arguments—no experiences in common, no communicable
notions—just as the faithful rejected the arguments that
undermined the foundations of their belief. Then again, what can
mankind expect or hope for out of a joint 'pooling of information'
with the living ocean? A catalogue of the vicissitudes associated
with an existence of such infinite duration that it probably has no
memory of its origins? A description of the aspirations, passions
and sufferings that find expression in the perpetual creation of
living mountains? The apotheosis of mathematics, the revelation of
plenitude in isolation and renunciation? But all this represents a
body of incommunicable knowledge. Transposed into any human
language, the values and meanings involved lose all substance; they
cannot be brought intact through the barrier. In any case, the
'adepts' do not expect such revelations—of the order of
poetry, rather than science—since unconsciously it is
Revelation itself that they expect, and this revelation is to
explain to them the meaning of the destiny of man! Solaristics is a
revival of long-vanished myths, the expression of mystical
nostalgias which men are unwilling to confess openly. The
cornerstone is deeply entrenched in the foundations of the edifice:
it is the hope of Redemption.

Solarists are incapable of recognizing this truth, and
consequently take care to avoid any interpretation of Contact,
which is presented in their writings as an ultimate goal, whereas
originally it had been considered as a beginning, and as a step
onto a new path, among many other possible paths. Over the years,
Contact has become sanctified. It has become the heaven of
eternity.

Muntius analyzes this 'heresy' of planetology very simply and
trenchantly. He brilliantly dismantles the Solarist myth, or rather
the myth of the Mission of Mankind.

Muntius's had been the first voice raised in protest, and had
encountered the contemptuous silence of the experts, at a time when
they still retained a romantic confidence in the development of
Solaristics. After all, how could they have accepted a thesis that
struck at the foundations of their achievements?

Solaristics went on waiting for the man who would reestablish it
on a firm foundation and define its frontiers with precision. Five
years after the death of Muntius, when his pamphlet had become a
rare collectors' piece, a group of Norwegian researchers founded a
school named after him. In contact with the personalities of his
various spiritual heirs, the quiet thought of the master went
through profound transformations; it led to the corrosive irony of
Erie Ennesson and, on a more mundane plane, the 'utilitarian' or
'utilitarianistic' Solaristics of Fa-leng, who argued that science
should settle for the immediate advantages offered by exploration,
and not concern itself with any intellectual communion of two
civilizations, or some illusory contact. Compared with the
ruthless, lucid analysis of Muntius, the works of his disciples are
hardly more than compilations and sometimes vulgarizations, with
the exception of Ennesson's essays and perhaps the studies of
Takata. Muntius himself had already defined the complete
development of Solarist concepts. He called the first phase the era
of the 'prophets,' among whom he included Giese, Holden and Sevada;
the second, the 'great schism'—the fragmentation of the one
Solarist church into a number of waning sects; and he anticipated a
third phase, which would set in when there was nothing left to
investigate, and manifest itself in a crabbed, academic dogmatism.
This prophecy was to prove inaccurate, however. In my opinion,
Gibarian was right to characterize Muntius's strictures as a
monumental simplification which ignored all the aspects of Solarist
studies that had nothing in common with a creed, since the work of
interpretation based itself only on the concrete evidence of a
globe orbiting two suns.

Slipped between two pages of Muntius's pamphlet, I discovered an
off-print of the quarterly review
Parerga
Solariana
, which turned out to be one of the first articles
written by Gibarian, even before he was appointed director of the
Institute. The article was called "Why I Am a Solarist" and began
with a concise account of all the material phenomena which
confirmed the possibility of contact. Gibarian belonged to that
generation of researchers who had been daring and optimistic enough
to hark back to the golden age, and who did not disown their own
version of a faith that overstepped the frontiers imposed by
science, and yet remained concrete, since it pre-supposed the
success of perseverance.

Gibarian had been influenced by the classical work in
bio-electronics for which the Eurasian school of Cho En-min,
Ngyalla and Kawakadze is famous. Their studies established an
analogy between the charted electrical activity of the brain and
certain discharges occurring deep in the plasma before the
appearance, for example, of elementary polymorphs or twin solarids.
Gibarian was opposed to anthropomorphizing interpretations, and the
mystifications of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric and
neurophysiological schools which attempted to endow the ocean with
the symptoms of human illnesses, epilepsy among them (supposed to
correspond with the spasmodic eruptions of the asymmetriads). He
was one of the most cautious and logical proponents of Contact, and
saw no advantage in the kind of sensationalism which was in any
case becoming more and more rare as applied to Solaris.

My own doctoral thesis received a fair amount of attention, not
all of it welcome. It was based on the discoveries of Bergmann and
Reynolds, who had succeeded in isolating and 'filtering' the
elements of the most powerful emotions—despair, grief and
pleasure—out of the mass of general mental processes.
Systematically comparing their recordings with the electrical
discharges from the ocean, I had observed oscillations in certain
parts of symmetriads and at the bases of nascent mimoids which were
sufficiently analogous to deserve further investigation. The
journalists pounced on my thesis, and in some newspapers my name
was coupled with grotesque headlines—'The Despairing Jelly,'
'The Planet in Orgasm.' But this dubious fame did have the
fortunate consequence (or so I had thought a few days previously)
of attracting the attention of Gibarian, who naturally could not
read every new publication dealing with Solaris. The letter he sent
me ended a chapter of my life, and began a new one…

When six days passed with no reaction from the ocean, we decided
to repeat the experiment. Until now, the Station had been located
at the intersection of the forty-third parallel and the 116th
meridian. We moved south, maintaining a constant altitude of 1200
feet above the ocean—our radar confirmed automatic
observations relayed by the artificial satellite which indicated a
build-up of activity in the plasma of the southern hemisphere.

Forty-eight hours later, a beam of X-rays modulated by my own
brain-patterns was bombarding the almost motionless surface of the
ocean at regular intervals.

At the end of this two-day journey we had reached the outskirts
of the polar region. The disc of the blue sun was setting to one
side of the horizon, while on the opposite side billowing purple
clouds announced the dawn of the red sun. In the sky, blinding
flames and showers of green sparks clashed with the dull purple
glow. Even the ocean participated in the battle between the two
stars, here glittering with mercurial flashes, there with crimson
reflections. The smallest cloud passing overhead brightened the
shining foam on the wave-crests with iridescence. The blue sun had
barely set when, at the meeting of ocean and sky, indistinct and
drowned in blood-red mist (but signalled immediately by the
detectors), a symmetriad blossomed like a gigantic crystal flower.
The Station held its course, and after fifteen minutes the colossal
ruby throbbing with dying gleams was once again hidden beneath the
horizon. Some minutes later, a thin column spouted thousands of
yards upwards into the atmosphere, its base obscured from view by
the curvature of the planet. This fantastic tree, which went on
growing and gushing blood and quicksilver, marked the end of the
symmetriad: the tangled branches at the top of the column melted
into a huge mushroom shape, illuminated by both suns
simultaneously, and carried on the wind, while the lower part
bulged, broke up into heavy clusters, and slowly sank. The
death-throes lasted well over an hour.

Another two days passed. Our X-rays had irradiated a vast
stretch of the ocean, and we made a final repetition of the
experiment. From our observation post we spotted a chain of islets
two hundred and fifty miles to the south—six rocky
promontories encrusted with a snowy substance which was in fact a
deposit of organic origin, proving that the mountainous formation
had once been part of the ocean bed.

We then moved south-west, and skirted a chain of mountains
capped by clouds which gathered during the red day, and then
disappeared. Ten days had elapsed since the first experiment.

On the surface, not much was happening in the Station. Sartorius
had programmed the experiment for automatic repetition at set
intervals. I did not even know whether anybody was checking the
apparatus for correct function. In fact, the calm was not as
complete as it seemed, but not because of any human activity.

I was afraid that Sartorius had no real intention of abandoning
the construction of the disruptor. And how would Snow react when he
found out that I had kept information from him and exaggerated the
dangers we might run in the attempt to annihilate neutrino
structures? Yet neither of the two said anything further about the
project, and I kept wondering why they were so silent. I vaguely
suspected them of keeping something from me—perhaps they had
been working in secret—and every day I inspected the room
which housed the disruptor, a windowless cell situated directly
underneath the main laboratory. I never found anybody in the room,
and the layer of dust over the armatures and cables of the
apparatus proved that it had not been touched for weeks.

As a matter of fact, I did not meet anybody anywhere, and could
not get through to Snow any more: nobody answered when I tried to
call the radio-cabin. Somebody had to be controlling the Station's
movements, but who? I had no idea, and oddly enough I considered
the question was out of my province. The absence of response from
the ocean left me equally indifferent, so much so that after two or
three days I had stopped being either hopeful or apprehensive, and
had completely written off the experiment and its possible
results.

For days on end, I remained sitting in the library or in my
cabin, accompanied by the silent shadow of Rheya. I was aware that
there was an unease between us, and that my state of mindless
suspension could not go on forever. Obviously it was up to me to
break the stalemate, but I resisted the very idea of any kind of
change: I was incapable of making the most trivial decision.
Everything inside the Station, and my relationship with Rheya in
particular, felt fragile and insubstantial, as if the slightest
alteration could shatter the perilous equilibrium and bring down
ruin. I could not tell where this feeling originated, and the
strangest thing of all is that Rheya too had a similar experience.
When I look back on those moments today, I have a strong conviction
that this atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense, and my
presentiment of impending disaster, was provoked by an invisible
presence which had taken possession of the Station. I believe too
that I can claim that this presence manifested itself just as
powerfully in dreams. I have never had visions of that kind before
or since, so I decided to note them down and to transcribe them
approximately, in so far as my vocabulary permits, given that I can
convey only fragmentary glimpses almost entirely denuded of an
incommunicable horror.

A blurred region, in the heart of vastness, far from earth and
heaven, with no ground underfoot, no vault of sky overhead,
nothing. I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is
clothed in a dead, formless substance—or rather I have no
body, I am that alien matter. Nebulous pale pink globules surround
me, suspended in a medium more opaque than air, for objects only
become clear at very close range, although when they do approach
they are abnormally distinct, and their presence comes home to me
with a preternatural vividness. The conviction of its substantial,
tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up,
I have the impression that I have just left a state of true
perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy
and unreal.

That is how the dream begins. All around me, something is
awaiting my consent, my inner acquiescence, and I know, or rather
the knowledge exists, that I must not give way to an unknown
temptation, for the more the silence seems to promise, the more
terrible the outcome will be. Yet I essentially know no such thing,
because I would be afraid if I knew, and I never feel the slightest
fear.

I wait. Out of the enveloping pink mist, an invisible object
emerges, and touches me. Inert, locked in the alien matter that
encloses me, I can neither retreat nor turn away, and still I am
being touched, my prison is being probed, and I feel this contact
like a hand, and the hand recreates me. Until now, I thought I saw,
but had no eyes: now I have eyes! Under the caress of the hesitant
fingers, my lips and cheeks emerge from the void, and as the caress
goes further I have a face, breath stirs in my chest—I exist.
And recreated, I in my turn create: a face appears before me that I
have never seen until now, at once mysterious and known. I strain
to meet its gaze, but I cannot impose any direction on my own, and
we discover one another mutually, beyond any effort of will, in an
absorbed silence. I have become alive again, and I feel as if there
is no limitation on my powers. This creature—a
woman?—stays near me, and we are motionless. The beat of our
hearts combines, and all at once, out of the surrounding void where
nothing exists or can exist, steals a presence of indefinable,
unimaginable cruelty. The caress that created us and which wrapped
us in a golden cloak becomes the crawling of innumerable fingers.
Our white, naked bodies dissolve into a swarm of black creeping
things, and I am—we are—a mass of glutinous coiling
worms, endless, and in that infinity, no, I am infinite, and I howl
soundlessly, begging for death and for an end. But simultaneously I
am dispersed in all directions, and my grief expands in a suffering
more acute than any waking state, a pervasive, scattered pain
piercing the distant blacks and reds, hard as rock and
ever-increasing, a mountain of grief visible in the dazzling light
of another world.

That dream was one of the simplest. I cannot describe the
others, for lack of a language to convey their dread. In those
dreams, I was unaware of the existence of Rheya, nor was there any
echo of past or recent events.

There were also visionless dreams, where in an unmoving, clotted
silence I felt myself being slowly and minutely explored, although
no instrument or hand touched me. Yet I felt myself being invaded
through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness
remained. Total annihilation was succeeded by such terror that its
memory alone makes my heart beat faster today.

So the days passed, each one like the next. I was indifferent to
everything, fearing only the night and unable to find a means of
escape from the dreams. Rheya never slept. I lay beside her,
fighting against sleep, and the tenderness with which I clung to
her was only a pretext, a way of avoiding the moment when I would
be compelled to close my eyes. I had not mentioned these nightmares
to her, but she must have guessed, for her attitude involuntarily
betrayed a sense of deep humiliation.

As I say, I had not seen Snow or Sartorius for some time, yet
Snow gave occasional signs of life. He would leave a note at my
door, or call me on the videophone, asking whether I had noticed
any new event or change, or anything at all which could be
interpreted as a response to the repeated X-ray bombardments. I
told him No, and asked him the same question, but there in the
little screen Snow only shook his head.

On the fifteenth day after the conclusion of the experiment, I
woke up earlier than usual, exhausted by the previous night's
dreams. All my limbs were numbed, as if emerging from the effects
of a powerful narcotic. The first rays of the red sun shone through
the window, a blanket of red flame ripped over the surface of the
ocean, and I realized that the vast expanse which had not been
disturbed by the slightest movement in the past four days was
beginning to stir. The dark ocean was abruptly covered by a thin
veil of mist which seemed at the same time to have a very palpable
consistency. Here and there the mist shook, and tremors spread out
to the horizon in all directions. Now the ocean disappeared
altogether beneath thick, corrugated membranes with pink swellings
and pearly depressions, and these strange waves suspended above the
ocean swirled suddenly and coalesced into great balls of blue-green
foam. A tempest of wind hurled them upwards to the height of the
Station, and wherever I looked, immense membranous wings were
soaring in the red sky. Some of these wings of foam, which blotted
out the sun, were pitch-black, and others shone with highlights of
purple as they were exposed obliquely to the sunlight. Still the
phenomenon continued, as if the ocean were mutating, or shedding an
old scaly skin. Now and again the dark surface of the ocean could
be glimpsed through a gap that the foam filled in an instant. Wings
of foam planed all around me, only a few yards from the window, and
one swooped to rub against the window pane like a silken scarf. As
the ocean went on giving birth to these fantastic birds, the first
flights were already dissipating high above, decomposing at their
zenith into transparent filaments.

The Station remained motionless as long as the spectacle
lasted—about three hours, until night intervened. And even
after the sun had set and the shadows had spread over the ocean,
the lurid glow of myriads of wings could still be discerned rising
into the sky, hovering in massed ranks, and climbing effortlessly
towards the light.

This performance had terrified Rheya, but it was no less
disconcerting for me, although its novelty ought not to have been
disturbing, since two or three times a year, and oftener when luck
smiled on them, Solarists observed forms and creations never
previously recorded.

The following night, an hour before the blue sunrise, we
witnessed another effect: the ocean was becoming phosphorescent.
Pools of grey light were rising and falling to the rhythm of
invisible waves. Isolated at first, these grey patches quickly
spread and joined together, and soon made up a carpet of spectral
light extending as far as the eye could see. The intensity of the
light grew progressively for some fifteen to twenty minutes, then
the phenomenon came to a surprising end. A pall of shadow
approached from the west, stretching along a front several hundred
miles wide. When this moving shadow had overtaken the Station, the
phosphorescent part of the ocean, retreating eastward, seemed to be
trying to escape from the vast extinguisher. It was like an aurora
put to flight, and retreating as far as the horizon, which was
edged by a fading glow before the darkness conquered. Shortly
afterwards, the sun rose above the ocean wastes, which were
furrowed by a few solidified waves, whose mercurial reflections
played on my window.

The phosphorescence was a recorded effect, sometimes observed
before the eruption of an asymmetriad, but always indicative of a
local increase in the activity of the plasma. Nevertheless, in the
course of the next two weeks nothing happened either inside or
outside the Station, except on one occasion when in the middle of
the night I heard the sound of a piercing scream which came from no
human throat. The shrill, protracted howling woke me out of a
nightmare, and at first I thought that it was the beginning of
another. Before falling asleep, I had heard dull noises coming from
the direction of the laboratory, part of which lay directly over my
cabin. It sounded like heavy objects and machinery being shifted.
When I realized that I was not dreaming, I decided that the scream
also came from above, but could not understand how it managed to
penetrate the sound-proof ceiling. The terrible sounds went on for
almost half an hour, until my nerves jangled and I was pouring with
sweat. I was about to go up and investigate when the screaming
stopped, to be replaced by more muffled sounds as of objects being
dragged across the floor.