Stanislaw Lem: Return from the Stars

The shock of recognition instantly freed me of all my weakness, so desperately concealed, concealed first with a pretense of calm, then by the intentional frenzy of my mountaineering. I reached down and, not embarrassed by the trembling of my fingers, took some snow and put it into my mouth. The cold melting on my tongue did not quench my thirst but made me more awake. I sat and ate snow, still not believing, now waiting to have my surmise confirmed by the first rays of the sun. Long before the sun appeared, from above the slowly fading stars, came a bird, which folded its wings, made itself smaller, and, alighting on a slanted sheet of rock, began to walk toward me. I froze, afraid of scaring it away. The bird went around me and moved away, and just when I thought that it hadn’t noticed me, it returned from the other side and circled the boulder where I was sitting. We regarded each other for a while, until I said quietly:

“And where did you come from?”

Seeing that it didn’t fear me, I resumed eating snow. It cocked its head, peered at me with its black beads of eyes, then suddenly, as if it had had enough of me, spread its wings and flew away. And I, resting against the rough rock, hunched over, my hands numb from the snow, waited for the dawn, and the whole night came back to me in a violent, incomplete synopsis — Thurber and his words, the silence between Olaf and me, the view of the city, the red mist and the breaks in the mist made by funnels of light, gusts of hot air, the inhaling and exhaling of a million, the hanging squares, malls, avenues, skyscrapers with wings of fire, the different levels with different colors, the uninspired conversation with the bird at the pass, and how I ate snow — and all these pictures were and were not themselves, as in dreams sometimes, they were both a reminder and an avoidance of the thing I dared not touch. Because, throughout, I had tried to find in myself an acceptance of what I could not accept. But that had been before, like a dream. Now, clearheaded and alert, awaiting the day, in air almost silver, in the presence of the slowly revealed mountain slopes, the gullies, the scree, which emerged from the night in silent confirmation of the reality of my return, for the first time I — alone but not a stranger to the Earth — now subject to her and her laws — for the first time I could, without protest, without regret, think of those setting out for the golden fleece of the stars…

The snow of the summit caught fire in gold and white, it stood above the purple shadows of the valley, stood powerful and eternal, and I, not closing my tear-filled eyes, got up slowly and began to walk across the stones, to the south, to my home.

Zakopane — Cracow, 1960

959 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10019

Copyright © 1961 by Stanislaw Lem

English translation Copyright © 1980 by Stanislaw Lem

Published by arrangement with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-3358

ISBN: 0-380-58578-2

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or

portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the

U. S. Copyright Law. For information address Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, Inc., 757 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10017

First Bard Printing, May, 1982

Printed in the U.S.A.

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