Stanisław Lem - Solaris

The dream was so vivid — not only was it in color, on the floor I could also see a number of objects that I hadn’t even noticed as I went to bed. When I wake up, I thought, I’ll have to check whether they’re actually there or whether they’re a creation of my dream, like Harey…

“Are you going to be sitting there much longer?” I asked, and I noticed I was speaking softly, like I was afraid someone might hear me — as if anyone could hear what happens in a dream!

In the meantime the red sun had risen a little higher. Even that much is good, I thought. I went to sleep during the red day, now it ought to be blue, and only after that would come the next red day. I couldn’t possibly have slept for fifteen hours straight, so this was definitely a dream!

Reassured, I studied Harey closely. She was lit from behind; a ray of light coming through a crack in the curtains gilded the velvety down on her left cheek, and her eyelashes cast a long shadow on her face. She was lovely. How about that, I thought to myself, how exact I am even when I’m not awake: I check the movement of the sun, and make sure she has that dimple of hers where nobody else has one, under the corner of her perpetually surprised mouth. All the same, I wished it would end. I need to get to work, after all. So I squeezed my eyelids shut, trying to wake up, when suddenly I heard a creak. I opened my eyes at once. She was sitting next to me on the bed, staring at me gravely. I smiled at her and she smiled back and leaned over me; the first kiss was a light one, like one small child kissing another. I gave her a lingering kiss in return. Can a dream be exploited like that? I wondered. Though it’s not even betraying her memory, because after all it was she herself I was dreaming about. This had never happened to me before… Still we said nothing. I lay on my back; when she raised her face I could see into her small nostrils, lit by the sun from the direction of the window, which were always a barometer of her feelings. I passed my fingertips over her ears, whose lobes had turned pink from kisses. I don’t know if that was what unsettled me so; I kept telling myself it was a dream, but my heart contracted.

I gathered myself to jump out of bed. I was expecting not to succeed; in dreams you often have no control over your own body, which seems paralyzed or somehow absent. I was rather counting on being woken up by the attempt. Yet I didn’t wake. I just sat up with my legs hanging to the floor. Nothing for it, I’d just have to dream this dream to the end, I thought to myself, but my good mood had vanished without a trace. I was afraid.

“What is it you want?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and I had to clear my throat.

Unthinkingly my bare feet sought my slippers and before I remembered I didn’t have any slippers here, I stubbed my toe so hard I winced. All right, now it’s going to come to an end! I thought gladly.

But still nothing happened. Harey had moved aside when I sat up. She leaned back against the bedrail. Her dress was trembling slightly just beneath the tip of her left breast, to the rhythm of a beating heart. She gazed at me with tranquil interest. It occurred to me that the best thing would be to take a shower, but on second thought I realized a dream shower wouldn’t wake me up.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

She took hold of my hand and started tossing it up and down the way she used to, knocking my fingertips up then catching hold of them.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is that bad?”

It was the same low voice, and the same absent-minded tone. She always spoke as if she was paying little attention to the words she was uttering, as if she was already occupied with something else. Sometimes this made her seem giddy, sometimes shameless, because she would stare at everything with a muted astonishment expressed only in her eyes.

“Has anyone… seen you?”

“I don’t know. I came here, that’s all. Does it matter, Kris?”

She was still playing with my hand, but her face was no longer taking part in the game. She frowned.

“Harey?”

“What is it, love?”

“How did you know where I was?”

That made her think. When she smiled — her lips were so dark that when she ate sour cherries you couldn’t tell — she showed the tips of her teeth.

“I’ve no idea. Isn’t that funny? You were asleep when I came in, but I didn’t wake you up. I tried not to, because you get grumpy. Grumpy and whiny,” she said, bouncing my hand up energetically to the rhythm of her words.

“Were you down below?”

“Yes. I left — it’s cold there.”

She let go of my hand. Lying down, she tossed her head back so all her hair spilled to one side, and she glanced at me with the half-smile that only had stopped irritating me when I fell in love with her.

“But… Harey… But—” I stammered.

I leaned towards her and raised the short sleeve of her dress. Just above the flower-shaped smallpox inoculation there was a tiny red pinprick. Though I’d suspected this (I was still instinctively seeking scraps of logic among all the impossibilities), I suddenly felt faint. I placed my finger on the injection mark, which I’d dreamed of for years afterwards: I would wake up with a groan in crumpled bedding, always in the same position, folded almost in two, the way she had been lying when I found her almost completely cold — because in my dream I’d tried to do the same thing she had done, as if in this way I’d been seeking her forgiveness or keeping her company in those last minutes, when she could already feel the effects of the injection and had begun to be afraid. After all, she was afraid even of an ordinary cut. She never could stand pain or the sight of blood, and then all at once she’d gone and done such a terrible thing, leaving five words on a note card addressed to me. I had it among my papers. I carried it with me at all times, faded and falling apart at the folds; I lacked the courage to part with it. A thousand times I’d returned to the moment when she wrote it, and to what she must have been feeling then. I tried to convince myself she’d only meant to pretend to do it to scare me, and it was just that the dose had accidentally proved too big. Everyone tried to tell me that was how it had been, or that it had been a momentary decision brought on by sudden depression. But they didn’t know what I had said to her five days earlier, or that I’d packed my things so as to hurt her as much as possible, and that as I was getting everything together she had said entirely calmly: “You do know what this means…?”, and I’d pretended I didn’t understand, though I understood perfectly well. It’s just that I thought she was a coward, and I told her that as well. And now she was lying across my bed and gazing at me as if she didn’t know I had killed her.

“Is that all you can manage?” she asked. The room was red from the sun, the glow smoldered in her hair. She looked at her own arm, it had suddenly become important because I’d been staring at it, and when I lowered my hand she placed a cool, soft cheek against it.

“Harey,” I said hoarsely, “this can’t be…”

“Stop it!”

Her eyes were closed; I could see them quivering under tightly shut eyelids. Her dark lashes touched her cheeks.

“Where are we, Harey?”

“At home.”

“Which is where?”

She opened one eye for a moment then shut it again immediately. Her eyelashes tickled my hand.

“Kris!”

“What?”

“I feel good.”

I sat over her without moving. I raised my head and in the mirror over the washbasin I saw part of the bunk, Harey’s ruffled hair, and my bare knees. With my foot I pulled up one of those half-melted tools lying around on the floor, and picked it up with my free hand. Its tip was sharp. I held it against my skin right above the place where there was a pink, semi-circular, symmetrical scar, and I pressed it into my body. The pain was acute. I watched the blood flow in large drops down the inside of my thigh and drip quietly onto the floor.