Stanisław Lem - Solaris

He said it so faintly that I surmised the last word rather than actually hearing it.

“Wait a minute, I don’t follow,” I said. “Surely you must have heard something. You said yourself that you listened in at the door. You must have heard two voices, so…”

“No. There was only his voice. And even if there’d been other unidentifiable noises, you understand we’d have assumed it was all him…”

“Only him alone? But… why?”

“I don’t know. I admit I have a theory. But I’m in no hurry to share it, especially since it doesn’t help any, even if it explains a few things. That’s right. But you must have seen something yesterday already, or you’d have taken both of us for madmen?”

“I thought I’d gone mad myself.”

“Is that right. So you didn’t see anyone?”

“I did.”

“Who?!”

His grimace was no longer a smirk. I gave him a long stare before I answered:

“The… black woman…”

He didn’t say anything, but the whole of his body, tense and leaning forward, relaxed imperceptibly.

“You might have warned me,” I began, with less conviction now.

“I did.”

“But how!”

“The only possible way. You have to understand, I didn’t know who it would be! No one knows that, it can’t be known…”

“Listen, Snaut, I have some questions. You’ve known about it… for some time. Will she… it… What’ll happen to her?”

“Are you asking if she’ll come back?”

“Right.”

“Yes and no…”

“What does that mean?”

“She’ll come back like at the beginning… of the first visit. She won’t know anything, or, to be precise, she’ll act as if everything you did to get rid of her simply never took place. She won’t be aggressive unless you create conditions in which she has to be.”

“What conditions?”

“It depends on the circumstances.”

“Snaut!”

“What’s the problem?”

“We can’t afford the luxury of keeping secrets!”

“It’s not a luxury,” he interrupted drily. “Kelvin, I have the impression you still don’t understand. though wait a moment!”

His eyes flashed.

“Can you tell me who was here?!”

I swallowed hard, and lowered my head. I didn’t want to look at him. I wished it were someone else, not him. But I had no choice. A strip of gauze came unstuck and fell onto my arm. I shuddered at the wet touch.

“A woman that I…”

I trailed off.

“She killed herself. She made a…she injected herself…”

He waited.

“She committed suicide?” he asked, seeing I wasn’t saying anything.

“Yes.”

“And that’s all?”

I said nothing.

“That can’t be all…”

I glanced up sharply. He wasn’t looking at me.

“How do you know?”

He didn’t answer.

“All right,” I said. I licked my lips. “We had a falling out. Well, not exactly. It was me who said something to her, you know, the way you do when you’re angry. I packed my things and left. She’d given me to understand, she didn’t say it outright, but when you’ve lived with someone for years you don’t need to… I was convinced it was just talk — that she’d be afraid to do it. And… I told her that, too. The next day I remembered I’d left the… the shots in a drawer. She knew they were there — I’d brought them home from the lab, I’d needed them. At the time I told her what effect they have. I got scared, I was going to go get them, but then I realized it would look like I was taking her seriously, and… I let it be. The day after that I went all the same, it was nagging at me. When I got there… she was already dead.”

“Oh, you poor, innocent boy…”

I started in anger. But when I looked at him I could see he wasn’t making fun of me. I felt like I was looking at him for the first time. His face was ashen. Unutterable exhaustion lay in the deep folds of his cheeks, he looked like someone gravely ill.

“Why do you say that?” I asked, strangely abashed.

“Because the story’s tragic. No no,” he added hurriedly, seeing me stir, “You still don’t get it. Of course, you can experience that as profoundly as you want, you can even see yourself as a murderer. But… it’s not the worst thing in all this.”

“Is that so!” I said sardonically.

“I’m glad you don’t believe me, really. What happened may have been terrible, but the most terrible thing is what… didn’t happen. Ever.”

“I don’t follow…,” I said faintly. I truly didn’t. He nodded.

“A normal person,” he said. “What is a normal person? Someone who’s never done anything heinous? Right, but has he never even thought about it? Or maybe he never thought about it, but something inside him thought it, the idea popped into his head, ten or thirty years ago, maybe he fought it off and forgot about it, and he wasn’t afraid, because he knew he’d never carry it out. Right, but now, imagine that suddenly, in broad daylight, among other people, he meets IT embodied, chained to him, indestructible. What then? What do you have then?”

I said nothing.

“The Station,” he said quietly. “Then you have Solaris Station.”

“But… what could it actually be?” I asked hesitantly. “You’re not a criminal, after all, nor Sartorius…”

“Come on, Kelvin, you’re a psychologist!” he interrupted me impatiently. “Who hasn’t had a dream like that? An imagining? Think of… of the fetishist who’s in love with, I don’t know, some dirty underwear, who risks his skin to obtain by hook or by crook a disgusting scrap of cloth that he adores. That has to be amusing, right? He’s disgusted by the object of his desire, and yet at the same time crazy about it, prepared to put his life in danger for it — his passion may equal Romeo’s for Juliet… Such things happen, it’s undeniable. But surely you understand there are also other things… situations… the kind that no one has dared enact beyond their own thoughts, in a single moment of confusion, breakdown, madness, call it what you will. After which, the word becomes flesh. That’s all.”

“That’s… all,” I repeated mindlessly, in a hollow voice. My head was in a whirl. “But, but the Station? What does the Station have to do with it?”

“Surely you’re kidding,” he murmured. He peered at me. “This whole time I’m talking about Solaris, nothing but Solaris. It’s not my fault if it’s so drastically different from your expectations. Besides, you’ve already seen enough to at least hear me out.

“We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don’t say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime — in the meantime, we’re not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits. Some planets are said to be as hot and dry as the Sahara, others as icy as the poles or tropical as the Brazilian jungle. We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Yet on the other side there’s something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from Earth we didn’t bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth — the part of it we pass over in silence — we’re unable to come to terms with it!”