Stanisław Lem - Solaris

“Then what is it?” I asked, having heard him out patiently.

“It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!”

Rage shook in his voice.

“So you think it’s… the ocean? What for, though? Never mind how for a moment. For the love of God, what for?! Do you really think it’s trying to play with us? Or punish us? That would be some truly primitive demonology! A planet taken over by a huge devil who satisfies his satanic sense of humor by sending succubi to members of a scientific expedition! Surely you don’t believe in such utter nonsense?!”

“This devil is far from stupid,” he muttered through his teeth. I looked at him in surprise. It crossed my mind that after all, he could have had a nervous breakdown, even if what had happened on the Station couldn’t be explained by madness. Reactive psychosis…? I wondered further, when he began to laugh very quietly, hardly making any sound.

“You’re diagnosing me? Wait a while yet. You’ve actually only experienced it in such a mild form you still don’t know anything!”

“I get it — the devil took pity on me,” I retorted. The conversation was beginning to tire me.

“What is it you’re really after? You want me to tell you what plans are being hatched against us by x-billion cells of metamorphic plasma? Maybe none at all.”

“What do you mean, none?” I asked, taken aback. Snaut was still smiling.

“You know as well as I do that science is only concerned with how something happens, not why it happens. How, then? Well, it began about eight or nine days after the X-ray experiment. Maybe the ocean was responding to the radiation with another kind of radiation, maybe it was using it to probe our brains and get them to release some kind of mental encystments.”

“Encystments?”

This was beginning to interest me.

“Right, processes separated from the rest of the mind, enclosed, suppressed, walled in, sore spots of the memory. It was treating them as a recipe, as a plan for reconstruction… I mean, you know the close resemblance between asymmetrical crystals of chromosomes and the nucleic compounds of cerebrosides that constitute the substrate of memory processes… After all, hereditary plasma is plasma that remembers. So it took it from us, made a note of it, and next, well, you know what came next. But why was it done? Ha! In any case, it wasn’t to destroy us. That would have been a lot easier to accomplish. With its technological abilities it could do anything at all, for example confront us with our own doppelgangers.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “So that’s why you were so scared the first evening when I arrived!”

“Yes. Though,” he added, “it may in fact have done so. How do you know I’m the same good old Rat who came here two years ago…?”

He started laughing softly, as if my bewilderment gave him God knows what kind of satisfaction; but he soon stopped.

“No, no,” he murmured, “There’s enough going on without that… There may be other differences, but I only know one — you and I can be killed.”

“And they can’t?”

“I’d advise you not to try. It’s a terrible thing to behold!”

“Not with anything?”

“I don’t know. In any case not with poison, knife, rope…”

“Atomic blaster?”

“Would you be prepared to try?”

“I’m not sure. If you know they’re not human.”

“The thing is, they are, in a certain sense. Subjectively they’re human. They have no awareness of their… origins. You must have noticed?”

“Right. So then… how is it?”

“They regenerate amazingly quickly. Impossibly quickly, before your eyes, I’m telling you. Then they start all over again, behaving like… like…”

“Like what?”

“Like our imaginations of them, the mental record that was used to…”

“That’s right. It’s true,” I agreed. I was ignoring the fact that lotion was dripping from my cheeks onto my arms.

“Did Gibarian know…?” I asked abruptly. He gave me an intent look.

“Did he know what we know?”

“Yes.”

“Almost certainly.”

“How do you know, did he tell you?”

“No. But I found a book in his cabin…”

“The Minor Apocrypha ?” I exclaimed, jumping up.

“Right. How could you know about it?” he asked, suddenly worried, his eyes boring into me. I shook my head.

“Take it easy,” I said. “Come on, you can see I’m burned and not regenerating at all, right? In his cabin there was a letter to me.”

“Is that so? A letter? What did it say?”

“Not a lot. It was actually more of a note than a letter. It was bibliographic references to the Appendix of the Yearbook of Solaristics , and to this Minor Apocrypha . What is it?”

“It’s an old thing. It might have something to do with all this. Here.”

From his pocket he took a slim little leather-bound volume with tattered corners and handed it to me.

“And Sartorius?” I asked as I put the book away.

“What about Sartorius? In a situation like this everyone acts whatever way… they can. He’s trying to be normal — with him that means being official.”

“Come off it!”

“Seriously. One time I was in a situation with him, never mind the details, suffice it to say we only had eleven hundred pounds of oxygen left for eight people. One after another we gave up our daily tasks, by the end everyone was walking around with a beard; he was the only one who shaved, polished his shoes — that’s the kind of guy he is. Of course, whatever he does now is going to be playacting, comedy or crime.”

“Crime?”

“Well, maybe not crime. We need a new term for it. Like ‘jet-propelled divorce.’ Does that sound better?”

“You’re quite the wit,” I said.

“Would you rather I was crying? You suggest something.”

“Give me a break.”

“No, I mean it: now you know more or less as much as me. Do you have a plan?”

“I like that! I don’t even know what I’m going to do when… she appears again. She has to appear again, right?”

“Probably.”

“How do they actually get in? I mean, the Station is hermetically sealed. Maybe through the plating…”

He shook his head.

“The plating is in good shape. I’ve no idea how they do it. The ‘guests’ are usually there when you wake up, and everyone has to sleep from time to time, after all.”

“What about locking them up?”

“It helps for a short time. Then there are other methods — you know what I’m talking about.”

He stood up. I followed suit.

“Listen, Snaut… You think the Station should be closed down, but you want the idea to come from me?”

He shook his head.

“It’s not that simple. Naturally we could escape, if only to the Satelloid, and send an SOS from there. Obviously they’d treat us like lunatics — there’d be a sanatorium on Earth, until we’d obligingly retract the whole thing. After all, there have been cases of group madness at isolated outposts like this… It wouldn’t be so bad. A nice garden, peace and quiet, white rooms, walks with the orderlies…”

He was completely serious, his hands in his pockets, staring vacantly into the corner of the room. The red sun had already dropped below the horizon and the curling waves had melted into an inky wasteland. The sky was afire. Clouds with lilac-tinted edges drifted over the unutterably dismal two-toned landscape.

“So do you want to run away? Or not? Not just yet?”

He smiled.

“You undaunted conqueror… You haven’t had a real taste of it yet, or you wouldn’t keep insisting like that. It’s not a matter of what I want but of what’s possible.”