Stanisław Lem - Solaris

At a certain moment, when I moved I felt the flat shape of the tape recorder against my hip. That’s right. Gibarian. His voice recorded on tape. It didn’t even occur to me to bring him back to life, to hear what he had to say. That was all I could have done for him. I took out the recorder to stow it under the bunk. I heard a rustle and the faint creak of the door opening.

“Kris?” came a soft voice, almost a whisper. “Are you there, Kris? It’s so dark.”

“Don’t mind that,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. Come here.”

I was lying on my back, without a thought, her head on my shoulder. The darkness filling the room was becoming populated. I could hear steps. The walls were disappearing. Something was towering over me, bigger and bigger, endless. I was penetrated through and through, embraced without being touched; I froze still in the darkness, feeling its acute transparency that was displacing the air. I could hear a heart very far away. I focused my whole attention, all the strength I had left, on expecting death throes. They didn’t come. I just kept shrinking, while the unseen sky, the unseen horizons, the emptiness, devoid of shapes, clouds, stars, drawing back and swelling, was making me its center; I strove to crawl into the thing I was lying on, but beneath me there was no longer anything and the darkness no longer concealed anything. I clenched my fists and hid my face in them. I no longer had one. My fingers passed all the way through. I felt like shouting, howling…

The room was blue-gray. The furniture, walls, corners seemed sketched in broad dull strokes, in outline only, with no color of their own. There was the brightest pearly white in the silence outside the window. My body was drenched in sweat. I glanced to the side; she was looking at me.

“Is your shoulder numb?”

“What?”

She raised her head. Her eyes were the same hue as the room — gray, luminous between her dark lashes. I felt the warmth of her whisper before I understood the words.

“No. Actually, yes.”

I placed my hand on her back. The touch teemed. I slowly pulled her to me with my other arm.

“You were having a bad dream,” she said.

“A dream? Oh, that’s right. Were you not asleep?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. I’m not tired. But you should sleep. Why are you looking at me like that?”

I half-closed my eyes. I could feel the small regular thump of her heart where mine beat slower. A prop, I thought to myself. But I wasn’t surprised by anything, even my own indifference. I was beyond fear and despair. I was further on; no one had ever gone that far. I touched her neck with my lips, then went lower down, to the little hollow between the tendons, that was smooth as the inside of a seashell. The pulse was there too.

I lifted myself on an elbow. There were no dawns, no softness of light. The horizon was filled with an electric blue glow. The first ray crossed the room like a shot. There was a sudden play of rainbow-colored reflections refracted in the mirror, in the door handles, the nickel-plated pipes; the light appeared to be striking against every surface it encountered as if it were trying to break free, to burst the confined space open. By now it was impossible to look. I turned around. Harey’s pupils dilated. Her gray irises rose to my face.

“Is it time for day already?” she asked in a lusterless voice. She seemed half-asleep, half-awake.

“It’s always like that here, honey.”

“And us?”

“What about us?”

“Are we going to be here for a long time?”

I felt like laughing. But when an indistinct sound burst from my chest, it didn’t resemble a laugh.

“For quite a while, I think. Do you not want that?”

Her eyelids weren’t twitching. She was looking at me intently. Was she winking? I couldn’t be sure. She pulled the blanket up; on her arm I saw a small triangular pink mark.

“Why are you staring like that?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

She smiled. But it was only out of politeness, a thank-you for the compliment.

“Really? Because you’re looking at me as if you… as if I…”

“What?”

“As if you were searching for something.”

“Come off it!”

“No, it’s like you thought there was something wrong with me, or there was something I wasn’t telling you.”

“Not at all.”

“If you insist, then I’m sure that’s so. But as you wish.”

Outside the flaming windows a lifeless blue heat was coming into being. Shading my eyes with my hand, I looked around for my dark glasses. They were on the table. I knelt on the bed, put them on, and caught sight of her reflection in the window. She was waiting for something. When I lay back down beside her she smiled.

“What about for me?”

I suddenly understood.

“Sunglasses?”

I got up and started rummaging through the drawers of the table by the window. I found two pairs, both too big. I handed them to her. She tried each pair. They slipped half-way down her nose.

The window shades began to descend with their prolonged grinding sound. A moment later and it was night inside the Station, which had crawled into its shell like a turtle. Going by touch alone, I took her glasses off and put them with mine under the bunk.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“What people do at night — sleep.”

“Kris.”

“What?”

“Maybe I should make you a new dressing.”

“No, there’s no need. There’s no need… darling.”

As I said it, I didn’t know myself if I was pretending, but a moment later, without seeing I put my arms around her slender back and when I felt it tremble, I suddenly believed in her. Though I’m not sure. All at once I felt I was the one deceiving her, not the other way around, because she was only herself.

After that I drifted off to sleep several times and kept being woken from my doze by a cramp. My hammering heart gradually calmed down, I held her close, dead tired; she touched my face and forehead gingerly, checking to see if I didn’t have a fever. This was Harey. Another, truer one could not have existed.

After that thought something changed inside me. I stopped struggling. I fell asleep almost immediately.

I was woken by a gentle touch. There was a pleasant coolness on my forehead. My face was covered with something moist and soft that was slowly being lifted up. I saw Harey’s face leaning over me. With both hands she was squeezing out the excess fluid from the gauze into a porcelain bowl. Nearby stood a bottle of sunburn cream. She smiled at me.

“Boy, did you sleep,” she said, then as she laid the gauze back: “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

I moved the skin on my forehead. It was true, I couldn’t feel the burns now. Harey was sitting on the edge of the bunk, wrapped in an orange-and-white striped man’s bathrobe; her black hair lay spread over the collar. She’d rolled the sleeves all the way up to the elbows so they wouldn’t get in the way. I was feeling extraordinarily hungry — it must have been twenty hours since I’d last eaten. When Harey finished dressing my face I got up. I suddenly caught sight of the two completely identical white dresses with red buttons, which lay side by side. The first was the one I’d helped her take off by cutting the back; the second was the dress she’d come in the day before. This time she’d unpicked the seam herself with a small pair of scissors, saying the zipper must have gotten stuck.

The two identical dresses were the most terrible thing of all I’d experienced till now. Harey was busy tidying the medicine cabinet. I turned away from her surreptitiously and bit my fist till it bled. Still staring at the two dresses — or rather the same dress repeated two times — I began backing towards the door. Water was still noisily running from the faucet. I opened the door, slipped quietly out and closed it carefully. I could hear the faint murmur of the running water and the clatter of bottles. Then, suddenly, the sound stopped. The strip lighting from the ceiling illuminated the corridor; a hazy patch of reflected light lay on the door, by which I was waiting with clenched jaw. I held the handle, though I didn’t expect to be able to keep the door closed. A sudden tug almost wrenched it out of my hand, but the door didn’t open; it just shook and started creaking horribly. Stunned, I let go of the handle and took a step back. Something quite incredible was happening with the door — its smooth plastic surface was cratering inwards as if it was being pressed into the room from my side. The enamel began cracking off in small flakes, exposing the steel frame, which was straining ever more. I suddenly realized that instead of pushing the door, which opened towards the corridor, she was trying to open it by pulling it towards herself. The reflection of the light curved on the white surface like a concave mirror; there was a powerful crunching sound and the solid panel, bent to its limit, made a snapping noise. At the same time the handle was ripped from its mount and flew into the room. In the hole it left, there immediately appeared a pair of bloodied hands that kept on pulling, leaving red streaks on the enamel. The panel of the door broke in two, hung crookedly on its hinges, and an orange-and-white creature with a livid blue, lifeless face threw its arms around me sobbing.