Stanisław Lem - Solaris

“Harey, listen to me. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you the truth…”

She sat up, gently leaning her weight on her hands. I could see the pulse beating beneath the thin skin on her neck. My face went numb again and I felt as cold as if I’d been standing on ice. My head was completely empty.

“The truth?” she said. “Cross your heart?”

I didn’t answer right away. I had to overcome a constriction in my throat. That was our old phrase. When it was uttered, neither of us dared lie, nor even remain silent on whatever it was about. There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

“Cross my heart,” I said solemnly. “Harey…”

She waited.

“You’ve changed too. We all change. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. It really looks as if… for a reason neither of us fully understands… you’re not able to be apart from me. But that’s not such a bad thing, because with you too, I’m not able to…”

“Kris!”

I picked her up, wrapped in the sheet. A corner of it, wet with tears, fell on my shoulder. I walked around the cabin, rocking her. She stroked my face.

“No. You haven’t changed. It’s me,” she whispered in my ear. “There’s something wrong with me. Maybe that?”

She was staring at the dark empty rectangle where the broken door had been; I’d taken what was left of it to the depository the previous evening. I’ll need to put a new one up, I thought to myself. I laid her on the bed.

“Do you even sleep at all?” I asked, standing over her with my arms dangling.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Think about it, darling.”

“I don’t think it’s real sleep. Maybe I’m sick. I lie here and think, and you know…”

She shuddered.

“What is it?” I asked in a whisper, knowing my voice might fail me.

“They’re really strange thoughts. I don’t know where they come from.”

“Like what for example?”

I have to stay calm, I thought to myself, whatever I hear, and I steeled myself for her words as if for a powerful blow.

She shook her head, at a loss.

“It’s just kind of… all around…”

“I don’t follow…?”

“As if it weren’t just inside me, but further away, kind of, I can’t explain. There aren’t words to express it…”

“It’s probably dreams,” I said in an offhand way, and breathed a sigh of relief. “Now let’s turn off the light and not worry about anything till morning, and if we feel like it, in the morning we’ll look for some new worries, OK?”

She reached out for the switch and darkness fell. I lay down on the cold bedding and felt the warmth of her breath drawing closer.

I put my arm around her.

“Tighter,” she whispered. Then after a long while: “Kris!”

“What?”

“I love you.”

I felt like screaming.

The dawn was red. The huge disk of the sun hung low over the horizon. There was a letter on the threshold. I tore open the envelope. Harey was in the bathroom; I could hear her humming to herself. From time to time she popped her head around the door, her hair all wet. I went up to the window and read:

Kelvin, we’re gotten bogged down. Sartorius is arguing for vigorous steps. He believes he’ll be able to destabilize the neutrino systems. For his experiments he needs a certain amount of plasma as initial G-matter. He’s proposing that you go on a reconnaissance and gather some plasma in a container. Do whatever you think right, but let us know your decision. I have no opinion either way. I don’t think I have anything at all anymore. I’d prefer you to do it, but only so we can move forward, or at least look as if we are. Otherwise there’s nothing left but to envy G.

Rat

PS Don’t come to the radio station. That you can still do for me. Best of all is to telephone.

My heart sank as I read the letter. I looked it over carefully one more time, tore it up and threw the scraps into the sink. Then I started looking for a space suit for Harey. That alone was awful. It was exactly like the last time. But she knew nothing about it, otherwise she wouldn’t have been so pleased when I told her I had to go on a short reconnaissance outside the Station and I’d like her to come along. We ate breakfast in the small galley (during which Harey barely swallowed a few mouthfuls) and went to the library.

I wanted to look over the literature on field problems and neutrino systems before I did what Sartorius wanted. I didn’t know how I was going to go about it, but I’d decided to keep an eye on what he was doing. It had occurred to me that this as-yet nonexistent neutrino annihilator could liberate Snaut and Sartorius, while I waited out the operation with Harey somewhere on the outside — in an aircraft for example. For some time I pored over the electronic catalogue, asking it questions to which it responded either by spitting out a slip of paper that read laconically “not in bibliography,” or inviting me into such a jungle of specialized research in physics that I didn’t know where to begin. For some reason I had an urge to remain in that large circular room with its smooth walls covered in a checkerwork of drawers with their multitudes of microfilms and electronic records. The library was located in the very center of the Station; as such it had no windows and was the most isolated place inside the steel shell. Who knows if that wasn’t the reason I felt so good there, despite the absolute failure of my search. I wandered about the large space till finally I came to a stop in front of a huge bookcase, reaching up to the ceiling and filled with books. It wasn’t so much an indulgence, and a very dubious one at that, as a respectful memorial to the pioneers of solaristic exploration: the shelves, on which there were perhaps six hundred volumes, contained all the classics of the discipline, starting with Giese’s already mostly outdated nine-volume monograph. I took out the tomes, so heavy they made my hand droop, and flipped through them idly as I perched on the arm of a chair. Harey also found herself a book — I read a few lines of it over her shoulder. It was one of the few books that had belonged to the first expedition, and had probably been owned by Giese himself— The Interplanetary Chef . I didn’t say anything, seeing the attentiveness with which Harey was studying recipes adapted for the austere conditions of space travel, and I returned to the venerable volume I had on my lap. Ten Years of Research on Solaris had appeared in the “Solariana” series as numbers four through thirteen, while the most recent additions to the series were in the four digits.

Giese had not been especially inspired, but such a quality can only hinder a scholar of Solaris — it may well be that imagination and the ability to formulate rapid hypotheses is nowhere more harmful. After all, on that planet anything is possible. Far-fetched descriptions of configurations formed by the plasma are in all likelihood true, though usually unconfirmable, since the ocean rarely repeats its evolutions. Those observing them for the first time are staggered above all by their outlandishness and their vast scope. If they’d taken place on a small scale, in some swamp, they’d probably be written off as a freak of nature, a manifestation of randomness and the blind play of forces. The fact that geniuses and mediocre minds are equally at a loss when faced with the inexhaustible variety of forms of Solaris is an additional hindrance in dealing with the marvels of the living ocean. Giese, though, was neither the one nor the other. He was simply a pedantic classifier, one of those whose outer calm concealed an unflagging passion that consumed his whole life. As long as he was able, here lied exclusively on the language of description; when words failed him he managed by creating new words, often infelicitous ones that did not match the phenomena they were intended to describe. When all’s said and done, though, no terms can convey what goes on on Solaris. Its “dendromountains,” its “extensors,” “megamushrooms,” “mimoids,” “symmetriads’ and “asymmetriads,” its “vertebrids” and “rapidos” sound terribly artificial, but they do give some idea of Solaris even to those who’ve seen nothing but a few blurry photographs and poor quality films. Of course, even this conscientious classifier was guilty of rash moments. Humans are constantly coming up with hypotheses, even when they’re being cautious, and even though they’re quite unaware of it. Giese believed that extensors constituted a root form, and he compared them to greatly magnified and heightened versions of tidal waves in terrestrial oceans. Besides, anyone who’s immersed himself in the first edition of the work knows that he originally named them precisely “tides” led by a geocentrism that would be amusing if it weren’t for his helplessness. For — if comparisons with Earth really do have to be employed — these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescences”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over the monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent formation, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystalizing jelly; but what is evident to the eye is not so readily accepted by science. For years and years there were furious discussions about what was actually happening within an extensor, millions of which litter the vastnesses of the living ocean. It was thought they were some sort of organs of the monster, in which it metabolizes matter or which contain processes of breathing, the transfer of nutrition, and other things now known only to dusty library shelves. Every hypothesis was eventually disproved by a thousand painstaking and often perilous experiments. And all this concerned only the extensors, when it came down to it the simplest and most enduring form, for their existence lasts several weeks — something quite exceptional here.