Stanisław Lem - Solaris

Two more days passed. The experiment was repeated one final time; the X-rays had by now penetrated a sizeable expanse of the plasmic ocean. To the south, from our altitude, despite the distance of a hundred and eighty miles, we now began to have an excellent view of the Arrhenides, a sixfold rocky chain of what looked like snow-capped peaks; these were in fact accumulations of organic matter, showing that this formation had once constituted the bed of the ocean.

At this point we shifted to a south-easterly course, moving for a time in parallel with the mountain barrier that was augmented with the clouds typical of the red day, till it too disappeared from view. By now ten days had passed since the first experiment.

The whole of that time, nothing really happened on the Station. Once Sartorius had completed the programming for the experiment, it was repeated automatically by the equipment; I’m not even sure whether anyone monitored it. Yet at the same time a great deal more than might have been desirable was happening on the Station. Not among the humans. I’d been concerned Sartorius would demand that work on the annihilator be started again; I was also waiting to see how Snaut would react when he learned from the other man that to a certain extent I had misled him, exaggerating the potential danger that could come from destroying neutrino-based matter. Yet nothing of the kind occurred, for reasons that initially were a complete mystery to me. Naturally I wondered too if this were some subterfuge, if they were concealing from me certain preparations and operations, so every day I checked out the windowless chamber beneath the deck of the main laboratory where the annihilator was kept. I never found anyone there, and the layer of dust on the casing and cables of the apparatus indicated that no one had so much as touched it for weeks.

During this time Snaut became as invisible as Sartorius, and more elusive, because now even the visuphone in the radio station went unanswered when it was called. Someone must have been steering the Station, but I couldn’t say who it was, and I didn’t care, strange as it may sound. The lack of response from the ocean had also left me indifferent to the point that after two or three days I’d stopped counting on it or worrying about it, and I forgot about the experiment completely. I spent entire days either in the library or in my cabin, with Harey drifting around me like a shadow. I could see that things were not good between us, and that this state of apathetic, mindless suspension couldn’t go on forever. I needed to break through it somehow, change something in our relations, but I kept postponing even the idea of any change, incapable as I was of making a decision. I can’t explain it any other way, but I had the feeling that everything on the Station, and especially what was between Harey and me, was presently in a frail, precarious equilibrium, and that moving it could bring everything to ruin. Why? I couldn’t say. The strangest thing was that she sensed something similar, to a degree in any case. When I think about it now, it seems to me that the impression of uncertainty, suspension, of the moment before an earthquake, was prompted by a presence that could not be sensed in any other way and yet which filled every deck and room on the Station. Though there was perhaps one other way it could be made out: through dreams. Never before and never afterwards have such apparitions appeared to me. I decided to write them down, and that’s how I’m able to say anything at all about them; but these are only fragments devoid of almost all their terrifying richness. In circumstances that were essentially inexpressible, I seemed to find myself in places devoid of sky, earth, floors, ceilings, or walls, as if I were shrunken or imprisoned in a substance that was alien to me, as if my whole body had become part of some half-dead, unmoving, shapeless lump. Or, rather, that I myself was that lump, deprived of flesh, surrounded by at first indistinct pale pink patches suspended in a medium with different optical properties than air, such that it was only from very close up things became clear, even excessively and supernaturally so, because in those dreams of mine my immediate surroundings were more concrete and material than anything I experienced awake. Whenever I woke up I had the paradoxical feeling that the real waking life was in fact the other one, and that what I saw when I opened my eyes was nothing but its wizened shadow.

Such, then, was the first image, the beginning, from which the dream unfolded. Around me something would be waiting for permission, for my say-so, for an inner go-ahead, and I knew, or rather something inside of me knew, that I ought not to yield to this unaccountable impulse, because the more I silently promised, the more terrible the end would be. Though really I did not know this, because if I had I’d probably have been afraid, and I never felt any fear. I waited. From the pink mist enveloping me there emerged the first touch, while I, inert as a block of wood, enmired deep in whatever it was that seemed to have locked me in, was unable to retreat or even move, while that other thing examined my prison by touch, seeing and unseeing at the same time; and it already seemed to be a hand that was creating me; up till that moment I lacked even sight and now I could see — beneath the fingers that roamed about my face, out of nothingness there emerged my lips, cheeks, and as that touch, broken down into a thousand infinitely tiny parts, began to go further, I already had a face and a breathing torso, summoned to existence by this symmetrical act of creation; for I myself, being created, was creating in turn, and a face was coming into view that I had never seen before, foreign and familiar, I tried to look into its eyes, but I was unable to, because the proportions were constantly being changed, there were no directions here, we were simply discovering one another in rapt silence and mutually becoming, and I was already my living self, though boundlessly enhanced, and that other being — a woman? — remained motionless with me. A pulse filled us and we were one, and then all at once the languor of this scene, beyond which nothing existed nor seemed able to, began to be infiltrated by something unutterably cruel, impossible, and unnatural. The same touch that had created us and had clung to our bodies with an invisible golden cloak began to pullulate. Our bodies, naked and white, started to flow, blackening into streams of writhing vermin that emerged out of us like air, and I was — we were — I was a glistening, febrile mass of wormlike motion, tangling and untangling, but never-ending, infinite, and in that boundlessness — no! — I who was the boundlessness, I howled in silence, asking to be extinguished, asking for an end, but it was exactly at this moment I would run off in every direction at once and gather back together in the form of a suffering that was more vivid than any waking state, multiplied a hundredfold, concentrated in black and red distances, now hardening into rock, now rising to a crescendo somewhere in the glow of another sun or another world.

This was the simplest of the dreams; the others I’m unable to recount, because the sources of terror pulsating within them had no counterpart in waking awareness. In them I knew nothing of the existence of Harey, but nor did I find in them any memories or experiences from the preceding day.

There were also other dreams in which, in darkness a congealed to the point of lifelessness, I felt myself to be the object of experiments being conducted slowly and painstakingly, without the use of any sensory implements; they involved being penetrated and taken to pieces and rubbed away into utter emptiness, and the underlying foundation of all these silent, destroying crucifixions was a fear the very recollection of which, in the daytime, made my heart race.