Stanisław Lem - Solaris

The days, undifferentiated and as if faded, filled with wearying ill will towards everything, inched by in extreme apathy; it was only the nights that I was afraid of, not knowing how I could save myself from them. I stayed awake with Harey, who had no need of sleep; I kissed her and caressed her, but I was aware that I wasn’t doing it either for her or for myself, that it was all because I was frightened of sleep. Though I didn’t say a word to her about my ghastly nightmares, she must have guessed something was up, because I sensed in her little deaths a consciousness of unrelenting humiliation, and there was nothing I could do about it. I mentioned before that the whole time I saw neither Snaut nor Sartorius. But Snaut would get in touch every few days, sometimes with a note, but more often by summoning me to the telephone. He would ask if I hadn’t seen anything new, any kind of change, something that could be interpreted as a reaction elicited by the so frequently repeated experiment. I would say no, and ask him the same question. Snaut would merely shake his head in the depths of the screen.

On the fifteenth day after the operation had been discontinued I woke earlier than usual, so exhausted by my bad dream that it felt like I was coming out of heavy sedation. Through the uncovered window, in the first light of the red sun, whose immense reflection sliced the smooth ocean in two with a river of crimson fire, I noticed how the surface, inert up till now, was imperceptibly becoming ruffled. It blackness initially grew paler, as if it had been covered by a fine layer of mist, but the mist itself had an entirely material consistency. Here and there points of turbulence appeared, till the vague movement spread to the entire expanse in sight. The blackness vanished, concealed beneath membranes that were bright pink where they bulged out and pearly brown in their hollow places. The colors, which alternated to begin with, decorating this strange covering of the ocean with long strips that seemed to freeze in place during the movement of the waves, then mingled together, and the entire ocean was coated by a foam of large bubbles that rose upwards in huge sheets both immediately beneath the Station and all around it. From every side at once, tissue-winged foam-clouds rose into the empty crimson sky; they extended horizontally, quite unlike real clouds, with thick bulbous edges. The ones whose horizontal streaks obscured the low disk of the sun were, in contrast to its glow, black as coal; others, in the vicinity of the sun, depending on the angle at which the rays from the east struck them, lit up cherry red or amaranthine purple, and this process went on as if the ocean were peeling in a series of bloody contour lines, every so often being blanketed with a new coating of hardened foam. Some of these formations floated up very close, right outside the windows, passing only a few feet away, and at a certain moment one of them brushed against the glass with its silky-looking surface, while the multitudes that had risen into the air first were barely visible by now, far up in the sky like scattered birds, dissolving at the zenith in a transparent precipitate.

The Station came to a stop, held in place, and remained so for about three hours; the spectacle did not cease. Towards the end, when the sun had sunk below the horizon and the ocean beneath us was concealed in darkness, the thousand fold throng of slender blushing silhouettes rose ever higher into the sky, drifting in endless ranks as if on invisible strings, still, weightless; and this magnificent ascension of what looked like ragged wings went on till it was completely swallowed up by the darkness.

The entire spectacle, shocking in its placid immensity, terrified Harey, yet I was unable to tell her anything about it, because for me as a solaricist it was just as new and unfathomable as for her. But shapes and formations as yet unlisted in any inventory could be observed two or three times a year on Solaris; with a little luck, even more often.

The next night, about an hour before the expected rise of the blue sun, we witnessed another phenomenon — the phosphorizing of the ocean. To begin with, on its surface shrouded in blackness there appeared isolated patches of light, or rather of a whiteish glow that was hazy and moved with the rhythm of the waves. The patches joined together and spread till the spectral glimmer had reached the horizon on all sides. The intensity of the light increased for a period of about fifteen minutes. Then the marvel ended in an astounding manner: the ocean began to be extinguished. From the west, across a front that must have been hundreds of miles wide a zone of darkness advanced; when it reached the Station and passed it the part of the ocean that was still phosphorescent could be seen as a radiance rising high into the shadows and moving further and further away to the east. Once it reached all the way to the horizon, it became like a vast polar dawn, then suddenly disappeared. When the sun rose soon afterwards the dead, empty expanse, barely marked with the wrinkles of waves sending mercuric glints at the windows of the Station, again extended in every direction. The phosphorescence of the ocean had already been described; in a certain percentage of cases it had been observed before the emergence of asymmetriads, in addition to which it was a rather characteristic indication of locally increased activity in the plasma. Yet for the next two weeks nothing happened either outside the Station or within it. Only once, in the middle of the night, I heard a distant shout that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once; it was remarkably high-pitched, piercing and prolonged, more of an inhumanly intensified wail. Torn from my nightmare, I lay there for a long while, listening intently, not entirely sure that the shout wasn’t also a dream. The previous day, from the lab that was partially located above our cabin, there had come muffled sounds like heavy objects or equipment being moved around; I had the impression that the shout had also come from up there, though exactly how was unclear, since the two floors were separated by a soundproof ceiling. The dying voice went on almost half an hour. Drenched in perspiration, half mad, I was all set to race upstairs, such was the effect of the sound on my nerves. But in the end it fell silent, and once again only the moving of heavy objects could be heard.

Two days later, in the evening, as Harey and I were sitting in the small galley, Snaut suddenly appeared. He was wearing a suit, a real terrestrial suit, which transformed him. He looked taller and older. Hardly glancing at us, he went up to the table, leaned over it and without sitting down began to eat cold meat straight from a can, accompanying it with mouthfuls of bread. As he ate he dipped his sleeve accidentally in the can and got grease on it.

“You’re dirtying your jacket,” I said.

“Hm?” he merely mumbled, his mouth full. He ate as if he hadn’t had anything for days. He poured himself half a cup of wine, drank it in one, wiped his mouth and, taking a breath, looked around through bloodshot eyes. He stared at me a moment and murmured:

“You’ve grown a beard? Well, well…”

Harey dropped the dishes into the sink with a clatter. Snaut began rocking lightly on his heels; he screwed his face up and smacked his lips loudly, cleaning his teeth with his tongue. I had the impression he was doing it deliberately.

“Can’t be bothered shaving, huh?” he asked, gazing at me obnoxiously. I didn’t respond.

“Be careful!” he exclaimed after a moment. “A word of advice: he stopped shaving to begin with as well.”

“Go get some sleep,” I murmured.

“What? You can’t fool me. Why should we not talk? Listen, Kelvin, maybe it wishes us well? Maybe it’s trying to make us happy, it just doesn’t yet know how? It reads our wishes from our brains, but only two percent of our nervous processes are conscious. So it knows us better than we know ourselves. So we should listen to it. Acquiesce. Don’t you think? You won’t? Why,” he said, his voice breaking tearfully, “why won’t you shave?”