Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

  Before venturing on the mission suggested by Sartorius, I wanted to glance through the literature dealing with magnetic fields and neutrino structures. I did not yet have any clear idea of how I would set about it, but I had made up my mind to make an independent check on Sartorius's activities. Not that I would prevent Snow and Sartorius from 'liberating' themselves when the annihilator was completed: I meant to take Rheya out of the Station and wait for the conclusion of the operation in the cabin of an aircraft. I set to work with the automatic librarian. Sometimes it answered my queries by ejecting a card with the laconic inscription "Not on file," sometimes it practically submerged me under such a spate of specialist physics textbooks that I hesitated to use its advice. Yet I had no desire to leave the big circular chamber. I felt at ease in my egg, among the rows of cabinets crammed with tape and microfilm. Situated right at the center of the Station, the library had no windows: It was the most isolated area in the great steel shell, and made me feel relaxed in spite of finding my researches held up.

  Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes—all classics on the history of Solaris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respectful tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located some reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book. which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was poring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris—Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.

  Giese was an unemotional man, but then in the study of Solaris emotion is a hindrance to the explorer. Imagination and premature theorizing are positive disadvantages in approaching a planet where—as has become clear—anything is possible. It is almost certain that the unlikely descriptions of the 'plasmatic' metamorphoses of the ocean are faithful accounts of the phenomena observed, although these descriptions are unverifiable, since the ocean seldom repeats itself. The freakish character and gigantic scale of these phenomena go too far outside the experience of man to be grasped by anybody observing them for the first time, and who would consider analogous occurrences as 'sports of nature,' accidental manifestations of blind forces, if he saw them on a reduced scale, say in a mud-volcano on Earth.

  Genius and mediocrity alike are dumbfounded by the teeming diversity of the oceanic formations of Solaris; no man has ever become genuinely conversant with them. Giese was by no means a mediocrity, nor was he a genius. He was a scholarly classifier, the type whose compulsive application to their work utterly divorces them from the pressures of everyday life. Giese devised a plain descriptive terminology, supplemented by terms of his own invention, and although these were inadequate, and sometimes clumsy, it has to be admitted that no semantic system is as yet available to illustrate the behavior of the ocean. The 'tree-mountains,' 'extensors,' 'fungoids,' 'mimoids,' 'symmetriads' and 'asymmetriads,' 'vertebrids' and 'agilus' are artificial, linguistically awkward terms, but they do give some impression of Solaris to anyone who has only seen the planet in blurred photographs and incomplete films. The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize. Giese, who thought himself immune to temptation, decided that the 'extensors' came into the category of basic forms. He compared them to accumulations of gigantic waves, similar to the tidal movements of our Terran oceans. In the first edition of his work, we find them originally named as 'tides.' This geocentrism might be considered amusing if it did not underline the dilemma in which he found himself.

  As soon as the question of comparisons with Earth arises, it must be understood that the 'extensors' are formations that dwarf the Grand Canyon, that they are produced in a substance which externally resembles a yeasty colloid (during this fantastic 'fermentation,' the yeast sets into festoons of starched open-work lace; some experts refer to 'ossified tumors'), and that deeper down the substance becomes increasingly resistant, like a tensed muscle which fifty feet below the surface is as hard as rock but retains its flexibility. The 'extensor' appears to be an independent creation, stretching for miles between membranous walls swollen with 'ossified growths,' like some colossal python which after swallowing a mountain is sluggishly digesting the meal, while a slow shudder occasionally ripples along its creeping body. The 'extensor' only looks like a lethargic reptile from overhead. At close quarters, when the two 'canyon walls' loom hundreds of yards above the exploring aircraft, it can be seen that this inflated cylinder, reaching from one side of the horizon to the other, is bewilderingly alive with movement. First you notice the continual rotating motion of a greyish-green, oily sludge which reflects blinding sunlight, but skimming just above the 'back of the python' (the 'ravine' sheltering the 'extensor' now resembles the sides of a geological fault), you realize that the motion is in fact far more complex, and consists of concentric fluctuations traversed by darker currents. Occasionally this mantle turns into a shining crust that reflects sky and clouds and then is riddled by explosive eruptions of the internal gases and fluids. The observer slowly realizes that he is looking at the guiding forces that are thrusting outward and upward the two gradually crystallizing gelatinous walls. Science does not accept the obvious without further proof, however, and virulent controversies have reverberated down the years on the key question of the exact sequence of events in the interior of the 'extensors that furrow the vast living ocean in their millions.

  Various organic functions have been ascribed to the 'extensors.' Some experts have argued that their purpose is the transformation of matter; others suggested respiratory processes; still others claimed that they conveyed alimentary materials. An infinite variety of hypotheses now moulder in library basements, eliminated by ingenious, sometimes dangerous experiments. Today, the scientists will go no further than to refer to the 'extensors' as relatively simple, stable formations whose duration is measurable in weeks—an exceptional characteristic among the recorded phenomena of the planet.

  The 'mimoid' formations are considerably more complex and bizarre, and elicit a more vehement response from the observer, an instinctive response, I mean. It can be stated without exaggeration that Giese fell in love with the 'mimoids' and was soon devoting all his time to them. For the rest of his life, he studied and described them and brought all his ingenuity to bear on defining their nature. The name he gave them indicates their most astonishing characteristic, the imitation of objects, near or far, external to the ocean itself.

  Concealed at first beneath the ocean surface, a large flattened disc appears, ragged, with a tar-like coating. After a few hours, it begins to separate into flat sheets which rise slowly. The observer now becomes a spectator at what looks like a fight to the death, as massed ranks of waves converge from all directions like contorted, fleshy mouths which snap greedily around the tattered, fluttering leaf, then plunge into the depths. As each ring of waves breaks and sinks, the fall of this mass of hundreds of thousands of tons is accompanied for an instant by a viscous rumbling, an immense thunderclap. The tarry leaf is overwhelmed, battered and torn apart; with every fresh assault, circular fragments scatter and drift like feebly fluttering wings below the ocean surface. They bunch into pear-shaped clusters or long strings, merge and rise again, and drag with them an undertow of coagulated shreds of the base of the primal disc. The encircling waves continue to break around the steadily expanding crater. This phenomenon may persist for a day or linger on for a month, and sometimes there are no further developments. The conscientious Giese dubbed
this first variation a 'stillbirth,' convinced that each of these upheavals aspired towards an ultimate condition, the 'major mimoid,' like a polyp colony (only covering an area greater than a town) of pale outcroppings with the faculty of imitating foreign bodies. Uyvens, on the other hand, saw this final stage as constituting a degeneration or necrosis: according to him, the appearance of the 'copies' corresponded to a localized dissipation of the life energies of the ocean, which was no longer in control of the original forms it created.

  Giese would not abandon his account of the various phases of the process as a sustained progression towards perfection, with a conviction which is particularly surprising coming from a man of such a moderate, cautious turn of mind in advancing the most trivial hypothesis on the other creations of the ocean. Normally he had all the boldness of an ant crawling up a glacier.

  Viewed from above, the mimoid resembles a town, an illusion produced by our compulsion to superimpose analogies with what we know. When the sky is clear, a shimmering heat-haze covers the pliant structures of the clustered polyps surmounted by membranous palisades. The first cloud passing overhead wakens the mimoid. All the outcrops suddenly sprout new shoots, then the mass of polyps ejects a thick tegument which dilates, puffs out, changes color and in the space of a few minutes has produced an astonishing imitation of the volutes of a cloud. The enormous 'object' casts a reddish shadow over the mimoid, whose peaks ripple and bend together, always in the opposite direction to the movement of the real cloud. I imagine that Giese would have been ready to give his right hand to discover what made the mimoids behave in this way, but these 'isolated' productions are nothing in comparison to the frantic activity the mimoid displays when 'stimulated' by objects of human origin.

  The reproduction process embraces every object inside a radius of eight or nine miles. Usually the facsimile is an enlargement of the original, whose forms are sometimes only roughly copied. The reproduction of machines, in particular, elicits simplifications that might be considered grotesque—practically caricatures. The copy is always modelled in the same colorless tegument, which hovers above the outcrops, linked to its base by flimsy umbilical cords; it slides, creeps, curls back on itself, shrinks or swells and finally assumes the most complicated forms. An aircraft, a net or a pole are all reproduced at the same speed. The mimoid is not stimulated by human beings themselves, and in fact it does not react to any living matter, and has never copied, for example, the plants imported for experimental purposes. On the other hand, it will readily reproduce a puppet or a doll, a carving of a dog, or a tree sculpted in any material.

  The observer must bear in mind that the 'obedience' of the mimoid does not constitute evidence of cooperation, since it is not consistent. The most highly evolved mimoid has its off-days, when it 'lives' in slow-motion, or its pulsation weakens. (This pulsation is invisible to the naked eye, and was only discovered after close examination of rapid-motion film of the mimoid, which revealed that each 'beat' took two hours.)

  During these 'off-days,' it is easy to explore the mimoid, especially if it is old, for the base anchored in the ocean, like the protuberances growing out of it, is relatively solid, and provides a firm footing for a man. It is equally possible to remain inside the mimoid during periods of activity, except that visibility is close to nil because of the whitish colloidal dust continually emitted through tears in the tegument above. In any case, at close range it is impossible to distinguish what forms the tegument is assuming, on account of their vast size—the smallest 'copy' is the size of a mountain. In addition, a thick layer of colloidal snow quickly covers the base of the mimoid: this spongy carpet takes several hours to solidify (the 'frozen' crust will take the weight of a man, though its composition is much lighter than pumice stone). The problem is that without special equipment there is a risk of being lost in the maze of tangled structures and crevasses, sometimes reminiscent of jumbled colonnades, sometimes of petrified geysers. Even in daylight it is easy to lose one's direction, for the sun's rays cannot pierce the white ceiling ejected into the atmosphere by the 'imitative explosions.'

  On gala days (for the scientist as well as for the mimoid), an unforgettable spectacle develops as the mimoid goes into hyperproduction and performs wild flights of fancy. It plays variations on the theme of a given object and embroiders 'formal extensions' that amuse it for hours on end, to the delight of the non-figurative artist and the despair of the scientist, who is at a loss to grasp any common theme in the performance. The mimoid can produce 'primitive' simplifications, but is just as likely to indulge in 'baroque' deviations, paroxysms of extravagant brilliance. Old mimoids tend to manufacture extremely comic forms. Looking at the photographs, I have never been moved to laughter; the riddle they set is too disquieting to be funny.

  During the early years of exploration, the scientists literally threw themselves upon the mimoids, which were spoken of as open windows on the ocean and the best opportunity to establish the hoped-for contact between the two civilizations. They were soon forced to admit that there was not the slightest prospect of communication, and that the entire process began and ended with the reproduction of forms. The mimoids were a dead end.

  Giving way to the temptations of a latent anthropomorphism or zoomorphism, there were many schools of thought which saw various other oceanic formations as 'sensory organs,' even as 'limbs,' which was how experts like Maartens and Ekkonai classified Giese's 'vertebrids' and 'agilus' for a time. Anyone who is rash enough to see protuberances that reach as far as two miles into the atmosphere as limbs, might just as well claim that earthquakes are the gymnastics of the Earth's crust!

  Three hundred chapters of Giese catalogue the standard formations which occur on the surface of the living ocean and which can be seen in dozens, even hundreds, in the course of any day. The symmetriads—to continue using the terminology and definitions of the Giese school—are the least 'human' formations, which is to say that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything on Earth. By the time, the symmetriads were being investigated, it was already clear that the ocean was not aggressive, and that its plasmatic eddies would not swallow any but the most foolhardy explorer (of course I am not including accidents resulting from mechanical failures). It is possible to fly in complete safety from one part to another of the cylindrical body of an extensor, or of the vertebrids, Jacob's ladders oscillating among the clouds: the plasma retreats at the speed of sound in the planet's atmosphere to make way for any foreign body. Deep funnels will open even beneath the surface of the ocean (at a prodigious expenditure of energy, calculated by Scriabin at around 1019 ergs). Nevertheless the first venture into the interior of a symmetriad was undertaken with the utmost caution and discipline, and involved a host of what turned out to be unnecessary safety measures. Every schoolboy on Earth knows of these pioneers.

  It is not their nightmare appearance that makes the gigantic symmetriad formations dangerous, but the total instability and capriciousness of their structure, in which even the laws of physics do not hold. The theory that the living ocean is endowed with intelligence has found its firmest adherents among those scientists who have ventured into their unpredictable depths.

  The birth of a symmetriad comes like a sudden eruption. About an hour beforehand, an area of tens of square miles of ocean vitrifies and begins to shine. It remains fluid, and there is no alteration in the rhythm of the waves. Occasionally the phenomenon of vitrification occurs in the neighbourhood of the funnel left by an agilus. The gleaming sheath of the ocean heaves upwards to form a vast ball that reflects sky, sun, clouds and the entire horizon in a medley of changing, variegated images. Diffracted light creates a kaleidoscopic play of color.

  The effects of light on a symmetriad are especially striking during the blue day and the red sunset. The planet appears to be giving birth to a twin that increases in volume from one moment to the next. The immense flaming globe has scarcely reached its maximum expansion above the ocean when it bursts at the summit and cracks vertically
. It is not breaking up; this is the second phase, which goes under the clumsy name of the 'floral calyx phase' and lasts only a few seconds. The membranous arches soaring into the sky now fold inwards and merge to produce a thick-set trunk enclosing a scene of teeming activity. At the center of the trunk, which was explored for the first time by the seventy-man Hamalei expedition, a process of polycrystallization on a giant scale erects an axis commonly referred to as the 'backbone,' a term which I consider ill-chosen. The mind-bending architecture of this central pillar is held in place by vertical shafts of a gelatinous, almost liquid consistency, constantly gushing upwards out of wide crevasses. Meanwhile, the entire trunk is surrounded by a belt of snow foam, seething with great bubbles of gas, and the whole process is accompanied by a perpetual dull roar of sound. From the center towards the periphery, powerful buttresses spin out and are coated with streams of ductile matter rising out of the ocean depths Simultaneously the gelatinous geysers are converted into mobile columns that proceed to extrude tendrils that reach out in clusters towards points rigorously predetermined by the over-all dynamics of the entire structure: they call to mind the gills of an embryo, except that they are revolving at fantastic speed and ooze trickles of pinkish 'blood' and a dark green secretion.

  The symmetriad now begins to display its most exotic characteristic—the property of 'illustrating,' sometimes contradicting, various laws of physics. (Bear in mind that no two symmetriads are alike, and that the geometry of each one is a unique 'invention' of the living ocean.) The interior of the symmetriad becomes a factory for the production of 'monumental machines,' as these constructs are sometimes called, although they resemble no machine which it is within the power of mankind to build: the designation is applied because all this activity has finite ends, and is therefore in some sense 'mechanical.'