Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

  Once the scientists recognized that it was impossible to keep alive, or even in a 'vegetative' state, any fragment of the ocean, large or small, in dissociation from the entire organism, a growing tendency developed (under the influence of the Meunier-Proroch school) to isolate this problem as the key to the mystery. It was seen as a matter of interpretation—solve it, and the back of the problem would be broken.

  The quest for this key, the philosopher's stone of Solarist studies, had absorbed the time and energy of all kinds of people with little or no scientific training. During the fourth decade of Solaristics the craze spread like an epidemic, and provided a fertile ground for the psychologists. An unknown number of cranks and ignorant fanatics toiled at their fumbling researches with a greater enthusiasm than any which had animated the old prophets of perpetual motion, or the squaring of the circle. The craze fizzled out in only a few years, and by the time I was ready to leave for Solaris it had vanished from the headlines and from conversation, and the ocean itself was practically forgotten by the public.

  I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct alphabetical position, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the grasp of mankind, and aimed in particular against the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling one- or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body—the projections of our senses, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man—in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom's conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be, any question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, and it must have been Gibarian who had added it to the Station's collection, on his own authority, since Grastrom's pamphlet was regarded more as a curiosity than a true contribution to Solarist literature.

  With a strange feeling almost of respect, I carefully slid the slim pamphlet back into the crowded bookshelf, then stroked the green bronze binding of the Solaris Annual with my fingertips. In the space of a few days, we had unquestionably gained positive information about a number of basic questions, which had made seas of ink flow and fed innumerable controversies, yet had remained sterile for lack of arguments. Today the mystery practically had us under siege, and we had powerful arguments.

  Was the ocean a living creature? It could hardly be doubted any longer by any but lovers of paradox or obstinacy. It was no longer possible to deny the 'psychic' functions of the ocean, no matter how that term might be defined. Certainly it was only too obvious that the ocean had 'noticed' us. This fact alone invalidated that category of Solarist theories which claimed that the ocean was an 'introverted' world, a 'hermit entity,' deprived by a process of degeneration of the thinking organs it once possessed, unaware of the existence of external objects and events, the prisoner of a gigantic vortex of mental currents created and confined in the depths of this monster revolving between two suns.

  Not only that, we had discovered that the ocean was capable of reproducing what we ourselves had never succeeded in creating artificially—a perfect human body, modified in its sub-atomic structure for purposes we could not guess.

  The ocean lived, thought and acted. The 'Solaris problem' had not been annihilated by its very absurdity. We were truly dealing with a living creature. The 'lost' faculty was not lost at all. All this now seemed proved beyond doubt. Like it or not, men must pay attention to this neighbor, light years away, but nevertheless a neighbor situated inside our sphere of expansion, and more disquieting than all the rest of the universe.

  Perhaps we had arrived at a turning-point. What would the high-level decision be? Would we be ordered to give up and return to Earth, immediately or in the near future? Was it even possible that we would be ordered to liquidate the Station? It was at least not improbable. But I did not favor the solution by retreat. The existence of the thinking colossus was bound to go on haunting men's minds. Even when man had explored every corner of the cosmos, and established relations with other civilizations founded by creatures similar to ourselves, Solaris would remain an eternal challenge.

  Misplaced among the thick volumes of the Annual, I discovered a small calf-bound book, and scanned its scuffed, worn cover for a moment. It was Muntius's Introduction to Solaristics, published many years before. I had read it in a single night, after Gibarian had smilingly lent me his personal copy; and when I had turned the final page the light of a new Earth dawn was shining through my window. According to Muntius, Solaristics is the space era's equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science. Contact, the stated aim of Solaristics, is no less vague and obscure than the communion of the saints, or the second coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy using the language of methodology; the drudgery of the Solarists is carried out only in the expectation of fulfillment, of an Annunciation, for there are not and cannot be any bridges between Solaris and Earth. The comparison is reinforced by obvious parallels: Solarists reject arguments—no experiences in common, no communicable notions—just as the faithful rejected the arguments that undermined the foundations of their belief. Then again, what can mankind expect or hope for out of a joint 'pooling of information' with the living ocean? A catalogue of the vicissitudes associated with an existence of such infinite duration that it probably has no memory of its origins? A description of the aspirations, passions and sufferings that find expression in the perpetual creation of living mountains? The apotheosis of mathematics, the revelation of plenitude in isolation and renunciation? But all this represents a body of incommunicable knowledge. Transposed into any human language, the values and meanings involved lose all substance; they cannot be brought intact through the barrier. In any case, the 'adepts' do not expect such revelations—of the order of poetry, rather than science—since unconsciously it is Revelation itself that they expect, and this revelation is to explain to them the meaning of the destiny of man! Solaristics is a revival of long-vanished myths, the expression of mystical nostalgias which men are unwilling to confess openly. The cornerstone is deeply entrenched in the foundations of the edifice: it is the hope of Redemption.

  Solarists are incapable of recognizing this truth, and consequently take care to avoid any interpretation of Contact, which is presented in their writings as an ultimate goal, whereas originally it had been considered as a beginning, and as a step onto a new path, among many other possible paths. Over the years, Contact has become sanctified. It has become the heaven of eternity.

  Muntius analyzes this 'heresy' of planetology very simply and trenchantly. He brilliantly dismantles the Solarist myth, or rather the myth of the Mission of Mankind.

  Muntius's had been the first voice raised in protest, and had encountered the contemptuous silence of the experts, at a time when they still retained a romantic confidence in the development of Solaristics. After all, how could they have accepted a thesis that struck at the foundations of their achievements?

  Solaristics went on waiting for the man who would reestablish it on a firm foundation and define its frontiers with precision. Five years after the death of Muntius, when his pamphlet had become a rare collectors' piece, a group of Norwegian researchers founded a school named after
him. In contact with the personalities of his various spiritual heirs, the quiet thought of the master went through profound transformations; it led to the corrosive irony of Erle Ennesson and, on a more mundane plane, the 'utilitarian' or 'utilitarianistic' Solaristics of Fa-leng, who argued that science should settle for the immediate advantages offered by exploration, and not concern itself with any intellectual communion of two civilizations, or some illusory contact. Compared with the ruthless, lucid analysis of Muntius, the works of his disciples are hardly more than compilations and sometimes vulgarizations, with the exception of Ennesson's essays and perhaps the studies of Takata. Muntius himself had already defined the complete development of Solarist concepts. He called the first phase the era of the 'prophets,' among whom he included Giese, Holden and Sevada; the second, the 'great schism'—the fragmentation of the one Solarist church into a number of waning sects; and he anticipated a third phase, which would set in when there was nothing left to investigate, and manifest itself in a crabbed, academic dogmatism. This prophecy was to prove inaccurate, however. In my opinion, Gibarian was right to characterize Muntius's strictures as a monumental simplification which ignored all the aspects of Solarist studies that had nothing in common with a creed, since the work of interpretation based itself only on the concrete evidence of a globe orbiting two suns.

  Slipped between two pages of Muntius's pamphlet, I discovered an off-print of the quarterly review Parerga Solariana, which turned out to be one of the first articles written by Gibarian, even before he was appointed director of the Institute. The article was called "Why I Am a Solarist" and began with a concise account of all the material phenomena which confirmed the possibility of contact. Gibarian belonged to that generation of researchers who had been daring and optimistic enough to hark back to the golden age, and who did not disown their own version of a faith that overstepped the frontiers imposed by science, and yet remained concrete, since it presupposed the success of perseverance.

  Gibarian had been influenced by the classical work in bio-electronics for which the Eurasian school of Cho En-min, Ngyalla and Kawakadze is famous. Their studies established an analogy between the charted electrical activity of the brain and certain discharges occurring deep in the plasma before the appearance, for example, of elementary polymorphs or twin solarids. Gibarian was opposed to anthropomorphizing interpretations, and the mystifications of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric and neurophysiological schools which attempted to endow the ocean with the symptoms of human illnesses, epilepsy among them (supposed to correspond with the spasmodic eruptions of the asymmetriads). He was one of the most cautious and logical proponents of Contact, and saw no advantage in the kind of sensationalism which was in any case becoming more and more rare as applied to Solaris.

  My own doctoral thesis received a fair amount of attention, not all of it welcome. It was based on the discoveries of Bergmann and Reynolds, who had succeeded in isolating and 'filtering' the elements of the most powerful emotions—despair, grief and pleasure—out of the mass of general mental processes. Systematically comparing their recordings with the electrical discharges from the ocean, I had observed oscillations in certain parts of symmetriads and at the bases of nascent mimoids which were sufficiently analogous to deserve further investigation. The journalists pounced on my thesis, and in some newspapers my name was coupled with grotesque headlines—'The Despairing Jelly,' 'The Planet in Orgasm.' But this dubious fame did have the fortunate consequence (or so I had thought a few days previously) of attracting the attention of Gibarian, who naturally could not read every new publication dealing with Solaris. The letter he sent me ended a chapter of my life, and began a new one…

  The Dreams

  When six days passed with no reaction from the ocean, we decided to repeat the experiment. Until now, the Station had been located at the intersection of the forty-third parallel and the 116th meridian. We moved south, maintaining a constant altitude of 1200 feet above the ocean—our radar confirmed automatic observations relayed by the artificial satellite which indicated a build-up of activity in the plasma of the southern hemisphere.

  Forty-eight hours later, a beam of X-rays modulated by my own brain-patterns was bombarding the almost motionless surface of the ocean at regular intervals.

  At the end of this two-day journey we had reached the outskirts of the polar region. The disc of the blue sun was setting to one side of the horizon, while on the opposite side billowing purple clouds announced the dawn of the red sun. In the sky, blinding flames and showers of green sparks clashed with the dull purple glow. Even the ocean participated in the battle between the two stars, here glittering with mercurial flashes, there with crimson reflections. The smallest cloud passing overhead brightened the shining foam on the wave-crests with iridescence. The blue sun had barely set when, at the meeting of ocean and sky, indistinct and drowned in blood-red mist (but signalled immediately by the detectors), a symmetriad blossomed like a gigantic crystal flower. The Station held its course, and after fifteen minutes the colossal ruby throbbing with dying gleams was once again hidden beneath the horizon. Some minutes later, a thin column spouted thousands of yards upwards into the atmosphere, its base obscured from view by the curvature of the planet. This fantastic tree, which went on growing and gushing blood and quicksilver, marked the end of the symmetriad: the tangled branches at the top of the column melted into a huge mushroom shape, illuminated by both suns simultaneously, and carried on the wind, while the lower part bulged, broke up into heavy clusters, and slowly sank. The death- throes lasted well over an hour.

  Another two days passed. Our X-rays had irradiated a vast stretch of the ocean, and we made a final repetition of the experiment. From our observation post we spotted a chain of islets two hundred and fifty miles to the south—six rocky promontories encrusted with a snowy substance which was in fact a deposit of organic origin, proving that the mountainous formation had once been part of the ocean bed.

  We then moved south-west, and skirted a chain of mountains capped by clouds which gathered during the red day, and then disappeared. Ten days had elapsed since the first experiment.

  On the surface, not much was happening in the Station. Sartorius had programmed the experiment for automatic repetition at set intervals. I did not even know whether anybody was checking the apparatus for correct function. In fact, the calm was not as complete as it seemed, but not because of any human activity.

  I was afraid that Sartorius had no real intention of abandoning the construction of the disruptor. And how would Snow react when he found out that I had kept information from him and exaggerated the dangers we might run in the attempt to annihilate neutrino structures? Yet neither of the two said anything further about the project, and I kept wondering why they were so silent. I vaguely suspected them of keeping something from me—perhaps they had been working in secret—and every day I inspected the room which housed the disruptor, a window-less cell situated directly underneath the main laboratory. I never found anybody in the room, and the layer of dust over the armatures and cables of the apparatus proved that it had not been touched for weeks.

  As a matter of fact, I did not meet anybody anywhere, and could not get through to Snow any more: nobody answered when I tried to call the radio cabin. Somebody had to be controlling the Station's movements, but who? I had no idea, and oddly enough I considered the question was out of my province. The absence of response from the ocean left me equally indifferent, so much so that after two or three days I had stopped being either hopeful or apprehensive, and had completely written off the experiment and its possible results.

  For days on end, I remained sitting in the library or in my cabin, accompanied by the silent shadow of Rheya. I was aware that there was an unease between us, and that my state of mindless suspension could not go on forever. Obviously it was up to me to break the stalemate, but I resisted the very idea of any kind of change: I was incapable of making the most trivial decision. Everything inside the Station, and my relation
ship with Rheya in particular, felt fragile and insubstantial, as if the slightest alteration could shatter the perilous equilibrium and bring down ruin. I could not tell where this feeling originated, and the strangest thing of all is that Rheya too had a similar experience. When I look back on those moments today, I have a strong conviction that this atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense, and my presentiment of impending disaster, was provoked by an invisible presence which had taken possession of the Station. I believe too that I can claim that this presence manifested itself just as powerfully in dreams. I have never had visions of that kind before or since, so I decided to note them down and to transcribe them approximately, in so far as my vocabulary permits, given that I can convey only fragmentary glimpses almost entirely denuded of an incommunicable horror.

  A blurred region, in the heart of vastness, far from earth and heaven, with no ground underfoot, no vault of sky overhead, nothing. I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is clothed in a dead, formless substance—or rather I have no body, I am that alien matter. Nebulous pale pink globules surround me, suspended in a medium more opaque than air, for objects only become clear at very close range, although when they do approach they are abnormally distinct, and their presence comes home to me with a preternatural vividness. The conviction of its substantial, tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up, I have the impression that I have just left a state of true perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy and unreal.