Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

  That is how the dream begins. All around me, something is awaiting my consent, my inner acquiescence, and I know, or rather the knowledge exists, that I must not give way to an unknown temptation, for the more the silence seems to promise, the more terrible the outcome will be. Yet I essentially know no such thing, because I would be afraid if I knew, and I never feel the slightest fear.

  I wait. Out of the enveloping pink mist, an invisible object emerges, and touches me. Inert, locked in the alien matter that encloses me, I can neither retreat nor turn away, and still I am being touched, my prison is being probed, and I feel this contact like a hand, and the hand recreates me. Until now, I thought I saw, but had no eyes: now I have eyes! Under the caress of the hesitant fingers, my lips and cheeks emerge from the void, and as the caress goes further I have a face, breath stirs in my chest—I exist. And recreated, I in my turn create: a face appears before me that I have never seen until now, at once mysterious and known. I strain to meet its gaze, but I cannot impose any direction on my own, and we discover one another mutually, beyond any effort of will, in an absorbed silence. I have become alive again, and I feel as if there is no limitation on my powers. This creature—a woman?—stays near me, and we are motionless. The beat of our hearts combines, and all at once, out of the surrounding void where nothing exists or can exist, steals a presence of indefinable, unimaginable cruelty. The caress that created us and which wrapped us in a golden cloak becomes the crawling of innumerable fingers. Our white, naked bodies dissolve into a swarm of black creeping things, and I am—we are—a mass of glutinous coiling worms, endless, and in that infinity, no, I am infinite, and I howl soundlessly, begging for death and for an end. But simultaneously I am dispersed in all directions, and my grief expands in a suffering more acute than any waking state, a pervasive, scattered pain piercing the distant blacks and reds, hard as rock and ever-increasing, a mountain of grief visible in the dazzling light of another world.

  That dream was one of the simplest. I cannot describe the others, for lack of a language to convey their dread. In those dreams, I was unaware of the existence of Rheya, nor was there any echo of past or recent events.

  There were also visionless dreams, where in an unmoving, clotted silence I felt myself being slowly and minutely explored, although no instrument or hand touched me. Yet I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained. Total annihilation was succeeded by such terror that its memory alone makes my heart beat faster today.

  So the days passed, each one like the next. I was indifferent to everything, fearing only the night and unable to find a means of escape from the dreams. Rheya never slept. I lay beside her, fighting against sleep, and the tenderness with which I clung to her was only a pretext, a way of avoiding the moment when I would be compelled to close my eyes. I had not mentioned these nightmares to her, but she must have guessed, for her attitude involuntarily betrayed a sense of deep humiliation.

  As I say, I had not seen Snow or Sartorius for some time, yet Snow gave occasional signs of life. He would leave a note at my door, or call me on the videophone, asking whether I had noticed any new event or change, or anything at all which could be interpreted as a response to the repeated X-ray bombardments. I told him No, and asked him the same question, but there in the little screen Snow only shook his head.

  On the fifteenth day after the conclusion of the experiment, I woke up earlier than usual, exhausted by the previous night's dreams. All my limbs were numbed, as if emerging from the effects of a powerful narcotic. The first rays of the red sun shone through the window, a blanket of red flame ripped over the surface of the ocean, and I realized that the vast expanse which had not been disturbed by the slightest movement in the past four days was beginning to stir. The dark ocean was abruptly covered by a thin veil of mist which seemed at the same time to have a very palpable consistency. Here and there the mist shook, and tremors spread out to the horizon in all directions. Now the ocean disappeared altogether beneath thick, corrugated membranes with pink swellings and pearly depressions, and these strange waves suspended above the ocean swirled suddenly and coalesced into great balls of blue-green foam. A tempest of wind hurled them upwards to the height of the Station, and wherever I looked, immense membranous wings were soaring in the red sky. Some of these wings of foam, which blotted out the sun, were pitch- black, and others shone with highlights of purple as they were exposed obliquely to the sunlight. Still the phenomenon continued, as if the ocean were mutating, or shedding an old scaly skin. Now and again the dark surface of the ocean could be glimpsed through a gap that the foam filled in an instant. Wings of foam planed all around me, only a few yards from the window, and one swooped to rub against the window pane like a silken scarf. As the ocean went on giving birth to these fantastic birds, the first flights were already dissipating high above, decomposing at their zenith into transparent filaments.

  The Station remained motionless as long as the spectacle lasted—about three hours, until night intervened. And even after the sun had set and the shadows had spread over the ocean, the lurid glow of myriads of wings could still be discerned rising into the sky, hovering in massed ranks, and climbing effortlessly towards the light.

  This performance had terrified Rheya, but it was no less disconcerting for me, although its novelty ought not to have been disturbing, since two or three times a year, and oftener when luck smiled on them, Solarists observed forms and creations never previously recorded.

  The following night, an hour before the blue sunrise, we witnessed another effect: the ocean was becoming phosphorescent. Pools of grey light were rising and falling to the rhythm of invisible waves. Isolated at first, these grey patches quickly spread and joined together, and soon made up a carpet of spectral light extending as far as the eye could see. The intensity of the light grew progressively for some fifteen to twenty minutes, then the phenomenon came to a surprising end. A pall of shadow approached from the west, stretching along a front several hundred miles wide. When this moving shadow had overtaken the Station, the phosphorescent part of the ocean, retreating eastward, seemed to be trying to escape from the vast extinguisher. It was like an aurora put to flight, and retreating as far as the horizon, which was edged by a fading glow before the darkness conquered. Shortly afterwards, the sun rose above the ocean wastes, which were furrowed by a few solidified waves, whose mercurial reflections played on my window.

  The phosphorescence was a recorded effect, sometimes observed before the eruption of an asymmetriad, but always indicative of a local increase in the activity of the plasma. Nevertheless, in the course of the next two weeks nothing happened either inside or outside the Station, except on one occasion when in the middle of the night I heard the sound of a piercing scream which came from no human throat. The shrill, protracted howling woke me out of a nightmare, and at first I thought that it was the beginning of another. Before falling asleep, I had heard dull noises coming from the direction of the laboratory, part of which lay directly over my cabin. It sounded like heavy objects and machinery being shifted. When I realized that I was not dreaming, I decided that the scream also came from above, but could not understand how it managed to penetrate the sound-proof ceiling. The terrible sounds went on for almost half an hour, until my nerves jangled and I was pouring with sweat. I was about to go up and investigate when the screaming stopped, to be replaced by more muffled sounds as of objects being dragged across the floor.

  Rheya and I were sitting in the kitchen two days later when Snow came in. He was dressed as people dress on Earth after their day's work, and looked like a different person, taller and older. He did not look at us, or pull up a chair, but stood at the table, opened a can of meat and began cramming it down between mouthfuls of bread. His jacket sleeve brushed against the greasy top of the can.

  "Look out, Snow, your sleeve!"

  "What?" he grunted, then went on stuffing himself with food as if he had not eaten for days. He poured out a gl
ass of wine, drank it at a gulp, sighed, and wiped his lips. Then he looked at me with bloodshot eyes, and mumbled:

  "So you've stopped shaving? Ah…"

  Rheya cleared the table. Snow swayed on his heels, then pulled a face and sucked his teeth noisily, deliberately exaggerating the action. He stared at me insistently:

  "So you've decided not to shave?" I made no reply. "Believe me," he went on, "you're making a mistake. That was how it started with him to…"

  "Go and lie down."

  "What? Just when I feel like talking? Listen, Kelvin, perhaps it wishes well … perhaps it wants to please us but doesn't quite know how to set about the job. It spies out desires in our brains, and only two per cent of mental processes are conscious. That means it knows us better than we know ourselves. We've got to reach an understanding with it. Are you listening? Don't you want to? Why?"—he was sobbing by now—"why don't you shave?"

  "Shut up! … you're drunk."

  "Me, drunk? And what if I am? Just because I drift about from one end of space to another and poke my nose into the cosmos, does that mean I'm not allowed to get drunk? Why not? You believe in the mission of mankind, don't you, Kelvin? Gibarian told me about you before he started letting his beard grow… It was a very good description. Just don't go to the lab, if you don't want to lose your faith. It belongs to Sartorius—Faust in reverse … he's looking for a cure for immortality! He is the last knight of the Holy Contact, the man we need. His latest discovery is pretty good too … prolonged dying. Not bad, eh? Agonia perpetua … of the straw … the straw hats and still you don't drink, Kelvin?"

  He raised his swollen eyelids and looked at Rheya, who was standing quite still with her back to the wall. Then he began chanting:

  "O fair Aphrodite, child of Ocean, your divine hand…" He choked with laughter. "It fits, eh, Kel … vin…"

  He broke off in a fit of coughing.

  "Shut up! Shut up and get out!" I grated through clenched teeth.

  "You're chucking me out? You too? You don't shave and you chuck me out? What about my warnings, and my advice? Interstellar colleagues ought to help each other! Listen Kelvin, let's go down and open the traps and call out. It might hear us. But what's its name? We have named all the stars and all the planets, even though they might already have had names of their own. What a nerve! Come on, let's go down. We'll shout it such a description of the trick it's played us that it will be touched. It will make us silver symmetriads, pray to us in calculus, send us its blood-stained angels. It will share our troubles and terrors, and beg us to help it die. It is already begging us, imploring us. It implores us to help it die with every one of its creations. You're not amused … but you know I'm just a joker. If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently. Do you know what he wants to do? He wants to punish this ocean, hear it screaming out of all its mountains at once. If you think he'll never have the nerve to submit his plan to that bunch of doddering ancients who sent us here to redeem sins we haven't committed, you're right—he is afraid. But he is only afraid of the little hat. He won't let anybody see the little hat, he won't dare, not Faust…"

  I said nothing. Snow's swaying increased. Tears were streaming down his cheeks and onto his clothes. He went on:

  "Who is responsible? Who is responsible for this situation? Gibarian? Giese? Einstein? Plato? All criminals… Just you think, in a rocket a man takes the risk of bursting like a balloon, or freezing, or roasting, or sweating all his blood out in a single gush, before he can even cry out, and all that remains is bits of bone floating inside armored hulls, in accordance with the laws of Newton as corrected by Einstein, those two milestones in our progress. Down the road we go, all in good faith, and see where it gets us. Think about our success, Kelvin; think about our cabins, the unbreakable plates, the immortal sinks, legions of faithful wardrobes, devoted cupboards… I wouldn't be talking this way if I weren't drunk, but sooner or later somebody was bound to say it, weren't they? You sit there like a baby in a slaughterhouse, and you let your beard grow… Who's to blame? Find out for yourself."

  He turned slowly and went out, putting an arm out against the doorpost to steady himself. Then his footsteps died away along the corridor.

  I tried not to look at Rheya, but my eyes were drawn to hers in spite of myself. I wanted to get up, take her in my arms and stroke her hair. I did not move.

  Victory

  Another three weeks. The shutters rose and fell on time. I was still a prisoner in my nightmares, and every morning the play began again. But was it a play? I put on a feigned composure, and Rheya played the same game. The deception was mutual and deliberate, and our agreement only contributed to our ultimate evasion. We talked about the future, and our life on Earth on the outskirts of some great city. We would spend the rest of our lives among green trees and under a blue sky, and never leave Earth again. Together we planned the lay-out of our house and garden and argued over details like the location of a hedge or a bench.

  I do not believe that I was sincere for a single instant. Our plans were impossible, and I knew it, for even if Rheya could leave the Station and survive the voyage, how could I have got through the immigration checks with my clandestine passenger? Earth admits only human beings, and even then only when they carry the necessary papers. Rheya would be detained for an identity check at the first barrier, we would be separated, and she would give herself away at once. The Station was the one place where we could live together. Rheya must have known that, or found it out.

  One night I heard Rheya get out of bed silently. I wanted to stop her; in the darkness and silence we occasionally managed to throw off our despair for a while by making each other forget. Rheya did not notice that I had woken up. When I stretched my hand out, she was already out of bed, and walking bare-foot towards the door. Without daring to raise my voice, I whispered her name, but she was outside, and a narrow shaft of light shone through the doorway from the corridor.

  There was a sound of whispering. Rheya was talking to somebody … but whom? Panic overtook me when I tried to stand up, and my legs would not move. I listened, but heard nothing. The blood hammered through my temples. I started counting, and was approaching a thousand when there was a movement in the doorway and Rheya returned. She stood there for a second without moving, and I made myself breathe evenly.

  "Kris?" she whispered.

  I did not answer.

  She slid quickly into bed and lay down, taking care not to disturb me. Questions buzzed in my mind, but I would not let myself be the first to speak, and made no move. The silent questioning went on for an hour, maybe more. Then I fell asleep.

  The morning was like any other. I watched Rheya furtively, but could not see any change in her behavior. After breakfast, we sat at the big panoramic window. The Station was hovering among purple clouds. Rheya was reading, and as I stared out I suddenly noticed that by holding my head at a certain angle I could see us both reflected in the window. I took my hand off the rail. Rheya had no idea that I was watching her. She glanced at me, obviously decided from my posture that I was looking at the ocean, then bent to kiss the place where my hand had rested. In a moment she was reading her book again.

  "Rheya," I asked gently, "where did you go last night?"

  "Last night?"

  "Yes."

  "You … you must have been dreaming, Kris. I didn't go anywhere."

  "You didn't leave the cabin?"

  "No. It must have been a dream."

  "Perhaps … yes, perhaps I dreamt it."

  The same evening, I started talking about our return to Earth again, but Rheya stopped me:

  "Don't talk to me about the journey again, Kris. I don't want to hear any more about it, you know very well…"

  "What?"

  "No, nothing."

  After we went to bed, she said that she was thirsty:

  "There's a glass of fruit-juice on the table over there. Could you give it to me?" She drank half of it then handed it to me.r />
  "I'm not thirsty."

  "Drink to my health then," she smiled.

  It tasted slightly bitter, but my mind was on other things. She switched the light off.

  "Rheya… If you won't talk about the voyage, let's talk about something else."

  "If I did not exist, would you marry?"

  "No."

  "Never?"

  "Never."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know. I was by myself for ten years and I didn't marry again. Let's not talk about that…" My head was spinning as if I had been drinking too much.

  "No, let's talk about it. What if I begged you to?"

  "To marry again? Don't be silly, Rheya. I don't need anybody except you."

  I felt her breath on my face and her arms holding me:

  "Say it another way."

  "I love you."

  Her head fell to my shoulder, and I felt tears.

  "Rheya, what's the matter?"

  "Nothing … nothing … nothing…" Her voice echoed into silence, and my eyes closed.

  The red dawn woke me with a splitting head and a neck so stiff that I felt as if the bones were welded together. My tongue was swollen, and my mouth felt foul. Then I reached out for Rheya, and my hand touched a cold sheet.

  I sat up with a start.

  I was alone—alone in bed and in the cabin. The concave window reflected a row of red suns. I dragged myself out of bed and staggered over to the bathroom, reeling like a drunkard and propping myself up on the furniture. It was empty. So was the workshop.

  "Rheya!"

  Calling, running up and down the corridor.

  "Rheya!" I screamed, one last time, then my voice gave out. I already knew the truth…

  I do not remember the exact sequence of events after that, as I stumbled half naked through all the length and breadth of the Station. It seems to me that I even went into the refrigeration section, searched through the storage rooms, hammered with my fists on bolted doors, then came back again to throw myself against doors which had already resisted me. I half-fell down flights of steps, picked myself up and hurried onwards. When I reached the double armoured doors which opened onto the ocean I was still calling, still hoping that it was a dream. Somebody was standing by me. Hands took hold of me and pulled me away.