Thinkers
“Kris, is it because of this experiment?”
I flinched at the sound of her voice. I’d been lying sleepless for hours, staring into the darkness, alone, because I couldn’t even hear her breathing, and in the tangled labyrinth of nighttime thoughts that were feverish, half logical, and thus acquired a new dimension and meaning, I’d forgotten about her.
“What. . . How did you know I wasn’t asleep. . . ?” I asked. There was fear in my voice.
“From the way you’re breathing,” she said quietly, as if apologetically. “I didn’t mean to bother you. . . If you can’t talk, don’t. . .”
“No, why not. Yes, it’s the experiment. You guessed.”
“What do they expect it to accomplish?”
“They don’t know themselves. Something. Anything. This isn’t Operation Thought, it’s Operation Despair. Now they only need only one thing, someone who’ll have enough courage to make a decision, but most people see that kind of courage as ordinary cowardice, because it’s a retreat, you know, surrender, an escape that’s unworthy of a person. As if worthiness was plodding forward and getting bogged down, and drowning in something you don’t understand and never will.”
I broke off, but before my quickened breathing calmed down I gave vent to a new burst of anger:
“Of course there’s never any lack of guys with a practical outlook. They said that even if contact isn’t made, still, by studying the plasma and all those crazy living cities that pop out of it for a single day then disappear again, we’ll learn the secrets of matter, as if they didn’t know they’re fooling themselves. They’re wandering around in a library of books written in an unknown language, and just looking at the colors of the spines. . . That’s how it is!”
“Are there no other planets like this?”
“No one knows. Perhaps there are, but we only know this one. In any case it’s something extremely rare, unlike Earth. Us, we’re common, we’re the grass of the universe, and we take pride in our commonness, that it’s so widespread, and we thought it could encompass everything. It was a kind of schema we took with us when we set off intrepidly and joyfully on our long journey: other worlds! But what exactly are they, those other worlds? We’d conquer them or we’d be conquered, there was nothing else in those wretched brains of ours. It wasn’t worth it. It really wasn’t.”
I got up; in the dark I found the first aid kit and a flat bottle of sleeping pills.
“I’m going to get some sleep, darling,” I said, turning towards the darkness, from where there came the high-pitched hum of the air conditioning. “I need to sleep. Otherwise I really don’t know. . .”
I sat back down on the bed. She touched my hand. I put my arms around her, unseen, and held her without moving until my grip was loosened by slumber.
In the morning, when I woke fresh and rested, the experiment seemed trivial to me; I couldn’t understand how I could have attached so much importance to it. I didn’t care either that Harey had to go to the lab with me. All her efforts became futile after I’d been gone from the room for a few minutes, so I gave up any thoughts of further attempts, even though she herself urged them (she was even prepared to be locked up somewhere); I suggested she take a book to read.
I was interested less in the procedure itself than in what I’d find in the laboratory. Aside from certain evident gaps in the bookcases and the cabinets with chemical glassware (in addition to which, panes were missing in the doors of several of the cabinets, while one of the doors itself had a star-shaped crack as if there’d been a recent struggle whose traces had been hurriedly though rather carefully covered over), there was nothing out of the ordinary in that blue and white room. Snaut, who was bustling about among the equipment, behaved entirely correctly, accepting the presence of Harey as something quite ordinary, and bowing slightly to her from a distance. As he was moistening my temples and forehead with conductive gel, Sartorius came in through a small door that led to the darkroom. He was wearing a white lab coat, over which he had a black anti-radiation apron that reached down to his ankles. Brisk and matter-of-fact, he greeted me as if we were just two employees among a hundred at some big institute on Earth and had seen each other just the previous day. It was only now I noticed that the lifeless expression of his face came from contact lenses, which he wore instead of eyeglasses.
Arms folded on his chest, he stood and watched as Snaut wrapped a bandage around the electrodes attached to my head, forming a kind of white cap. Several times he cast his eyes about the whole room, seeming not to notice Harey, who sat hunched and uncomfortable on a small stool by the wall, pretending to read her book. When Snaut stepped away from my chair I moved my head, which was weighed down with metal and wires, to watch him turn on the apparatus. But all at once Sartorius raised his hand and said unctuously:
“Doctor Kelvin! I’d like to ask for a moment of your attention! I don’t wish to impose anything on you, for that would not serve our purpose; but you need to stop thinking about yourself, about me, about our colleague Snaut, about any other persons, so that by eliminating the randomness of particular individuals, you concentrate on the matter at hand. Earth and Solaris; generations of researchers who constitute a whole, despite the fact that particular people have their beginnings and endings; our unyielding efforts at establishing intellectual contact; the historical path taken by humanity; the certainty that it will be continued into the future; the readiness to make any effort and any sacrifice, to give up all personal feelings in the interests of our mission—these are the subjects that ought to fill your consciousness completely. True, the sequence of associations does not depend entirely on your will, but the fact that you are here at all guarantees the authenticity of the continuity I speak of. If you are uncertain you have performed the task appropriately please say so, and Dr. Snaut will repeat the recording. After all, we do not lack for time. . .”
He uttered these last words with a pale dry smile that did not detract in the slightest from the expression of penetrating consternation in his eyes. I was writhing inside from this mountain of cliches pronounced with such earnestness and gravity; fortunately Snaut interrupted the lengthening silence.
“Shall we, Kris?” he asked, leaning on the high console of the electroencephalograph, in a casual, unconstrained pose, as if he were resting his elbow on an armchair. I was grateful to him for using my first name.
“Yes,” I said, half-closing my eyes. The jitters that had laid waste to my mind when he finished attaching the electrodes and placed his fingers on the switch suddenly passed; through my eyelashes I could see the pinkish glow of the control lights on the black dashboard of the machine. The cold, disagreeable chill of the metal electrodes, pressed to my head like frozen coins, also went away. I was like a dark, unlit stage. The empty space was surrounded on all sides by an invisible crowd of spectators gathered in a circle around a silence filled with an ironic contempt for Sartorius and the Mission. The tension felt by these inner observers, eager to play an improvised role, grew weaker. “Harey?”—I thought the word as a test, with a sickening unease, prepared to withdraw it immediately. But that blind, attentive audience of mine did not protest. For a certain short time I was nothing but pure tenderness, sincere regret, willing to undertake long, patient sacrifices. Harey filled me, lacking features, shape, face; and at the same time, through the impersonal idea of her, infused with desperate affection, I had a vision of Giese, the father of solaristics and of solaricists, in all the dignity of his professorial presence. But I wasn’t thinking about the muddy explosion, about the stinking void that swallowed up his gold-rimmed spectacles and his scrupulously brushed gray mustache. I could only see the engraving on the title page of his monograph, the densely hatched background the artist had added around his head such that it appeared unsuspectingly almost in an aureola, so similar not in its features but its steadfast old-fashioned prudence to the face of my own father, and in the end I didn’t know which of the two of them was looking at me. Neither of them had a grave, something that in our times was so frequent and ordinary that it stirred no particular feelings.
The image was fading already, and for a moment that lasted I don’t know how long I forgot about the Station, the experiment, Harey, the black ocean, everything; I was filled with an instantaneous certainty that those two men, who were no longer with us, infinitely small and turned to dust, had been equal to anything they had encountered, and the calm that resulted from this realization annihilated the formless crowd surrounding the arena in mute expectation of my defeat. Along with a double click of the apparatus being turned off, the artificial light exploded into my eyes. I squinted. Sartorius was gazing at me inquiringly, still in the same pose; Snaut, his back to the other man, was busy with the equipment, seemingly deliberately clattering the clogs he wore loosely on his feet.
“Do you think it was successful, Dr. Kelvin?” Sartorius asked, his repulsive nasal voice breaking off.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Sartorius responded with a hint of surprise or even suspicion.
“Yes.”
The certainty and brusqueness of my reply temporarily threw him off balance with his stiff solemnity.
“Oh. . . Very well. . . ,” he mumbled, and looked around as if he didn’t know what to do now. Snaut came up to my chair and started unwinding the bandage.
I got up and walked around the room; in the meantime Sartorius, who had disappeared into the darkroom, came out with the film already developed and dried. The wavering lines with their whitish zigzags covered several yards of tape, like some kind of mold or cobweb extending along the shiny black ribbon of celluloid.
I no longer had anything to do, but I didn’t leave. The other two men had entered the tape into the oxidized head of the modulator; Sartorius had taken a last look at the end of it, frowning mistrustfully, as if he were attempting to decipher what was contained in those shaky lines.
The rest of the experiment was not to be seen. I only knew what was happening when they stood at the instrument consoles by the wall and turned on the appropriate apparatus. The current sprang to life with a faint bass hum in the coil casing beneath the armored floor, and then there were just the lights in the vertical glass tubes of the indicators moving downwards to show that the great tube of the X-ray cannon was dropping down the vertical shaft and coming to rest in its open mouth. At this point the lights stopped at the lowest levels of the scale and Snaut began to crank up the voltage till the indicators, or more accurately the white bars that represented them, fluttered and made a half-turn to the right. The noise of the current was barely audible. Nothing was happening; the drums containing the film revolved beneath their cover so even that was out of sight, and the footage counter ticked softly like the workings of a clock.
Harey gazed now at me, now at them, from over her book. I went up to her. She gave me a quizzical look. The experiment was ending now; Sartorius slowly approached the conical top of the machine.
“Can we go?” Harey mouthed at me. I nodded. She got up. Without saying goodbye to anyone—I would have found it too ridiculous—I walked past Sartorius.
The high windows of the upper corridor were filled with a sunset of exceptional beauty. It wasn’t the usual cheerless tumescent red, but every possible shade of pink, beneath a luminous mist that seemed sprinkled with the finest silver. The leaden, irregularly undulating black of the ocean’s endless plain seemed to respond to this mild aura with a spume that gave off a soft, dirty purple reflection. It was only at its very zenith that the sky was fiercely ruddy.
All at once I came to a halt in the middle of the downstairs corridor. I couldn’t bear to think that once again we’d be stuck in our cabin open to the ocean, like in a prison cell.
“Harey,” I said, “you know. . . I wouldn’t mind swinging by the library. Would that be OK. . . ?”
“Sure, I’d be glad to. I could look for something to read,” she said, with somewhat artificial animation.
I sensed that since the day before there was an unfilled gulf between us and that I ought to show her a least a little warmth; but I was overcome by complete apathy. I don’t know what would have had to happen for me to be shaken out of it. We went back along the corridor, then down a ramp to a small vestibule. Here there were three doors, and between them flowers as if in display cabinets behind crystal glass panes.
The middle door, which led to the library, was lined on both sides with bulging artificial leather which I tried not to touch as I went in. Inside it was a little cooler in the large circular space under the pale silver ceiling with its stylized suns.
I ran my hand across the backs of the series of solaristic classics, and I was about to take down the first volume of Giese, the one with the engraving under tissue paper on the title page, when I unexpectedly found Gravinsky’s small-format book, which I’d overlooked the previous time.
I sat down on an upholstered chair. It was completely quiet. A few feet away from me Harey was flipping through some book. I could hear the faint rustle of the pages beneath her fingers. Gravinsky’s compendium, which was most often used in school as a simple crib, was an alphabetically arranged collection of solaristic hypotheses, from Abiological to Zoo-degenerative. The compiler, who I don’t think had ever seen Solaris, had plowed through every monograph, expedition logbook, fragmentary text and interim report; he’d even found quotations in the works of planetologists who studied other globes, and provided a catalogue that was somewhat terrifying in the brevity of its formulations, since some of them veered into inconsequentiality, deprived of the subtle complexity of thought that had accompanied their inception. Though in fact the whole, encyclopedic in intention, had ended up rather having curiosity value only; the book had been published twenty years before, and in the meantime a mountain of new hypotheses had appeared, by now too numerous to be contained in a single volume. I looked over the alphabetical index of authors, which was like a list of the fallen—very few of them were still alive, and I don’t think a single one was still active in the field. This entire treasury of thought, branching off in every direction, left the impression that one of the hypotheses simply had to be correct, that it wasn’t possible reality should be entirely other than the myriad propositions hurled at it. Gravinsky had prefaced the whole with an introduction in which he divided the preceding almost sixty years of Solaris studies into periods. In the first, dating from the initial exploration of the planet, no one was really consciously proposing hypotheses yet. At that time it was assumed, intuitively as it were, on the basis of “common sense,” that the ocean was a lifeless chemical conglomerate, a monstrous mass of jelly covering the globe, which produced extraordinary formations as a consequence of its “quasi-volcanic” activity, and through self-generating automatic processes stabilized its irregular orbit, just as a pendulum maintains an unchanging plane once set in motion. True, only three years later Magenon declared the living nature of the “gelatinous machine,” though Gravinsky dated the period of biological hypotheses as beginning only nine years afterwards, when Magenon’s previously isolated notion began to gather more and more supporters. The subsequent years abounded in theoretical models of the living ocean, all highly complex and based on biomathematical analyses. The third period involved the collapse of what had hitherto been largely monolithic opinion on the part of scholars.
A multiplicity of schools appeared, that often fought furiously with one another. It was the time when Panmaller, Strobla, Freyhouss, le Greuill, and Osipovich were active; Giese’s entire legacy was subject to devastating critique. It was at that time there appeared the first atlases, catalogues, stereoscopic photographs of asymmetriads, which previously had been regarded as unexaminable—the turning-point came with new remote-controlled mechanisms that were dispatched into the stormy hearts of the giants, which threatened to explode at any moment. At this point, in the margins of the raging discussions, there began to appear isolated, scornfully ignored minimalistic hypotheses suggesting that even if the much-trumpeted “contact” with a “rational monster” were not made, an examination of the hardening mimoid cities and balloon-like mountains thrown up and subsequently swallowed by the ocean was still likely to produce valuable chemical and physio-chemical knowledge and insights into the structure of giant molecules; but no one even engaged the proponents of such ideas in debate. After all, it was a period that saw the appearance of still current catalogues of typical metamorphoses, or Franck’s bioplasmic theory of mimoids, which, though it was abandoned as false, remained a magnificent example of intellectual panache and logical construction.
These “Gravinsky periods,” which lasted over thirty years in all, were the naive youth, the impulsively optimistic romanticism, and finally the maturity of solaristics, marked by the first skeptical voices. By the end of the first twenty-five years there were already heard—as a return to the first colloidal-mechanistic theories—hypotheses that were their late offspring, concerning the non-mental state of Solaris’ ocean. The entire search for signs of a conscious will, for a teleology of processes, for activity motivated by the ocean’s inner needs, was almost universally acknowledged to have been an aberration on the part of a whole generation of researchers. A journalistic passion for refuting their assertions prepared the ground for the sober, analytically oriented work, concentrating on the assiduous gathering of facts, that was conducted by the group of Holden, Eonides, and Stoliwa; it was a time of the rapid increase in number and size of archives and microfilm collections, of expeditions lavishly equipped with every possible device Earth had to offer: automatic recording equipment, sensors, probes, you name it. In some years more than a thousand people took part in the research at the same time; but while the speed at which new material was amassed continued to grow, the spirit that moved the scientists was waning, and there began a period of decline, hard to pinpoint in time, for that still optimistic phase in the exploration of Solaris.
It was characterized above all by the great and courageous personalities—sometimes in theoretical imagination, sometimes in negation—of people such as Giese, Strobla, or Sevada; the last of these, who was also the last of the great solaricists, perished in mysterious circumstances in the vicinity of the planet’s south pole, having done something that even first-timers never would. Before the eyes of a hundred observers he flew his machine, which had been gliding low over the ocean, into the heart of a rapido which was clearly moving out of his way. There was talk of some kind of sudden incapacity, a loss of consciousness, or a rudder defect; in reality, I believe it was the first suicide—the first abrupt, overt explosion of despair.
But not the last. Gravinsky’s volume, however, did not include such information; I added dates, facts, and details from myself as I studied the yellowed pages and tiny print of his book.
In fact, those sorry attempts on one’s own life also came to a stop; nor were there any more of the great characters. The recruitment of scientists who are to devote themselves to a particular branch of planetology is itself an unstudied phenomenon. People of outstanding abilities and strength of character are born at more or less regular intervals, so it’s only the matter of their selection that is uneven. Their presence or absence in a particular field of inquiry can perhaps be explained by the perspectives it opens up. Whatever one thinks about the classic scholars of solaristics, no one can deny them greatness, often genius. The best mathematicians and physicists, the leading figures in biophysics, information theory, and electrophysiology, for decades were drawn to the silent giant of Solaris. All at once, from one year to the next the army of researchers was, as it were, deprived of its generals. There remained a gray, nameless mass of patient fact-gatherers, compilers, creators of experiments that were occasionally designed with originality; but there were no more mass expeditions on a global scale, or bold unifying theories.
Solaristics seemed to be falling apart, and as a kind of accompaniment or parallel to its descent there was a flurry of hypotheses, barely distinguishable from one another by second-order details, revolving around the degeneration, retardation, involution of the seas of Solaris. From time to time more daring and intriguing conceptualizations emerged, but they all seemed to pass judgment on the ocean, which came to be seen as the final stage of a development which long ago, thousands of years back, had had its period of supreme organization and now, having survived only physically, was disintegrating into a multitude of unnecessary, nonsensical agonal formations. So these were monumental, centuries-long death throes—that was how Solaris was perceived. Its extensors and mimoids were seen as tumorous growths; the processes that moved its huge fluid body were examined for indications of chaos and anarchy, to the point that this orientation became an obsession, and the entire scientific literature of the following seven or eight years, though of course free of expressions explicitly indicating the feelings of its authors, nevertheless was like one long barrage of insults—revenge taken by the gray leaderless masses of solaricists upon the unchangingly indifferent object of their intensified research, which continued to pay no attention to them whatsoever.
I was familiar with the work of a number of European psychologists wrongly, I think, excluded from this collection of classic Solariana, whose only connection with the field was that for a lengthy period they researched public opinion, collecting the most ordinary views, the attitudes of non-specialists, and in this way demonstrated the astonishingly close relationship between changes in such views and processes simultaneously taking place among the ranks of scholars.
Changes also occurred within the coordinating group of the Planetology Institute, where decisions were made concerning the material support provided for research. These changes resulted in a gradual but prolonged reduction in the budget of solaristic institutes and centers, and in grants for teams traveling to the planet.
Voices arguing for cutbacks in research mingled with speeches demanding more vigorous means; though no one may have gone further than the administrative director of the Worldwide Cosmology Institute, who stubbornly maintained that the living ocean wasn’t ignoring human beings, but rather it simply didn’t notice them, just as an elephant fails to see the ants crawling across its back; in order to call its attention to ourselves, then, what was needed were powerful stimuli and gigantic machines operating at the level of the entire planet. One amusing detail was the fact that, as the press mischievously pointed out, such costly measures were being demanded by the director of the Cosmology Institute, not the Institute of Planetology, which financed the exploration of Solaris; this, then, was generosity with someone else’s money.
Subsequently, the confusion of hypotheses, the reviving of old ones, the introduction of trivial changes rendering them more precise or, on the contrary, more ambiguous—all this began to turn the field of solaristics, which despite its breadth had been rather straightforward up to this point, into an ever more entangled labyrinth full of blind alleys. In an atmosphere of general indifference, stagnation, and discouragement, a second ocean of futile print seemed in time to be accompanying the ocean of Solaris.
About two years before I joined Gibarian’s workshop as a graduate of the Institute, the Mett-Irving Foundation was founded. It offered large prizes to anyone who found a way to utilize the energy of the oceanic plasma to the benefit of human beings. This had already been a temptation earlier, and spaceships had brought numerous consignments of plasma to Earth. Long and patient work had been carried out to find methods to conserve it, applying both high and low temperatures, an artificial micro-atmosphere and micro-climate resembling that of Solaris, preservative radiation, and a thousand chemical recipes, all of which merely allowed us to observe a more or less sluggish process of decay which, it goes without saying, like everything else was described multiple times in extreme detail in all its stages—autolysis, maceration, primary or early liquefaction, secondary or late liquefaction. A similar fate befell samples taken from the various productions and formations of the plasma. They differed from one another only in the path they took to the end, which constituted a watery fluid attenuated by auto-fermentation, light as ash and gleaming like metal. Its composition, proportion of elements, and chemical formulas could be given by any solaricist at the drop of a hat.
The absolute failure to keep any large or small portion of the monster alive, or at least in a state of suspended vegetation or hibernation, away from its planetary organism, became the source of a belief (developed by the school of Meunier and Prorokh) that there was in fact only one single mystery to solve, and that once we opened it with the right interpretive key, everything would immediately be clear. . .
In the search for this key, this philosopher’s stone of Solaris, time and energy were expended by people who often had nothing to do with science, and in solaristics’ fourth decade the numbers of maniacal impostors from outside the scientific community, zealots whose fanaticism exceeded that of their distant predecessors, like the prophets of the “perpetuum mobile” or the “squaring of the circle”—their numbers, then, assumed the dimensions of an epidemic, actually alarming many psychologists. After a few years, however, this passion died down, and when I was preparing for my voyage to Solaris, both it and the ocean that had inspired it had long disappeared from newspaper headlines and from daily conversation.
As I replaced Gravinsky’s volume on the shelf, next to it—since the books were arranged alphabetically—I noticed, barely visible between the thick tomes, a small pamphlet by Grattenstrom, one of the most curious blooms of the solaristic literature. It was a work that, in the struggle to understand the Non-Human, was directed against humans themselves, against people, a kind of lampoon of our species, furious in its mathematical coldness. It was written by a self-taught scholar who had first published a series of outstanding contributions to certain highly specific and rather marginal branches of quantum physics. In his most important and most extraordinary work, a mere dozen or so pages long, he sought to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us. Grattenstrom examined the formulas of relativity theory and of the theorem of force fields; he looked at parastatics and the hypotheses of a unified cosmic field, in search of traces of the human body -- all that comes from and is a consequence of the existence of our senses, the structure of our organism, and the limitations and weaknesses of humankind’s animal physiology. He reached the conclusion that there cannot now, nor in the future could there ever be, talk of “contact” between human beings and any non-humanoid civilization. In this satire against the entire species the thinking ocean is not mentioned once, but its presence, in the shape of a contemptuously triumphal silence, could be sensed underlying virtually every sentence. That was at any rate the impression I had had when I read Grattenstrom’s pamphlet for the first time. This work was actually more of a curio than a work of solaristics in the strict sense of the term; it was included in the library of classics of the genre because it had been placed there by Gibarian himself—who, as it happened, had been the one who gave it me to read.
With a strange feeling akin to respect I slipped the slim unbound offprint back among the books on the shelf. I ran my fingertips over the green and brown Almanac of Solaristics. Amid all the chaos and helplessness we were embroiled in, it couldn’t be denied that the experiences of the last few weeks had given us some certainty on a couple of fundamental questions over which a sea of ink had been spilled in recent years—debates that previously had been futile because they were unresolvable.
Someone fond of paradoxes and sufficiently stubborn could go on doubting that the ocean was a living being. But it was impossible to deny the existence of its mind, whatever could be understood by the term. It had become quite clear that it was only too aware of our presence above it. . . That statement alone disconfirmed the entire expansive wing of solaristics that declared the ocean to be “a world unto itself,” “a being unto itself,” deprived by a process of repeated atrophy of its former sensory organs, such that it supposedly knew nothing of the existence of external phenomena or objects, enclosed in a vortex of gigantic currents of thought whose abode, cradle, and creator were the depths spinning beneath their two suns.
And more: we had learned it could synthesize artificially that which we ourselves could not—our bodies—and even improve them by introducing into their subatomic structure inconceivable changes which probably had something to do with the purposes that drove it.
It existed then, it lived, thought, acted; the possibility of reducing the “Solaris problem” to nonsense or to zero, the belief that we were not dealing with any Being, and by the same token that our loss was not in fact any kind of loss—all this was gone for good. Whether they liked it or not, human beings had to take cognizance of a neighbor that, though it was billions of miles away across the void and separated from us by entire light years, still lay in the path of their expansion, and was harder to grasp than the whole of the rest of the Universe.
We may be at the turning point of all history, I thought to myself. A decision to give up, turn back, either now or in the near future, could prevail; I no longer regarded even the closing down of the Station as improbable, or at least beyond the bounds of possibility. But I didn’t believe that anything could be saved in this way. The very existence of the thinking colossus would never let people abide in peace again. However much they traveled across the Galaxy and made contact with civilizations of other beings similar to us, Solaris would present a perpetual challenge to humankind.
One other small leather-bound volume had found its way among the yearbooks of the Almanac. I gazed for a moment at the cover, darkened from the touch of fingers, before I opened it. It was an old book, the Introduction to Solaristics by Muntius. I was remembering the night I spent poring over it, and Gibarian’s smile when he gave me his copy, and the terrestrial dawn in the window as I reached the words “The End.” Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy couched in methodological formulas; the humble work of researchers is the expectation of consummation, of Annunciation, for there are not nor can there be any bridges between Solaris and Earth. This obvious fact, like many others—the absence of shared experiences, the absence of conveyable concepts—was rejected by solaricists, the same way the faithful reject arguments that would subvert the underpinnings of their faith. Besides, what do people expect, what can they want from “informational communication” with thinking seas? A recording of experiences of a being that endures through time, and is so old it probably cannot remember its own beginning? A description of the desires, passions, hopes and sufferings, that are released in the instantaneous birth of living mountains, the transformation of mathematics into existence, of loneliness and resignation into plenitude? Yet all this constitutes uncommunicable knowledge, and if one attempts to translate it into any terrestrial language, all those sought-after values and significations are lost, they remain on the far side. Besides, it isn’t these sorts of revelations, more worthy of poetry than science, that are hoped for by the “believers,” oh no; though they themselves are unaware of it, what they are waiting for is a Revelation that would explain to them the meaning of humankind itself! Solaristics, then, is the posthumous child of long-dead myths, the final flower of mystical yearnings that people no longer have the courage to utter aloud; while the cornerstone hidden deep in the foundations of this edifice is the hope of Redemption. . .
But, incapable of admitting that this is truly the case, solaricists scrupulously avoid all commentary on Contact, such that in their writings it becomes something ultimate—and while in its initial, still sober sense it was supposed to be a beginning, an introduction, an entry point onto a new path, one of many, it became beatified, and after the passage of years it turned into their eternity and their heaven. . .
Straightforward and bitter is the analysis offered by Muntius, that “heretic” of planetology; dazzling in its negation, in shattering the myth of Solaris, or rather of the Human Mission. That first voice, which dared to speak out as solaristics was still a developing field imbued with confidence and romanticism, was greeted with complete disregard and silence—something only too understandable, since accepting Muntius’s words would have been tantamount to erasing solaristics completely as it had existed thus far. The beginnings of a different, dispassionate, modest solaristics waited in vain for a founder. Five years after Muntius died, by which time his book had become a bibliographic rarity, a collector’s item not be found either in any solaristic series or in philosophy libraries, a school named after him arose—a Norwegian circle in which the composure of his exposition, divided among the different characters of the thinkers assuming his legacy, turned into the caustic, pigheaded sarcasm of Erle Ennesson, and in a somewhat trivialized version, the “utilitarian” solaristics of Phaelanga; the latter called for a focus on the concrete benefits to be gained from research, without becoming distracted by the daydreams and false hopes of civilizational contact and intellectual communion between two civilizations. Yet next to Muntius’s pitiless analysis, the writings of all his intellectual disciples are little more than footnotery, if not garden variety popularization, with the exception of the works of Ennesson and possibly Takata. Muntius himself had essentially accomplished everything, labeling the first phase of solaristics the “period of the prophets,” among whom he included Giese, Holden, and Sevada; the second phase he called “the great schism”—the splitting of the one solarian Church into a clutch of warring denominations; and he predicted a third phase—one of dogmatism and scholastic fossilization which would set in when everything there was to research had already been researched. This, however, did not happen. I believe Gibarian was correct after all in seeing Muntius’s scorched-earth exposition as a massive over-simplification that disregarded anything in solaristics that ran contrary to the elements of faith; for in reality what predominated in the field was unceasingly mundane research that promised nothing beyond a material globe orbiting around two suns.
Inside Muntius’s book there was a faded offprint from the journal Parerga Solariana, folded in two. It was one of the first papers Gibarian had written, before he became director of the Institute. After the title—“Why I Am a Solaricist”—there followed a list, concise as a precis almost, of the specific phenomena that justified the real possibility of Contact. For Gibarian belonged to what may well have been the last generation of researchers who had the courage to refer back to the glory days of optimism and were not averse to their own kind of faith, which went beyond the boundaries laid down by science, yet was eminently material, since it believed their efforts would succeed so long as those efforts were sufficiently persistent and unceasing.
He was trained in the well-known, classic bioelectronic line of research of the Eurasian school, which included Cho-En-Min, Ngyalla, and Kavakadze. This work had demonstrated similarities between images of the electrical functioning of the brain and certain discharges that occurred within the plasma preceding the appearance of some of its formations, including early-stage Polymorpha and geminate Solarids. He rejected overly anthropomorphic interpretations, all those mystical notions of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and neurophysiological schools, which sought to attribute to the neurogliac ocean particular human ailments such as epilepsy (the analogue of which were supposedly the convulsive eruptions of asymmetriads), because among the advocates of Contact he was one of the most cautious and clear-headed, and could not abide anything so much as the sensationalism which, admittedly very infrequently, accompanied one or another discovery. As it happened, a wave of exactly this kind of cheap interest was provoked by my doctoral dissertation. That was here too, though of course not in printed form—it was buried in one of the microfilm capsules. In it, taking as my starting point the innovative research of Bergmann and Reynolds, who from the mosaic of cortical processes had succeeded in identifying and “filtering out” the components accompanying the most powerful emotions—despair, pain, joy—I went on to juxtapose those recordings with discharges emitted by currents in the ocean, and discovered oscillations and patterns in the curves (in certain parts of the symmetriads’ canopy, at the base of immature mimoids, and elsewhere) that offered a noteworthy analogy. This was enough for my name to appear soon afterwards in the gutter press beneath ludicrous headlines along the lines of “Despair of the Jelly” or “Planetary Orgasm.” But this worked out to my advantage (or so I thought till recently), since I came to the attention of Gibarian who, like any other solaricist, did not read every one of the thousands of papers being published, especially those written by novices. He wrote me a letter. That letter closed one chapter of my life, and opened up a new one.