The Old Mimoid
I was sitting by the big window and staring at the ocean. I had nothing to do. The report, which had taken five days to write, was now a bundle of waves speeding across the void somewhere beyond the constellation of Orion. When it reached the dark dusty nebula that extends across eight trillion cubic miles and swallows every signal and light ray, it would hit the first of a series of relays. From there, from one radio beacon to the next, in leaps of billions of miles it would hurtle in a vast arc all the way to the last relay, a metal container packed tight with precision instruments and equipped with the extended muzzle of a directional antenna, which would compress it one more time and fling it further into space, toward Earth. Months would pass and an identical packet of energy, trailing a wake of shockwave distortions through the gravitational field of the Galaxy, would be shot from Earth, would reach the edge of the cosmic cloud, squeeze through it, fortified by the series of slowly drifting beacons, and with undiminished rapidity would speed on toward the double suns of Solaris.
Beneath the red sun the ocean was blacker than ever. A ruddy mist melted the place where it met the sky; the day was exceptionally hot, as if presaging one of those extremely rare and unimaginably violent storms that strike the planet a few times a year. There are reasons to believe that its only inhabitant controls the climate and itself causes the storms.
For several more months I would be gazing from those windows, observing from high up the sunrises of white gold and oppressive red, mirrored from time to time in some fluid eruption, in the silvery bauble of a symmetriad; following the journey made by slender rapidos leaning into the wind; encountering half-degraded, crumbling mimoids. One day the screens of all the visuphones would start to flicker, the entire electronic signalization system, long dormant, would spring to life, set in motion by an impulse sent from hundreds of thousands of miles away announcing the approach of a metal colossus that would lower itself over the ocean with a prolonged thunder of its gravitors. It would be either the Ulysses or the Prometheus, or another of the great long-distance cruisers. When I climbed the accommodation ladder from the flat roof of the Station, on board I’d see ranks of bulky white-armored automats that do not share mankind’s original sin and are so innocent they carry out any command, to the point of destroying themselves or any object lying in their path, if their memory, oscillating in crystal, is so programmed. And then the ship would move off, noiselessly, faster than sound, leaving behind it a cone of reverberations splitting into bass octaves as it reached the ocean, and the faces of all the humans would brighten for a moment at the thought that they were returning home.
But I had no home. Earth? I thought about its great crowded buzzing cities, in which I would become lost, almost effaced, as if I’d gone through with what I wanted to do that second or third night—thrown myself into the ocean where it rocked sluggishly in the darkness. I’d drown in people. I’d be a reticent, observant, and therefore valued, companion, I’d have many acquaintances, friends even, and women, maybe even one woman. For some time I’d have to force myself to smile, say hello, get to my feet, perform a thousand trivial actions from which life on Earth is composed, till I stopped being aware of them. I’d find new interests, new pastimes, but I wouldn’t give myself over to them completely. Not to anything or anyone, ever again. And, maybe, I’d stare into the night towards the place where the darkness of the dusty nebula blocks the light of two suns like a black veil; I’d remember everything, even what I was thinking now, and with an indulgent smile in which there was a hint of regret, but also of superiority, I’d recall my follies and my hopes. I absolutely did not regard that “me” of the future as anything worse than the Kelvin who was prepared to do anything in the cause of so-called Contact. And no one would ever have the right to judge me.
Snaut came into the cabin. He looked around, then stared at me. I got up and went up to the table.
“Did you want something?”
“Am I right in thinking you don’t have anything to do. . . ?” he asked, blinking. “I could give you, there are some calculations that need running, not that they’re urgent or anything. . .”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile, “but that’s not necessary.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, looking out of the window.
“Yes. I’ve been thinking about various things and—”
“I’d rather you didn’t think so much.”
“Then you have no idea what this is about. Tell me, do you. . . believe in God?”
He gave me a sharp look.
“Come off it. Who still believes these days. . .”
Unease flickered in his eyes.
“It’s not so straightforward,” I said in a deliberately light tone. “I don’t mean the traditional God of terrestrial beliefs. I’m no specialist in religion, and I may not have come up with anything new, but do you happen to know if there ever existed a faith in. . . a defective God?”
“Defective?” he repeated, raising his eyebrows. “How do you mean? In a certain sense the god of every religion was defective, because he was encumbered with human qualities, only magnified. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, was a hothead who craved servility and was jealous of other gods. . . the Greek gods had just as many human imperfections, with their quarrelsomeness and their family squabbles—”
“No,” I interrupted him, “I mean a God whose deficiencies don’t arise from the simplemindedness of his human creators, but constitute his most essential, immanent character. This would be a God limited in his omniscience and omnipotence, one who can make mistakes in foreseeing the future of his works, who can find himself horrified by the course of events he has set in motion. This is. . . a cripple God, who always desires more than he’s able to have, and doesn’t always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure.”
“Once there was Manicheism,” Snaut began hesitantly. The guarded reserve with which he’d been treating me in recent days had disappeared.
“But this has nothing to do with good and evil,” I interrupted him at once. “This God doesn’t exist outside of matter, he’s unable to free himself of it, and that’s all he wants. . .”
“I don’t know any religion like that,” he said after a moment of silence. “Such a religion was never. . . necessary. If I understand you correctly, and I’m afraid I do, then you’re thinking about an evolving god who develops through time and grows, mounting higher and higher levels of power toward the awareness of that power’s impotence? This God of yours is a being who has entered godhood like entering a blind alley, and when he comprehends this, he yields to despair. Fine, but surely a despairing God is a human being, my friend? You’re thinking about human beings. . . This isn’t just poor philosophy, it’s even poor mysticism.”
“No,” I insisted, “I’m not thinking about human beings. Perhaps in certain features that might match the provisional definition, but only because it’s full of holes. A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that’s impossible, since a person who isn’t brought up among people cannot become a person. My. . . one has to be a being devoid of plurality, you follow?”
“Oh,” he said, “right away I should’ve. . .”
And he pointed out the window.
“No,” I disagreed, “not that either. At the most as something that in its growth missed an opportunity for godhood, having retreated too soon into itself. It’s more of an anchorite, the hermit of the universe, not its god. . . It repeats itself, Snaut, whereas the one I’m thinking about would never do that. Maybe he’s coming into existence as we speak, in some corner of the Galaxy, and before long, in a fit of youthful intoxication he’ll start extinguishing some stars and lighting others, after a certain time we’ll notice it. . .”
“We already have,” said Snaut sourly. “ Novas and supernovas. . . are they candles on his altar, according to you?”
“If you want to treat what I’m saying so literally. . .”
“Perhaps Solaris is precisely the cradle of this divine infant of yours,” added Snaut. An ever more distinct smile was ringing his eyes with little creases. “Perhaps in your conception this is the origin, the seed of the God of despair, perhaps its exuberant childhood is way beyond our comprehension, and everything our libraries of solariana contain is merely a catalogue of his infant reflexes. . .”
“And for a while we were his playthings,” I finished. “Yes, that’s possible. You know what we just managed to do? Create an entirely new hypothesis on the subject of Solaris, and that’s no small achievement! Right away you have an explanation of the failure to make Contact, the lack of response, certain, let’s say, extravagances in its treatment of us: the mind of a small child. . .”
“I don’t need to put my name to it,” he murmured as he stood by the window. For a long moment we gazed at the black waves. On the eastern horizon a pale elongated smudge could be seen through the mist.
“Where did you get that idea of a defective God?” he asked suddenly, not taking his eyes off the emptiness bathed in light.
“I don’t know. It seemed to me very, very authentic, you know? It would be the only God I’d be inclined to believe in, one whose suffering wasn’t redemption, didn’t save anyone, didn’t serve any purpose, it just was.”
“A mimoid,” Snaut said ever so quietly, in a different voice.
“What was that? Oh, right. I noticed it before. It’s really old.”
We both gazed at the misty red horizon.
“I’m going to go fly there,” I said unexpectedly. “All the more because I’ve been on the Station the whole time; this is a good opportunity. I’ll be back in half an hour. . .”
“What did you say?” Snaut opened his eyes wide. “You’re going out there? Where to?”
“There.” I pointed at the indistinct flesh-colored shape looming in the mist. “What harm could it do? I’ll take the small helicopter. It’d be ridiculous if, one day on Earth, I had to admit that I’m a solaricist who’s never set foot on the planet. . .”
I went up to the locker and started picking out a set of overalls. Snaut watched me in silence then eventually said:
“I don’t like this.”
“What?” I turned around with the overalls in my hand. I was overcome by an excitement I hadn’t experienced in a long while. “What’s the problem? Come on, cards on the table! You’re afraid that I’ll. . . that’s absurd! I give you my word I wouldn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to me. No, really no.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather be on my own. After all, it’s something new, something completely new.” I was speaking quickly as I pulled on the overalls. Snaut went on talking but I didn’t really listen as I hunted for what I’d need.
He went with me to the docking bay. He helped me wheel out the helicopter from its hangar into the middle of the launch pad. As I was putting on my space suit he suddenly asked:
“Does a man’s word still carry any value with you?”
“For God’s sake, Snaut, are you still on about that? It does. I already gave you it. Where are the backup canisters?”
He didn’t say any more. When I’d closed the transparent cockpit cover I signaled to him. He turned on the lift and I slowly rose to the roof of the Station. The engine sprang to life with a lengthy growl, the three-bladed rotor started spinning and the craft rose up, oddly light, leaving behind it the ever shrinking silver disk of the Station.
It was my first time alone over the ocean. The effect was completely different than what one experiences watching through the windows. This may also have been because of the low altitude—I had dropped to less than three hundred feet above the surface. It was only now that I not only knew but actually felt how the alternating crests and troughs of the vast expanse, with their oily glister, moved not like a marine tide or a cloud, but like an animal. Constant though extremely slow contractions of a muscular naked torso—that was what it looked like. The top of each wave flamed with red foam as it turned over lazily; when I altered course to head directly toward the slowly drifting island of the mimoid, the sun hit me in the eyes; there was a flicker of bloody lightning in the convex windshield, while the ocean itself turned inky blue with spots of dark fire.
The arc that I described somewhat unskillfully brought me far to windward, the mimoid left behind as a broad bright patch whose irregular outline stood out against the ocean. It had lost the pink hue the mist had given it; it was yellow as dry bone. For a moment I lost sight of it, and instead I caught a glimpse of the Station in the distance where it seemed to hang suspended right over the ocean like a huge Zeppelin from the old days. I repeated the maneuver, concentrating intently: the solid mass of the mimoid with its grotesque vertiginous shape hove into view. I suddenly worried that I’d clip the topmost of its bulbous ledges, and I brought the helicopter up so abruptly that it juddered as it lost speed. My caution was unnecessary, as the rounded summits of the bizarre towers sailed by far below me. I guided the craft alongside the drifting island and slowly, foot by foot, I began to reduce altitude till the crumbling peaks rose above the cockpit. It wasn’t big. From one end to the other it measured perhaps three quarters of a mile, and no more than a few hundred yards across; there were some narrower places where it was likely to break up before long. It must have been a fragment from an incomparably larger formation; by Solaris’ standards it was a mere splinter, a remnant, God knows how many weeks or months old.
In amongst the stringy protuberances, right next to the ocean I discovered a sort of shore, a few dozen square yards of rather steep but smooth surface, and I directed the helicopter there. Landing proved harder than I’d thought: I came very close to catching the rotor on a wall that suddenly rose up before my eyes, but I nailed it. I turned the engine off at once and flipped up the cockpit cover. Standing on the wing, I made sure the helicopter wasn’t in danger of slipping into the ocean; the waves were licking at the jagged edge only a dozen or so yards from where I’d touched down, but the craft stood firmly on its broad landing skids. I jumped onto the. . . “earth.” What I’d taken before for a wall, the thing I almost crashed into, was a huge osseous sheet, thin as a membrane and honeycombed with holes, that stood vertical and was covered with swellings that resembled balustrades. A gap several yards wide cut across this whole multi-story surface diagonally and, like the large and irregularly placed holes, showed what lay beyond. I climbed up the incline of the closest span of the wall, discovering that the boots of the space suit had an excellent grip, while the suit itself did not hinder my movements. Finding myself four stories above the ocean, I turned to face the interior of the skeletal landscape; it was only now that I could get a proper look at it.
The similarity to an ancient city half in ruins, to an exotic Moroccan settlement from centuries ago that had been brought down by earthquake or other natural disaster, was astounding. I could see with the greatest clarity the twisting labyrinth of streets partially blocked by rubble: their steep winding descent toward a shore washed by clammy foam; higher up, the still intact battlements and bastions, their rounded foundations; and, in the bulging or concave walls, the dark openings like broken windows or defensive slits. The whole island-city, leaning heavily to one side like a sunken galleon, proceeded in senseless motion, turning very slowly, as could be seen from the apparent movement of the sun in the sky, which produced a lazy play of shadow across the inner reaches of the ruins; at times a ray of sunlight would slip through to reach the spot where I was standing. I climbed higher still, at considerable risk, till a fine powder began to crumble from the excrescences protruding over my head; as it floated down it filled the crooked gullies and alleyways with great billows of dust. A mimoid is of course not actual rock, and its resemblance to limestone ends when you take a piece in your hand—it’s a lot lighter than pumice, small-celled, and hence extraordinarily airy.
I was so high up now I could feel its movement; it wasn’t just floating forward, driven by the blows of the ocean’s black muscles, who knows where from or where to, but it was also tilting first one way then the other, exceptionally slowly. Each of these pendulum-like swings was accompanied by the drawn-out, glutinous sounds of yellow and gray foam dripping from the shore as it rose away from the ocean. This rocking motion had been given it long ago, probably when it was born, and it retained it thanks to its huge mass. Having observed as much as I could from my elevated vantage point, I climbed carefully back down; it was only then, strange to relate, that I realized the mimoid did not interest me in the slightest, that I had come here to encounter not it, but the ocean.
I sat down on the rough, cracked surface, a few yards from the helicopter. A black wave crawled sluggishly up onto the shore, spreading and at the same time losing its color; when it retreated, the edge of the previously untouched rock was marked with trembling filaments of slime. I moved further down and reached out my hand to the next wave. It faithfully repeated the phenomenon that humans had first witnessed almost a century before: it hesitated, withdrew, then flowed over my hand yet without touching it, in such a way that a narrow layer of air remained between the surface of my gauntlet and the inside of the covering, which instantly changed consistency, turning from liquid to almost fleshy. I then raised my arm; the wave, or rather its narrow tongue, followed it upwards, continuing to encase my hand in an ever more transparent dirty green encystment. I rose to my feet, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to lift my arm any further. A shaft of the gelatinous substance stretched like a vibrating violin string, but did not break off; the base of the entirely flattened wave, like a strange creature waiting patiently for the end of these experiments, clung to the shore around my feet (also without coming into contact with them). It looked as if a ductile flower had grown out of the ocean, its calyx encircling my fingers in such a way that it became their exact negative, though without touching them. I stepped back. The stem of the flower shuddered and, as if reluctantly, it returned toward the ground -- elastic, swaying, unsure. The wave gathered, drawing it into itself, and disappeared from the edge of the shore. I repeated the game until at some point—like a hundred years ago—one of the waves receded indifferently, as if having had enough of the new experience, and I knew that I’d have had to wait several hours to revive its “curiosity.” I took my seat as before, but as if changed by this theoretically familiar phenomenon that I had provoked; theory was quite incapable of conveying the actual experience.
In the budding, growth, and spread of this living formation, in each of its movements separately and in all taken together, there was something one was tempted to call a cautious yet not timid naivety, as it strove frantically and rapidly to know, to take in, an unexpectedly encountered new shape. Then, in mid-journey, it had to withdraw when it was in danger of transgressing certain boundaries established by a mysterious law. This agile inquisitiveness was so utterly at odds with the immensity that stretched to every bright horizon. I had never before been so aware of its vast presence, its powerful, inexorable silence breathing evenly through its waves. Staring in wonderment, I was descending to regions of inertia that might have seemed inaccessible, and in the gathering intensity of engrossment I was becoming one with this fluid unseeing colossus, as if—without the slightest effort, without words, without a single thought—I was forgiving it for everything.
For the whole of the final week I behaved so sensibly that the distrustful glint in Snaut’s eye eventually stopped harassing me. On the outside I was calm; secretly, without being fully conscious of it, I was expecting something. What? Her return? How could I? Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws; it can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love, which is more enduring than death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries, is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it’s simply futile. To be a clock, on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs; to know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through multiple repetitions? To replay human existence—fine, but to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune, pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? I didn’t believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication—that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But its actions were geared towards some purpose. True, even this I was not completely certain of. Yet to leave meant to strike out that perhaps slim, perhaps only imagined chance concealed in the future. And thus years amid furniture, objects, that we had both touched, in air that still remembered her breathing? In the name of what? The hope of her return? I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me—the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea, as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
Zakopane, June 1959 - June 1960