Solaris

Harey


I’d carried out my calculations in a kind of silent doggedness that had been the only thing keeping me on my feet. I was so dazed by exhaustion that I couldn’t figure out how to set up the bunk in the cabin; instead of releasing the top latches I just pulled on the rail, and all the bedding fell on me. When I finally got it down, I tossed my clothes and underwear on the floor and, barely conscious, dropped onto the pillow, which I hadn’t even properly inflated. I don’t know when I fell asleep; the light was still on. When I opened my eyes I had the feeling I’d only been sleeping a few minutes. The room was filled with a cloudy red glow. I felt cold and I felt fine. I lay naked outside the covers. Across from the bed, by the window, which was half covered by the shades, someone was sitting in the light of the red sun. It was Harey, in a white summer dress. Her legs were crossed, she was barefoot, her dark hair was tied back; the sheer material was taut over her breasts. Her dangling arms were tanned to the elbows; she sat motionless, looking at me from under dark eyelashes. I gazed at her for a long time, entirely calm. My first thought was: “I’m glad this is one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming.” All the same, I’d have preferred her not to be there. I closed my eyes and began to wish this intensely, but when I opened them again she was still sitting there. Her mouth was set in the way it always used to be, as if she was about to whistle, but her eyes weren’t smiling in the slightest. I recalled everything I’d been thinking about dreams the previous evening before I fell asleep. She looked exactly like she had the last time I saw her alive. At that time she’d only been nineteen years old; today she would have been twenty-nine, but naturally she hadn’t altered—the dead remain young. She had the same eyes that were surprised at everything, and she was looking at me. I’ll throw something at her, I thought, but though it was only a dream, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to throw objects at a dead woman.

“You poor little thing,” I said. “You’ve come to visit me, huh?”

I got a little scared, because my voice sounded normal, and the whole room and Harey—it all looked as real as could be imagined.

The dream was so vivid—not only was it in color, on the floor I could also see a number of objects that I hadn’t even noticed as I went to bed. When I wake up, I thought, I’ll have to check whether they’re actually there or whether they’re a creation of my dream, like Harey. . .

“Are you going to be sitting there much longer?” I asked, and I noticed I was speaking softly, like I was afraid someone might hear me—as if anyone could hear what happens in a dream!

In the meantime the red sun had risen a little higher. Even that much is good, I thought. I went to sleep during the red day, now it ought to be blue, and only after that would come the next red day. I couldn’t possibly have slept for fifteen hours straight, so this was definitely a dream!

Reassured, I studied Harey closely. She was lit from behind; a ray of light coming through a crack in the curtains gilded the velvety down on her left cheek, and her eyelashes cast a long shadow on her face. She was lovely. How about that, I thought to myself, how exact I am even when I’m not awake: I check the movement of the sun, and make sure she has that dimple of hers where nobody else has one, under the corner of her perpetually surprised mouth. All the same, I wished it would end. I need to get to work, after all. So I squeezed my eyelids shut, trying to wake up, when suddenly I heard a creak. I opened my eyes at once. She was sitting next to me on the bed, staring at me gravely. I smiled at her and she smiled back and leaned over me; the first kiss was a light one, like one small child kissing another. I gave her a lingering kiss in return. Can a dream be exploited like that? I wondered. Though it’s not even betraying her memory, because after all it was she herself I was dreaming about. This had never happened to me before. . . Still we said nothing. I lay on my back; when she raised her face I could see into her small nostrils, lit by the sun from the direction of the window, which were always a barometer of her feelings. I passed my fingertips over her ears, whose lobes had turned pink from kisses. I don’t know if that was what unsettled me so; I kept telling myself it was a dream, but my heart contracted.

I gathered myself to jump out of bed. I was expecting not to succeed; in dreams you often have no control over your own body, which seems paralyzed or somehow absent. I was rather counting on being woken up by the attempt. Yet I didn’t wake. I just sat up with my legs hanging to the floor. Nothing for it, I’d just have to dream this dream to the end, I thought to myself, but my good mood had vanished without a trace. I was afraid.

“What is it you want?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and I had to clear my throat.

Unthinkingly my bare feet sought my slippers and before I remembered I didn’t have any slippers here, I stubbed my toe so hard I winced. All right, now it’s going to come to an end! I thought gladly.

But still nothing happened. Harey had moved aside when I sat up. She leaned back against the bedrail. Her dress was trembling slightly just beneath the tip of her left breast, to the rhythm of a beating heart. She gazed at me with tranquil interest. It occurred to me that the best thing would be to take a shower, but on second thought I realized a dream shower wouldn’t wake me up.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

She took hold of my hand and started tossing it up and down the way she used to, knocking my fingertips up then catching hold of them.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is that bad?”

It was the same low voice, and the same absent-minded tone. She always spoke as if she was paying little attention to the words she was uttering, as if she was already occupied with something else. Sometimes this made her seem giddy, sometimes shameless, because she would stare at everything with a muted astonishment expressed only in her eyes.

“Has anyone. . . seen you?”

“I don’t know. I came here, that’s all. Does it matter, Kris?”

She was still playing with my hand, but her face was no longer taking part in the game. She frowned.

“Harey?”

“What is it, love?”

“How did you know where I was?”

That made her think. When she smiled—her lips were so dark that when she ate sour cherries you couldn’t tell—she showed the tips of her teeth.

“I’ve no idea. Isn’t that funny? You were asleep when I came in, but I didn’t wake you up. I tried not to, because you get grumpy. Grumpy and whiny,” she said, bouncing my hand up energetically to the rhythm of her words.

“Were you down below?”

“Yes. I left—it’s cold there.”

She let go of my hand. Lying down, she tossed her head back so all her hair spilled to one side, and she glanced at me with the half-smile that only had stopped irritating me when I fell in love with her.

“But. . . Harey. . . But—” I stammered.

I leaned towards her and raised the short sleeve of her dress. Just above the flower-shaped smallpox inoculation there was a tiny red pinprick. Though I’d suspected this (I was still instinctively seeking scraps of logic among all the impossibilities), I suddenly felt faint. I placed my finger on the injection mark, which I’d dreamed of for years afterwards: I would wake up with a groan in crumpled bedding, always in the same position, folded almost in two, the way she had been lying when I found her almost completely cold—because in my dream I’d tried to do the same thing she had done, as if in this way I’d been seeking her forgiveness or keeping her company in those last minutes, when she could already feel the effects of the injection and had begun to be afraid. After all, she was afraid even of an ordinary cut. She never could stand pain or the sight of blood, and then all at once she’d gone and done such a terrible thing, leaving five words on a note card addressed to me. I had it among my papers. I carried it with me at all times, faded and falling apart at the folds; I lacked the courage to part with it. A thousand times I’d returned to the moment when she wrote it, and to what she must have been feeling then. I tried to convince myself she’d only meant to pretend to do it to scare me, and it was just that the dose had accidentally proved too big. Everyone tried to tell me that was how it had been, or that it had been a momentary decision brought on by sudden depression. But they didn’t know what I had said to her five days earlier, or that I’d packed my things so as to hurt her as much as possible, and that as I was getting everything together she had said entirely calmly: “You do know what this means. . . ?”, and I’d pretended I didn’t understand, though I understood perfectly well. It’s just that I thought she was a coward, and I told her that as well. And now she was lying across my bed and gazing at me as if she didn’t know I had killed her.

“Is that all you can manage?” she asked. The room was red from the sun, the glow smoldered in her hair. She looked at her own arm, it had suddenly become important because I’d been staring at it, and when I lowered my hand she placed a cool, soft cheek against it.

“Harey,” I said hoarsely, “this can’t be. . .”

“Stop it!”

Her eyes were closed; I could see them quivering under tightly shut eyelids. Her dark lashes touched her cheeks.

“Where are we, Harey?”

“At home.”

“Which is where?”

She opened one eye for a moment then shut it again immediately. Her eyelashes tickled my hand.

“Kris!”

“What?”

“I feel good.”

I sat over her without moving. I raised my head and in the mirror over the washbasin I saw part of the bunk, Harey’s ruffled hair, and my bare knees. With my foot I pulled up one of those half-melted tools lying around on the floor, and picked it up with my free hand. Its tip was sharp. I held it against my skin right above the place where there was a pink, semi-circular, symmetrical scar, and I pressed it into my body. The pain was acute. I watched the blood flow in large drops down the inside of my thigh and drip quietly onto the floor.

It wasn’t working. The terrible thoughts moving through my mind were growing more and more distinct. I’d stopped saying “this is a dream,” I’d long stopped believing it. Now I was thinking, “I have to protect myself.” I glanced at her back, where it turned into the curve of her hips beneath the white fabric. Her bare feet dangled above the floor. I reached toward them, gently took hold of her pink heel and moved my fingers across the sole.

It was soft as the skin of a new-born baby.

By now I pretty much knew it wasn’t Harey; and I was almost certain she herself didn’t know it.

The bare foot twisted in my hand, and Harey’s dark lips filled with laughter without making a sound.

“Stop it,” she whispered.

I eased my hand away and stood up. I was still naked. As I dressed hurriedly I saw her sit on the bunk. She was watching me.

“Where are your things?” I asked, and regretted it immediately.

“My things?”

“You mean you only have that dress?”

By this stage I was just putting on an act. I deliberately tried to sound casual, ordinary, as if we’d just parted the day before or, rather, as if we’d never parted at all. She stood up and with the light but firm gesture I knew so well she brushed her dress to straighten it out. My words had intrigued her, though she didn’t say anything. For the first time she took a long hard look at her surroundings, then she looked back at me, visibly surprised.

“I don’t know. . . ,” she said helplessly. “Maybe in the locker?” she added and opened the door.

“No, there’s nothing but overalls in there,” I replied. I found an electric razor by the washbasin and began shaving. As I did so I tried not to stand with my back to the girl, whoever she was.

She walked around the cabin, peering into every corner, looking out of the window; in the end she came up to me and said:

“Kris, I have the feeling that something has happened?”

She broke off. I waited, the turned-off razor in my hand.

“It’s as if I’d forgotten something. . . As if I’d forgotten a great deal. I know. . . I only remember you. . . and. . . and nothing else.”

I listened, trying to control the look on my face.

“Was I. . . sick?”

“Well. . . you could put it like that. Yes, for a while you were a bit sick.”

“Oh. Then that’s probably what it is.”

She was already in better spirits. I can’t express what I was going through. As she stood there silently, walked around, sat, smiled, the feeling that this was Harey in front of me was stronger than my churning fear; then at other moments, like the present one, it seemed as if this was a simplified version of Harey, reduced to a few distinctive expressions, gestures, movements. She came close, rested her fists on my chest by my neck and asked:

“How are things between us? Good or bad?”

“They couldn’t be better,” I replied.

She gave a half-smile.

“When you say that, it usually means they’re bad.”

“Not at all. Harey darling, I have to go now,” I said hurriedly. “Wait for me here, OK? Or maybe. . . are you hungry?” I asked, because I myself suddenly felt a growing hunger.

“Hungry? No.”

She shook her head so hard it made her hair wave back and forth.

“Should I wait here for you? Will you be long?”

“An hour tops,” I began, but she interrupted:

“I’ll go with you.”

“You can’t go with me. I have work to get done.”

“I’ll go with you.”

This was a completely different Harey—the old one didn’t intrude. Ever.

“It isn’t possible, kid. . .”

She looked up at me, then all at once took me by the hand. I ran my fingers up her forearm; the upper arm was full and warm. I hadn’t meant it but it was almost a caress. My body was acknowledging her, wanting her, drawing me to her beyond reason, beyond argumentation and fear.

Trying to remain calm come what may, I repeated:

“Harey, it isn’t possible. You have to stay here.”

“No.”

How strange it sounded!

“Why?”

“I d. . . I don’t know.”

She looked around and raised her eyes to me again.

“I can’t,” she said as quiet as could be.

“But why?!”

“I don’t know. I can’t. I have the feeling that. . . the feeling that. . .”

She was evidently searching for the answer inside herself, and when she found it, it was a discovery for her.

“I have the feeling that I always have to. . . be able to see you.”

Her matter-of-fact tone prevented the words from being an expression of emotion; this was something quite different. It suddenly altered the way I was holding her—though on the outside there was no change, I still had my arms around her. As I looked into her eyes I began to push her arms backwards. This movement, not entirely decisive to begin with, was already leading somewhere—it had found its purpose. I cast around with my eyes for something to tie her up with.

Her elbows, twisted back, knocked lightly against each other and at the same moment flexed with a strength that rendered my hold ineffective. I struggled for perhaps one second. Not even a wrestler would have been able to get free if he’d been bent over backwards as Harey was, feet barely touching the floor; but she broke my grip, straightened up and lowered her arms, while her face took no part in any of this, bearing nothing but a faint, uncertain smile.

Her eyes observed me with the same calm interest as at the very beginning, when I woke up, as if she was unaware of my desperate exertions from a moment ago, brought on by an attack of anxiety. She’d become passive and seemed to be waiting for something—simultaneously indifferent, intent, and a little take aback by it all.

My arms dropped of their own accord. I left her in the middle of the room and went up to the shelf by the washbasin. I felt caught in an unimaginable trap, and I was looking for a way out, weighing ever more ruthless options. If someone had asked what was happening to me and what it all meant, I wouldn’t have been able to respond with a single word, but I was already becoming aware that what was happening to all of us on the Station constituted some kind of whole, as dire as it was incomprehensible. Yet this was not what I was thinking about at the present moment. Rather, I was looking for some sort of trick, a maneuver that would make it possible for me to escape. Without looking, I could feel Harey’s gaze on me. In a locker over the shelf there was a small first aid box. I flipped through its contents. I found a container of soluble sleeping tablets and put four of them—the maximum dose—in a glass. I didn’t even particularly conceal what I was doing from her. I don’t really know why. I didn’t think about it. I added hot water, waited till the tablets had dissolved, and went up to Harey, who was still standing in the middle of the room.

“Are you angry?” she asked in a low voice.

“No. Here, drink this.”

I don’t know why I’d assumed she would do what I said. But sure enough, she took the glass from me without a word and drank the whole thing in one gulp. I set the empty glass aside on the table and sat down in the corner between the locker and the bookshelves. Harey slowly came up to me and sat down on the floor by the armchair, the way she often used to, folding her legs under her, and with an equally familiar gesture she tossed her hair back. Though I no longer remotely believed it was her, every time I recognized her in these small quirks my throat tightened. It was beyond understanding and it was terrible, and the most terrible thing about it was that I myself had to dissemble, pretending that I took her for Harey; though after all, she took herself for Harey too, and in her own reasoning she was not being deceitful. I don’t know how I concluded that this was the case, but I was sure of it, insofar as anything could still be sure.

I sat there, and the girl leaned back against my knees, her hair tickling my motionless hand. We were almost completely still. A couple of times I glanced at my watch. Half an hour had passed and the sleeping tablets ought to have started working. Harey murmured something faintly.

“What was that?” I asked, but she didn’t reply. I took this as a sign she was growing sleepy, though truth be told, deep down I doubted whether the medication would be effective. Why? I don’t know the answer to that question either, probably because my ruse had been only too simple.

Her head, swathed in dark hair, gradually sank onto my lap; she was breathing regularly like a sleeping person. I leaned over to carry her across to the bunk; suddenly, without opening her eyes she took hold of my hair lightly and burst out in a strident laugh.

I froze, while she was in fits of laughter. Through eyes narrowed to slits she studied me with a gaze that was at once naive and cunning. I sat unnaturally stiffly, dazed and helpless; Harey giggled one more time, pressed her face into my arm and fell silent.

“What are you laughing about?” I asked in a hollow voice. The same expression of slightly uneasy puzzlement appeared on her face. I knew she was trying to give a straight answer. She tapped her diminutive nose and finally said with a sigh:

“I couldn’t say myself.”

It sounded like genuine surprise.

“I’m behaving like an idiot, aren’t I?” she continued. “It just kind of suddenly. . . But you’re no one to talk: you’re sitting there all sulky like. . . like Pelvis. . .”

“Like who?” I asked. I thought I’d misheard.

“Pelvis. You know, the fat guy. . .”

The thing was, beyond the shadow of a doubt Harey could not have known Pelvis or heard about him from me, for the simple reason that he’d come back from his mission a good three years after she died. I’d never met him up till then, and I didn’t know that when he presided over Institute meetings he had the annoying habit of prolonging them into infinity. In fact his name was Pelle Villis, which had been shortened to Pelvis as a nickname, something I also didn’t know till he returned.

Harey leaned her elbows on my lap and looked into my face. I placed my hands on her shoulders and slid them towards her back till they almost met at the pulsing, bare base of her neck. The gesture could actually have been taken for a caress, and judging from her eyes she hadn’t understood it any other way. In reality I was checking that her body felt like ordinary, soft human flesh, and that beneath her muscles there were bones and joints. As I gazed into her tranquil eyes I had an awful urge to tighten my fingers abruptly.

I was on the point of squeezing when I suddenly remembered Snaut’s bloodied hands, and I let go of her.

“What a strange look you have in your eyes. . . ,” she said evenly.

My heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t say a word. I closed my eyes for a moment.

All at once an entire course of action came to me, from beginning to end, with all the details. Without wasting a moment I stood up from the armchair.

“I have to go now, Harey,” I said. “If you really want, you can come with me.”

“All right.”

She jumped to her feet.

“Why are you barefoot?” I asked, going up to the locker and picking out two pairs of colored overalls for myself and for her.

“I don’t know. . . I must have kicked my shoes off somewhere. . . ,” she said hesitantly. I let it slide.

“You won’t be able to put this on over your dress—you’ll need to take it off.”

“Overalls? What for?” she asked. She immediately made to remove her dress, but something very odd came to light: it couldn’t be taken off because there was no fastening. The red buttons down the middle were only decoration. There was no zipper or any other kind of fastener. Harey gave an embarrassed smile. Acting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I picked up a scalpel-like tool from the floor and cut the material in the middle of the neckline at the back. Now she could pull the dress over her head. The overalls were a little too big for her.

“Are we flying somewhere? . . . But you’re coming too?” she asked as we were leaving the cabin, both in our overalls now. I merely nodded. I was terrified we’d meet Snaut, but the corridor to the docking bay was deserted, and the door to the radio station, which we had to pass, was closed.

A dead calm hung over the Station. Harey watched as I brought a rocket from the middle cubicle on an electric cart and drove it onto a free track. I checked in turn the microreactor, the remote controlled rudders, and the nozzles; then along with the takeoff carriage I wheeled the missile onto the circular roller surface of the launch pad beneath the central funnel of the dome, having first removed the empty capsule that was there.

The rocket was a small vessel that served as a shuttle between the Station and the Satelloid. It was used to transport cargo, not people, barring exceptional circumstances, because it couldn’t be opened from inside. This happened to suit my purpose and was a part of my plan. Of course I had no intention of launching the rocket, but I did everything the way I would if I were preparing it for an actual takeoff. Harey, who had accompanied me so many times on my travels, was somewhat familiar with it all. Once again I checked the air conditioning and the breathing apparatus inside and turned them both on; then when I fired up the main circuit and the control lights came on, I crawled out of the cramped interior and indicated it to Harey, who was standing by the access ladder.

“Get in.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll follow you. I have to close the hatch behind us.”

I didn’t think she could have seen through the deception ahead of time. When she climbed the ladder and entered the vessel, I immediately stuck my head through the hatch and asked if she’d been able to find a comfortable position. When I heard a muffled “yes” from the cramped space, I stepped back and slammed the trapdoor shut. With a flick of the hand I snapped the bolts shut as far as they would go and with a wrench I had ready I started tightening the five reinforcing screws set into wells in the plating.

The sharpened cigar of the rocket stood upright as if it were actually about to fly off into space. I knew nothing bad would happen to the woman locked inside—there was plenty of air, even some food, and besides, I had no intention of imprisoning her in there forever.

I wanted at any price to buy myself a few hours of freedom so I could make plans for the less immediate future, and get in touch with Snaut, now on an equal basis.

As I was tightening the second-to-last screw I felt a slight shake in the metal struts that held the rocket in place, suspended from projections on three sides, but I thought I must have set the steel mass atremble myself as I wielded the large wrench.

Yet when I took a few steps away I saw something I hope never to see again.

The whole rocket was juddering from a series of blows coming from inside. But the strength of those blows. . . Even if the slim dark-haired girl inside the vessel had been replaced by a steel automat, it wouldn’t have been able to make the entire eight tons convulse in that way!

The reflections of the docking bay lights flickered and flashed in the polished bodywork. In fact I didn’t hear any knocking. Inside the projectile there was undisturbed quiet; but the broadly planted stays of the scaffolding in which the rocket was suspended lost their sharp outline, quivering like violin strings. The frequency of the vibrations was such that I worried about the integrity of the plating. With shaking hands I finished securing the last screw, tossed the wrench aside and jumped down off the ladder. As I stepped slowly backwards I could see the bolts in the shock absorbers, designed only to withstand a constant pressure, bouncing in their mounts. I had the impression the plating of the hull was losing its uniform gleam. Like a madman I rushed to the remote control console and with both hands pushed the lever that started up the reactor and the communications system. At that point, from the loudspeaker now connected to the rocket’s interior there came a half-whimper, half-whistle that was utterly unlike any human voice, despite which I could make out in it a repeated howl: “Kris! Kris! Kris!!”

Though actually I didn’t hear it clearly. My knuckles were cut and bleeding from the helter-skelter of trying to launch the rocket. A pale blue glow lit the walls. Dust clouds burst from the launch pad beneath the exhaust nozzles and turned into a pillar of toxic sparks, then a sustained roar drowned out all other sounds. The rocket rose up on three flames that instantly merged into a single column of fire, and flew out through the open launch aperture, leaving trembling layers of heat behind. The aperture closed up immediately, and automatically activated compressors began flushing clean air into the bay, which was filled with swirling clouds of acrid smoke. I was completely oblivious to all this. My hands gripping the console, my face still smarting with living fire, my hair curled and scorched from the thermic blast, I was gasping for breath. The air was filled with the stench of burning and the smell of ionization, unmistakable as ozone. Though at the moment of liftoff I’d closed my eyes instinctively, I’d still been struck by the exhaust flame. For a good while I could see nothing but black, red, and gold rings. Gradually they dissipated. The smoke, dust, and fog thinned, drawn into the perpetually moaning ventilation ducts. The first thing I saw was the greenish glow of the radar screen. I started maneuvering the directional reflector, looking for the rocket. When I found it, it was already above the atmosphere. I’d never in my life sent up a projectile in such a mad, blind fashion, with no idea what acceleration to give it or even where to send it. It occurred to me that the simplest thing would be to put it in orbit around Solaris, at an altitude of six hundred miles or so, because then I could turn off the engines—if they were left on too long, I thought it might lead to a disaster that could have unpredictable consequences. I ascertained from the tables that a six-hundred-mile orbit was stationary. It didn’t guarantee anything, true, but it was the only solution I could see.

I had switched the loudspeaker off right after takeoff, and I lacked the courage to turn it back on. I would have done virtually anything not to have to hear again that terrible voice, which carried no vestige of anything human. This much I could say—all appearances had been smashed, and from under the appearance of Harey’s face another, truer face had begun to show, compared to which the alternative of madness was truly becoming a liberation.

It was one o’clock when I left the docking bay.