Solaris

Monsters


In the middle of the night I was woken by a light. I propped myself up on my elbow, covering my eyes with my other hand. Harey was wrapped in the bedsheet; she was sitting at the foot of the bed, hunched over, her hair falling across her face. Her shoulders were shaking. She was crying soundlessly.

“Harey!”

She curled up even more.

“What’s wrong? Harey. . .”

I sat up on the bed, still not entirely awake, slowly disengaging from the nightmare that had been stifling me a moment ago. The girl was trembling. I put my arms around her. She pushed me away with her elbow and hid her face.

“Darling.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Harey, for goodness’ sake, what is it?”

I saw her quivering, tear-stained face. Big childlike teardrops were rolling down her cheeks; they glistened in the dimple on her chin and fell onto the sheet.

“You don’t want me.”

“Where did you get that idea!”

“I heard.”

I could feel my whole face stiffening.

“What did you hear? You misunderstood, it was only. . .”

“No. No. You were saying it isn’t me. That I should go away. I would, God I would, but I can’t. I don’t know what it is. I wanted to and I can’t. I’m so, I’m so bad!”

“Come on, kid!”

I snatched her up, pulled her to myself as hard as I could, everything was falling apart. I kissed her hands, her wet salty fingers, I repeated entreaties, oaths, I apologized, I said it was a stupid nasty dream. She gradually calmed down. She stopped crying. Her eyes were huge, somnambulistic. They dried. She turned her head away.

“No,” she said, “don’t say all that, there’s no need. You’re not the same towards me either. . .”

“I’m not!”

It came out like a groan.

“That’s right. You don’t want me. I felt it the whole time. I pretended not to see it. I thought I was maybe just imagining it or something. But no. You’re behaving. . . differently. You don’t take me seriously. It was a dream, that’s true, but you were dreaming me. You called me by my name. You were disgusted. Why? Why?!”

I knelt in front of her and put my arms around her knees.

“Come on now, kid.”

“I don’t want you to talk like that. I don’t want it, you hear? I’m not a kid. I’m. . .”

She burst out sobbing and fell face down on the bed. I stood up. Cool air blew from the air vents with a faint rustle. I was cold. I threw on a bath robe, sat on the bed and touched her shoulder.

“Harey, listen to me. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you the truth. . .”

She sat up, gently leaning her weight on her hands. I could see the pulse beating beneath the thin skin on her neck. My face went numb again and I felt as cold as if I’d been standing on ice. My head was completely empty.

“The truth?” she said. “Cross your heart?”

I didn’t answer right away. I had to overcome a constriction in my throat. That was our old phrase. When it was uttered, neither of us dared lie, nor even remain silent on whatever it was about. There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

“Cross my heart,” I said solemnly. “Harey. . .”

She waited.

“You’ve changed too. We all change. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. It really looks as if. . . for a reason neither of us fully understands. . . you’re not able to be apart from me. But that’s not such a bad thing, because with you too, I’m not able to. . .”

“Kris!”

I picked her up, wrapped in the sheet. A corner of it, wet with tears, fell on my shoulder. I walked around the cabin, rocking her. She stroked my face.

“No. You haven’t changed. It’s me,” she whispered in my ear. “There’s something wrong with me. Maybe that?”

She was staring at the dark empty rectangle where the broken door had been; I’d taken what was left of it to the depository the previous evening. I’ll need to put a new one up, I thought to myself. I laid her on the bed.

“Do you even sleep at all?” I asked, standing over her with my arms dangling.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Think about it, darling.”

“I don’t think it’s real sleep. Maybe I’m sick. I lie here and think, and you know. . .”

She shuddered.

“What is it?” I asked in a whisper, knowing my voice might fail me.

“They’re really strange thoughts. I don’t know where they come from.”

“Like what for example?”

I have to stay calm, I thought to myself, whatever I hear, and I steeled myself for her words as if for a powerful blow.

She shook her head, at a loss.

“It’s just kind of. . . all around. . .”

“I don’t follow. . . ?”

“As if it weren’t just inside me, but further away, kind of, I can’t explain. There aren’t words to express it. . .”

“It’s probably dreams,” I said in an offhand way, and breathed a sigh of relief. “Now let’s turn off the light and not worry about anything till morning, and if we feel like it, in the morning we’ll look for some new worries, OK?”

She reached out for the switch and darkness fell. I lay down on the cold bedding and felt the warmth of her breath drawing closer.

I put my arm around her.

“Tighter,” she whispered. Then after a long while: “Kris!”

“What?”

“I love you.”

I felt like screaming.


The dawn was red. The huge disk of the sun hung low over the horizon. There was a letter on the threshold. I tore open the envelope. Harey was in the bathroom; I could hear her humming to herself. From time to time she popped her head around the door, her hair all wet. I went up to the window and read:

Kelvin, we’re gotten bogged down. Sartorius is arguing for vigorous steps. He believes he’ll be able to destabilize the neutrino systems. For his experiments he needs a certain amount of plasma as initial G-matter. He’s proposing that you go on a reconnaissance and gather some plasma in a container. Do whatever you think right, but let us know your decision. I have no opinion either way. I don’t think I have anything at all anymore. I’d prefer you to do it, but only so we can move forward, or at least look as if we are. Otherwise there’s nothing left but to envy G.

Rat

PS Don’t come to the radio station. That you can still do for me. Best of all is to telephone.

My heart sank as I read the letter. I looked it over carefully one more time, tore it up and threw the scraps into the sink. Then I started looking for a space suit for Harey. That alone was awful. It was exactly like the last time. But she knew nothing about it, otherwise she wouldn’t have been so pleased when I told her I had to go on a short reconnaissance outside the Station and I’d like her to come along. We ate breakfast in the small galley (during which Harey barely swallowed a few mouthfuls) and went to the library.

I wanted to look over the literature on field problems and neutrino systems before I did what Sartorius wanted. I didn’t know how I was going to go about it, but I’d decided to keep an eye on what he was doing. It had occurred to me that this as-yet nonexistent neutrino annihilator could liberate Snaut and Sartorius, while I waited out the operation with Harey somewhere on the outside—in an aircraft for example. For some time I pored over the electronic catalogue, asking it questions to which it responded either by spitting out a slip of paper that read laconically “not in bibliography,” or inviting me into such a jungle of specialized research in physics that I didn’t know where to begin. For some reason I had an urge to remain in that large circular room with its smooth walls covered in a checkerwork of drawers with their multitudes of microfilms and electronic records. The library was located in the very center of the Station; as such it had no windows and was the most isolated place inside the steel shell. Who knows if that wasn’t the reason I felt so good there, despite the absolute failure of my search. I wandered about the large space till finally I came to a stop in front of a huge bookcase, reaching up to the ceiling and filled with books. It wasn’t so much an indulgence, and a very dubious one at that, as a respectful memorial to the pioneers of solaristic exploration: the shelves, on which there were perhaps six hundred volumes, contained all the classics of the discipline, starting with Giese’s already mostly outdated nine-volume monograph. I took out the tomes, so heavy they made my hand droop, and flipped through them idly as I perched on the arm of a chair. Harey also found herself a book—I read a few lines of it over her shoulder. It was one of the few books that had belonged to the first expedition, and had probably been owned by Giese himself—The Interplanetary Chef. I didn’t say anything, seeing the attentiveness with which Harey was studying recipes adapted for the austere conditions of space travel, and I returned to the venerable volume I had on my lap. Ten Years of Research on Solaris had appeared in the “Solariana” series as numbers four through thirteen, while the most recent additions to the series were in the four digits.

Giese had not been especially inspired, but such a quality can only hinder a scholar of Solaris—it may well be that imagination and the ability to formulate rapid hypotheses is nowhere more harmful. After all, on that planet anything is possible. Far-fetched descriptions of configurations formed by the plasma are in all likelihood true, though usually unconfirmable, since the ocean rarely repeats its evolutions. Those observing them for the first time are staggered above all by their outlandishness and their vast scope. If they’d taken place on a small scale, in some swamp, they’d probably be written off as a freak of nature, a manifestation of randomness and the blind play of forces. The fact that geniuses and mediocre minds are equally at a loss when faced with the inexhaustible variety of forms of Solaris is an additional hindrance in dealing with the marvels of the living ocean. Giese, though, was neither the one nor the other. He was simply a pedantic classifier, one of those whose outer calm concealed an unflagging passion that consumed his whole life. As long as he was able, here lied exclusively on the language of description; when words failed him he managed by creating new words, often infelicitous ones that did not match the phenomena they were intended to describe. When all’s said and done, though, no terms can convey what goes on on Solaris. Its “dendromountains,” its “extensors,” “megamushrooms,” “mimoids,” “symmetriads’ and “asymmetriads,” its “vertebrids” and “rapidos” sound terribly artificial, but they do give some idea of Solaris even to those who’ve seen nothing but a few blurry photographs and poor quality films. Of course, even this conscientious classifier was guilty of rash moments. Humans are constantly coming up with hypotheses, even when they’re being cautious, and even though they’re quite unaware of it. Giese believed that extensors constituted a root form, and he compared them to greatly magnified and heightened versions of tidal waves in terrestrial oceans. Besides, anyone who’s immersed himself in the first edition of the work knows that he originally named them precisely “tides” led by a geocentrism that would be amusing if it weren’t for his helplessness. For—if comparisons with Earth really do have to be employed—these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescences”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over the monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent formation, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystalizing jelly; but what is evident to the eye is not so readily accepted by science. For years and years there were furious discussions about what was actually happening within an extensor, millions of which litter the vastnesses of the living ocean. It was thought they were some sort of organs of the monster, in which it metabolizes matter or which contain processes of breathing, the transfer of nutrition, and other things now known only to dusty library shelves. Every hypothesis was eventually disproved by a thousand painstaking and often perilous experiments. And all this concerned only the extensors, when it came down to it the simplest and most enduring form, for their existence lasts several weeks—something quite exceptional here.

One highly complex, capricious form that stirs the fiercest resistance in the viewer—a resistance that is, of course, instinctive—is the mimoids. It can be said without exaggeration that Giese fell in love with them, and to the very end he devoted himself to exploring them, describing them, and puzzling out their essence. With the name he strove to convey what for humans is most curious about them: a tendency to imitate the forms around them, whether close or remote.

On a certain day, deep below the surface of the ocean there appears the darkening shape of a broad flat circle that has ragged sides and is as if coated with tar. After twelve or fifteen hours it becomes layered, is more and more visibly segmented, and at the same time thrusts upwards toward the surface. The observer could swear that beneath him a violent struggle is taking place, because endless series of synchronous circular waves flow in from all around like shrinking mouths, like living, muscled, closing craters; they pile up on top of the swaying blackish phantom lying in the depths and, first rising vertically, they plummet downwards. Each such plunge of hundreds of thousands of tons is accompanied by a sticky, almost smacking rumble that goes on for several seconds, because here everything happens on a monstrous scale. The dark formation is forced downwards; each successive impact seems to flatten and spread it. From individual layers, which droop like wet wings, elongated clusters break loose; they narrow into long necklaces, fuse together and drift upwards, drawing with them the fragmented mother disk, which has as it were adhered to them; in the meantime successive rings of waves are continuing incessantly to descend from above into a huge and ever more distinctly concave circle. This game can go on for a day, or it can last a whole month. Sometimes that’s the end of it. The conscientious Giese labeled such a variant an “abortive mimoid” as though, from who-knew-where, he possessed the certain knowledge that the ultimate goal of every such upheaval was a “mature mimoid,” that is to say, the colony of polyp-like, light-skinned excrescences (usually larger than a terrestrial city) whose destiny is to copy external forms. . . It goes without saying that another solaricist came along, by the name of Uyvens, who on the contrary determined that this last phase was a “degenerative” one, a degradation, an atrophy, and that the forest of created shapes was an evident manifestation of the branching formations freeing themselves from the control of the matrix.

Giese, however—who in all his descriptions of other formations on Solaris proceeded like an ant climbing a frozen waterfall, allowing nothing to distract him from the regular tread of his dry language—was in this case so sure of being right that he classified the successive phases of the mimoid’s emergence in a sequence of increasing perfection.

Seen from high up, a mimoid looks like a city; but this is an illusion arising from the need for any sort of analogy with something familiar. When the sky is clear, all the multistory growths and their crowning palisades are surrounded by a layer of heated air that makes the shapes, already hard to determine, look as if they were swaying and bending. The first cloud crossing the blue (I use this expression out of habit, because this “blue” is ruddy during the red day and terrifyingly white during the blue one) brings an immediate response. An abrupt gemmation begins: a malleable skin, almost completely separate from the base and swelling out like a cauliflower, is projected upwards; simultaneously it grows pale, and in a few minutes it offers a perfect imitation of the puffy cloud. This huge object casts a reddish shadow. Some of the mimoid’s peaks seem to pass it on to others; this movement always takes place in the opposite direction to the movement of the real cloud. I think Giese would have given his right arm to know at the very least why this happens. But such “isolated” creations of the mimoid are nothing in comparison with the elemental activity it displays when it is “stimulated” by the presence of objects and shapes appearing above it due to the actions of terrestrial visitors.

The re-creation of forms essentially includes anything to be found within a radius of up to eight or nine miles. More often than not the mimoid produces magnified copies; at times it distorts them, creating caricatures or grotesque simplifications, especially of machines. It goes without saying that the material is always the same, a rapidly decoloring mass that, when flung into the air, instead of falling hangs there, joined by easily broken umbilical cords to the base, across which it crawls, at the same time contracting, narrowing or expanding as it fluidly assumes the most complex patterns. Aircraft, grate, or mast are reproduced with equal rapidity; the mimoid fails to respond only to people, or to be precise, to any living beings, including plants, because these too were brought to Solaris for research purposes by indefatigable scientists. Whereas a mannequin, a human doll, a figure of a dog or tree made in any material whatsoever is instantly imitated.

And here, unfortunately, it needs to be said in parentheses that this “obedience” on the part of the mimoid toward the scientists, so unusual on Solaris, is sometimes suspended. The most mature mimoid has its “lazy days” during which it does nothing but pulsate very slowly. This pulsation, incidentally, is not visible to the eye; its rhythm, a single beat of the pulse, happens once every two hours, and stop motion photography was needed to discover it.

In such circumstances a mimoid, especially an old one, is perfect for visiting, since both the base disk, fixed deep in the ocean, and the formations rising from it offer entirely firm support for the feet.

Of course, it’s also possible to be inside a mimoid on its “busy” days, but at such moments visibility is close to zero because of the incessant precipitation of flaky colloidal suspension, the off-white color of powdery snow, which constantly falls from the swollen branches of the abdomen as it manufactures its imitated forms. In fact these forms cannot be perceived from close up, due to their mountainous immensity. In addition, the base of a “working” mimoid grows slimy from the dense rain, which only hours later hardens into a solid shell many times lighter than pumice. In the final stages, without the right equipment it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of bulging stalks that look a little like retractable columns, a little like semi-liquid geysers, even in full sunlight, since the sun’s rays cannot penetrate the cover of “imitative explosions” being thrown up into the atmosphere.

Observing a mimoid on its happy days (which are, to be precise, the happy days of the scientist who finds himself close by) can be an unforgettable experience. They have their “creative frenzy” when they commence an extraordinary hyper-production. At these times they make either their own variations on external forms, more complex versions of them, or even “formal extensions,” and they can entertain themselves in this way for hours, to the delight of the abstract artist and the despair of the researcher, who strives in vain to comprehend any of the emerging processes. At times the mimoid’s activity includes utterly childlike simplifications; sometimes it engages in “baroque deviations,” at which moments all it creates is marked by bulging elephantiasis. Old mimoids in particular fabricate shapes that can induce a hearty chuckle. True, I myself have never been able to laugh at them, having always been overly awed by the mystery of the spectacle.

It goes without saying that in the early years the scientists literally pounced on mimoids as supposedly perfect centers of the Solarian ocean, as places where the longed-for contact between two civilizations would take place. Yet it transpired only too quickly that such contact was out of the question, since everything began and ended with an imitation of shapes leading nowhere.

The anthropomorphism and zoomorphism constantly present in the scientists’ desperate quests saw the ever newer productions of the living ocean as “sense organs” or even “limbs,” which for some time scholars such as Maartens or Ekkonai perceived in Giese’s vertebrids and rapidos. Yet these protuberances of the living ocean, sometimes soaring two miles into the atmosphere, are no more its limbs than an earthquake is gymnastic exercise for the earth’s crust.

The list of forms that occur relatively regularly, and are produced by the ocean sufficiently often that several dozen or even several hundred can be found on its surface in the course of an average day, runs to three hundred or so items. The most un-human, meaning those that bear absolutely no resemblance to anything experienced by humankind on Earth, are according to the Giese school the symmetriads. Even back then it was well established that the ocean did not behave aggressively, and one could perish in its plasmic depths only by truly striving to do so through one’s own imprudence or carelessness (naturally I don’t include accidents caused by malfunctioning equipment such as a damaged oxygen tank or cooling apparatus); and that even the cylindrical rivers of extensors and the monstrous pillars of vertebrids could be flown through in a airplane or other flying machine without the slightest danger. The plasma allowed free passage, parting before the foreign body at the equivalent of the speed of sound in the atmosphere of Solaris, and when forced to, even creating deep tunnels far beneath the surface of the ocean. (The energy it mobilized at such moments was massive—Skriabin calculated that in extreme cases it could amount to 109 ergs!) Symmetriads were investigated with exceptional caution, constantly drawing back, adopting multiple safety measures (though, truth be told, these were often bogus); the names of those who first explored them are known to every child on Earth.

The direness of these giants doesn’t lie in their appearance, though that can truly induce nightmares. It rather arises from the fact that within them nothing is stable or certain; even the laws of physics are suspended. It was always those studying symmetriads who proclaimed most vociferously the thesis that the living ocean was rational.

Symmetriads arise without warning. Their beginning is a kind of eruption. About an hour beforehand, the ocean begins to gleam, as if it’s been covered with glass over an area of tens of square miles. Other than this, its fluidity and the rhythm of its waves remain unchanged. At times a symmetriad emerges where there is a funnel from an absorbed rapido, but this is not a rule. After an hour or so, the glassy coating rises upwards in a monstrous bubble that reflects the entire sky, sun and clouds and the whole horizon, shimmering and glinting. The lightning play of colors, caused partly by the curvature and partly by refraction of the light, has no parallel.

Particularly striking effects of light are produced by symmetriads that arise during the blue day and immediately before sunset. At such times it looks as if the planet is giving birth to another one, doubling its volume with every moment. The moment the globe with its flaming shimmer bursts from the depths, it splits at its highest point into vertical sectors, but it isn’t disintegrating. This stage, rather clumsily labeled the “calycate phase,” lasts only seconds. The arches of membranous spans rising into the sky become inverted, link up in the unseen interior and instantly begin to form something along the lines of a squat torso within which hundreds of things happen at once. In the very center, which was first studied by the seventy-person Hamalei expedition, a process of gigantocrystalization and polycrystalization leads to the emergence of an axial supporting pivot sometimes called a “spine,” though I am not a fan of the term. The precipitous architecture of this central pillar is held up in statu nascendi—as it is being born—by vertical columns of a jelly so diluted it’s almost watery, bursting endlessly from the mile-deep recesses. During this process the colossus emits a prolonged hollow roar, and is encircled by a shaft of snowy, coarse-celled foam that quakes furiously. There then follow, moving from the center to the periphery, extraordinarily complex revolutions of the hardened planes on which the layers of ductile matter rising from below have accumulated, while at the same time the deep-ocean geysers mentioned above condense and transform into mobile tentacle-like columns; clusters of them reach toward loci of construction that are strictly determined by the dynamics of the whole, recalling some sort of immense gills of an embryo growing a thousand times faster than normal, and streaming with pinkish blood and a green water so dark it’s almost black. From this moment the symmetriad begins to manifest its most extraordinary quality: the modeling or even suspension of laws of physics. Let us begin by saying that no two symmetriads are alike and that the geometry of each is, as it were, an “invention” of the living ocean. So then, the symmetriad produces in its interior things that are often called “instant machines,” though these formations bear no resemblance to machines constructed by people—the term only refers to a certain “mechanical” purposiveness of operation.

When the geysers erupting far beneath the ocean surface solidify or swell into thick-walled galleries and corridors that run in every direction, and the “membranes” form a system of intersecting planes, overhangs, and ceilings, the symmetriad justifies its name by the fact that each intricate arrangement of passages, pathways, and inclines within one of its poles has a faithful copy at the other.

After twenty or thirty minutes the giant slowly begins to sink, occasionally first leaning between eight and twelve degrees in the vertical axis. There are larger and smaller symmetriads, but even the dwarves rise a good two and a half thousand feet over the horizon after they begin to submerge, and can be seen from miles away. It’s safest to enter their interior immediately after they reach stability, since the whole ceases to drop into the ocean, and at the same time it returns to the perfectly perpendicular. The best point of entry is the area just below the summit. In this place the relatively smooth polar “cap” is encircled by an area honeycombed with funnel-shaped openings to inner chambers and channels. This configuration constitutes, as a whole, a three-dimensional solution to a higher-order equation.

It’s common knowledge that any equation can be expressed in the figural language of higher geometry, and a solid can be constructed that is its equivalent. In this understanding, a symmetriad is a relative of Lobachevsky’s cones and Riemann’s negative curvatures, but a very distant relative, due to its unimaginable complexity. Occupying an area of several cubic miles, it constitutes the solution to an entire mathematical system; this solution, furthermore, is four-dimensional, since certain essential coefficients in the equation are also expressed in time, that is to say, in the changes brought about by its passing.

Naturally, the simplest conception was that this was no more and no less than a “mathematical machine” of the living ocean, a model created on its own scale for calculations it needed for some unknown purpose; but this idea, the Fermont Hypothesis, is no longer credited. It was tempting, to be sure; but the claim that these titanic eruptions, every tiny particle of which was constantly subject to the complicating formulas of the overall analysis, were being used by the living ocean to examine questions of matter, space, existence—this notion proved untenable. Too many phenomena were to be found in the giant’s innards that could not be reconciled with such a simple (some said childishly naive) depiction.

There was no lack of attempts to come up with an intelligible model of a symmetriad, a visualization of it. One popular explanation was offered by Averian, who presented the matter as follows. Imagine an ancient terrestrial building from Babylonian times. Let it be built out of a living, responsive, evolving substance. Its design proceeds fluidly through a series of phases, taking on, as we watch, the forms of Greek and Roman architecture. Then the columns begin to grow narrow as stalks, the ceiling loses its weight; it rises, sharpens, the arches turn into steep parabolas and eventually fold and soar. The Gothic that has appeared in this way begins to mature and age; it dissolves into late forms, its former precipitous severity replaced with eruptions of orgiastic exuberance. Before our eyes Baroque excess proliferates; and if we continue this sequence -- all the time regarding our changing formation as if it were the successive stages of a living being -- we’ll finally arrive at the architecture of the space center era, at the same time perhaps getting closer to understanding the nature of the symmetriad.

Yet this analogy, however it may be expanded and enriched (in fact, there were efforts to show it visually using special models and films), remains at best weak, at worst an evasion, if not a downright falsehood, for a symmetriad is unlike anything on Earth. . .

A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all. A symmetriad is millions, no, billions, to the nth power; it is unimaginability itself. What of it if, in the recesses of one of its aisles that is a ten-fold version of a Kronecker space, we stand like ants holding onto the folds of a breathing vault, that we watch the rise of vast planes grayly opalescent in the light of our flares, their interpenetration, the softness and infallible perfection of their resolution, which only lasts a moment, for everything here is fluid—the content of this architecture is motion, intent and purposive. We observe a fragment of the process, the trembling of a single string in a symphonic orchestra of supergiants, and on top of that we know—we only know, without comprehending—that at the same time, above us and beneath us, in the plunging deep, beyond the limits of sight and imagination there are multiple, million fold simultaneous transformations connected to one another like the notes of musical counterpoint. For this reason someone gave them the name of geometric symphony, but if this is the case, we are its unhearing audience.

Here, in order to truly see anything at all, one would have to draw back rapidly, retreat to an immense distance; yet in a symmetriad all is internal, all is propagation, surging avalanches of births, endless shaping. At the same time each shaped thing is itself in the business of shaping other things, and no mimosa is as sensitive to a single touch, to the changes taking place where we stand, as the distant other pole of the symmetriad, miles away and separated by hundreds of stories. Here every momentary structure, with a beauty that attains its fulfillment beyond the limits of sight, is a co-creator and conductor of all the others that occur at the same time, and they in turn have a modeling influence on it. A symphony—very well, but a kind that writes itself and drowns itself out. Terrible is the end of the symmetriad. No one who sees it can resist the impression of witnessing a tragedy, if not a murder. After two, at the most three hours—this explosive growth, multiplication of itself, self-reproduction, never lasts longer—the living ocean goes on the offensive. It looks as follows: the smooth surface wrinkles over; the surf, calm now and covered with dried foam, starts to seethe; concentric series of waves rush in from the horizons. They form the same kind of muscle-bound craters as those that assist at the birth of a mimoid, though these ones are incomparably huger. The submerged part of the symmetriad is compressed and the colossus rises slowly upwards as if it were about to be flung from the planet; the upper layers of the ocean’s glial matter move into action, they creep higher and higher up the symmetriad’s side walls, covering them over, hardening, blocking up the passageways. But all this is nothing in comparison with what’s taking place at the same time within. To begin with, the formative processes—the making of successive architectures—pause for a brief moment, then suddenly accelerate; movements that up till now have been fluid, interpenetrations, foldings, the addition of foundations and ceilings, all of which has proceeded thus far smoothly and as surely as if it were to endure for centuries, begins to rush. There’s an overwhelming sense that faced with imminent danger, the colossus is hurriedly moving towards some kind of consummation. Yet the greater the speed of the transformations, the more glaring the terrible, horrific metamorphosis of the material itself and its dynamics. All the soaring, magically curving planes soften, grow flaccid, droop; there begin to appear lapses, unfinished forms, grotesque, misshapen. A gathering roar rises from the unseen depths; air, expelled as if in death throes and rubbing against the narrowing channels, wheezing and thundering in the passageways, stimulates the collapsing ceilings to a wail as if from lifeless vocal cords or monstrous throats overgrown with stalactites of slime, and despite the furious movement that has been unleashed—it is, after all, the movement of destruction—the spectator is immediately overcome by a sense of utter deadness. By this point the towering construction is supported only by the gale howling from the abyss, passing through it via a thousand shafts, inflating the structure, which begins to slide downwards, collapse like a plaster statue caught in the flames, though here and there the last twitchings can still be seen, incoherent movements disconnected from the rest, blind, ever weaker, till the huge mass, undermined and exposed to constant attack from outside, collapses with the slowness of a mountain and vanishes in a confusion of foam like that which accompanied its titanic appearance.

And what does all this mean? Yes indeed, what does it mean. . .

I remember a school tour visiting the Solaris Institute in Aden when I was Gibarian’s assistant. After passing through a side area of the library, the young people were led into its main room, which is mostly filled with boxes of microfilms. They contain images of brief moments from the interior of symmetriads which themselves, of course, are long gone. There are over ninety thousand of them—reels, that is, not photographs. And then a plump girl of perhaps fifteen, in glasses, with a resolute and intelligent expression, suddenly asked:

“What’s it all for?”

In the awkward silence that followed, the teacher gave her troublesome charge a stern look; but none of the solaricists accompanying the group (of whom I was one) could offer an answer. Because symmetriads are unique, as are most of the phenomena that take place in them. Sometimes the air ceases to conduct sound within them. Sometimes the refraction coefficient increases or decreases. Localized pulsing, rhythmic changes of gravitation occur, as if the symmetriad had a beating gravitational heart. Occasionally the scientists’ gyrocompasses would start to behave as if they’d gone mad; layers of intensified ionization would appear then vanish. The list goes on. Besides, if the mystery of the symmetriads is ever solved, there’ll still be the asymmetriads. . .

They arise in a similar way, but they have a different end and nothing can be observed in them except for trembling, glowing, twinkling; we know only that they are the seat of dizzyingly rapid processes, at the limits of physically possible velocities, also known as “magnified quantum phenomena.” Their mathematical resemblance to certain models of the atom is, however, so unstable and fleeting that some consider it a side effect or even something entirely accidental. They exist a much shorter time than symmetriads—only ten or fifteen minutes—and their end is perhaps even more terrible, because following the hurricane that fills them to bursting with hard, roaring air, with a hellish swiftness they become filled with a liquid that eddies beneath a coating of dirty foam, and that floods over everything, bubbling hideously, after which there follows an explosion like a volcano of mud erupting, tossing up a disheveled pillar of remnants that for a long time afterwards descend in a macerated rain on the unquiet surface of the ocean. Some of these pieces, carried on the wind—dry as sticks, yellowing, flat, and for this reason resembling membranous bones or cartilage—can be found drifting on the waves dozens of miles from the heart of the explosion.

A separate group comprises formations that detach themselves completely from the living ocean for a shorter or longer time. They are much less frequent that the previously mentioned phenomena, and much harder to observe. The first time fragments of them were found they were completely misidentified, it transpired much later, as the dead bodies of beings that dwelled in the ocean. At times they appear to be fleeing like strange multi-winged birds being pursued by the funnels of rapidos, but this concept, borrowed from Earth, once again becomes a wall that cannot be broken through. Sometimes, though only very infrequently, on the rocky shores of islands one can see groups of flightless creatures like pods of seals, basking in the sun or lazily crawling to the sea, so as to melt into it.

In this way everyone remained within the limitations of human, terrestrial concepts, while first contact. . .

Expeditions traveled hundred of miles deep inside symmetriads, setting up recording equipment and automatic film cameras; the television eyes of robot satellites captured the gemmation of mimoids and extensors, their maturation and decease. Libraries filled, archives grew; the cost was sometimes high. Seven hundred and eighteen people died in various disasters, having failed to withdraw in time from colossuses whose time had come. Of these, one hundred and six perished in a single catastrophe that was infamous because their number included Giese himself, by that time an old man of seventy, when a formation that was a clear example of a symmetriad suddenly met the end that usually befalls an asymmetriad. Seventy-nine of the victims, wearing armored space suits, along with their apparatus and machinery, were swallowed up in a matter of seconds by an explosion of muddy slime whose offshoots struck down twenty-seven others piloting aircraft and helicopters above the formation being investigated. This place, at the intersection of the forty-second parallel and the eighty-ninth meridian, is marked on maps as the Eruption of the One Hundred and Six. But the point exists on maps alone, since in that place the surface of the ocean is no different than any of its other regions.

At that moment, for the first time in the history of research on Solaris, voices were heard calling for the use of thermonuclear strikes. It was to be in essence crueler than revenge: it would have meant the destruction of that which we cannot comprehend. Tsanken, the second-in-command of Giese’s relief team, who survived only thanks to an error—the relay automat had incorrectly indicated the place where the others were studying the symmetriad, such that Tsanken traipsed about all over the ocean and only came to the right place literally minutes after the explosion, seeing the black mushroom cloud as he approached—at the moment when the decision to attack was being weighed, threatened he would blow up the Station along with himself and the other eighteen crew members remaining on it, and though it was never admitted that this suicidal ultimatum influenced the vote, it can be assumed such was the case.

But the times of such large expeditions visiting the planet are past. The Station itself—its construction, supervised from satellites, was an engineering venture on a scale Earth could have been proud of, were it not for the fact that the ocean produced out of itself structures a million times larger in the space of seconds—was built in the form of a disk with a diameter of six hundred and fifty feet, with four stories in the center and two around the edges. Suspended between fifteen hundred and five thousand feet above the ocean -- thanks to gravitors driven by annihilation energy, along with all the equipment usually found on Stations and large Satelloids of other planets -- it was additionally provided with special radar sensors that at the first change in the ocean’s smooth surface would initiate extra power, bringing the steel disk up into the stratosphere the moment a new living formation showed signs of being born.

Now the Station was virtually deserted. Since the automats had been locked away in the cavernous depositories —for reasons still unknown to me—one could wander the corridors without meeting anyone, like in a drifting wreck whose motors have survived the demise of its crew.

As I was setting the ninth volume of Giese’s monograph back on the shelf I had the impression that the steel floor under its covering of thick foam plastic suddenly trembled beneath my feet. I froze, but the trembling didn’t recur. The library was thoroughly insulated from the rest of the structure, and tremors could be caused by one thing only. A rocket had been launched from the Station. This thought brought me back to reality. I still hadn’t fully made up my mind whether to go on the reconnaissance as Sartorius wanted. By acting as though I concurred with his plans in full, I could do no more than postpone the crisis; I was almost certain there’d be conflict, because I’d decided to do whatever I could to save Harey. The big question was whether there was a chance Sartorius might succeed. He had a huge advantage over me—as a physicist he knew the problem ten times better than I did, while I, paradoxically, could count only on the excellence of the solutions the ocean deigned to offer us. For the next hour I pored over microfilms, striving to extract any sense whatsoever from the sea of hellish mathematics that was the language spoken by the physics of neutrino processes. To begin with it seemed hopeless, the more so because there were as many as five extraordinarily difficult theories of the neutrino field, a clear indication that none of them was perfect. Yet I managed after all to find something promising. I was just copying out the formulas when there was a knock.

I went quickly to the door and cracked it open, blocking the gap with my body. Snaut’s face appeared, glistening with perspiration. The corridor behind him was empty.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said, opening the door further. “Come in.”

“Yes, it’s me,” he responded. His voice was hoarse, there were bags under his red eyes, and he was wearing a shiny rubber anti-radiation apron on elastic suspenders. Underneath it I could see the grubby legs of the same pants he always wore. His eyes ran around the circular, evenly lit space and came to a stop when he spotted Harey standing by an armchair at the far end of the library. We exchanged the briefest of glances, I lowered my eyelids, at which he gave a slight bow, and I said in a casual tone:

“Harey, this is Dr. Snaut. Snaut, this is. . . my wife.”

“I’m. . . a very rarely seen member of the crew and that’s why. . .”—the pause extended dangerously—“I’ve not had the opportunity to make your acquaintance. . .” Harey smiled and put out her hand which he shook, it seemed to me, with a certain astonishment. He blinked several times and stood staring at her till I took him by the arm.

“Excuse me,” he said then to Harey. “I need a word with you, Kelvin. . .”

“Of course,” I replied with the ease of a man about town; it all sounded to me like cheap comedy, but there was nothing to be done. “Harey, darling, don’t mind us. Dr. Snaut and I have to talk about our boring scientific business.”

And I led him at once to some small armchairs on the other side of the room. Harey dropped into the chair she’d been sitting in before, but she pushed it around in such a way that she could see us when she raised her eyes from her book.

“What is it?” I asked softly.

“I got divorced,” he answered just as quietly, though his whisper had a sibillance about it. At one time I might have laughed at a story like that and such a conversation opener, but on the Station my sense of humor had been amputated. “I’ve lived through years since yesterday, Kelvin,” he added. “A good few years. What’s with you?”

“Not much,” I answered after a moment, because I didn’t know what to say. I liked him, but I sensed that at the present moment I needed to be on my guard with him, or rather with what he had come to me about.

“Not much?” he replied in the same tone as me. “I see, so that’s how things are. . . ?”

“What do you mean?” I said, pretending I didn’t understand. He narrowed his bloodshot eyes and, leaning in so close I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face, he whispered:

“We’re bogged down, Kelvin. I can’t get a hold of Sartorius anymore, all I know is what I wrote you about what he said after that lovely little conference of ours. . .”

“He’s turned off his visuphone?” I asked.

“No. There’s a short circuit at his end. It looks like he did it deliberately, or maybe...” He made a movement with his fist as if he were smashing something. I looked at him without saying a word. The left corner of his mouth rose in a disagreeable smile.

“Kelvin, I came here because. . .”

He didn’t finish.

“What do you intend to do?”

“You mean the letter. . . ?” I replied slowly. “I can do it. I see no reason to refuse. Actually that’s why I’m sitting here; I wanted to figure out—”

“No,” he interrupted, “I didn’t mean that. . .”

“No?” I said, feigning surprise. “Do tell.”

“It’s Sartorius,” he murmured after a short pause. “He thinks he’s found a way. . . you know.”

He kept his gaze fixed on me. I sat there calmly, striving to make my expression look indifferent.

“First there’s that business with the X-rays. What Gibarian was doing with them, remember. It’s possible to modify it somewhat. . .”

“How?”

“All they were doing was sending a bundle of rays into the ocean and modulating their intensity according to different formulas.”

“Yes, I know about that. Nilin did it too. And a whole bunch of others.”

“Right, but they used soft radiation. This was the hard stuff; they packed everything they had into the ocean, the whole nine yards.”

“That could have unpleasant consequences,” I remarked. “It’s a violation of the Convention of the Four, and of UN restrictions.”

“Kelvin. . . Don’t act dumb. That’s neither here nor there at this point. Gibarian’s dead.”

“Oh, so Sartorius is thinking of blaming the whole thing on him?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him about it. That’s not important. Sartorius reckons that since guests only appear when we wake up, it must be extracting the prescription to produce them while we’re asleep. It thinks our most important state is sleep, precisely. That’s why it does what it does. So Sartorius wants to send it our waking state—our conscious thoughts. You follow?”

“How? By mail?”

“Save the jokes for later. The bundle of rays will be modified with the brain waves of one of us.”

It all suddenly became clear to me.

“Oh,” I said. “And that one of us would be me. Right?”

“Yes. He was thinking of you.”

“I’m deeply grateful.”

“What do you say?”

I was silent. Without a word he took an unhurried look at Harey where she sat immersed in her reading, then turned his gaze back to me. I felt I was turning pale; I couldn’t stop myself.

“Well?” he said.

I shrugged.

“All those X-ray sermons about the wonderfulness of humankind—that’s all nonsense in my view. Yours, too. Or am I wrong?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Very well then,” he said and smiled, as if I’d granted his wish. “So you’re opposed to this business of Sartorius’s?”

I didn’t yet understand what had happened, but from his expression I realized that he’d led me exactly where he wanted to. I didn’t speak—what could I have said at that juncture?

“Excellent,” he said. “Because there’s also another project. To adapt a Roche machine.”

“An annihilator. . . ?”

“Yes. Sartorius has already carried out the preliminary calculations. It’s doable. It won’t even require a lot of power. The machine will run twenty-four hours a day or for an unlimited time, to create an antifield.”

“W. . .wait! How do you envisage that?!”

“It’s very simple. It’ll be a neutrino antifield. Ordinary matter will remain untouched. The only thing to be destroyed will be. . . neutrino systems. You understand?”

He gave a satisfied smile. I sat there with my mouth agape. The smile gradually disappeared from his face. He frowned at me searchingly and waited.

“So Project Thought, the first one, we’re rejecting that. Right? And the second one? Sartorius is working on it already. We’re going to call it Project Freedom.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I’d suddenly made up my mind. Snaut was not a physicist. Sartorius had turned his visuphone off or broken it. Very well.

“I’d call it rather Project Butchery,” I said slowly.

“You were a butcher yourself. Am I not right? Now things will be quite different. No guests, no G-formations—nothing. The moment the materialization appears, it’ll disintegrate.”

“You misunderstand,” I replied, shaking my head with a smile that I hoped looked sufficiently natural. “These aren’t moral scruples, they’re a survival instinct. I don’t want to die, Snaut.”

“What. . . ?”

He was taken aback. He gave me a suspicious look. From my pocket I pulled out the crumpled sheet of paper containing the formulas.

“I’ve been thinking about it too. Does that surprise you? After all, I was the first one to propose the neutrino hypothesis, you won’t deny that? So look: an antifield can be built. For ordinary matter it’s harmless. That much is true. But at the moment of destabilization, when the neutrino system begins to disintegrate, the energy of its bonds will be released as surplus. If we assume ten to the eighth ergs for every kilogram of rest mass, for one G-formation we get between five and seven times ten to the eighth. Do you know what that means? The equivalent of a small uranium charge going off inside the Station.”

“What are you saying! But. . . surely Sartorius must have taken that into consideration. . .”

“Not necessarily,” I retorted with a malicious smile. “The thing is, Sartorius belongs to the Frazer and Cajolli school. According to them, at the moment of disintegration the entire energy of the bonds is released in the form of light radiation. There’d be just a powerful flash, maybe not completely safe, but not destructive. But there are other hypotheses, other theories of the neutrino field. According to Cayatt, according to Avalov, to Siona, the emission spectrum is much broader, with the maximum occurring as hard gamma radiation. It’s very nice that Sartorius trusts his masters and their theory, but there are others, Snaut. And you know what else?” I went on, seeing that my words had made an impression on him. “The ocean also needs to be taken into consideration. If it did what it did, for sure it used the best possible method. In other words: its activities seem to me an argument in favor of the other school and against Sartorius.”

“Let me see that paper, Kelvin. . .”

I handed it to him. He peered at it, trying to make sense of my scribblings.

“What’s that?” He pointed with his finger.

I took the paper back.

“That’s the field transmutation tensor.”

“Let me have it. . .”

“What do you need it for?” I asked. I knew what he’d say.

“I have to show Sartorius.”

“As you wish,” I replied indifferently. “You can take it. The point is, no one has tested this experimentally; we’ve never known these kinds of systems before. He believes in Frazer, I followed Siona in my calculations. He’ll tell you I’m not a physicist and that Siona isn’t either. At least not in his estimation. But that’s a matter for discussion. I’ve no wish to engage in a debate that could result in my being vaporized, to the greater glory of Sartorius. You I can convince, but not him. And I’m not going to try.”

“So what do you mean to do. . . ? He’s working on it,” said Snaut in a toneless voice. He hunched over; all his liveliness was gone. I didn’t know if he trusted me, but I no longer cared.

“What a person does when someone’s trying to kill him,” I replied quietly.

“I’ll try and get in touch with him. Maybe he’s planning some safety measures,” murmured Snaut. He raised his eyes to me: “Listen, maybe the first project after all. . . ? Hm? Sartorius would agree. For sure. It’s. . . at least. . . a shot. . .”

“Do you believe that?”

“No,” he replied at once. “But. . . how could it hurt?”

I didn’t want to agree too readily, since that was what I wanted. He was becoming my ally in playing for time.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“All right, I’m off,” he mumbled, getting up. His bones cracked as he rose from the chair. “So you’ll let us make an encephalogram of you?” he asked, rubbing his apron with his fingers as if he were trying to erase an unseen stain.

“OK,” I said. Without looking at Harey (who was watching the scene silently, her book on her lap), he went to the door. When it closed behind him I stood up. I unfolded the paper I held in my hand. The formulas were good. I hadn’t doctored them. Though I’m not sure Siona would have recognized my solution. Probably not. I gave a start. Harey had come up behind me and touched me on the shoulder.

“Kris!”

“What is it, darling?”

“Who was that?”

“I told you. Dr. Snaut.”

“What kind of a person is he?”

“I don’t know him that well. Why do you ask?”

“He was looking at me in this strange way. . .”

“He probably found you attractive.”

“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “It wasn’t that kind of look. He was looking at me as if. . . as if he. . .”

She shuddered, raised her eyes at me then lowered them right away.

“Let’s go somewhere else. . .”