Solaris Read online

  He accompanied me to the hangar deck, and helped me drag the flitter out onto the elevator disc. As I was checking my suit, he asked me abruptly:

  "Can I rely on your word?"

  "Still fretting? Yes, you can. Where are the oxygen tanks?"

  We exchanged no further words. I slid the transparent canopy shut, gave him the signal, and he set the lift going. I emerged onto the Station roof; the motor burst into life; the three blades turned and the machine rose—strangely light—into the air. Soon the Station had fallen far behind.

  Alone over the ocean, I saw it with a different eye. I was flying quite low, at about a hundred feet, and for the first time I felt a sensation often described by the explorers but which I had never noticed from the height of the Station: the alternating motion of the gleaming waves was not at all like the undulation of the sea or the billowing of clouds. It was like the crawling skin of an animal—the incessant, slow-motion contractions of muscular flesh secreting a crimson foam.

  When I started to bank towards the drifting mimoid, the sun shone into my eyes and blood-red flashes struck the curved canopy. The dark ocean, flickering with sombre flames, was tinged with blue.

  The flitter came around too wide, and I was carried a long way down wind from the mimoid, a long irregular silhouette looming out of the ocean. Emerging from the mist, the mimoid was no longer pink, but a yellowish grey. I lost sight of it momentarily, and glimpsed the Station, which seemed to be sitting on the horizon, and whose outline was reminiscent of an ancient zeppelin. I changed course, and the sheer mass of the mimoid grew in my line of vision—a baroque sculpture. I was afraid of crashing into the bulbous swellings, and pulled the flitter up so brutally that it lost speed and started to lurch; but my caution was unnecessary, for the rounded peaks of those fantastic towers were subsiding.

  I flew past the island; and slowly, yard by yard, I descended to the level of the eroded peaks. The mimoid was not large. It measured about three quarters of a mile from end to end, and was a few hundred yards wide. In some places, it was close to splitting apart. This mimoid was obviously a fragment of a far larger formation. On the scale of Solaris it was only a tiny splinter, weeks or perhaps months old.

  Among the mottled crags overhanging the ocean, I found a kind of beach, a sloping, fairly even surface a few yards square, and steered towards it. The rotors almost hit a cliff that reared up suddenly in my path, but I landed safely, cut the motor and slid back the canopy. Standing on the fuselage I made sure that there was no chance of the flitter sliding into the ocean. Waves were licking at the jagged bank about fifteen paces away, but the machine rested solidly on its legs, and I jumped to the 'ground.'

  The cliff I had almost hit was a huge bony membrane pierced with holes, and full of knotty swellings. A crack several yards wide split this wall diagonally and enabled me to examine the interior of the island, already glimpsed through the apertures in the membrane. I edged warily onto the nearest ledge, but my boots showed no tendency to slide and the suit did not impede my movements, and I went on climbing until I had reached a height of about four storeys above the ocean, and could see a broad stretch of petrified landscape stretching back until it was lost from sight in the depths of the mimoid.

  It was like looking at the ruins of an ancient town, a Moroccan city tens of centuries old, convulsed by an earthquake or some other disaster. I made out a tangled web of winding sidestreets choked with debris, and alleyways which fell abruptly towards the oily foam that floated close to the shore. In the middle distance, great battlements stood intact, sustained by ossified buttresses. There were dark openings in the swollen, sunken walls—traces of windows or loop-holes. The whole of this floating town canted to one side or another like a foundering ship, pitched and turned slowly, and the sun cast continually moving shadows, which crept among the ruined alleys. Now and again a polished surface caught and reflected the light. I took the risk of climbing higher, then stopped; rivulets of fine sand were beginning to trickle down the rocks above my head, cascading into ravines and alleyways and rebounding in swirling clouds of dust. The mimoid is not made of stone, and to dispel the illusion one only has to pick up a piece of it: it is lighter than pumice, and composed of small, very porous cells.

  Now I was high enough to feel the swaying of the mimoid. It was moving forward, propelled by the dark muscles of the ocean towards an unknown destination, but its inclination varied. It rolled from side to side, and the languid oscillation was accompanied by the gentle rustling sound of the yellow and grey foam which streamed off the emerging shore. The mimoid had acquired its swinging motion long before, probably at its birth, and even while it grew and broke up it had retained its initial pattern.

  Only now did I realize that I was not in the least concerned with the mimoid, and that I had flown here not to explore the formation but to acquaint myself with the ocean.

  With the flitter a few paces behind me, I sat on the rough, fissured beach. A heavy black wave broke over the edge of the bank and spread out, not black, but a dirty green. The ebbing wave left viscous streamlets behind, which flowed back quivering towards the ocean. I went closer, and when the next wave came I held out my hand. What followed was a faithful reproduction of a phenomenon which had been analyzed a century before: the wave hesitated, recoiled, then enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin covering of 'air' separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluid a moment previously, and now had a fleshy consistency. I raised my hand slowly, and the wave, or rather an outcrop of the wave, rose at the same time, enfolding my hand in a translucent cyst with greenish reflections. I stood up, so as to raise my hand still higher, and the gelatinous substance stretched like a rope, but did not break. The main body of the wave remained motionless on the shore, surrounding my feet without touching them, like some strange beast patiently waiting for the experiment to finish. A flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was moulded to my fingers. I stepped back. The stem trembled, stirred uncertainly and fell back into the wave, which gathered it and receded.

  I repeated the game several times, until—as the first experimenter had observed—a wave arrived which avoided me indifferently, as if bored with a too familiar sensation. I knew that to revive the 'curiosity' of the ocean I would have to wait several hours. Disturbed by the phenomenon I had stimulated, I sat down again. Although I had read numerous accounts of it, none of them had prepared me for the experience as I had lived it, and I felt somehow changed.

  In all their movements, taken together or singly, each of these branches reaching out of the ocean seemed to display a kind of cautious but not feral alertness, a curiosity avid for quick apprehension of a new, unexpected form, and regretful at having to retreat, unable to exceed the limits set by a mysterious law. The contrast was inexpressible between that lively curiosity and the shimmering immensity of the ocean that stretched away out of sight… I had never felt its gigantic presence so strongly, or its powerful changeless silence, or the secret forces that gave the waves their regular rise and fall. I sat unseeing, and sank into a universe of inertia, glided down an irresistible slope and identified myself with the dumb, fluid colossus; it was as if I had forgiven it everything, without the slightest effort of word or thought.

  During that last week, I had been behaving so normally that Snow had stopped keeping a watchful eye on me. On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the ide
a that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…

  That liquid giant had been the death of hundreds of men. The entire human race had tried in vain to establish even the most tenuous link with it, and it bore my weight without noticing me any more than it would notice a speck of dust. I did not believe that it could respond to the tragedy of two human beings. Yet its activities did have a purpose… True, I was not absolutely certain, but leaving would mean giving up a chance, perhaps an infinitesimal one, perhaps only imaginary… Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.