Dreams
After six days, the lack of any reaction whatsoever inclined us to repeat the experiment, at which the Station, which thus far had stayed in place at the intersection of the forty-third parallel and the one hundred and sixteenth meridian, moved off at an altitude of twelve hundred feet above the ocean towards the south, where, as the radar sensors and radiograms from the Satelloid were indicating, there had been significantly increased activity in the plasma.
For two days the bundle of X-rays modulated by my encephalogram pounded the almost completely smooth surface of the ocean at intervals of several hours.
Towards the end of the second day we found ourselves so close to the pole that when the disk of the blue sun had almost completely disappeared beyond the horizon, the crimson tinge of the clouds in the opposite direction heralded the rising of the red sun. The vast blackness of the ocean and the empty sky above it were then filled with a blindingly fierce clash between hard colors aglow like metal, glistening with poisonous green and subdued hollow flames of crimson, while the ocean itself was rent with the glare of two counterposed disks, two furious fires, one mercuric and one scarlet; at such moments it was enough for the tiniest cloud to be at the zenith for the rays falling across the diagonals of waves with their lumbering foam to be lit up with an incredible rainbow glitter. Immediately following the setting of the blue sun, on the north-west skyline, first heralded by the indicators, there appeared a symmetriad; it was fused almost indistinguishably with the red-stained mist and arose out of it only with isolated glinting reflections, like an immense glass flower growing from the meeting point of sky and plasma. The Station, however, maintained its course, and fifteen minutes or so later the colossus, red and trembling like a guttering lamp made of rubies, vanished again beyond the horizon. A few minutes later a tall thin pillar, whose base was hidden from our view by the curvature of the planet, shot up soundlessly several miles into the atmosphere. This clear indication of the end of the symmetriad we’d seen, one side fiery red, the other bright as a column of quicksilver, branched into a two-colored tree, then the extremities of its ever more spreading limbs merged into a single mushroom-shaped cloud whose upper portion set off in the fire of two suns on a distant journey driven by the wind, while the lower part fell extraordinarily slowly in ponderous clusterlike fragments spread across a good third of the horizon. An hour later the last trace of this spectacle had vanished.
Two more days passed. The experiment was repeated one final time; the X-rays had by now penetrated a sizeable expanse of the plasmic ocean. To the south, from our altitude, despite the distance of a hundred and eighty miles, we now began to have an excellent view of the Arrhenides, a sixfold rocky chain of what looked like snow-capped peaks; these were in fact accumulations of organic matter, showing that this formation had once constituted the bed of the ocean.
At this point we shifted to a south-easterly course, moving for a time in parallel with the mountain barrier that was augmented with the clouds typical of the red day, till it too disappeared from view. By now ten days had passed since the first experiment.
The whole of that time, nothing really happened on the Station. Once Sartorius had completed the programming for the experiment, it was repeated automatically by the equipment; I’m not even sure whether anyone monitored it. Yet at the same time a great deal more than might have been desirable was happening on the Station. Not among the humans. I’d been concerned Sartorius would demand that work on the annihilator be started again; I was also waiting to see how Snaut would react when he learned from the other man that to a certain extent I had misled him, exaggerating the potential danger that could come from destroying neutrino-based matter. Yet nothing of the kind occurred, for reasons that initially were a complete mystery to me. Naturally I wondered too if this were some subterfuge, if they were concealing from me certain preparations and operations, so every day I checked out the windowless chamber beneath the deck of the main laboratory where the annihilator was kept. I never found anyone there, and the layer of dust on the casing and cables of the apparatus indicated that no one had so much as touched it for weeks.
During this time Snaut became as invisible as Sartorius, and more elusive, because now even the visuphone in the radio station went unanswered when it was called. Someone must have been steering the Station, but I couldn't say who it was, and I didn’t care, strange as it may sound. The lack of response from the ocean had also left me indifferent to the point that after two or three days I’d stopped counting on it or worrying about it, and I forgot about the experiment completely. I spent entire days either in the library or in my cabin, with Harey drifting around me like a shadow. I could see that things were not good between us, and that this state of apathetic, mindless suspension couldn’t go on forever. I needed to break through it somehow, change something in our relations, but I kept postponing even the idea of any change, incapable as I was of making a decision. I can’t explain it any other way, but I had the feeling that everything on the Station, and especially what was between Harey and me, was presently in a frail, precarious equilibrium, and that moving it could bring everything to ruin. Why? I couldn’t say. The strangest thing was that she sensed something similar, to a degree in any case. When I think about it now, it seems to me that the impression of uncertainty, suspension, of the moment before an earthquake, was prompted by a presence that could not be sensed in any other way and yet which filled every deck and room on the Station. Though there was perhaps one other way it could be made out: through dreams. Never before and never afterwards have such apparitions appeared to me. I decided to write them down, and that’s how I’m able to say anything at all about them; but these are only fragments devoid of almost all their terrifying richness. In circumstances that were essentially inexpressible, I seemed to find myself in places devoid of sky, earth, floors, ceilings, or walls, as if I were shrunken or imprisoned in a substance that was alien to me, as if my whole body had become part of some half-dead, unmoving, shapeless lump. Or, rather, that I myself was that lump, deprived of flesh, surrounded by at first indistinct pale pink patches suspended in a medium with different optical properties than air, such that it was only from very close up things became clear, even excessively and supernaturally so, because in those dreams of mine my immediate surroundings were more concrete and material than anything I experienced awake. Whenever I woke up I had the paradoxical feeling that the real waking life was in fact the other one, and that what I saw when I opened my eyes was nothing but its wizened shadow.
Such, then, was the first image, the beginning, from which the dream unfolded. Around me something would be waiting for permission, for my say-so, for an inner go-ahead, and I knew, or rather something inside of me knew, that I ought not to yield to this unaccountable impulse, because the more I silently promised, the more terrible the end would be. Though really I did not know this, because if I had I’d probably have been afraid, and I never felt any fear. I waited. From the pink mist enveloping me there emerged the first touch, while I, inert as a block of wood, enmired deep in whatever it was that seemed to have locked me in, was unable to retreat or even move, while that other thing examined my prison by touch, seeing and unseeing at the same time; and it already seemed to be a hand that was creating me; up till that moment I lacked even sight and now I could see—beneath the fingers that roamed about my face, out of nothingness there emerged my lips, cheeks, and as that touch, broken down into a thousand infinitely tiny parts, began to go further, I already had a face and a breathing torso, summoned to existence by this symmetrical act of creation; for I myself, being created, was creating in turn, and a face was coming into view that I had never seen before, foreign and familiar, I tried to look into its eyes, but I was unable to, because the proportions were constantly being changed, there were no directions here, we were simply discovering one another in rapt silence and mutually becoming, and I was already my living self, though boundlessly enhanced, and that other being—a woman?—remained motionless with me. A pulse filled us and we were one, and then all at once the languor of this scene, beyond which nothing existed nor seemed able to, began to be infiltrated by something unutterably cruel, impossible, and unnatural. The same touch that had created us and had clung to our bodies with an invisible golden cloak began to pullulate. Our bodies, naked and white, started to flow, blackening into streams of writhing vermin that emerged out of us like air, and I was—we were—I was a glistening, febrile mass of wormlike motion, tangling and untangling, but never-ending, infinite, and in that boundlessness—no!—I who was the boundlessness, I howled in silence, asking to be extinguished, asking for an end, but it was exactly at this moment I would run off in every direction at once and gather back together in the form of a suffering that was more vivid than any waking state, multiplied a hundredfold, concentrated in black and red distances, now hardening into rock, now rising to a crescendo somewhere in the glow of another sun or another world.
This was the simplest of the dreams; the others I’m unable to recount, because the sources of terror pulsating within them had no counterpart in waking awareness. In them I knew nothing of the existence of Harey, but nor did I find in them any memories or experiences from the preceding day.
There were also other dreams in which, in darkness a congealed to the point of lifelessness, I felt myself to be the object of experiments being conducted slowly and painstakingly, without the use of any sensory implements; they involved being penetrated and taken to pieces and rubbed away into utter emptiness, and the underlying foundation of all these silent, destroying crucifixions was a fear the very recollection of which, in the daytime, made my heart race.
The days, undifferentiated and as if faded, filled with wearying ill will towards everything, inched by in extreme apathy; it was only the nights that I was afraid of, not knowing how I could save myself from them. I stayed awake with Harey, who had no need of sleep; I kissed her and caressed her, but I was aware that I wasn’t doing it either for her or for myself, that it was all because I was frightened of sleep. Though I didn’t say a word to her about my ghastly nightmares, she must have guessed something was up, because I sensed in her little deaths a consciousness of unrelenting humiliation, and there was nothing I could do about it. I mentioned before that the whole time I saw neither Snaut nor Sartorius. But Snaut would get in touch every few days, sometimes with a note, but more often by summoning me to the telephone. He would ask if I hadn’t seen anything new, any kind of change, something that could be interpreted as a reaction elicited by the so frequently repeated experiment. I would say no, and ask him the same question. Snaut would merely shake his head in the depths of the screen.
On the fifteenth day after the operation had been discontinued I woke earlier than usual, so exhausted by my bad dream that it felt like I was coming out of heavy sedation. Through the uncovered window, in the first light of the red sun, whose immense reflection sliced the smooth ocean in two with a river of crimson fire, I noticed how the surface, inert up till now, was imperceptibly becoming ruffled. It blackness initially grew paler, as if it had been covered by a fine layer of mist, but the mist itself had an entirely material consistency. Here and there points of turbulence appeared, till the vague movement spread to the entire expanse in sight. The blackness vanished, concealed beneath membranes that were bright pink where they bulged out and pearly brown in their hollow places. The colors, which alternated to begin with, decorating this strange covering of the ocean with long strips that seemed to freeze in place during the movement of the waves, then mingled together, and the entire ocean was coated by a foam of large bubbles that rose upwards in huge sheets both immediately beneath the Station and all around it. From every side at once, tissue-winged foam-clouds rose into the empty crimson sky; they extended horizontally, quite unlike real clouds, with thick bulbous edges. The ones whose horizontal streaks obscured the low disk of the sun were, in contrast to its glow, black as coal; others, in the vicinity of the sun, depending on the angle at which the rays from the east struck them, lit up cherry red or amaranthine purple, and this process went on as if the ocean were peeling in a series of bloody contour lines, every so often being blanketed with a new coating of hardened foam. Some of these formations floated up very close, right outside the windows, passing only a few feet away, and at a certain moment one of them brushed against the glass with its silky-looking surface, while the multitudes that had risen into the air first were barely visible by now, far up in the sky like scattered birds, dissolving at the zenith in a transparent precipitate.
The Station came to a stop, held in place, and remained so for about three hours; the spectacle did not cease. Towards the end, when the sun had sunk below the horizon and the ocean beneath us was concealed in darkness, the thousand fold throng of slender blushing silhouettes rose ever higher into the sky, drifting in endless ranks as if on invisible strings, still, weightless; and this magnificent ascension of what looked like ragged wings went on till it was completely swallowed up by the darkness.
The entire spectacle, shocking in its placid immensity, terrified Harey, yet I was unable to tell her anything about it, because for me as a solaricist it was just as new and unfathomable as for her. But shapes and formations as yet unlisted in any inventory could be observed two or three times a year on Solaris; with a little luck, even more often.
The next night, about an hour before the expected rise of the blue sun, we witnessed another phenomenon—the phosphorizing of the ocean. To begin with, on its surface shrouded in blackness there appeared isolated patches of light, or rather of a whiteish glow that was hazy and moved with the rhythm of the waves. The patches joined together and spread till the spectral glimmer had reached the horizon on all sides. The intensity of the light increased for a period of about fifteen minutes. Then the marvel ended in an astounding manner: the ocean began to be extinguished. From the west, across a front that must have been hundreds of miles wide a zone of darkness advanced; when it reached the Station and passed it the part of the ocean that was still phosphorescent could be seen as a radiance rising high into the shadows and moving further and further away to the east. Once it reached all the way to the horizon, it became like a vast polar dawn, then suddenly disappeared. When the sun rose soon afterwards the dead, empty expanse, barely marked with the wrinkles of waves sending mercuric glints at the windows of the Station, again extended in every direction. The phosphorescence of the ocean had already been described; in a certain percentage of cases it had been observed before the emergence of asymmetriads, in addition to which it was a rather characteristic indication of locally increased activity in the plasma. Yet for the next two weeks nothing happened either outside the Station or within it. Only once, in the middle of the night, I heard a distant shout that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once; it was remarkably high-pitched, piercing and prolonged, more of an inhumanly intensified wail. Torn from my nightmare, I lay there for a long while, listening intently, not entirely sure that the shout wasn’t also a dream. The previous day, from the lab that was partially located above our cabin, there had come muffled sounds like heavy objects or equipment being moved around; I had the impression that the shout had also come from up there, though exactly how was unclear, since the two floors were separated by a soundproof ceiling. The dying voice went on almost half an hour. Drenched in perspiration, half mad, I was all set to race upstairs, such was the effect of the sound on my nerves. But in the end it fell silent, and once again only the moving of heavy objects could be heard.
Two days later, in the evening, as Harey and I were sitting in the small galley, Snaut suddenly appeared. He was wearing a suit, a real terrestrial suit, which transformed him. He looked taller and older. Hardly glancing at us, he went up to the table, leaned over it and without sitting down began to eat cold meat straight from a can, accompanying it with mouthfuls of bread. As he ate he dipped his sleeve accidentally in the can and got grease on it.
“You’re dirtying your jacket,” I said.
“Hm?” he merely mumbled, his mouth full. He ate as if he hadn’t had anything for days. He poured himself half a cup of wine, drank it in one, wiped his mouth and, taking a breath, looked around through bloodshot eyes. He stared at me a moment and murmured:
“You’ve grown a beard? Well, well. . .”
Harey dropped the dishes into the sink with a clatter. Snaut began rocking lightly on his heels; he screwed his face up and smacked his lips loudly, cleaning his teeth with his tongue. I had the impression he was doing it deliberately.
“Can’t be bothered shaving, huh?” he asked, gazing at me obnoxiously. I didn’t respond.
“Be careful!” he exclaimed after a moment. “A word of advice: he stopped shaving to begin with as well.”
“Go get some sleep,” I murmured.
“What? You can’t fool me. Why should we not talk? Listen, Kelvin, maybe it wishes us well? Maybe it’s trying to make us happy, it just doesn’t yet know how? It reads our wishes from our brains, but only two percent of our nervous processes are conscious. So it knows us better than we know ourselves. So we should listen to it. Acquiesce. Don’t you think? You won’t? Why,” he said, his voice breaking tearfully, “why won’t you shave?”
“Give it a rest,” I snapped. “You’re drunk.”
“Drunk? Me? What of it? Can’t a guy that dragged all his crap from one end of the Galaxy to the other to find out how much he’s worth, can’t he get drunk? Why not? I guess you believe in humanity’s mission, eh, Kelvin? Gibarian told me about you, before he grew his beard. . . You’re exactly the way he described. . . Just don’t come up to the lab, or you’ll lose your faith. . . Sartorius is at work there, our Faust in reverse—looking for a cure for immortality, get it? He’s the last Knight of the Holy Contact, he’s all we deserve. . . His previous idea was pretty good too—endless death throes. Not bad, huh? Agonia perpetua. . . straws. . . straw hats. . . How can you not drink, Kelvin?”
His eyes, almost completely hidden beneath their swollen lids, came to rest on Harey, who was standing motionless by the wall.
“O white Aphrodite, born of the ocean. Afflicted with greatness, your hand . . . ,” he began to recite, and choked on his own laughter.
“Almost. . . word for word. . . eh, Kelvin?” he sputtered through his coughing.
I was still calm, but my calmness was beginning to harden into a cold rage.
“Stop it!” I hissed. “Stop it and leave!”
“You’re kicking me out? You too? You’re growing a beard, and you’re throwing me out? You don’t want me to warn you any more, to offer you advice, as one interstellar comrade to another? Kelvin, let’s open the lower hatches, we can shout to it down there, below, maybe it’ll hear us? But what’s its name? Think about it, we’ve named all the stars and the planets, but maybe they already had names? Such arrogance! Come on, let’s go down there. We can call out to it. . . tell it what it’s turned us into, it’ll be appalled. . . it’ll build us some silver symmetriads and pray for us in its own math, and throw bloody angels at us, and its suffering will be our suffering, its fear our fear, and it’ll beg us for an end. Because everything it is and everything it does is a plea for an end. Why are you not laughing? I’m just joking around. If we had more of a sense of humor as a race, things might not have gone this far. Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to punish it, this ocean, he’s trying to make it howl through every mountain. . . You don’t think he’ll have the courage to present his plan for the approval of that doddery old council of elders that sent us out here as redeemers of other people’s sins? You’re right, he’ll chicken out. . . but only because of the hat. The hat he won’t mention to anyone, he’s not that brave, our little Faust. . .”
I said nothing. Snaut was increasingly unsteady on his feet. Tears were rolling down his cheeks and dripping on his suit.
“Who did it? Which of us did it? Gibarian? Giese? Einstein? Plato? They were all criminals—you know? Think about it, in a rocket a person can burst like a bubble, or solidify completely, or boil, or explode in a fountain of blood so quickly he doesn’t have time to shout out, and then only his bones will be clattering against the metal, and they’ll go on circling in Newtonian orbit with an Einsteinian adjustment, our rattles of progress! And we’ll go willingly, because it’s a beautiful journey, till we arrive, and in these cabins, over this tableware, amid the immortal dishwashers, with our serried ranks of faithful lockers, our devoted toilets, here is our fulfillment. . . so you see, Kelvin—if I wasn’t drunk I’d not be talking like this, but someone finally ought to say it. Someone finally ought to! You’re sitting here, you child in the slaughterhouse, and your beard is growing. . . Whose fault is it? Answer that question yourself. . .”
He turned slowly and left the galley; on the threshold he grabbed hold of the door so as not to fall. Then the sound of his steps reached us from the corridor. I was avoiding Harey’s gaze, but at one moment our eyes met. I wanted to go up to her, put my arms around her, stroke her hair; but I couldn’t. I couldn’t.