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The sky in this part of the Galaxy meant nothing to me; I didn’t know a single constellation, and all I saw through the porthole was glittering dust.
In this noise there was something unutterably terrestrial—after so many months, the first real sound of wind.
I was too taken aback to say anything, and this wordless scene continued until in some mysterious way his fear was transferred to me.
It occurred to me I might need a weapon. My all-purpose pocket knife certainly wouldn’t do the trick, but I didn’t have anything else, and I wasn’t yet in the kind of mental state that would make me go looking for a ray gun or anything of that kind.
When the problem was at least in some measure cleared up, it transpired that as was so often the case with Solaris, one mystery had been replaced with another that was perhaps even more puzzling.
Besides, all the attempts at “establishing contact” were nothing compared to other branches of solaristics, in which specializations grew so advanced a cybernetician was barely able to communicate with a symmetriadologist. Veubeke, who at the time, during my studies, was director of the Institute, once jokingly asked: “How can you communicate with the ocean if you can’t communicate with each other?” His jibe contained much truth.
My thoughts seemed to be moving along the edge of a cliff, in danger of falling off at any moment—annihilation or at least loss of consciousness would have been a unutterable, unattainable act of grace.
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.
“We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don’t say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime—in the meantime, we’re not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits. Some planets are said to be as hot and dry as the Sahara, others as icy as the poles or tropical as the Brazilian jungle. We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to
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Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy.
but what is evident to the eye is not so readily accepted by science.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have left it at that, but there was nothing I was so afraid of as “heart-to-hearts.”
No, I needed to pretend, to lie, all the time, always. Though that was because there may have been thoughts in me, intentions, hopes, cruel, wonderful, murderous, yet of which I was quite unaware. Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.
I was writhing inside from this mountain of cliches pronounced with such earnestness and gravity; fortunately Snaut interrupted the lengthening silence.
Besides, what do people expect, what can they want from “informational communication” with thinking seas? A recording of experiences of a being that endures through time, and is so old it probably cannot remember its own beginning?
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!
