Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start. This was highly original, except that it was still the case no one knew how a syrupy jelly could stabilize the orbit of a celestial body.

Research revealed that the ocean did not operate at all like our gravitors (which, of course, would have been impossible), but that it was capable of directly modeling space-time specifications, which led among other things to variations in the measurement of time at one and the same meridian on Solaris. In this way the ocean not only in a certain sense knew the Einstein-Boeve hypothesis, but (unlike us humans) was even able to make use of its consequences.

The second volume of Hughes and Eugel, which I was still abstractedly thumbing through, opened with a taxonomy that was as original as it was amusing. A classification table showed the following: Type: Polytheria Order : Syncytialia Class : Metamorpha.

In reality, however, not everyone agreed that this was a “being,” quite aside from the question of whether an ocean could be called rational.

So much for the mathematicians. These hypotheses were regarded by some as an underestimation of human capability, as an obeisance toward something we didn’t yet comprehend, but which could be understood as a resurrection of the old doctrine of ignoramus et ignorabimus—“we do not know and will not know.” Others saw these as harmful, sterile fairy stories, and claimed the mathematicians’ hypotheses revealed a latterday mythology that saw an immense brain—whether electronic or plasmic—as the highest goal of being, the sum total of existence.

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?”

These hypotheses resuscitated one of the most ancient of philosophical problems—the relationship between matter and consciousness.

This problem, which the methodologists over-hastily classified as metaphysical, smoldered beneath virtually every discussion and dispute. Was thinking without consciousness possible? Yet could the processes that took place in the ocean be regarded as thought? Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain?

The whole room was transformed. Everything that had been red turned brown and faded to the color of liver, whereas the color of white, green, and yellow objects was so intensified they looked as if they were emitting their own glow. I squinted through the crack in the curtains. The sky was a white sea of fire, beneath which what looked like molten metal was twitching and trembling. I squeezed my eyes shut at the red circles that were filling my field of vision. On the shelf of the washbasin, the edge of which was cracked, I found a pair of sunglasses and put them on; they covered almost half of my face. The curtain covering the window was now flaring like a sodium flame. I went on reading, picking up sheets of paper from the floor and stacking them on the one small table still standing. Parts of the text were missing.

“I wrote a kind of interim report,” he said. “It’s actually good that you took a look at the room. Cause of death… injection of a lethal dose of Pernostal. It’s written here…” I scanned the brief text. “Suicide,” I repeated quietly. “And the reason?” “Nervous breakdown… depression… or whatever it ought to be called. You know these things better than I do.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked calmly. “He injected himself with Pernostal and hid in a closet, yes? If that was the case, it wasn’t depression or nervous breakdown, it was severe psychosis. Paranoia… He probably thought he was seeing something…,” I said, speaking ever more slowly and looking him in the eye.

My hands were trembling as I took the telegraphic printout from the drawer and spread it out next to the other, wider sheet from the calculator. Both lists of figures matched as I had predicted, to the fourth decimal place. Discrepancies appeared only in the fifth. I put all the papers into the drawer. So the calculator existed independently of me; this meant that the Station and everything on it was also real.

using the absolutely rational number to rtell reality from dreams

“All right,” I said. I licked my lips. “We had a falling out. Well, not exactly. It was me who said something to her, you know, the way you do when you’re angry. I packed my things and left. She’d given me to understand, she didn’t say it outright, but when you’ve lived with someone for years you don’t need to… I was convinced it was just talk—that she’d be afraid to do it. And… I told her that, too. The next day I remembered I’d left the… the shots in a drawer. She knew they were there—I’d brought them home from the lab, I’d needed them. At the time I told her what effect they have. I got scared, I was going to go get them, but then I realized it would look like I was taking her seriously, and… I let it be. The day after that I went all the same, it was nagging at me. When I got there… she was already dead.”

nodded. “A normal person,” he said. “What is a normal person? Someone who’s never done anything heinous? Right, but has he never even thought about it? Or maybe he never thought about it, but something inside him thought it, the idea popped into his head, ten or thirty years ago, maybe he fought it off and forgot about it, and he wasn’t afraid, because he knew he’d never carry it out. Right, but now, imagine that suddenly, in broad daylight, among other people, he meets IT embodied, chained to him, indestructible. What then? What do you have then?” I said nothing. “The Station,” he said quietly. “Then you have Solaris Station.” “But… what could it actually be?” I asked hesitantly. “You’re not a criminal, after all, nor Sartorius…”

no idea what this is about

Yet on the other side there’s something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from Earth we didn’t bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth—the part of it we pass over in silence—we’re unable to come to terms with it!”

“It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!”

the emergence of solaristics was accompanied by a veritable explosion of the oddest notions. Ravintzer’s book was filled with this sort of mental matter—prefaced, to be fair, by an introduction in which the editor distanced himself from this house of wonders.

Chairman:… and taking all this into consideration, the commission, comprising three medical doctors, three biologists, one physicist, one mechanical engineer and the second in command of the expedition, has concluded that the incidents described by Berton constitute a hallucinatory syndrome resulting from poisoning by the atmosphere of the planet, a condition in which symptoms of confusion were accompanied by a stimulation of the associative regions of the cerebral cortex; and that these incidents had little or no correspondence in reality. Berton: Excuse me, what does “little or no” mean? What is “little”? How big is it?

“Maybe I should make you a new dressing.” “No, there’s no need. There’s no need… darling.” As I said it, I didn’t know myself if I was pretending, but a moment later, without seeing I put my arms around her slender back and when I felt it tremble, I suddenly believed in her. Though I’m not sure. All at once I felt I was the one deceiving her, not the other way around, because she was only herself.

“—Everything is normal, but it’s camouflage. A mask. In some sense it’s a supercopy—a re-creation more exact than the original. That’s to say, where in humans we encounter the limits of granularity, the limits of divisibility of matter, here the road goes further, thanks to the use of subatomic building matter!”

Harey looked across at me. I became aware of how excited I was. I’d almost shouted the last words. I calmed down, hunched over on my uncomfortable perch, and closed my eyes. How could I phrase it?

But they’re not. That means that all the proteins, cells, cell nuclei—they’re all just a mask! The actual structure responsible for the functioning of the ‘guest’ is hidden deeper.”

What are G-formations? They are not persons, nor are they copies of specific individuals, but rather materialized projections of what our brain contains regarding a particular person.”

There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us.

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.

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, he relied 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

gen ai can already do this

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 th...

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…

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…

“Kris… Kris… surely he’s… you yourself said he died…” “He might be alive in a dream,” I said slowly. I was no longer at all certain it had been a dream. “He was saying something.

“Harey,” I began again insistently, “the tape recorder isn’t on the shelf.” “You don’t have anything more important to tell me?” “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “You’re right, it’s not that big of a deal.” That was all we needed—to start an argument!

“No,” she said. “No, because you’re afraid. Listen to me, though, I can’t do it. This isn’t right. I didn’t know anything about it. I still don’t get it even now. I mean, surely it’s not possible?” She clenched her fists so tight they turned white, and pressed them to her chest. “I don’t know anything except, except Harey! Do you think I’m pretending maybe? I’m not pretending, cross my heart, I’m not.”

Her last words turned into a groan. She slumped to the floor, sobbing. What she had shouted had shattered something inside of me; in one long stride I reached her and seized her in my arms. She fought back, pushing me away, sobbing without tears, exclaiming: “Let me go! Let me go! I disgust you! I know! I don’t want things this way! I don’t! You see it, you know you do, that it’s not me, not me, not me.”

“Harey, can I say something too?” She waited. “It’s true that you’re not entirely like me. But that doesn’t mean you’re worse. Quite the opposite. Well, you can think any way you like about it, but it’s thanks to that… that you survived.” A kind of pathetic childlike smile appeared on her face. “Is that supposed to mean I’m… immortal?”

As a result of one of them I’m looking at you right now and trying to explain to you that you’re more precious to me than the twelve years of my life I devoted to Solaris, and that I want to go on being with you.

“But that’s also… an experiment. Don’t you think?” “How do you mean? Whether she’ll… be able to? If she’s with me, I don’t see why not…” I was speaking ever more slowly, till I broke off. Snaut gave a soft sigh. “We’re all sticking our heads in the sand here, Kelvin, but at least we’re aware of it and we’re not trying to act noble.”

Can a person be responsible for his own subconscious? If I’m not responsible for it, then who could be…?

Gravinsky’s compendium, which was most often used in school as a simple crib, was an alphabetically arranged collection of solaristic hypotheses, from Abiological to Zoo-degenerative. The compiler, who I don’t think had ever seen Solaris, had plowed through every monograph, expedition logbook, fragmentary text and interim report; he’d even found quotations in the works of planetologists who studied other globes, and provided a catalogue that was somewhat terrifying in the brevity of its formulations, since some of them veered into inconsequentiality, deprived of the subtle complexity of thought that had accompanied their inception.

the living ocean wasn’t ignoring human beings, but rather it simply didn’t notice them, just as an elephant fails to see the ants crawling across its back; in order to call its attention to ourselves, then, what was needed were powerful stimuli and gigantic machines operating at the level of the entire planet.

why le

One amusing detail was the fact that, as the press mischievously pointed out, such costly measures were being demanded by the director of the Cosmology Institute, not the Institute of Planetology, which financed the exploration of Solaris; this, then, was generosity with someone else’s money.

As I replaced Gravinsky’s volume on the shelf, next to it—since the books were arranged alphabetically—I noticed, barely visible between the thick tomes, a small pamphlet by Grattenstrom, one of the most curious blooms of the solaristic literature.

reading books in the book

In his most important and most extraordinary work, a mere dozen or so pages long, he sought to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.

Yet all this constitutes uncommunicable knowledge, and if one attempts to translate it into any terrestrial language, all those sought-after values and significations are lost, they remain on the far side.

He rejected overly anthropomorphic interpretations, all those mystical notions of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and neurophysiological schools, which sought to attribute to the neurogliac ocean particular human ailments such as epilepsy (the analogue of which were supposedly the convulsive eruptions of asymmetriads), because among the advocates of Contact he was one of the most cautious and clear-headed, and could not abide anything so much as the sensationalism which, admittedly very infrequently, accompanied one or another discovery.

In it, taking as my starting point the innovative research of Bergmann and Reynolds, who from the mosaic of cortical processes had succeeded in identifying and “filtering out” the components accompanying the most powerful emotions—despair, pain, joy—I went on to juxtapose those recordings with discharges emitted by currents in the ocean, and discovered oscillations and patterns in the curves (in certain parts of the symmetriads’ canopy, at the base of immature mimoids, and elsewhere) that offered a noteworthy analogy.

So the symmetraids are showing similar patterns as when human shows emotions.

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.

as if he has become part of the ocean