“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. And I’m almost glad that you refuse to believe me. Certain events, which have actually happened, are horrible, but what is more horrible still is what hasn’t happened, what has never existed.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, my voice faltering.
He shook his head from side to side.
“A normal man,” he said. “What is a normal man? A man who has never committed a disgraceful act? Maybe, but has he never had uncontrollable thoughts? Perhaps he hasn’t. But perhaps something, a phantasm, rose up from somewhere within him, ten or thirty years ago, something which he suppressed and then forgot about, which he doesn’t fear since he knows he will never allow it to develop and so lead to any action on his part. And now, suddenly, in broad daylight, he comes across this thing . . . this thought, embodied, riveted to him, indestructible. He wonders where he is . . . Do you know where he is?”
“Where?”
“Here,” whispered Snow, “on Solaris.”
“But what does it mean? After all, you and Sartorius aren’t criminals . . . .”
“And you call yourself a psychologist, Kelvin! Who hasn’t had, at some moment in his life, a crazy daydream, an obsession? Imagine . . . imagine a fetishist who becomes infatuated with, let’s say, a grubby piece of cloth, and who threatens and entreats and defies every risk in order to acquire this beloved bit of rag. A peculiar idea, isn’t it? A man who at one and the same time is ashamed of the object of his desire and cherishes it above everything else, a man who is ready to sacrifice his life for his love, since the feeling he has for it is perhaps as overwhelming as Romeo’s feeling for Juliet. Such cases exist, as you know. So, in the same way, there are things, situations, that no one has dared to externalize, but which the mind has produced by accident in a moment of aberration, of madness, call it what you will. At the next stage, the idea becomes flesh and blood. That’s all.”
Stupefied, my mouth dry, I repeated:
“That’s all?” My head was spinning. “And what about the Station? What has it got to do with the Station?”
“It’s almost as if you’re purposely refusing to understand,” he groaned. “I’ve been talking about Solaris the whole time, solely about Solaris. If the truth is hard to swallow, it’s not my fault. Anyhow, after what you’ve already been through, you ought to be able to hear me out! We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us – that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence – then we don’t like it any more.”
I had listened to him patiently.
“But what on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what we all wanted: contact with another civilization. Now we’ve got it! And we can observe, through a microscope, as it were, our own monstrous ugliness, our folly, our shame!” His voice shook with rage.
“So . . . you think it’s . . . the ocean? That the ocean is responsible for it all? But why? I’m not asking how, I’m simply asking why? Do you seriously think that it wants to toy with us, or punish us – a sort of elementary demonomania? A planet dominated by a huge devil, who satisfies the demands of his satanic humors by sending succubi to haunt the members of a scientific expedition . . . ? Snow, you can’t believe anything so absurd!”
He muttered under his breath.
“This devil isn’t such a fool as all that . . .”
I looked at him in amazement. Perhaps what had happened, assuming that we had experienced it in our right minds, had finally driven him over the edge? A reaction psychosis?
He was laughing to himself.
“Making your diagnosis? Don’t be in too much of a hurry! You’ve only been through one ordeal – and that a reasonably mild one.”
“Oh, so the devil had pity on me!”
I was beginning to weary of this conversation.
“What is it you want exactly?” Snow went on. “Do you want me to tell you what this mass of metamorphic plasma – _x_-billion tons of metamorphic plasma – is scheming against us? Perhaps nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
Snow smiled.
“You must know that science is concerned with phenomena rather than causes. The phenomena here began to manifest themselves eight or nine days after that X-ray experiment. Perhaps the ocean reacted to the irradiation with a counter-irradiation, perhaps it probed our brains and penetrated to some kind of psychic tumor.”
I pricked up my ears.
“Tumor?”
“Yes, isolated psychic processes, enclosed, stifled, encysted – foci smouldering under the ashes of memory. It deciphered them and made use of them, in the same way as one uses a recipe or a blue-print. You know how alike the asymmetric crystalline structures of a chromosome are to those of the DNA molecule, one of the constituents of the cerebrosides which constitute the substratum of the memory-processes? This genetic substance is a plasma which ‘remembers.’ The ocean has ‘read’ us by this means, registering the minutest details, with the result that . . . well, you know the result. But for what purpose? Bah! At any rate, not for the purpose of destroying us. It could have annihilated us much more easily. As far as one can tell, given its technological resources, it could have done anything it wished – confronted me with your double, and you with mine, for example.”
“So that’s why you were so alarmed when I arrived, the first evening!”
“Yes. In fact, how do you know it hasn’t done so? How do you know I’m really the same old Ratface who landed here two years ago?”
He went on laughing silently, enjoying my discomfiture, then he growled:
“No, no, that’s enough of that! We’re two happy mortals; I could kill you, you could kill me.”
“And the others, can’t they be killed?”
“I don’t advise you to try – a horrible sight!”
“Is there no means of killing them?”
“I don’t know. Certainly not with poison, or a weapon, or by injection . . .”
“What about a gamma pistol?”
“Would you risk it?”
“Since we know they’re not human . . .”
“In a certain subjective sense, they _are_ human. They know nothing whatsoever about their origins. You must have noticed that?”
“Yes. But then, how do you explain . . . ?”
“They . . . the whole thing is regenerated with extraordinary rapidity, at an incredible speed – in the twinkling of an eye. Then they start behaving again as . . .”
“As?”
“As we remember them, as they are engraved on our memories, following which . . .”
“Did Gibarian know?” I interrupted.
“As much as we do, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Very probably.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“No. I found a book in his room . . .”
I leapt to my feet.
“_The Little Apocrypha_!”
“Yes.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Who could have told you about that?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t worry, you can see that I’ve burnt my skin and that it’s not exactly renewing itself. No, Gibarian left a letter addressed to me in his cabin.”