Once the scientists recognized that it was impossible to keep alive, or even in a ‘vegetative’ state, any fragment of the ocean, large or small, in dissociation from the entire organism, a growing tendency developed (under the influence of the Meunier-Proroch school) to isolate this problem as the key to the mystery. It was seen as a matter of interpretation – solve it, and the back of the problem would be broken.
The quest for this key, the philosopher’s stone of Solarist studies, had absorbed the time and energy of all kinds of people with little or no scientific training. During the fourth decade of Solaristics the craze spread like an epidemic, and provided a fertile ground for the psychologists. An unknown number of cranks and ignorant fanatics toiled at their fumbling researches with a greater enthusiasm than any which had animated the old prophets of perpetual motion, or the squaring of the circle. The craze fizzled out in only a few years, and by the time I was ready to leave for Solaris it had vanished from the headlines and from conversation, and the ocean itself was practically forgotten by the public.
I took care to replace the _Compendium_ in its correct alphabetical position, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the grasp of mankind, and aimed in particular against the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling one- or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body – the projections of our senses, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man – in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be, any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, and it must have been Gibarian who had added it to the Station’s collection, on his own authority, since Grastrom’s pamphlet was regarded more as a curiosity than a true contribution to Solarist literature.
With a strange feeling almost of respect, I carefully slid the slim pamphlet back into the crowded bookshelf, then stroked the green bronze binding of the Solaris Annual with my fingertips. In the space of a few days, we had unquestionably gained positive information about a number of basic questions, which had made seas of ink flow and fed innumerable controversies, yet had remained sterile for lack of arguments. Today the mystery practically had us under siege, and we had powerful arguments.
Was the ocean a living creature? It could hardly be doubted any longer by any but lovers of paradox or obstinacy. It was no longer possible to deny the ‘psychic’ functions of the ocean, no matter how that term might be defined. Certainly it was only too obvious that the ocean had ‘noticed’ us. This fact alone invalidated that category of Solarist theories which claimed that the ocean was an ‘introverted’ world, a ‘hermit entity,’ deprived by a process of degeneration of the thinking organs it once possessed, unaware of the existence of external objects and events, the prisoner of a gigantic vortex of mental currents created and confined in the depths of this monster revolving between two suns.
Not only that, we had discovered that the ocean was capable of reproducing what we ourselves had never succeeded in creating artificially – a perfect human body, modified in its sub-atomic structure for purposes we could not guess.
The ocean lived, thought and acted. The ‘Solaris problem’ had not been annihilated by its very absurdity. We were truly dealing with a living creature. The ‘lost’ faculty was not lost at all. All this now seemed proved beyond doubt. Like it or not, men must pay attention to this neighbor, light years away, but nevertheless a neighbor situated inside our sphere of expansion, and more disquieting than all the rest of the universe.
Perhaps we had arrived at a turning-point. What would the high-level decision be? Would we be ordered to give up and return to Earth, immediately or in the near future? Was it even possible that we would be ordered to liquidate the Station? It was at least not improbable. But I did not favor the solution by retreat. The existence of the thinking colossus was bound to go on haunting men’s minds. Even when man had explored every corner of the cosmos, and established relations with other civilizations founded by creatures similar to ourselves, Solaris would remain an eternal challenge.
Misplaced among the thick volumes of the Annual, I discovered a small calf-bound book, and scanned its scuffed, worn cover for a moment. It was Muntius’s _Introduction to Solaristics_, published many years before. I had read it in a single night, after Gibarian had smilingly lent me his personal copy; and when I had turned the final page the light of a new Earth dawn was shining through my window. According to Muntius, Solaristics is the space era’s equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science. Contact, the stated aim of Solaristics, is no less vague and obscure than the communion of the saints, or the second coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy using the language of methodology; the drudgery of the Solarists is carried out only in the expectation of fulfillment, of an Annunciation, for there are not and cannot be any bridges between Solaris and Earth. The comparison is reinforced by obvious parallels: Solarists reject arguments – no experiences in common, no communicable notions – just as the faithful rejected the arguments that undermined the foundations of their belief. Then again, what can mankind expect or hope for out of a joint ‘pooling of information’ with the living ocean? A catalogue of the vicissitudes associated with an existence of such infinite duration that it probably has no memory of its origins? A description of the aspirations, passions and sufferings that find expression in the perpetual creation of living mountains? The apotheosis of mathematics, the revelation of plenitude in isolation and renunciation? But all this represents a body of incommunicable knowledge. Transposed into any human language, the values and meanings involved lose all substance; they cannot be brought intact through the barrier. In any case, the ‘adepts’ do not expect such revelations – of the order of poetry, rather than science – since unconsciously it is Revelation itself that they expect, and this revelation is to explain to them the meaning of the destiny of man! Solaristics is a revival of long-vanished myths, the expression of mystical nostalgias which men are unwilling to confess openly. The cornerstone is deeply entrenched in the foundations of the edifice: it is the hope of Redemption.
Solarists are incapable of recognizing this truth, and consequently take care to avoid any interpretation of Contact, which is presented in their writings as an ultimate goal, whereas originally it had been considered as a beginning, and as a step onto a new path, among many other possible paths. Over the years, Contact has become sanctified. It has become the heaven of eternity.
Muntius analyzes this ‘heresy’ of planetology very simply and trenchantly. He brilliantly dismantles the Solarist myth, or rather the myth of the Mission of Mankind.
Muntius’s had been the first voice raised in protest, and had encountered the contemptuous silence of the experts, at a time when they still retained a romantic confidence in the development of Solaristics. After all, how could they have accepted a thesis that struck at the foundations of their achievements?
Solaristics went on waiting for the man who would reestablish it on a firm foundation and define its frontiers with precision. Five years after the death of Muntius, when his pamphlet had become a rare collectors’ piece, a group of Norwegian researchers founded a school named after him. In contact with the personalities of his various spiritual heirs, the quiet thought of the master went through profound transformations; it led to the corrosive irony of Erie Ennesson and, on a more mundane plane, the ‘utilitarian’ or ‘utilitarianistic’ Solaristics of Fa-leng, who argued that science should settle for the immediate advantages offered by exploration, and not concern itself with any intellectual communion of two civilizations, or some illusory contact. Compared with the ruthless, lucid analysis of Muntius, the works of his disciples are hardly more than compilations and sometimes vulgarizations, with the exception of Ennesson’s essays and perhaps the studies of Takata. Muntius himself had already defined the complete development of Solarist concepts. He called the first phase the era of the ‘prophets,’ among whom he included Giese, Holden and Sevada; the second, the ‘great schism’ – the fragmentation of the one Solarist church into a number of waning sects; and he anticipated a third phase, which would set in when there was nothing left to investigate, and manifest itself in a crabbed, academic dogmatism. This prophecy was to prove inaccurate, however. In my opinion, Gibarian was right to characterize Muntius’s strictures as a monumental simplification which ignored all the aspects of Solarist studies that had nothing in common with a creed, since the work of interpretation based itself only on the concrete evidence of a globe orbiting two suns.