Solaris (11 page)

Snow's voice erupted:

"Stop that, do you hear? I told you to stop it!"

I could see his profile on the screen, but I could no longer
hear him although his lips were moving—he had put his hand
over the microphone.

"No, I can't come," he said quickly. "Later perhaps, in any
case, I'll contact you in an hour."

The screen went blank; I replaced the receiver.

"Who was it?" asked Rheya indifferently.

"Snow, a cybernetician. You don't know him."

"Is this going on much longer?"

"Are you bored?"

I put the first of the series of slides into the neutron
microscope, and, one after another, I pressed the different-colored
switches; the magnetic fields rumbled hollowly.

"There's not much to do in here, and if my humble company isn't
enough for you…"

I was talking distractedly, with long gaps between my words.

I pulled the big black hood round the eye-piece of the
microscope towards me, and leaned my forehead against the resilient
foam-rubber viewer. I could hear Rheya's voice, but without taking
in what she was saying. Beneath my gaze, sharply foreshortened, was
a vast desert flooded with silvery light, and strewn with rounded
boulders—red corpuscles—which trembled and wriggled
behind a veil of mist. I focused the eye-piece and penetrated
further into the depths of the silvery landscape. Without taking my
eyes away from the viewer, I turned the view-finder; when a
boulder, a single corpuscle, detached itself and appeared at the
junction of the cross-hairs, I enlarged the image. The lens had
apparently picked up a deformed erythrocyte, sunken in the centre,
whose uneven edges projected sharp shadows over the depths of a
circular crater. The crater, bristling with silver ion deposits,
extended beyond the microscope's field of vision. The nebulous
outlines of threads of albumen, distorted and atrophied, appeared
in the midst of an opalescent liquid. A worm of albumen twisted and
turned beneath the cross-hairs of the lens. Gradually I increased
the enlargement. At any moment, I should reach the limit of this
exploration of the depths; the shadow of a molecule occupied the
whole of the space; then the image became fuzzy.

There was nothing to be seen. There should have been the ferment
of a quivering cloud of atoms, but I saw nothing. A dazzling light
filled the screen, which was flawlessly clear. I pushed the lever
to its utmost. The angry, whirring noise grew louder, but the
screen remained a blank. An alarm signal sounded once, then was
repeated; the circuit was overloaded. I took a final look at the
silvery desert, then I cut the current.

I looked at Rheya. She was in the middle of a yawn which she
changed adroitly into a smile. "Am I in good health?" she
asked.

"Excellent. Couldn't be better." I continued to look at her and
once more I felt as though something was crawling along my lower
lip. What had happened exactly? What was the meaning of it? Was
this body, frail and weak in appearance but indestructible in
reality, actually made of nothing? I gave the microscope cylinder a
blow with my fist. Was the instrument out of order? No, I knew that
it was working perfectly. I had followed the procedure faithfully:
first the cells, then the albumen, then the molecules; and
everything was just as I was accustomed to seeing it in the course
of examining thousands of slides. But the final step, into the
heart of the matter, had taken me nowhere.

I put a ligature on Rheya, took some blood from a median vein
and transferred it to a graduated glass, then divided it between
several test-tubes and began the analyses. These took longer than
usual; I was rather out of practice. The reactions were normal,
every one of them.

I dropped some congealed acid on to a coral-tinted pearl. Smoke.
The blood turned grey and a dirty foam rose to the surface.
Disintegration, decomposition, faster and faster! I turned my back
to get another test-tube; when I looked again at the experiment, I
nearly dropped the slim glass phial.

Beneath the skin of dirty foam, a dark coral was rising. The
blood, destroyed by the acid, was re-creating itself. It was crazy,
impossible!

"Kris." I heard my name called, as though from a great distance.
"Kris, the videophone!"

"What? Oh, thanks."

The instrument had been buzzing for some time, but I had only
just noticed it. I picked up the receiver: "Kelvin."

"Snow. We are now all three plugged into the same circuit."

The high-pitched voice of Sartorius came over the receiver:

"Greetings, Dr. Kelvin!" It was the wary tone of voice, full of
false assurance, of the lecturer who knows he is on tenuous
ground.

"Good-day to you, Dr. Sartorius!" I wanted to laugh; but in the
circumstances I hardly felt I could yield to a mood of hilarity.
After all, which of us was the laughing stock? In my hand I held a
test-tube containing some blood. I shook it. The blood coagulated.
Had I been the victim of an illusion a moment ago? Had I, perhaps,
been mistaken?

"I should like to set forth, gentlemen, certain questions
concerning the…the phantoms."

I listened to Sartorius, but my mind refused to take in his
words. I was pondering the coagulated blood and shutting out this
distracting voice.

"Let's call them Phi-creatures," Snow interjected.

"Very well, agreed."

A vertical line, bisecting the screen and barely perceptible,
showed that I was linked by two channels: on either side of this
line, I should have seen two images—Snow and Sartorius. But
the light-rimmed screen remained dark. Both my interlocutors had
covered the lenses of their sets.

"Each of us has made various experiments." The nasal voice still
held the same wariness. There was a pause.

"I suggest first of all that we pool such knowledge as we have
acquired so far," Sartorius went on. "Afterwards, I shall venture
to communicate to you the conclusion that I, personally, have
reached. If you would be so good as to begin, Dr.
Kelvin…"

"Me?"

All of a sudden, I sensed Rheya watching me. I put my hand on
the table and rolled the test-tube under the instrument racks. Then
I perched myself on a stool which I dragged up with my foot. I was
about to decline to give an opinion when, to my surprise, I heard
myself answer:

"Right. A little talk? I haven't done much, but I can tell you
about it. A histological sample…certain reactions.
Micro-reactions. I have the impression that…" I did not know
how to go on. Suddenly I found my tongue and continued: "Everything
looks normal, but it's a camouflage. A cover. In a way, it's a
super-copy, a reproduction which is superior to the original. I'll
explain what I mean: there exists, in man, an absolute
limit—a term to structural divisibility—whereas here,
the frontiers have been pushed back. We are dealing with a
sub-atomic structure."

"Just a minute, just a minute! Kindly be more precise!"
Sartorius interrupted.

Snow said nothing. Did I catch an echo of his rapid breathing?
Rheya was looking at me again. I realized that, in my excitement, I
had almost shouted the last words. Calmer, I settled myself on my
uncomfortable perch and closed my eyes. How could I be more
precise?

"The atom is the ultimate constituent element of our bodies. My
guess is that the Phi-beings are constituted of units smaller than
ordinary atoms, much smaller."

"Mesons," put in Sartorius. He did not sound in the least
surprised.

"No, not mesons…I would have seen them. The power of this
instrument here is between a 10th to a 20th of an angstrom, isn't
it? But nothing is visible, nothing whatsoever. So it can't be
mesons. More likely neutrinos."

"How do you account for that theory? Conglomerations of
neutrinos are unstable…"

"I don't know. I'm not a physicist. Perhaps a magnetic field
could stabilize them. It's not my province. In any event, if my
observations are correct, the structure is made up of particles at
least ten thousand times smaller than atoms. Wait a minute, I
haven't finished! If the albuminous molecules and the cells were
directly constructed from micro-atoms, they would be proportionally
even smaller. This applies to the corpuscles, the micro-organisms,
everything. Now, the dimensions are those of atomic structures.
Consequently, the albumen, the cell and the nucleus of the cell are
nothing but camouflage. The real structure, which determines the
functions of the visitor, remains concealed."

"Kelvin!"

Snow had uttered a stifled cry. I stopped, horrified. I had said
"visitor."

Rheya had not overheard. At any rate, she had not understood.
Her head in her hand, she was staring out of the window, her
delicate profile etched against the purple dawn.

My distant interlocutors were silent; I could hear their
breathing.

"There's something in what he says," Snow muttered.

"Yes," remarked Sartorius, "but for one fact: Kelvin's
hypothetical particles have nothing to do with the structure of the
ocean. The ocean is composed of atoms."

"Perhaps it's capable of producing neutrinos," I replied.

Suddenly I was bored with all their talk. The conversation was
pointless, and not even amusing.

"Kelvin's hypothesis explains this extraordinary resistance and
the speed of regeneration," Snow growled. "They probably carry
their own energy source as well; they don't need food…"

"I believe I have the chair," Sartorius interrupted. The
self-designated chairman of the debate was clinging exasperatingly
to his role. "I should like to raise the question of the motivation
behind the appearance of the Phi-creatures. I put it to you as
follows: what are the Phi-creatures? They are not autonomous
individuals, nor copies of actual persons. They are merely
projections materializing from our brains, based on a given
individual."

I was struck by the soundness of this description; Sartorius
might not be very sympathetic, but he was certainly no fool.

I rejoined the conversation:

"I think you're right. Your definition explains why a particular
per…creation appears rather than another. The origin of the
materialization lies in the most durable imprints of memory, those
which are especially well-defined, but no single imprint can be
completely isolated, and in the course of the reproduction,
fragments of related imprints are absorbed. Thus the new arrival
sometimes reveals a more extensive knowledge than that of the
individual of whom it is a copy…"

"Kelvin!" shouted Snow once more.

It was only Snow who reacted to my lapses; Sartorius did not
seem to be affected by them. Did this mean that Sartorius's visitor
was less perspicacious than Snow's? For a moment, I imagined the
scholarly Sartorius cohabiting with a cretinous dwarf.

"Indeed, that corresponds with our observations," Sartorius
said. "Now, let us consider the motivation behind the apparition!
It is natural enough to assume, in the first instance, that we are
the object of an experiment. When I examine this proposition, the
experiment seems to me badly designed. When we carry out an
experiment, we profit by the results and, above all, we carefully
note the defects of our methods. As a result, we introduce
modifications in our future procedure. But, in the case with which
we are concerned, not a single modification has occurred. The
Phi-creatures reappear exactly as they were, down to the last
detail…as vulnerable as before, each time we attempt
to…to rid ourselves of them…"

"Exactly," I broke in, "a recoil, with no compensating
mechanism, as Dr. Snow would say. Conclusions?"

"Simply that the thesis of experimentation is inconsistent with
this…this unbelievable bungling. The ocean
is…precise. The dual-level structure of the Phi-creatures
testifies to this precision. Within the prescribed limits, the
Phi-creatures behave in the same way as the
real…the…er…"

He could not disentangle himself.

"The originals," said Snow, in a loud whisper.

"Yes, the originals. But when the situation no longer
corresponds to the normal faculties of…er…the
original, the Phi-creature suffers a sort of 'disconnection of
consciousness,' followed immediately by unusual, non-human
manifestations…"

"It's true," I said, "and we can amuse ourselves drawing up a
catalogue of the behavior of…of these creatures—a
totally frivolous occupation!"

"I'm not sure of that," protested Sartorius. I suddenly realized
why he irritated me so much: he didn't talk, he lectured, as though
he were in the chair at the Institute. He seemed to be incapable of
expressing himself in any other way. "Here we come to the question
of individuality," he went on, "of which, I am quite sure, the
ocean has not the smallest inkling. I think that
the…er…delicate or shocking aspect of our present
situation is completely beyond its comprehension."

"You think its activities are unpremeditated?"

I was somewhat bewildered by Sartorius's point of view, but on
second thought, I realized that it could not be dismissed.

"No, unlike our colleague Snow, I don't believe there is malice,
or deliberate cruelty…"

Snow broke in:

"I'm not suggesting it has human feelings, I'm merely trying to
find an explanation for these continual reappearances."

With a secret desire to nag poor Sartorius, I said:

"Perhaps they are plugged into a contrivance which goes round
and round, endlessly repeating itself, like a gramophone
record…"

"Gentlemen, I beg you, let us not waste time! I haven't yet
finished. In normal circumstances, I would have felt it premature
to present a report, even a provisional one, on the progress of my
research; in view of the prevailing situation, however, I think I
may allow myself to speak out. I have the impression—only an
impression, mark you—that Dr. Kelvin's hypothesis is not
without validity. I am alluding to the hypothesis of a neutrino
structure…Our knowledge in this field is purely theoretical.
We did not know if there was any possibility of stabilizing such
structures. Now a clearly defined solution offers itself to us. A
means of neutralizing the magnetic field that maintains the
stability of the structure…"