Solaris (22 page)

Now I was high enough to feel the swaying of the mimoid. It was
moving forward, propelled by the dark muscles of the ocean towards
an unknown destination, but its inclination varied. It rolled from
side to side, and the languid oscillation was accompanied by the
gentle rustling sound of the yellow and grey foam which streamed
off the emerging shore. The mimoid had acquired its swinging motion
long before, probably at its birth, and even while it grew and
broke up it had retained its initial pattern.

Only now did I realize that I was not in the least concerned
with the mimoid, and that I had flown here not to explore the
formation but to acquaint myself with the ocean.

With the flitter a few paces behind me, I sat on the rough,
fissured beach. A heavy black wave broke over the edge of the bank
and spread out, not black, but a dirty green. The ebbing wave left
viscous streamlets behind, which flowed back quivering towards the
ocean. I went closer, and when the next wave came I held out my
hand. What followed was a faithful reproduction of a phenomenon
which had been analyzed a century before: the wave hesitated,
recoiled, then enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a
thin covering of 'air' separated my glove inside a cavity which had
been fluid a moment previously, and now had a fleshy consistency. I
raised my hand slowly, and the wave, or rather an outcrop of the
wave, rose at the same time, enfolding my hand in a translucent
cyst with greenish reflections. I stood up, so as to raise my hand
still higher, and the gelatinous substance stretched like a rope,
but did not break. The main body of the wave remained motionless on
the shore, surrounding my feet without touching them, like some
strange beast patiently waiting for the experiment to finish. A
flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was moulded to my
fingers. I stepped back. The stem trembled, stirred uncertainly and
fell back into the wave, which gathered it and receded.

I repeated the game several times, until—as the first
experimenter had observed—a wave arrived which avoided me
indifferently, as if bored with a too familiar sensation. I knew
that to revive the 'curiosity' of the ocean I would have to wait
several hours. Disturbed by the phenomenon I had stimulated, I sat
down again. Although I had read numerous accounts of it, none of
them had prepared me for the experience as I had lived it, and I
felt somehow changed.

In all their movements, taken together or singly, each of these
branches reaching out of the ocean seemed to display a kind of
cautious but not feral alertness, a curiosity avid for quick
apprehension of a new, unexpected form, and regretful at having to
retreat, unable to exceed the limits set by a mysterious law. The
contrast was inexpressible between that lively curiosity and the
shimmering immensity of the ocean that stretched away out of
sight…I had never felt its gigantic presence so strongly, or
its powerful changeless silence, or the secret forces that gave the
waves their regular rise and fall. I sat unseeing, and sank into a
universe of inertia, glided down an irresistible slope and
identified myself with the dumb, fluid colossus; it was as if I had
forgiven it everything, without the slightest effort of word or
thought.

During that last week, I had been behaving so normally that Snow
had stopped keeping a watchful eye on me. On the surface, I was
calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for
something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We
all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of
physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings
combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The
age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger
than death, that
finis vitae sed non amoris
, is a
lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a
clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now
repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as
its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every
man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound
because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence
should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat
itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing
as he feeds coins into the jukebox…

That liquid giant had been the death of hundreds of men. The
entire human race had tried in vain to establish even the most
tenuous link with it, and it bore my weight without noticing me any
more than it would notice a speck of dust. I did not believe that
it could respond to the tragedy of two human beings. Yet its
activities did have a purpose…True, I was not absolutely
certain, but leaving would mean giving up a chance, perhaps an
infinitesimal one, perhaps only imaginary…Must I go on
living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air
she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I
hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had
gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements,
what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing,
and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was
not past.