Solaris

11 THE THINKERS

“Kris, is it the experiment that’s on your mind?”

The sound of her voice made me start with surprise. I had been lying in the dark for hours with my eyes open, unable to sleep. Not hearing Rheya’s breathing, I had forgotten her, letting myself drift in a tide of aimless speculation. The waking dream had lured me out of sight of the measure and meaning of reality. “How did you know I wasn’t asleep?” “Your breathing changes when you are asleep,” she said gently, as if to apologize for her question. “I didn’t want to interfere… If you can’t answer, don’t.”

“Why would I not tell you? Anyway you’ve guessed right, it is the experiment.”

“What do they expect to achieve?”

“They don’t know themselves. Something. Anything. It isn’t ‘Operation Brainwave,’ it’s ‘Operation Desperation.’ Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind — as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don’t understand and never will.” I stopped, but a new access of rage quickly built up. “Needless to say they’re not short of arguments. They claim that even if we fail to establish contact we won’t have been wasting our time investigating the plasma, and that we shall eventually uncover the secret of matter. They know very well that they are deceiving themselves. It’s like wandering about in a library where all the books are written in an indecipherable language. The only thing that’s familiar is the color of the bindings!”

“Are there no other planets like this?”

“It’s possible. This is the only one we’ve come across. In any case, it’s in an extremely rare category, not like Earth. Earth is a common type — the grass of the universe! And we pride ourselves on this universality. There’s nowhere we can’t go; in that belief we set out for other worlds, all brimming with confidence. And what were we going to do with them? Rule them or be ruled by them: that was the only idea in our pathetic minds! What a useless waste…”

I got out of bed and fumbled in the medicine cabinet. My fingers recognized the shape of the big bottle of sleeping pills, and I turned around in the darkness:

“I’m going to sleep, darling.” Up in the ceiling, the ventilator hummed. “I must get some sleep…”

In the morning, I woke up feeling calm and refreshed. The experiment seemed a petty matter, and I could not understand how I had managed to take the encephalogram so seriously. Nor was I much bothered by having to bring Rheya into the laboratory. In spite of all her exertions, she could not bear to stay out of sight and earshot for longer than five minutes, so I had abandoned my idea of further tests (she was even prepared to let herself be locked up somewhere), asked her to come with me, and advised her to bring something to read.

I was especially curious about what I would find in the laboratory. There was nothing unusual about the appearance of the big, blue-and-white-painted room, except that the shelves and cupboards meant to contain glass instruments seemed bare. The glass panel in one door was starred, and in some doors it was missing altogether, suggesting that there had been a struggle here recently, and that someone had done his best to remove the traces.

Snow busied himself with the equipment, and behaved quite civilly, showing no surprise at the sight of Rheya, and greeting her with a quick nod of the head.

I was lying down and Snow was swabbing my temples and forehead with saline solution, when a narrow door opened and Sartorius emerged from an unlighted room. He was wearing a white smock and a black anti-radiation overall that came down to his ankles, and his greeting was authoritative and very professional in manner. We might have been two researchers in some great institute on Earth, continuing from where we had left off the day before. He was not wearing his dark glasses, but I noticed that he had on contact lenses, which I took to be the explanation of his lack of expression.

Satorius looked on with arms folded as Snow attached the electrodes and wrapped a bandage around my head. He looked around the room several times, ignoring Rheya, who sat on a stool with her back against the wall, pretending to read.

Snow stepped back, and I moved my head, which was bulging with metal discs and wires, to watch him switch on. At this point Sartorius raised his hand and launched into a flowery speech:

“Dr. Kelvin, may I have your attention and concentration for a moment. I do not intend to dictate any precise sequence of thought to you, for that would invalidate the experiment, but I do insist that you cease thinking of yourself, of me, our colleague Snow, or anybody else. Make an effort to eliminate any intrusion of individual personalities, and concentrate on the matter in hand. Earth and Solaris; the body of scientists considered as a single entity, although generations succeed each other and man as an individual has a limited span; our aspirations, and our perseverance in the attempt to establish an intellectual contact; the long historic march of humanity, our own certitude of furthering that advance, and our determination to renounce all personal feelings in order to accomplish our mission; the sacrifices that we are prepared to make, and the hardships we stand ready to overcome… These are the themes that might properly occupy your awareness. The association of ideas does not depend entirely on your own will. However, the very fact of your presence here bears out the authenticity of the progression I have drawn to your attention. If you are unsure that you have acquitted yourself of your task, say so, I beg you, and our colleague Snow will make another recording. We have plenty of time.”

A dry little smile flickered over his face as he spoke these last words, but his expression remained morose. I was still trying to unravel the pompous phraseology which he had spun out with the utmost gravity. Snow broke the lengthening silence:

“Ready Kris?”

He was leaning with one elbow on the control-panel of the electro-encephalograph, looking completely relaxed. His confident tone reassured me, and I was grateful to him for calling me by my first name.

“Let’s get started.” I closed my eyes.

A sudden panic had overwhelmed me after Snow had fixed the electrodes and walked over to the controls: now it disappeared just as suddenly. Through half-closed lids, I could see the red lights winking on the black control-panel. I was no longer aware of the damp, unpleasant touch of the crown of clammy electrodes. My mind was an empty grey arena ringed by a crowd of invisible onlookers massed on tiers of seats, attentive, silent, and emanating in their silence an ironic contempt for Sartorius and the Mission. What should I improvise for these spectators?… Rheya… I introduced her name cautiously, ready to withdraw it at once, but no protest came, and I kept going. I was drunk with grief and tenderness, ready to suffer prolonged sacrifices patiently. My mind was pervaded with Rheya, without a body or a face, but alive inside me, real and imperceptible. Suddenly, as if printed over that despairing presence, I saw in the grey shadows the learned, professorial face of Giese, the father of Solarist studies and of Solarists. I was not visualizing the nauseating mud-eruption which had swallowed up the gold-rimmed spectacles and carefully brushed moustache. I was seeing the engraving on the title-page of his classic work, and the close-hatched strokes against which the artist had made his head stand out — so like my father’s, that head, not in its I features but in its expression of old-fashioned wisdom and honesty, that I was finally no longer able to tell which of them was looking at me, my father or Giese. They were dead, and neither of them buried, but then deaths without burial are not uncommon in our time.

The image of Giese vanished, and I momentarily forgot the Station, the experiment, Rheya and the ocean. Recent memories were obliterated by the overwhelming conviction that these two men, my father and Giese, nothing but ashes now, had once faced up to the totality of their existence, and this conviction afforded a profound calm which annihilated the formless assembly clustered around the grey arena in the expectation of my defeat.

I heard the click of circuit-breakers, and light penetrated my eyelids, which blinked open. Sartorius had not budged from his previous position, and was looking at me. Snow had his back turned to operate the control-panel. I had the impression that he was amusing himself by making his sandals slap on the floor.

“Do you think that stage one has been successful, Dr. Kelvin?” Sartorius inquired, in the nasal voice which I had come to detest.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” he persisted, obviously rather surprised, and perhaps even suspicious.

“Yes.”

My assurance and the bluntness of my answers made him lose his composure briefly.

“Oh… good,” he stammered.

Snow came over to me and started to unwrap the bandage from my head. Sartorius stepped back, hesitated, then disappeared into the dark-room.

I was rubbing the circulation back into my legs when he came out again, holding the developed film. Zigzag lines traced a lacy pattern along fifty feet of glistening black ribbon. My presence was no longer necessary, but I stayed, and Snow fed the ribbon into the modulator. Sartorius made a final suspicious examination of the last few feet of the spool, as if trying to decipher the content of the wavering lines.

The experiment proceeded with a minimum of fuss.

Snow and Sartorius each sat at a bank of controls and pushed buttons. Through the reinforced floor, I heard the whine of power building up in the turbines. Lights moved downward inside glass-fronted indicators in time with the descent of the great X-ray beamer to the bottom of its housing. They came to a stop at the low limit of the indicators.

Snow stepped up the power, and the white needle of the voltmeter described a left-to-right semicircle. The hum of current was barely audible now, as the film unwound, invisible behind the two round caps. Numbers clicked through the footage indicator.

I went over to Rheya, who was watching us over her book. She glanced up at me inquiringly. The experiment was over, and Sartorius was walking towards the heavy conical head of the machine.

“Can we go?” Rheya mouthed silently.

I replied with a nod, Rheya stood up and we left the room without taking leave of my colleagues.

A superb sunset was blazing through the windows of the upper-deck corridor. Usually the horizon was reddish and gloomy at this hour. This time it was a shimmering pink, laced with silver. Under the soft glow of the light, the somber foothills of the ocean shone pale violet. The sky was red only at the zenith.

We came to the bottom of the stairway, and I stopped, reluctant to wall myself up again in the prison cell of the cabin.

“Rheya, I want to look something up in the library. Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” she exclaimed, in a forced attempt at cheerfulness. “I can find something to read…”

I knew only too well that a gulf had opened between us since the previous day. I should have behaved more considerately, and tried to master my apathy, but I could not summon the strength.

We walked down the ramp leading to the library. There were three doors giving onto the little entrance hall, and crystal globes containing flowers were spaced out along the walls. I opened the middle door, which was lined with synthetic leather on either side. I always avoided contact with this upholstery when entering the library. We were greeted by a pleasant gust of fresh air. In spite of the stylized sun painted on the ceiling, the great circular hall had remained cool.

Idly running a finger along the spines of the books, I was on the point of choosing, out of all the Solarist classics, the first volume of Giese, so as to refresh my memory of the portrait on the title-page, when I came upon a book I had not noticed before, an octavo volume with a cracked binding. It was Gravinsky’s Compendium, used mostly by students, as a crib.

Sitting in an armchair, with Rheya at my side, I leafed through Gravinsky’s alphabetical classification of the various Solarist theories. The compiler, who had never set foot on Solaris, had combed through every monograph, expedition report, fragmentary outline and provisional account, even making excerpts of incidental comments about Solaris in planetological works dealing with other worlds. He had drawn up an inventory crammed with simplistic formulations, which grossly diminished the subtlety of the ideas it resuméd. Originally intended as an all-embracing account, Gravinsky’s book was little more than a curiosity now. It had only been published twenty years before, but since that time such a mass of new theories had accumulated that there would not have been room for them in a single volume. I glanced through the index — practically an obituary list, for few of the authors cited were still alive, and among the survivors none was still playing an active part in Solarist studies. Reading all these names, and adding up the sum of the intellectual efforts they represented in every field of research, it was tempting to think that surely one of the theories quoted must be correct, and that the thousands of listed hypotheses must each contain some grain of truth, could not be totally unrelated to the reality.

In his introduction, Gravinsky divided the first sixty years of Solarist studies into periods. During the initial period, which began with the scouting ship that studied the planet from orbit, nobody had produced theories in the strict sense. ‘Common sense’ suggested that the ocean was a lifeless chemical conglomerate, a gelatinous mass which through its ‘quasi-volcanic’ activity produced marvellous creations and stabilized its eccentric orbit by virtue of a self-generated mechanical process, as a pendulum keeps itself on a fixed path once it is set in motion. To be precise, Magenon had come up with the idea three years after the first expedition, but according to the Compendium the period of biological hypotheses does not begin until nine years later, when Magenon’s idea had acquired numerous supporters. The following years teemed with theoretical accounts of the living ocean, extremely complex, and supported by biomathematical analysis. During the third period, scientific opinion, hitherto practically unanimous, became divided.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination. The first atlases and inventories appeared, and new techniques in remote control enabled instruments to transmit stereophotographs from the interior of the asymmetriads, once considered impossible to explore. In the hubbub of controversy, the ‘minimal’ hypotheses were contemptuously dismissed: even if the long-awaited contact with the ‘reasoning monster’ did not materialize, it was argued that it was still worth investigating the cartilaginous cities of the mimoids and the ballooning mountains that rose above the ocean because we would gain valuable chemical and physio-chemical information, and enlarge our understanding of the structure of giant molecules. Nobody bothered even to refute the adherents of this defeatist line of reasoning. Scientists devoted themselves to drawing up catalogues of the typical metamorphoses which are still standard works, and Frank developed his bioplasmatic theory of the mimoids, which has since been shown to be inaccurate, but remains a superb example of intellectual audacity and logical construction.

The thirty or so years of the first three ‘Gravinsky periods,’ with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the early colloido-mechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the ‘apsychic ocean,’ a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean. This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data. It was the golden age of the archivists. Microfilm libraries burst at the seams with documents; expeditions, some of them more than a thousand strong, were equipped with the most lavish apparatus Earth could provide — robot recorders, sonar and radar, and the entire range of spectrometers, radiation counters and so on. Material was being accumulated at an accelerating tempo, but the essential spirits of the research flagged, and in the course of this period, still an optimistic one in spite of everything, a decline set in.

The first phase of Solaristics had been shaped by the personality of men like Giese, Strobel and Sevada, who had remained adventurous whether they were asserting or attacking a theoretical position. Sevada, the last of the great Solarists, disappeared near the south pole of the planet, and his death was never satisfactorily explained. He fell victim to a mistake which not even a novice would have made. Flying at low altitude, in full view of scores of observers, his aircraft had plunged into the interior of an agilus which was not even directly in its path. There was speculation about a sudden heart attack or fainting fit, or a mechanical failure, but I have always believed that this was in fact the first suicide, brought on by the first abrupt crisis of despair.

There were other ‘crises,’ not mentioned in Gravinsky, whose details I was able to fill in out of my own knowledge as I stared at the yellowed, closely printed pages.

The later expressions of despair were in any case less dramatic, just as outstanding personalities became rarer. The recruitment of scientists to any particular field of study in a given age has never been studied as a phenomenon in its own right. Every generation throws up a fairly constant number of brilliant and determined men; the only difference lies in the direction they choose to take. The absence or presence of such individuals in a particular field of study is probably explicable in terms of the new perspectives offered. Opinions may differ about the researchers of the classical age of Solarist studies, but nobody can deny their stature, even their genius. For several decades, the mysterious ocean had attracted the best mathematicians and physicists, and the top specialists in biophysics, information theory and electro-physiology. Now, without warning, the army of researchers found itself leaderless. There remained a faceless mass of industrious collectors and compilers. The occasional original experiment might be devised, but the succession of vast expeditions mounted on a worldwide scale petered out, and the scientific world no longer echoed with ambitious, controversial theories.

The machinery of Solaristics fell into disrepair, and rusted over with hypotheses differentiated only in minor details, and unanimous in their concentration on the theme of the ocean’s degeneration, regression and introversion. Now and then a bolder, more interesting concept might emerge, but it always amounted to a kind of indictment of the ocean, viewed as the end-product of a development which long ago, thousands of years before, had gone through a phase of superior organization, and now had nothing more than a physical unity. The argument went that its many useless, absurd creations were its death-throes — impressive enough, nonetheless — which had been going on for centuries. Thus, for instance, the extensors and mimoids were seen as tumors, and all the surface processes of the huge fluid body as expressions of chaos and anarchy. This approach to the problem became an obsession. For seven or eight years, the academic literature produced a spate of assertions which although framed in polite, cautious terms, amounted to little more than insults, the revenge of a rabble of leaderless suitors when they realized that the object of their most pressing attentions was indifferent to the point of obstinately ignoring all their advances.

A group of European psychologists once carried out a public opinion poll spread over a period of several years. Their report had no direct bearing on Solarist studies, and was not included in the library collection, but I had read it, and retained a clear memory of its findings. The investigators had strikingly demonstrated that the changes in lay opinion were closely correlated to the fluctuations of opinion recorded in scientific circles.

That change was expressed even in the coordinating committee of the Institute of Planetology, which controls the financial appropriations for research, by means of a progressive reduction in the budgets of institutes and appointments devoted to Solarist studies, as well as by restrictions on the size of the exploration teams.

Some scientists adopted a position at the other extreme, and agitated for more vigorous steps to be taken. The administrative director of the Universal Cosmological Institute ventured to assert that the living ocean did not despise men in the least, but had not noticed them, as an elephant neither feels nor sees the ants crawling on its back. To attract and hold the ocean’s attention, it would be necessary to devise more powerful stimuli, and gigantic machines tailored to the dimensions of the entire planet. Malicious commentators were not slow to point out that the director could well afford to be generous, since it was the Institute of Planetology which would have to foot the bill.

Still the hypotheses rained down — old, ‘resurrected’ hypotheses, superficially modified, simplified, or complicated to the extreme — and Solaristics, a relatively well-defined discipline in spite of its scope, became an increasingly tangled maze where every apparent exit led to a dead end. In the despondency, the ocean of Solaris was submerging under an ocean of printed paper.

Two years before I began the stint in Gibarian’s laboratory which ended when I obtained the diploma of the Institute, the Mett-Irving Foundation offered a huge prize to anybody who could find a viable method of tapping the energy of the ocean. The idea was not a new one. Several cargoes of the plasmatic jelly had been shipped back to Earth in the past, and various methods of preservation had been patiently tested: high and low temperatures, artificial micro-atmospheres and micro-climates, and prolonged irradiation. The whole gamut of physical and chemical processes had been run, only to end with the same outcome, a gradual process of decomposition which passed through well-defined stages, starting with wasting, maceration, then first-degree (primary) and late (secondary) liquefaction. The samples removed from the plasmatic growths and creations met with the same fate, with certain variations in the phases of decomposition. The end-product was always a light metallic ash.

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.

Slipped between two pages of Muntius’s pamphlet, I discovered an off-print of the quarterly review Parerga Solariana, which turned out to be one of the first articles written by Gibarian, even before he was appointed director of the Institute. The article was called “Why I Am a Solarist” and began with a concise account of all the material phenomena which confirmed the possibility of contact. Gibarian belonged to that generation of researchers who had been daring and optimistic enough to hark back to the golden age, and who did not disown their own version of a faith that overstepped the frontiers imposed by science, and yet remained concrete, since it pre-supposed the success of perseverance.

Gibarian had been influenced by the classical work in bio-electronics for which the Eurasian school of Cho En-min, Ngyalla and Kawakadze is famous. Their studies established an analogy between the charted electrical activity of the brain and certain discharges occurring deep in the plasma before the appearance, for example, of elementary polymorphs or twin solarids. Gibarian was opposed to anthropomorphizing interpretations, and the mystifications of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric and neurophysiological schools which attempted to endow the ocean with the symptoms of human illnesses, epilepsy among them (supposed to correspond with the spasmodic eruptions of the asymmetriads). He was one of the most cautious and logical proponents of Contact, and saw no advantage in the kind of sensationalism which was in any case becoming more and more rare as applied to Solaris.

My own doctoral thesis received a fair amount of attention, not all of it welcome. It was based on the discoveries of Bergmann and Reynolds, who had succeeded in isolating and ‘filtering’ the elements of the most powerful emotions — despair, grief and pleasure — out of the mass of general mental processes. Systematically comparing their recordings with the electrical discharges from the ocean, I had observed oscillations in certain parts of symmetriads and at the bases of nascent mimoids which were sufficiently analogous to deserve further investigation. The journalists pounced on my thesis, and in some newspapers my name was coupled with grotesque headlines — ‘The Despairing Jelly,’ ‘The Planet in Orgasm.’ But this dubious fame did have the fortunate consequence (or so I had thought a few days previously) of attracting the attention of Gibarian, who naturally could not read every new publication dealing with Solaris. The letter he sent me ended a chapter of my life, and began a new one…