Solaristics seemed to be falling apart, and as a kind of accompaniment or parallel to its descent there was a flurry of hypotheses, barely distinguishable from one another by second-order details, revolving around the degeneration, retardation, involution of the seas of Solaris. From time to time more daring and intriguing conceptualizations emerged, but they all seemed to pass judgment on the ocean, which came to be seen as the final stage of a development which long ago, thousands of years back, had had its period of supreme organization and now, having survived only physically, was disintegrating into a multitude of unnecessary, nonsensical agonal formations. So these were monumental, centuries-long death throes — that was how Solaris was perceived. Its extensors and mimoids were seen as tumorous growths; the processes that moved its huge fluid body were examined for indications of chaos and anarchy, to the point that this orientation became an obsession, and the entire scientific literature of the following seven or eight years, though of course free of expressions explicitly indicating the feelings of its authors, nevertheless was like one long barrage of insults — revenge taken by the gray leaderless masses of solaricists upon the unchangingly indifferent object of their intensified research, which continued to pay no attention to them whatsoever.
I was familiar with the work of a number of European psychologists wrongly, I think, excluded from this collection of classic Solariana, whose only connection with the field was that for a lengthy period they researched public opinion, collecting the most ordinary views, the attitudes of non-specialists, and in this way demonstrated the astonishingly close relationship between changes in such views and processes simultaneously taking place among the ranks of scholars.
Changes also occurred within the coordinating group of the Planetology Institute, where decisions were made concerning the material support provided for research. These changes resulted in a gradual but prolonged reduction in the budget of solaristic institutes and centers, and in grants for teams traveling to the planet.
Voices arguing for cutbacks in research mingled with speeches demanding more vigorous means; though no one may have gone further than the administrative director of the Worldwide Cosmology Institute, who stubbornly maintained that the living ocean wasn’t ignoring human beings, but rather it simply didn’t notice them, just as an elephant fails to see the ants crawling across its back; in order to call its attention to ourselves, then, what was needed were powerful stimuli and gigantic machines operating at the level of the entire planet. One amusing detail was the fact that, as the press mischievously pointed out, such costly measures were being demanded by the director of the Cosmology Institute, not the Institute of Planetology, which financed the exploration of Solaris; this, then, was generosity with someone else’s money.
Subsequently, the confusion of hypotheses, the reviving of old ones, the introduction of trivial changes rendering them more precise or, on the contrary, more ambiguous — all this began to turn the field of solaristics, which despite its breadth had been rather straightforward up to this point, into an ever more entangled labyrinth full of blind alleys. In an atmosphere of general indifference, stagnation, and discouragement, a second ocean of futile print seemed in time to be accompanying the ocean of Solaris.
About two years before I joined Gibarian’s workshop as a graduate of the Institute, the Mett-Irving Foundation was founded. It offered large prizes to anyone who found a way to utilize the energy of the oceanic plasma to the benefit of human beings. This had already been a temptation earlier, and spaceships had brought numerous consignments of plasma to Earth. Long and patient work had been carried out to find methods to conserve it, applying both high and low temperatures, an artificial micro-atmosphere and micro-climate resembling that of Solaris, preservative radiation, and a thousand chemical recipes, all of which merely allowed us to observe a more or less sluggish process of decay which, it goes without saying, like everything else was described multiple times in extreme detail in all its stages — autolysis, maceration, primary or early liquefaction, secondary or late liquefaction. A similar fate befell samples taken from the various productions and formations of the plasma. They differed from one another only in the path they took to the end, which constituted a watery fluid attenuated by auto-fermentation, light as ash and gleaming like metal. Its composition, proportion of elements, and chemical formulas could be given by any solaricist at the drop of a hat.
The absolute failure to keep any large or small portion of the monster alive, or at least in a state of suspended vegetation or hibernation, away from its planetary organism, became the source of a belief (developed by the school of Meunier and Prorokh) that there was in fact only one single mystery to solve, and that once we opened it with the right interpretive key, everything would immediately be clear…
In the search for this key, this philosopher’s stone of Solaris, time and energy were expended by people who often had nothing to do with science, and in solaristics’ fourth decade the numbers of maniacal impostors from outside the scientific community, zealots whose fanaticism exceeded that of their distant predecessors, like the prophets of the “perpetuum mobile” or the “squaring of the circle”—their numbers, then, assumed the dimensions of an epidemic, actually alarming many psychologists. After a few years, however, this passion died down, and when I was preparing for my voyage to Solaris, both it and the ocean that had inspired it had long disappeared from newspaper headlines and from daily conversation.
As I replaced Gravinsky’s volume on the shelf, next to it — since the books were arranged alphabetically — I noticed, barely visible between the thick tomes, a small pamphlet by Grattenstrom, one of the most curious blooms of the solaristic literature. It was a work that, in the struggle to understand the Non-Human, was directed against humans themselves, against people, a kind of lampoon of our species, furious in its mathematical coldness. It was written by a self-taught scholar who had first published a series of outstanding contributions to certain highly specific and rather marginal branches of quantum physics. In his most important and most extraordinary work, a mere dozen or so pages long, he sought to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us. Grattenstrom examined the formulas of relativity theory and of the theorem of force fields; he looked at parastatics and the hypotheses of a unified cosmic field, in search of traces of the human body — all that comes from and is a consequence of the existence of our senses, the structure of our organism, and the limitations and weaknesses of humankind’s animal physiology. He reached the conclusion that there cannot now, nor in the future could there ever be, talk of “contact” between human beings and any non-humanoid civilization. In this satire against the entire species the thinking ocean is not mentioned once, but its presence, in the shape of a contemptuously triumphal silence, could be sensed underlying virtually every sentence. That was at any rate the impression I had had when I read Grattenstrom’s pamphlet for the first time. This work was actually more of a curio than a work of solaristics in the strict sense of the term; it was included in the library of classics of the genre because it had been placed there by Gibarian himself — who, as it happened, had been the one who gave it me to read.