With a strange feeling akin to respect I slipped the slim unbound offprint back among the books on the shelf. I ran my fingertips over the green and brown Almanac of Solaristics. Amid all the chaos and helplessness we were embroiled in, it couldn’t be denied that the experiences of the last few weeks had given us some certainty on a couple of fundamental questions over which a sea of ink had been spilled in recent years — debates that previously had been futile because they were unresolvable.
Someone fond of paradoxes and sufficiently stubborn could go on doubting that the ocean was a living being. But it was impossible to deny the existence of its mind, whatever could be understood by the term. It had become quite clear that it was only too aware of our presence above it… That statement alone disconfirmed the entire expansive wing of solaristics that declared the ocean to be “a world unto itself,” “a being unto itself,” deprived by a process of repeated atrophy of its former sensory organs, such that it supposedly knew nothing of the existence of external phenomena or objects, enclosed in a vortex of gigantic currents of thought whose abode, cradle, and creator were the depths spinning beneath their two suns.
And more: we had learned it could synthesize artificially that which we ourselves could not — our bodies — and even improve them by introducing into their subatomic structure inconceivable changes which probably had something to do with the purposes that drove it.
It existed then, it lived, thought, acted; the possibility of reducing the “Solaris problem” to nonsense or to zero, the belief that we were not dealing with any Being, and by the same token that our loss was not in fact any kind of loss — all this was gone for good. Whether they liked it or not, human beings had to take cognizance of a neighbor that, though it was billions of miles away across the void and separated from us by entire light years, still lay in the path of their expansion, and was harder to grasp than the whole of the rest of the Universe.
We may be at the turning point of all history, I thought to myself. A decision to give up, turn back, either now or in the near future, could prevail; I no longer regarded even the closing down of the Station as improbable, or at least beyond the bounds of possibility. But I didn’t believe that anything could be saved in this way. The very existence of the thinking colossus would never let people abide in peace again. However much they traveled across the Galaxy and made contact with civilizations of other beings similar to us, Solaris would present a perpetual challenge to humankind.
One other small leather-bound volume had found its way among the yearbooks of the Almanac. I gazed for a moment at the cover, darkened from the touch of fingers, before I opened it. It was an old book, the Introduction to Solaristics by Muntius. I was remembering the night I spent poring over it, and Gibarian’s smile when he gave me his copy, and the terrestrial dawn in the window as I reached the words “The End.” Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy couched in methodological formulas; the humble work of researchers is the expectation of consummation, of Annunciation, for there are not nor can there be any bridges between Solaris and Earth. This obvious fact, like many others — the absence of shared experiences, the absence of conveyable concepts — was rejected by solaricists, the same way the faithful reject arguments that would subvert the underpinnings of their faith. Besides, what do people expect, what can they want from “informational communication” with thinking seas? A recording of experiences of a being that endures through time, and is so old it probably cannot remember its own beginning? A description of the desires, passions, hopes and sufferings, that are released in the instantaneous birth of living mountains, the transformation of mathematics into existence, of loneliness and resignation into plenitude? Yet all this constitutes uncommunicable knowledge, and if one attempts to translate it into any terrestrial language, all those sought-after values and significations are lost, they remain on the far side. Besides, it isn’t these sorts of revelations, more worthy of poetry than science, that are hoped for by the “believers,” oh no; though they themselves are unaware of it, what they are waiting for is a Revelation that would explain to them the meaning of humankind itself! Solaristics, then, is the posthumous child of long-dead myths, the final flower of mystical yearnings that people no longer have the courage to utter aloud; while the cornerstone hidden deep in the foundations of this edifice is the hope of Redemption…
But, incapable of admitting that this is truly the case, solaricists scrupulously avoid all commentary on Contact, such that in their writings it becomes something ultimate — and while in its initial, still sober sense it was supposed to be a beginning, an introduction, an entry point onto a new path, one of many, it became beatified, and after the passage of years it turned into their eternity and their heaven…
Straightforward and bitter is the analysis offered by Muntius, that “heretic” of planetology; dazzling in its negation, in shattering the myth of Solaris, or rather of the Human Mission. That first voice, which dared to speak out as solaristics was still a developing field imbued with confidence and romanticism, was greeted with complete disregard and silence — something only too understandable, since accepting Muntius’s words would have been tantamount to erasing solaristics completely as it had existed thus far. The beginnings of a different, dispassionate, modest solaristics waited in vain for a founder. Five years after Muntius died, by which time his book had become a bibliographic rarity, a collector’s item not be found either in any solaristic series or in philosophy libraries, a school named after him arose — a Norwegian circle in which the composure of his exposition, divided among the different characters of the thinkers assuming his legacy, turned into the caustic, pigheaded sarcasm of Erle Ennesson, and in a somewhat trivialized version, the “utilitarian” solaristics of Phaelanga; the latter called for a focus on the concrete benefits to be gained from research, without becoming distracted by the daydreams and false hopes of civilizational contact and intellectual communion between two civilizations. Yet next to Muntius’s pitiless analysis, the writings of all his intellectual disciples are little more than footnotery, if not garden variety popularization, with the exception of the works of Ennesson and possibly Takata. Muntius himself had essentially accomplished everything, labeling the first phase of solaristics the “period of the prophets,” among whom he included Giese, Holden, and Sevada; the second phase he called “the great schism”—the splitting of the one solarian Church into a clutch of warring denominations; and he predicted a third phase — one of dogmatism and scholastic fossilization which would set in when everything there was to research had already been researched. This, however, did not happen. I believe Gibarian was correct after all in seeing Muntius’s scorched-earth exposition as a massive over-simplification that disregarded anything in solaristics that ran contrary to the elements of faith; for in reality what predominated in the field was unceasingly mundane research that promised nothing beyond a material globe orbiting around two suns.