Inside Muntius’s book there was a faded offprint from the journal Parerga Solariana, folded in two. It was one of the first papers Gibarian had written, before he became director of the Institute. After the title—“Why I Am a Solaricist”—there followed a list, concise as a precis almost, of the specific phenomena that justified the real possibility of Contact. For Gibarian belonged to what may well have been the last generation of researchers who had the courage to refer back to the glory days of optimism and were not averse to their own kind of faith, which went beyond the boundaries laid down by science, yet was eminently material, since it believed their efforts would succeed so long as those efforts were sufficiently persistent and unceasing.
He was trained in the well-known, classic bioelectronic line of research of the Eurasian school, which included Cho-En-Min, Ngyalla, and Kavakadze. This work had demonstrated similarities between images of the electrical functioning of the brain and certain discharges that occurred within the plasma preceding the appearance of some of its formations, including early-stage Polymorpha and geminate Solarids. He rejected overly anthropomorphic interpretations, all those mystical notions of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and neurophysiological schools, which sought to attribute to the neurogliac ocean particular human ailments such as epilepsy (the analogue of which were supposedly the convulsive eruptions of asymmetriads), because among the advocates of Contact he was one of the most cautious and clear-headed, and could not abide anything so much as the sensationalism which, admittedly very infrequently, accompanied one or another discovery. As it happened, a wave of exactly this kind of cheap interest was provoked by my doctoral dissertation. That was here too, though of course not in printed form — it was buried in one of the microfilm capsules. In it, taking as my starting point the innovative research of Bergmann and Reynolds, who from the mosaic of cortical processes had succeeded in identifying and “filtering out” the components accompanying the most powerful emotions — despair, pain, joy — I went on to juxtapose those recordings with discharges emitted by currents in the ocean, and discovered oscillations and patterns in the curves (in certain parts of the symmetriads’ canopy, at the base of immature mimoids, and elsewhere) that offered a noteworthy analogy. This was enough for my name to appear soon afterwards in the gutter press beneath ludicrous headlines along the lines of “Despair of the Jelly” or “Planetary Orgasm.” But this worked out to my advantage (or so I thought till recently), since I came to the attention of Gibarian who, like any other solaricist, did not read every one of the thousands of papers being published, especially those written by novices. He wrote me a letter. That letter closed one chapter of my life, and opened up a new one.
Dreams
After six days, the lack of any reaction whatsoever inclined us to repeat the experiment, at which the Station, which thus far had stayed in place at the intersection of the forty-third parallel and the one hundred and sixteenth meridian, moved off at an altitude of twelve hundred feet above the ocean towards the south, where, as the radar sensors and radiograms from the Satelloid were indicating, there had been significantly increased activity in the plasma.
For two days the bundle of X-rays modulated by my encephalogram pounded the almost completely smooth surface of the ocean at intervals of several hours.
Towards the end of the second day we found ourselves so close to the pole that when the disk of the blue sun had almost completely disappeared beyond the horizon, the crimson tinge of the clouds in the opposite direction heralded the rising of the red sun. The vast blackness of the ocean and the empty sky above it were then filled with a blindingly fierce clash between hard colors aglow like metal, glistening with poisonous green and subdued hollow flames of crimson, while the ocean itself was rent with the glare of two counterposed disks, two furious fires, one mercuric and one scarlet; at such moments it was enough for the tiniest cloud to be at the zenith for the rays falling across the diagonals of waves with their lumbering foam to be lit up with an incredible rainbow glitter. Immediately following the setting of the blue sun, on the north-west skyline, first heralded by the indicators, there appeared a symmetriad; it was fused almost indistinguishably with the red-stained mist and arose out of it only with isolated glinting reflections, like an immense glass flower growing from the meeting point of sky and plasma. The Station, however, maintained its course, and fifteen minutes or so later the colossus, red and trembling like a guttering lamp made of rubies, vanished again beyond the horizon. A few minutes later a tall thin pillar, whose base was hidden from our view by the curvature of the planet, shot up soundlessly several miles into the atmosphere. This clear indication of the end of the symmetriad we’d seen, one side fiery red, the other bright as a column of quicksilver, branched into a two-colored tree, then the extremities of its ever more spreading limbs merged into a single mushroom-shaped cloud whose upper portion set off in the fire of two suns on a distant journey driven by the wind, while the lower part fell extraordinarily slowly in ponderous clusterlike fragments spread across a good third of the horizon. An hour later the last trace of this spectacle had vanished.
Two more days passed. The experiment was repeated one final time; the X-rays had by now penetrated a sizeable expanse of the plasmic ocean. To the south, from our altitude, despite the distance of a hundred and eighty miles, we now began to have an excellent view of the Arrhenides, a sixfold rocky chain of what looked like snow-capped peaks; these were in fact accumulations of organic matter, showing that this formation had once constituted the bed of the ocean.
At this point we shifted to a south-easterly course, moving for a time in parallel with the mountain barrier that was augmented with the clouds typical of the red day, till it too disappeared from view. By now ten days had passed since the first experiment.
The whole of that time, nothing really happened on the Station. Once Sartorius had completed the programming for the experiment, it was repeated automatically by the equipment; I’m not even sure whether anyone monitored it. Yet at the same time a great deal more than might have been desirable was happening on the Station. Not among the humans. I’d been concerned Sartorius would demand that work on the annihilator be started again; I was also waiting to see how Snaut would react when he learned from the other man that to a certain extent I had misled him, exaggerating the potential danger that could come from destroying neutrino-based matter. Yet nothing of the kind occurred, for reasons that initially were a complete mystery to me. Naturally I wondered too if this were some subterfuge, if they were concealing from me certain preparations and operations, so every day I checked out the windowless chamber beneath the deck of the main laboratory where the annihilator was kept. I never found anyone there, and the layer of dust on the casing and cables of the apparatus indicated that no one had so much as touched it for weeks.
During this time Snaut became as invisible as Sartorius, and more elusive, because now even the visuphone in the radio station went unanswered when it was called. Someone must have been steering the Station, but I couldn’t say who it was, and I didn’t care, strange as it may sound. The lack of response from the ocean had also left me indifferent to the point that after two or three days I’d stopped counting on it or worrying about it, and I forgot about the experiment completely. I spent entire days either in the library or in my cabin, with Harey drifting around me like a shadow. I could see that things were not good between us, and that this state of apathetic, mindless suspension couldn’t go on forever. I needed to break through it somehow, change something in our relations, but I kept postponing even the idea of any change, incapable as I was of making a decision. I can’t explain it any other way, but I had the feeling that everything on the Station, and especially what was between Harey and me, was presently in a frail, precarious equilibrium, and that moving it could bring everything to ruin. Why? I couldn’t say. The strangest thing was that she sensed something similar, to a degree in any case. When I think about it now, it seems to me that the impression of uncertainty, suspension, of the moment before an earthquake, was prompted by a presence that could not be sensed in any other way and yet which filled every deck and room on the Station. Though there was perhaps one other way it could be made out: through dreams. Never before and never afterwards have such apparitions appeared to me. I decided to write them down, and that’s how I’m able to say anything at all about them; but these are only fragments devoid of almost all their terrifying richness. In circumstances that were essentially inexpressible, I seemed to find myself in places devoid of sky, earth, floors, ceilings, or walls, as if I were shrunken or imprisoned in a substance that was alien to me, as if my whole body had become part of some half-dead, unmoving, shapeless lump. Or, rather, that I myself was that lump, deprived of flesh, surrounded by at first indistinct pale pink patches suspended in a medium with different optical properties than air, such that it was only from very close up things became clear, even excessively and supernaturally so, because in those dreams of mine my immediate surroundings were more concrete and material than anything I experienced awake. Whenever I woke up I had the paradoxical feeling that the real waking life was in fact the other one, and that what I saw when I opened my eyes was nothing but its wizened shadow.