The Station came to a stop, held in place, and remained so for about three hours; the spectacle did not cease. Towards the end, when the sun had sunk below the horizon and the ocean beneath us was concealed in darkness, the thousand fold throng of slender blushing silhouettes rose ever higher into the sky, drifting in endless ranks as if on invisible strings, still, weightless; and this magnificent ascension of what looked like ragged wings went on till it was completely swallowed up by the darkness.
The entire spectacle, shocking in its placid immensity, terrified Harey, yet I was unable to tell her anything about it, because for me as a solaricist it was just as new and unfathomable as for her. But shapes and formations as yet unlisted in any inventory could be observed two or three times a year on Solaris; with a little luck, even more often.
The next night, about an hour before the expected rise of the blue sun, we witnessed another phenomenon — the phosphorizing of the ocean. To begin with, on its surface shrouded in blackness there appeared isolated patches of light, or rather of a whiteish glow that was hazy and moved with the rhythm of the waves. The patches joined together and spread till the spectral glimmer had reached the horizon on all sides. The intensity of the light increased for a period of about fifteen minutes. Then the marvel ended in an astounding manner: the ocean began to be extinguished. From the west, across a front that must have been hundreds of miles wide a zone of darkness advanced; when it reached the Station and passed it the part of the ocean that was still phosphorescent could be seen as a radiance rising high into the shadows and moving further and further away to the east. Once it reached all the way to the horizon, it became like a vast polar dawn, then suddenly disappeared. When the sun rose soon afterwards the dead, empty expanse, barely marked with the wrinkles of waves sending mercuric glints at the windows of the Station, again extended in every direction. The phosphorescence of the ocean had already been described; in a certain percentage of cases it had been observed before the emergence of asymmetriads, in addition to which it was a rather characteristic indication of locally increased activity in the plasma. Yet for the next two weeks nothing happened either outside the Station or within it. Only once, in the middle of the night, I heard a distant shout that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once; it was remarkably high-pitched, piercing and prolonged, more of an inhumanly intensified wail. Torn from my nightmare, I lay there for a long while, listening intently, not entirely sure that the shout wasn’t also a dream. The previous day, from the lab that was partially located above our cabin, there had come muffled sounds like heavy objects or equipment being moved around; I had the impression that the shout had also come from up there, though exactly how was unclear, since the two floors were separated by a soundproof ceiling. The dying voice went on almost half an hour. Drenched in perspiration, half mad, I was all set to race upstairs, such was the effect of the sound on my nerves. But in the end it fell silent, and once again only the moving of heavy objects could be heard.
Two days later, in the evening, as Harey and I were sitting in the small galley, Snaut suddenly appeared. He was wearing a suit, a real terrestrial suit, which transformed him. He looked taller and older. Hardly glancing at us, he went up to the table, leaned over it and without sitting down began to eat cold meat straight from a can, accompanying it with mouthfuls of bread. As he ate he dipped his sleeve accidentally in the can and got grease on it.
“You’re dirtying your jacket,” I said.
“Hm?” he merely mumbled, his mouth full. He ate as if he hadn’t had anything for days. He poured himself half a cup of wine, drank it in one, wiped his mouth and, taking a breath, looked around through bloodshot eyes. He stared at me a moment and murmured:
“You’ve grown a beard? Well, well…”
Harey dropped the dishes into the sink with a clatter. Snaut began rocking lightly on his heels; he screwed his face up and smacked his lips loudly, cleaning his teeth with his tongue. I had the impression he was doing it deliberately.
“Can’t be bothered shaving, huh?” he asked, gazing at me obnoxiously. I didn’t respond.
“Be careful!” he exclaimed after a moment. “A word of advice: he stopped shaving to begin with as well.”
“Go get some sleep,” I murmured.
“What? You can’t fool me. Why should we not talk? Listen, Kelvin, maybe it wishes us well? Maybe it’s trying to make us happy, it just doesn’t yet know how? It reads our wishes from our brains, but only two percent of our nervous processes are conscious. So it knows us better than we know ourselves. So we should listen to it. Acquiesce. Don’t you think? You won’t? Why,” he said, his voice breaking tearfully, “why won’t you shave?”
“Give it a rest,” I snapped. “You’re drunk.”
“Drunk? Me? What of it? Can’t a guy that dragged all his crap from one end of the Galaxy to the other to find out how much he’s worth, can’t he get drunk? Why not? I guess you believe in humanity’s mission, eh, Kelvin? Gibarian told me about you, before he grew his beard… You’re exactly the way he described… Just don’t come up to the lab, or you’ll lose your faith… Sartorius is at work there, our Faust in reverse — looking for a cure for immortality, get it? He’s the last Knight of the Holy Contact, he’s all we deserve… His previous idea was pretty good too — endless death throes. Not bad, huh? Agonia perpetua… straws… straw hats… How can you not drink, Kelvin?”
His eyes, almost completely hidden beneath their swollen lids, came to rest on Harey, who was standing motionless by the wall.
“O white Aphrodite, born of the ocean. Afflicted with greatness, your hand …,” he began to recite, and choked on his own laughter.
“Almost… word for word… eh, Kelvin?” he sputtered through his coughing.
I was still calm, but my calmness was beginning to harden into a cold rage.
“Stop it!” I hissed. “Stop it and leave!”
“You’re kicking me out? You too? You’re growing a beard, and you’re throwing me out? You don’t want me to warn you any more, to offer you advice, as one interstellar comrade to another? Kelvin, let’s open the lower hatches, we can shout to it down there, below, maybe it’ll hear us? But what’s its name? Think about it, we’ve named all the stars and the planets, but maybe they already had names? Such arrogance! Come on, let’s go down there. We can call out to it… tell it what it’s turned us into, it’ll be appalled… it’ll build us some silver symmetriads and pray for us in its own math, and throw bloody angels at us, and its suffering will be our suffering, its fear our fear, and it’ll beg us for an end. Because everything it is and everything it does is a plea for an end. Why are you not laughing? I’m just joking around. If we had more of a sense of humor as a race, things might not have gone this far. Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to punish it, this ocean, he’s trying to make it howl through every mountain… You don’t think he’ll have the courage to present his plan for the approval of that doddery old council of elders that sent us out here as redeemers of other people’s sins? You’re right, he’ll chicken out… but only because of the hat. The hat he won’t mention to anyone, he’s not that brave, our little Faust…”