In amongst the stringy protuberances, right next to the ocean I discovered a sort of shore, a few dozen square yards of rather steep but smooth surface, and I directed the helicopter there. Landing proved harder than I’d thought: I came very close to catching the rotor on a wall that suddenly rose up before my eyes, but I nailed it. I turned the engine off at once and flipped up the cockpit cover. Standing on the wing, I made sure the helicopter wasn’t in danger of slipping into the ocean; the waves were licking at the jagged edge only a dozen or so yards from where I’d touched down, but the craft stood firmly on its broad landing skids. I jumped onto the… “earth.” What I’d taken before for a wall, the thing I almost crashed into, was a huge osseous sheet, thin as a membrane and honeycombed with holes, that stood vertical and was covered with swellings that resembled balustrades. A gap several yards wide cut across this whole multi-story surface diagonally and, like the large and irregularly placed holes, showed what lay beyond. I climbed up the incline of the closest span of the wall, discovering that the boots of the space suit had an excellent grip, while the suit itself did not hinder my movements. Finding myself four stories above the ocean, I turned to face the interior of the skeletal landscape; it was only now that I could get a proper look at it.
The similarity to an ancient city half in ruins, to an exotic Moroccan settlement from centuries ago that had been brought down by earthquake or other natural disaster, was astounding. I could see with the greatest clarity the twisting labyrinth of streets partially blocked by rubble: their steep winding descent toward a shore washed by clammy foam; higher up, the still intact battlements and bastions, their rounded foundations; and, in the bulging or concave walls, the dark openings like broken windows or defensive slits. The whole island-city, leaning heavily to one side like a sunken galleon, proceeded in senseless motion, turning very slowly, as could be seen from the apparent movement of the sun in the sky, which produced a lazy play of shadow across the inner reaches of the ruins; at times a ray of sunlight would slip through to reach the spot where I was standing. I climbed higher still, at considerable risk, till a fine powder began to crumble from the excrescences protruding over my head; as it floated down it filled the crooked gullies and alleyways with great billows of dust. A mimoid is of course not actual rock, and its resemblance to limestone ends when you take a piece in your hand — it’s a lot lighter than pumice, small-celled, and hence extraordinarily airy.
I was so high up now I could feel its movement; it wasn’t just floating forward, driven by the blows of the ocean’s black muscles, who knows where from or where to, but it was also tilting first one way then the other, exceptionally slowly. Each of these pendulum-like swings was accompanied by the drawn-out, glutinous sounds of yellow and gray foam dripping from the shore as it rose away from the ocean. This rocking motion had been given it long ago, probably when it was born, and it retained it thanks to its huge mass. Having observed as much as I could from my elevated vantage point, I climbed carefully back down; it was only then, strange to relate, that I realized the mimoid did not interest me in the slightest, that I had come here to encounter not it, but the ocean.
I sat down on the rough, cracked surface, a few yards from the helicopter. A black wave crawled sluggishly up onto the shore, spreading and at the same time losing its color; when it retreated, the edge of the previously untouched rock was marked with trembling filaments of slime. I moved further down and reached out my hand to the next wave. It faithfully repeated the phenomenon that humans had first witnessed almost a century before: it hesitated, withdrew, then flowed over my hand yet without touching it, in such a way that a narrow layer of air remained between the surface of my gauntlet and the inside of the covering, which instantly changed consistency, turning from liquid to almost fleshy. I then raised my arm; the wave, or rather its narrow tongue, followed it upwards, continuing to encase my hand in an ever more transparent dirty green encystment. I rose to my feet, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to lift my arm any further. A shaft of the gelatinous substance stretched like a vibrating violin string, but did not break off; the base of the entirely flattened wave, like a strange creature waiting patiently for the end of these experiments, clung to the shore around my feet (also without coming into contact with them). It looked as if a ductile flower had grown out of the ocean, its calyx encircling my fingers in such a way that it became their exact negative, though without touching them. I stepped back. The stem of the flower shuddered and, as if reluctantly, it returned toward the ground — elastic, swaying, unsure. The wave gathered, drawing it into itself, and disappeared from the edge of the shore. I repeated the game until at some point — like a hundred years ago — one of the waves receded indifferently, as if having had enough of the new experience, and I knew that I’d have had to wait several hours to revive its “curiosity.” I took my seat as before, but as if changed by this theoretically familiar phenomenon that I had provoked; theory was quite incapable of conveying the actual experience.
In the budding, growth, and spread of this living formation, in each of its movements separately and in all taken together, there was something one was tempted to call a cautious yet not timid naivety, as it strove frantically and rapidly to know, to take in, an unexpectedly encountered new shape. Then, in mid-journey, it had to withdraw when it was in danger of transgressing certain boundaries established by a mysterious law. This agile inquisitiveness was so utterly at odds with the immensity that stretched to every bright horizon. I had never before been so aware of its vast presence, its powerful, inexorable silence breathing evenly through its waves. Staring in wonderment, I was descending to regions of inertia that might have seemed inaccessible, and in the gathering intensity of engrossment I was becoming one with this fluid unseeing colossus, as if — without the slightest effort, without words, without a single thought — I was forgiving it for everything.
For the whole of the final week I behaved so sensibly that the distrustful glint in Snaut’s eye eventually stopped harassing me. On the outside I was calm; secretly, without being fully conscious of it, I was expecting something. What? Her return? How could I? Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws; it can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love, which is more enduring than death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries, is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it’s simply futile. To be a clock, on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs; to know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through multiple repetitions? To replay human existence — fine, but to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune, pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? I didn’t believe for a minute that this liquid colossus, which had brought about the death of hundreds of humans within itself, with which my entire race had for decades been trying in vain to establish at least a thread of communication — that this ocean, lifting me up unwittingly like a speck of dust, could be moved by the tragedy of two human beings. But its actions were geared towards some purpose. True, even this I was not completely certain of. Yet to leave meant to strike out that perhaps slim, perhaps only imagined chance concealed in the future. And thus years amid furniture, objects, that we had both touched, in air that still remembered her breathing? In the name of what? The hope of her return? I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me — the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea, as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.