Stanisław Lem

Stanislaw Lem HOME Solaris is about a crew of scientists as they attempt to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence, which takes the form of a vast ocean on the titular alien planet.
Stanislaw Lem Solaris first pages and selected excerpts The Arrival At 19.00 hours, ship's time, I made my way to the launch ing bay. The men around the shaft stood aside to let me pass, and I climbed down into the capsule. Inside the narrow cockpit, there was scarcely room to move. I attached the hose to the valve on my space suit and it inflated rapidly. From then on, I was incapable of making the smallest movement. There I stood, or rather hung suspended, enveloped in my pneumatic suit and yoke to the metal hull. I looked up: through the transparent canopy I could see a smooth, polished wall and, far above, Moddard's head leaning over the top of the shaft. He vanished, and sud denly I was plunged in darkness: the heavy protective cone had been lowered into place. Eight times I heard the hum of the electric motors which turned the screws, fol lowed by the hiss of the shock-absorbers. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see the luminous circle of the solitary dial. A voice echoed in my headphones: "Ready Kelvin?" "Ready, Moddard," I answered. "Don't worry about a thing. The Station will pick you up in flight. Have a good trip!" There was a grinding noise and the capsule swayed. My muscles tensed in spite of myself, but there was no further noise or movement. "When is lift-off?" As I asked, I noticed a rustling out. side, like a shower of fine sand. "You're on your way, Kelvin. Good luck!" Moddard's voice sounded as close as before. A wide slit opened at eye-level, and I could see the stars. The Prometheus was orbiting in the region of Alpha in Aquarius and I tried in vain to orient myself; a glittering dust filled my porthole. I could not recognize a single constellation; in this region of the galaxy the sky was un familiar to me. I waited for the moment when I would pass near the first distinct but I was unable isolate any one of them. Their brightness was fading; they receded, merging into a vague, purplish glimmer, the sole indica tion of the distance I had already travelled. My body rigid, sealed in its pneumatic envelope, I was knifing through space with the impression of standing still in the void, my only distraction the steadily mounting heat. Suddenly, there was a shrill, grating sound, like a steel blade being drawn across a sheet of wet glass. This was it, the descent. If I had not seen the figures racing across the dial, I would not have noticed the change in direction. The stars having vanished long since, my gaze was swal lowed up on the pale reddish glow of infinity. I could hear my heart thudding heavily. I could feel the coolness from the air-conditioning on my neck, although my face seemed to be on fire. I regretted not having caught a glimpse of the Prometheus, but the ship must have been out of sight by the time the automatic controls had raised the shutter of my porthole. The capsule was shaken by a sudden jolt, then another. The whole vehicle began to vibrate. Filtered through the insulating layers of the outer skins, penetrating my pneu matic cocoon, the vibration reached me, and ran through my entire body. The image of the dial shivered and multi plied, and its phosphorescence spread out in all direc tions. I felt no fear. I had not undertaken this long voyage only to overshoot my target! I called into the microphone: "Station Solaris! Station Solaris! Station Solaris! I think I am leaving the flight-path, correct my course! Sta tion Solaris, this is the Prometheus capsule. Over." I had missed the precious moment when the planet first came into view. Now it was spread out before my eyes; flat, and already immense. Nevertheless, from the appearance of its surface, I judged that I was still at a great height above it, since I had passed that imperceptible frontier after which we measure the distance that separates us from a celestial body in terms of altitude. I was falling. Now I had the sensation of falling, even with my eyes closed. (I quickly reop ned them: I did not want to miss anything there was to be seen.) I waited a moment in silence before trying once more to make contact. No response. Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself. A veil of mist covered the orange-colored sky, obscuring the porthole. Instinctively, I hunched myself up as much as my inflated suit would allow, but almost at once I realized that I was passing through cloud. Then, as though sucked upwards, the cloud-mass lifted; I was gliding, half in light, half in shadow, the capsule revolving upon its own vertical axis. At last, through the porthole, the gigantic ball of the sun appeared, looming up on the left and disappearing to the right. A distant voice reached me through the murmuring and crackling. [....] [...] “We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.” […] “On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”

Stanislaw Lem HOME

Solaris is about a crew of scientists as they attempt to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence, which takes the form of a vast ocean on the titular alien planet.

Stanislaw Lem

Solaris

first pages and selected excerpts

The Arrival At 19.00 hours, ship's time, I made my way to the launch ing bay. The men around the shaft stood aside to let me pass, and I climbed down into the capsule. Inside the narrow cockpit, there was scarcely room to move. I attached the hose to the valve on my space suit and it inflated rapidly. From then on, I was incapable of making the smallest movement. There I stood, or rather hung suspended, enveloped in my pneumatic suit and yoke to the metal hull.

I looked up: through the transparent canopy I could see a smooth, polished wall and, far above, Moddard's head leaning over the top of the shaft. He vanished, and sud denly I was plunged in darkness: the heavy protective cone had been lowered into place. Eight times I heard the hum of the electric motors which turned the screws, fol lowed by the hiss of the shock-absorbers. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see the luminous circle of the solitary dial. A voice echoed in my headphones: "Ready Kelvin?"

"Ready, Moddard," I answered. "Don't worry about a thing. The Station will pick you up in flight. Have a good trip!"

There was a grinding noise and the capsule swayed. My muscles tensed in spite of myself, but there was no further noise or movement.
"When is lift-off?" As I asked, I noticed a rustling out. side, like a shower of fine sand. "You're on your way, Kelvin. Good luck!" Moddard's voice sounded as close as before.

A wide slit opened at eye-level, and I could see the stars. The Prometheus was orbiting in the region of Alpha in Aquarius and I tried in vain to orient myself; a glittering dust filled my porthole. I could not recognize a single constellation; in this region of the galaxy the sky was un familiar to me. I waited for the moment when I would pass near the first distinct but I was unable isolate any one of them. Their brightness was fading; they receded, merging into a vague, purplish glimmer, the sole indica tion of the distance I had already travelled. My body rigid, sealed in its pneumatic envelope, I was knifing through space with the impression of standing still in the void, my only distraction the steadily mounting heat.

Suddenly, there was a shrill, grating sound, like a steel blade being drawn across a sheet of wet glass. This was it, the descent. If I had not seen the figures racing across the dial, I would not have noticed the change in direction. The stars having vanished long since, my gaze was swal lowed up on the pale reddish glow of infinity. I could hear my heart thudding heavily. I could feel the coolness from the air-conditioning on my neck, although my face seemed to be on fire. I regretted not having caught a glimpse of the Prometheus, but the ship must have been out of sight by the time the automatic controls had raised the shutter of my porthole.

The capsule was shaken by a sudden jolt, then another. The whole vehicle began to vibrate. Filtered through the insulating layers of the outer skins, penetrating my pneu matic cocoon, the vibration reached me, and ran through my entire body. The image of the dial shivered and multi plied, and its phosphorescence spread out in all direc tions. I felt no fear. I had not undertaken this long voyage only to overshoot my target!

I called into the microphone: "Station Solaris! Station Solaris! Station Solaris! I think I am leaving the flight-path, correct my course! Sta tion Solaris, this is the Prometheus capsule. Over."

I had missed the precious moment when the planet first came into view. Now it was spread out before my eyes; flat, and already immense. Nevertheless, from the appearance of its surface, I judged that I was still at a great height above it, since I had passed that imperceptible frontier after which we measure the distance that separates us from a celestial body in terms of altitude. I was falling. Now I had the sensation of falling, even with my eyes closed. (I quickly reop ned them: I did not want to miss anything there was to be seen.)

I waited a moment in silence before trying once more to make contact. No response. Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself. A veil of mist covered the orange-colored sky, obscuring the porthole. Instinctively, I hunched myself up as much as my inflated suit would allow, but almost at once I realized that I was passing through cloud. Then, as though sucked upwards, the cloud-mass lifted; I was gliding, half in light, half in shadow, the capsule revolving upon its own vertical axis. At last, through the porthole, the gigantic ball of the sun appeared, looming up on the left and disappearing to the right. A distant voice reached me through the murmuring and crackling.
[....]

[...] “We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.”

[…]

“On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”