Solaris

Solarists are incapable of recognizing this truth, and consequently take care to avoid any interpretation of Contact, which is presented in their writings as an ultimate goal, whereas originally it had been considered as a begi

Muntius analyzes this ‘heresy’ of planetology very simply and trenchantly. He brilliantly dismantles the Solarist myth, or rather the myth of the Mission of Mankind.

Muntius’s had been the first voice raised in protest, and had encountered the contemptuous silence of the experts, at a time when they still retained a romantic confidence in the development of Solaristics. After all, how could they have accepted a thesis that struck at the foundations of their achievements?

Solaristics went on waiting for the man who would reestablish it on a firm foundation and define its frontiers with precision. Five years after the death of Muntius, when his pamphlet had become a rare collectors’ piece, a group of Norwegian researchers founded a school named after him. In contact with the personalities of his various spiritual heirs, the quiet thought of the master went through profound transformations; it led to the corrosive irony of Erie E

Slipped between two pages of Muntius’s pamphlet, I discovered an off-print of the quarterly review Parerga Solariana, which turned out to be one of the first articles written by Gibarian, even before he was appointed director of the Institute. The article was called “Why I Am a Solarist” and began with a concise account of all the material phenomena which confirmed the possibility of contact. Gibarian belonged to that generation of researchers who had been daring and optimistic enough to hark back to the golden age, and who did not disown their own version of a faith that overstepped the frontiers imposed by science, and yet remained concrete, since it pre-supposed the success of perseverance.

Gibarian had been influenced by the classical work in bio-electronics for which the Eurasian school of Cho En-min, Ngyalla and Kawakadze is famous. Their studies established an analogy between the charted electrical activity of the brain and certain discharges occurring deep in the plasma before the appearance, for example, of elementary polymorphs or twin solarids. Gibarian was opposed to anthropomorphizing interpretations, and the mystifications of the psychoanalytic, psychiatric and neurophysiological schools which attempted to endow the ocean with the symptoms of human illnesses, epilepsy among them (supposed to correspond with the spasmodic eruptions of the asymmetriads). He was one of the most cautious and logical proponents of Contact, and saw no advantage in the kind of sensationalism which was in any case becoming more and more rare as applied to Solaris.

My own doctoral thesis received a fair amount of attention, not all of it welcome. It was based on the discoveries of Bergma

12 THE DREAMS

When six days passed with no reaction from the ocean, we decided to repeat the experiment. Until now, the Station had been located at the intersection of the forty-third parallel and the 116th meridian. We moved south, maintaining a constant altitude of 1200 feet above the ocean — our radar confirmed automatic observations relayed by the artificial satellite which indicated a build-up of activity in the plasma of the southern hemisphere.

Forty-eight hours later, a beam of X-rays modulated by my own brain-patterns was bombarding the almost motionless surface of the ocean at regular intervals.

At the end of this two-day journey we had reached the outskirts of the polar region. The disc of the blue sun was setting to one side of the horizon, while on the opposite side billowing purple clouds a

Another two days passed. Our X-rays had irradiated a vast stretch of the ocean, and we made a final repetition of the experiment. From our observation post we spotted a chain of islets two hundred and fifty miles to the south — six rocky promontories encrusted with a snowy substance which was in fact a deposit of organic origin, proving that the mountainous formation had once been part of the ocean bed.

We then moved south-west, and skirted a chain of mountains capped by clouds which gathered during the red day, and then disappeared. Ten days had elapsed since the first experiment.