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 beginning, and as a step onto a new path, among many other possible paths. Over the years, Contact has become sanctified. It has become the heaven of eternity.

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 Ennesson and, on a more mundane plane, the ‘utilitarian’ or ‘utilitarianistic’ Solaristics of Fa-leng, who argued that science should settle for the immediate advantages offered by exploration, and not concern itself with any intellectual communion of two civilizations, or some illusory contact. Compared with the ruthless, lucid analysis of Muntius, the works of his disciples are hardly more than compilations and sometimes vulgarizations, with the exception of Ennesson’s essays and perhaps the studies of Takata. Muntius himself had already defined the complete development of Solarist concepts. He called the first phase the era of the ‘prophets,’ among whom he included Giese, Holden and Sevada; the second, the ‘great schism’ — the fragmentation of the one Solarist church into a number of waning sects; and he anticipated a third phase, which would set in when there was nothing left to investigate, and manifest itself in a crabbed, academic dogmatism. This prophecy was to prove inaccurate, however. In my opinion, Gibarian was right to characterize Muntius’s strictures as a monumental simplification which ignored all the aspects of Solarist studies that had nothing in common with a creed, since the work of interpretation based itself only on the concrete evidence of a globe orbiting two suns.

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 Bergmann and Reynolds, who had succeeded in isolating and ‘filtering’ the elements of the most powerful emotions — despair, grief and pleasure — out of the mass of general mental processes. Systematically comparing their recordings with the electrical discharges from the ocean, I had observed oscillations in certain parts of symmetriads and at the bases of nascent mimoids which were sufficiently analogous to deserve further investigation. The journalists pounced on my thesis, and in some newspapers my name was coupled with grotesque headlines — ‘The Despairing Jelly,’ ‘The Planet in Orgasm.’ But this dubious fame did have the fortunate consequence (or so I had thought a few days previously) of attracting the attention of Gibarian, who naturally could not read every new publication dealing with Solaris. The letter he sent me ended a chapter of my life, and began a new one…

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 announced the dawn of the red sun. In the sky, blinding flames and showers of green sparks clashed with the dull purple glow. Even the ocean participated in the battle between the two stars, here glittering with mercurial flashes, there with crimson reflections. The smallest cloud passing overhead brightened the shining foam on the wave-crests with iridescence. The blue sun had barely set when, at the meeting of ocean and sky, indistinct and drowned in blood-red mist (but signalled immediately by the detectors), a symmetriad blossomed like a gigantic crystal flower. The Station held its course, and after fifteen minutes the colossal ruby throbbing with dying gleams was once again hidden beneath the horizon. Some minutes later, a thin column spouted thousands of yards upwards into the atmosphere, its base obscured from view by the curvature of the planet. This fantastic tree, which went on growing and gushing blood and quicksilver, marked the end of the symmetriad: the tangled branches at the top of the column melted into a huge mushroom shape, illuminated by both suns simultaneously, and carried on the wind, while the lower part bulged, broke up into heavy clusters, and slowly sank. The death-throes lasted well over an hour.

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.