One highly complex, capricious form that stirs the fiercest resistance in the viewer — a resistance that is, of course, instinctive — is the mimoids. It can be said without exaggeration that Giese fell in love with them, and to the very end he devoted himself to exploring them, describing them, and puzzling out their essence. With the name he strove to convey what for humans is most curious about them: a tendency to imitate the forms around them, whether close or remote.
On a certain day, deep below the surface of the ocean there appears the darkening shape of a broad flat circle that has ragged sides and is as if coated with tar. After twelve or fifteen hours it becomes layered, is more and more visibly segmented, and at the same time thrusts upwards toward the surface. The observer could swear that beneath him a violent struggle is taking place, because endless series of synchronous circular waves flow in from all around like shrinking mouths, like living, muscled, closing craters; they pile up on top of the swaying blackish phantom lying in the depths and, first rising vertically, they plummet downwards. Each such plunge of hundreds of thousands of tons is accompanied by a sticky, almost smacking rumble that goes on for several seconds, because here everything happens on a monstrous scale. The dark formation is forced downwards; each successive impact seems to flatten and spread it. From individual layers, which droop like wet wings, elongated clusters break loose; they narrow into long necklaces, fuse together and drift upwards, drawing with them the fragmented mother disk, which has as it were adhered to them; in the meantime successive rings of waves are continuing incessantly to descend from above into a huge and ever more distinctly concave circle. This game can go on for a day, or it can last a whole month. Sometimes that’s the end of it. The conscientious Giese labeled such a variant an “abortive mimoid” as though, from who-knew-where, he possessed the certain knowledge that the ultimate goal of every such upheaval was a “mature mimoid,” that is to say, the colony of polyp-like, light-skinned excrescences (usually larger than a terrestrial city) whose destiny is to copy external forms… It goes without saying that another solaricist came along, by the name of Uyvens, who on the contrary determined that this last phase was a “degenerative” one, a degradation, an atrophy, and that the forest of created shapes was an evident manifestation of the branching formations freeing themselves from the control of the matrix.
Giese, however — who in all his descriptions of other formations on Solaris proceeded like an ant climbing a frozen waterfall, allowing nothing to distract him from the regular tread of his dry language — was in this case so sure of being right that he classified the successive phases of the mimoid’s emergence in a sequence of increasing perfection.
Seen from high up, a mimoid looks like a city; but this is an illusion arising from the need for any sort of analogy with something familiar. When the sky is clear, all the multistory growths and their crowning palisades are surrounded by a layer of heated air that makes the shapes, already hard to determine, look as if they were swaying and bending. The first cloud crossing the blue (I use this expression out of habit, because this “blue” is ruddy during the red day and terrifyingly white during the blue one) brings an immediate response. An abrupt gemmation begins: a malleable skin, almost completely separate from the base and swelling out like a cauliflower, is projected upwards; simultaneously it grows pale, and in a few minutes it offers a perfect imitation of the puffy cloud. This huge object casts a reddish shadow. Some of the mimoid’s peaks seem to pass it on to others; this movement always takes place in the opposite direction to the movement of the real cloud. I think Giese would have given his right arm to know at the very least why this happens. But such “isolated” creations of the mimoid are nothing in comparison with the elemental activity it displays when it is “stimulated” by the presence of objects and shapes appearing above it due to the actions of terrestrial visitors.
The re-creation of forms essentially includes anything to be found within a radius of up to eight or nine miles. More often than not the mimoid produces magnified copies; at times it distorts them, creating caricatures or grotesque simplifications, especially of machines. It goes without saying that the material is always the same, a rapidly decoloring mass that, when flung into the air, instead of falling hangs there, joined by easily broken umbilical cords to the base, across which it crawls, at the same time contracting, narrowing or expanding as it fluidly assumes the most complex patterns. Aircraft, grate, or mast are reproduced with equal rapidity; the mimoid fails to respond only to people, or to be precise, to any living beings, including plants, because these too were brought to Solaris for research purposes by indefatigable scientists. Whereas a mannequin, a human doll, a figure of a dog or tree made in any material whatsoever is instantly imitated.
And here, unfortunately, it needs to be said in parentheses that this “obedience” on the part of the mimoid toward the scientists, so unusual on Solaris, is sometimes suspended. The most mature mimoid has its “lazy days” during which it does nothing but pulsate very slowly. This pulsation, incidentally, is not visible to the eye; its rhythm, a single beat of the pulse, happens once every two hours, and stop motion photography was needed to discover it.