The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

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  Table of CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Prelude—The Visionary Awakes

  Chapter One—The Music of the Spheres

  Chapter Two—A Midsummer Night

  Chapter Three—Terra Incognita

  Chapter Four—Through the Discontinuity

  Chapter Five—The Sun on Olympus

  Chapter Six—Out of the Plane

  Chapter Seven—Mars the Planet of Peace

  Chapter Eight—Time Passes

  Chapter Nine—Mercury and Prometheus

  Praise

  Copyright

  It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Prelude

  THE VISIONARY AWAKES

  Now all my life forces my flight through the streets of Lowell, and I run from alley to commons to alley like a rat pursued through a maze. It is dark night and the commons are eerie, empty fields. In the darkness the city’s enveloping hemisphere is invisible, and beyond one alley’s abrupt ending Pluto’s Tartarus Plain stretches like a black ocean. I cast dim shadows, my upper arms slide wetly against my sides, I feel my heart’s allegro thumping. An interior chorus demands the drug nepanathol.

  I will see him sober, I promise myself again. My hand shakes, I shove it in my pocket. Familiar back alleys now, I am nearing the Institute; I slow down as if the air is thickening. It is past time for my next crystal. I have not slept for days, I am continuing on the drive of … my destiny.

  Home. Across the dark tree-filled commons stands a big square building with a tall door; over the door in carved letters is written HOLYWELKIN INSTITUTE OF MUSIC. I cross the commons, open the door, slip in, sneak across the foyer. Holywelkin’s hologrammic statue stares down at me, a short figure semitransparent in the low light. I circle him warily, alive to his presence in the shadows between me and the ceiling. Kin of the Holy Well, Master of our world, could you possibly have intended it to be this way? Halls determine my path, then another door, the door: sanctum sanctorum. A deep bell clangs from the main hall and I jump. Midnight, time for the breaking of vows. I knock on the door, which is a mistake; I have the privilege of entering without knocking; but no, I have lost all that, I have revoked all that. An indistinct shout arrives from inside. Oh.… Time to face him. Take a deep breath.

  I push the door open and a slice of white light cuts into the hallway. In I go, blinking.

  The Master is under the Orchestra, on his back, tapping away cautiously at a dent the tuba bell suffered during the last Grand Tour.

  The Master looks up, gray eyebrows rising like a bird’s crest. “Johannes,” he says mildly. “Why did you knock?”

  “Master,” I say shakily, my resolve still firm: “I can no longer be your apprentice.”

  Watch that sink in, oh, oh.… The autocrat edges out from under the Orchestra, stands up, all slowly, very slowly. He is so old. “What is this, Johannes?”

  I swallow. I have a lie all prepared, I have considered it for days; it is absurd, impossible. Suddenly I am impelled to tell him the truth. “I am addicted to nepanathol.”

  Right before my eyes his face turns a deep red, his blue eyes stand out. “You what?” he says, then almost shouts, “I don’t understand?”

  “The drug,” I explain. “I’m hooked.”

  Has the shock been too much for him? Oh, old man, old man that I love.… He trembles, says, “Why?”

  It is all so complex—too complex to say. “Master,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

  With a convulsive jerk he throws the hammers in his hand, and I flinch; they hit the foam lining of the wall without a sound, then click against each other as they fall. “You’re sorry,” he hisses, and I can feel his contempt. “You’re sorry! By God, you’d better be more than sorry! Three centuries and eight Masters of the Orchestra, you to be the ninth and you break the line for a drug? This is history’s greatest musical achievement”—he waves toward the Orchestra, but I refuse to look at it—“you choose nepanathol above it? How could you? I’m an old man—I’ll die in a few years—there isn’t time to train another musician like you. And you’ll be dead before I will.” True enough, in all probability. “I will be the last Master,” he cries, “and the Orchestra will be silenced!”

  With the thought of it he twists and sits down cross-legged on the floor, crying. I have never seen the Master cry before, never thought I would. He is not an emotional man.

  “What have I done?” he moans. “The Orchestra will end with me and Ekern and the rest will say it was my fault. That I was a bad Master.”

  Ekern, Chairman of the Institute’s board of directors, has always disagreed with the Master’s choice of me as apprentice, has always hated me—this will vindicate his judgment. “You are the best of them,” I get out.

  He turns on me. “Then why? Why? Johannes, how could you do this?”

  I would have been the ninth Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra. I was the heir to the throne, the crown prince. Why indeed? “I … couldn’t help it.”

  He only cries.

  Then, as from a great distance, I hear myself. “Master,” I say, “I will stop taking the drug.”

  I close my eyes as I say it. For an old man’s sake I will go through the bitter withdrawal from nepanathol. I shake my head, surprised at myself. What moves us to act, where are the springs of action?

  He looks up at me with—what is it, craftiness? Is he manipulating me? No. It’s just contempt. “You can’t,” he mutters, angrily. “It would kill you.”

  “No,” I say, though I am not sure of this. “I haven’t been using it long enough. A few hours—eight, maybe—then it will be over.” It will be short; that is my only comfort. The interior chorus is protesting loudly: what are you doing! Pain … cramps, memory confusion, memory loss, nausea, hallucinations, and a strong possibility of sensory damage, especially to the ears, palate, and eyes: I do not want to go blind.

  “Truly?” the old man is saying. “When will you do this?”

  “Now,” I say, ignoring the chorus. “I’ll stay here, I think,” gesturing toward the Orchestra that I still refuse to look at.

  “I too will stay—”

  “No. Not here. In the recording booth, or one of the practice rooms. Or better yet, go up to your chambers, and come back in the morning.”

  We look at each other then, old Richard and young Johannes, and finally he nods. He walks to the door, pulls it open, looks back. “Be careful, Johannes.”

  I nearly laugh, but am too appalled. The door clicks shut, and I stand alone with Holywelkin’s Orchestra.

  * * *

  I recall the first time I saw it, in the Institute’s performance hall, in a special program for young people. My mother and I had come by train from the far side of Pluto to hear the concert, invited because my teachers at the Vancouver Conservatory had recommended me. The Master—the same one, Richard Yablonski, an old man even then—played pieces to delight the young mind: Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, De Bruik�
��s Night Sea, her Biologic Symphony, Shimatu’s Concerto for Digeree-doo. The last piece was a revelation to me; the Master started each phrase hesitantly, and exaggerated the rests, and the solo instrument’s mournful honks and hoots sounded like music played for the first time, improvised, filling space beyond the hall, beyond music itself, as if the fantastic tower of blue circles and glints was creating a texture of transcendent vibration all on its own.

  After the performance a few children, the ones already being considered for the apprenticeship, came forward to speak with the Master. I walked down the aisle in a daze, my mother’s palm firm in the middle of my back, barely able to pull my gaze from the baroque statue of wood and metal and glass, to the mere mortal who played the thing.

  Yablonski spoke quietly to us of the glories of playing an entire orchestra by oneself. As he spoke he watched our faces. “And which did you like better,” he asked, “Pictures at an Exhibition played on the piano, or with the full orchestral arrangement?”

  “Orchestra!” cried a score of voices.

  “Piano,” I said, hitting a rest.

  “Why?” he asked politely, focusing on me for the first time. I shrugged nervously; I couldn’t think, I truly didn’t know; fingers digging into my back, I searched for it—

  “Because it was written for piano,” I said.

  Simple. “But don’t you like Ravel’s orchestration?” he inquired, interested now.

  “Ravel smoothed a rough Russian piano score into a lush French piece. He changed it.” I was dogmatic then, a precocious child who even before the move to the conservatory had spent five hours a day at the keyboard and three in the books—and one in the streets, one desperately short hour, six o’clock to seven every day in the streets burning up a day’s pent energy—

  “Have you compared the scores?” the Master asked me, blue eyes piercing mine.

  “Yes, Master. The notes are nearly the same, but the textures are wrong. The timbre is wrong. And timbre is—” I was going to say everything, but instead I said, “important.”

  Yablonski nodded, seeming to consider this. “I believe I agree with you.”

  Then the talk was over and we were on our way home. Years would pass before I saw the Master and his Orchestra again, but I knew something had happened. I felt sick to my stomach. “You did well,” my mother said. I was nine years old.

  * * *

  And here I am ten years later, sick to my stomach again. It is difficult to tell what is happening in my body—past time for the next nepanathol crystal. The little twinges of dependence are giving me their warning, in the backs of my upper arms. At least it will be short.

  I turn to the Orchestra at last. “Imagine all of the instruments of a modern orchestra caught in a small tornado,” an early detractor wrote of it, “and you will have Holywelkin’s invention.” But there are few detractors left. Age equals respectability, and the Orchestra is now three hundred years old. An institution.

  And imposing enough: eleven meters of musical instruments soaring in air, eleven meters of twisted metal and curved wood, suspended from a complex armature of glass rods only visible because of the blue and red spotlights glinting from them. The cloud of violas, the broken staircase of trombones, the bulbous mercury drum; the comical balloon flutes, sleek lyricon, sinuous godzilla … all the world’s soundmakers hanging like fruit in a giant glass tree. It is a beautiful statue, truly. But Holywelkin, architect of our age, was a mathematician as well as a sculptor, a musician as well as an inventor, and this particular result of his synthesizing mind was, in my opinion, unfortunate. Unmusical. Dangerous.

  I stride to the piano entrance and slide onto the bench. The glassy depression rods cover the keys so that it is impossible to play the piano from its bench; and that symbolizes the whole. I continue up to the control booth, using the glass steps behind the cellos. Even the steps are inlaid with tiny figures, of French horns, lyres, serpentines.… It is as if I see everything in the Orchestra for the first time. The control booth, suspended in the center of the thing, nearly hidden from the outside: I am astounded by it. I sit on the revolving stool and look at it. Computer consoles, keyboards, foot pedals, chord knobs, ensemble tabs, volume stops, percussion buttons, tape machines, amp controls, keyboards: strings yellow, woodwinds blue, brass red, percussion brown, synthetics green.… I hit the tympani roll tab with my toe, hit tempo and sustain keys and boom, suddenly the B flat tympani fills the room, sticks a blur in the glass arms holding them. I long to hold the sticks and become the rhythm myself, to see the vibrations in the round surface and feel them in the pit of my stomach, for that is what music is, that feeling; but to play that roll in Holywelkin’s Orchestra I just slide a tab to a certain position and push another one down with my toe, so I stop pushing the tab down and there is instant silence. “No, Holywelkin, no! Don’t you see what you’ve done? Don’t you see how you’ve stripped from music the human component, the human act that allows it to move us? This damned orchestrina.…” I don’t know what to say to it. I shake my fist around me. I climb out the glass arms of the statue to the mercury drum, seize it in a bearhug and pull it to and fro; inside the liquid sloshes over the pickups, and the eerie oscillation of silver sound cuts at me … but I can’t control it. Starts of pain flare like matchheads in my arms and legs and neck. I struggle back to the control booth, defeated. Out with a yellow keyboard, down with ensemble tabs: the left hand plays, and sixty violins burst into life, in a rich, vibrant tone—another mark for Holywelkin. Add a fast big toe to the lower yellow keyboards and the basses join from below, and I’m off, into De Bruik’s Winds of Utopia. Some adroit taping and the right foot can splay out through the brass, leaving the right hand free for the arching oboe cries, full of pain, denying the name of those endless plains, ah De Bruik!—Such performance requires intense concentration, which I am not capable of at the moment; it is necessary to split the attention four or five ways, a truly spiritual discipline. Still, four or five ways is not one hundred and fifty ways; this machine is no orchestra, and orchestral music suffers in it, is condensed, recorded, rearranged.…

  Quit. Only the double basses, lugubrioso. I indulge myself and watch my feet bounding over the yellow keys and creating the low bowed notes that expand out of the rising spiral of big, dark bodies below me, primal vibration, hidden right hand tickling the synthesized bass to take the notes down, down, below twenty hertz, a trembling in the stomach below hearing— Both arches cramp, and in my guts something twists. I can’t remember the De Bruik, the conductor’s score that threaded through my head is gone, the basses saw away like industrial machinery. Sweat breaks out on my face and arms, and the Orchestra is slowly spinning, spinning, as it does in concerts—

  … I am waiting for Mikel and Joanne to arrive so we can leave for the concert. I sit at the battered old upright piano that I brought from Mother’s house right after her funeral, playing Ravel’s Pavanne pour une Infante defunt and feeling lonely. Tears fall and I laugh bitterly at my ability to act for myself, unsure as always if my emotions are real or feigned for some imaginary audience in a theater wrapped around my head; ignoring the evidence blinking before me, I think, I can call them up at will when I’m miserable enough!

  Mikel and Joanne arrive, laughing like wind chimes. They are both singers from the conservatory I have left, true artists, friends who are sad I no longer study with them. I compose myself, greet them, we sit in a circle, laugh, talk about Thomson’s Gazelle, the balloon-flute quintet we are going to hear. The conversation slows, Mikel and Joanne look at each other:

  “Johannes,” Mikel says slowly. “Joanne and I are going to eat crystals for the concert.” He holds out his hand. In his palm is a small clear crystal that looks like nothing so much as a diamond. He flips it into the air, catches it in his mouth, swallows it, grins. “Want to join us?” Joanne takes one from him and swallows it with the same casual, defiant toss. She offers one to me, between her fingers. I look at her, remembering what I have heard. Nepanathol
. I do not want to go blind.

  “Are you addicted?” I ask.

  They shake their heads. “We restrict ourselves to special occasions,” Joanne explains. They laugh. Happy people.

  “Oh,” I say, and once again all my life is behind me pushing, Mother’s lessons, the years at the conservatory, the winning of the apprenticeship, her death, the Orchestra and the Master and Ekern looming behind it all, “Oh,” I say, “give it to me.” I don’t care—it seems a solution, even—and—I cannot help it. I place the crystal on my tongue. It has no taste. I swallow—

  * * *

  Hallucinations. For a moment there I was confused. I climb back onto the stool and regret moving so quickly. Nausea weakens me. Pulling keyboards out is a bit of an effort. I try the St. Louis Blues; impossible to play the seven instruments all at once, so I tape passages, replay them in loops, playing the Orchestra with the sound engineering skills so crucial to it, setting it all up in a compilation fugue, then concentrating on the front line. The trombone is hilarity itself; unable to anticipate the notes as human players do, the glass arms of the Orchestra move the slide about with a tremendously rapid, mechanical, inhuman precision. The trombone solo from St. Louis Blues becomes the clarinet solo from Rampart Street Parade (see how they fit together?) and I quit in resignation. I hate to play poorly. And that, after all, is the whole point; the whole problem.

  * * *

  All you have to do to stop this, the interior chorus says, is go home and swallow a crystal. Without a moment’s thought I slip off the stool; my knees buckle like closing penknives and I crash into a bank of keyboards, fall to the floor of the booth. In the glassy floor are inlaid bass and treble clef signs, swimming under me, reproaching me. After a while I pull myself up and am sick in the booth’s drinking fountain. Then I drop back to the floor. I feel as sick after vomiting as before, which is frightening. “Do something!” Do what? This cobra tree entrancing me … I pull out the celesta keyboard just before my face, the bottom one in the bank. Far above is the ornate white box that is the instrument, suspended in the air, dwarfed by the godzilla beside it. The celesta: a piano whose hammers hit steel plates rather than wires. I run my finger along a few octaves and a spray of quick bell notes echoes through the chamber. (No echoes in this room.)