The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Johannes shrugged. “Mathematically, you see, it is not so crazy. The structure of our thinking and the structure of reality need not always correspond. Mauring herself said that it was the pressure of the two time dimensions working against each other that caused change to occur in the other dimensions—that entropy was the work of their contrary action … Chronos overcoming Antichronos, but also grinding up the world in the attempt.”

  Dent sighed. “I don’t think I have the temperament to grasp these things.…”

  Johannes smiled again. “And Holywelkin! He said that when we dream, we are living in the fifth dimension, in the realm of Antichronos, and claimed that this explained the scrambled nature of our dreaming consciousness, and the curious frequency of precognitive dreams.”

  “Holywelkin sounds like a raving lunatic,” Dent said.

  Johannes nodded. “But look at the proof of his work.” He gestured out at the pure black ground of the constellations, where the spangling of stars was punctuated by the first magnitude pinpoints of several whitsuns. “Such results in the real world are hard to argue with.”

  For a long time they stared out at space. Such an intense, perfect black, pierced so very often by the jewelry of the stars; as always when Dent contemplated the sky for too long, he became a little giddy.

  “It is so vast and … all-encompassing,” Dent said, waving out at the sight incoherently. “It is almost as if … space itself is God.”

  The inward smile. “A man named Henry More wrote the same thing in 1671, in a book called Enchiridion Metaphysicum. He noted that the attributes of space are the same as those that the Scholastics had always assigned to the Supreme Being. ‘One, simple, immovable, eternal, complete, independent, existing by itself, existing through itself, incorruptible, necessary, measureless, uncreated, unbounded, incomprehensible, omnipresent, incorporeal, all-pervading, all-embracing, Being in essence, Being in act, pure act, pure Being.’”

  Dent shook his head. “I don’t understand most of those. Why is space necessary, for instance?”

  “I’m not sure it is. And I don’t know that it must be incomprehensible, either.” Johannes turned from the view to observe a group of people entering the chamber. Three people were stumbling over each other, giggling. Small wire-covered helmets encased their heads, leaving their vacant faces open to the world. “More proof of Holywelkin’s work,” he said sarcastically.

  When Dent saw them he gasped. “What are they?”

  “They are dreamwalkers,” Johannes said. He looked at Dent curiously. “You really didn’t know?”

  Dent blushed. “I’ve never really paid much attention to the worlds outside the Uranus system.…”

  “These are probably Jovians. The helmets keep their brainwaves in the delta state, where they will dream continuously. See their eyes.”

  Dent watched one woman and saw that her eyes were jerking back and forth violently, like a little pair of beings trying to break free. He shuddered.

  “So we all appear while dreaming,” Johannes said. “But the helmets can be programmed to feed the brain certain sensory stimuli, so that these people are partially awake, and their dreams are guided by the stimuli. Thus they send themselves on surrealistic voyages—perhaps into the fifth dimension, eh?” He laughed, waved back at the stars behind them. “Retreating into their pitiful fantasies, while all the while they are being carried by great winds across the sky.”

  augmentation, diminution

  Margaret Nevis was happy to land on Iapetus, her little home world. Every familiar sight made her smile: the large rundown space terminal, the big broad boulevards outside, the green tram cars, the frosty comet remnants dusting the rocky plains outside the hemispheres, reflecting in bright highlights the glow from the city; and ringed Saturn, floating big and beautiful in the sky above. Yes, Port Iapetus was the same as ever. The sound of Russian made her smile. And she liked the sense of order. Not for her the anarchic chaos of the outer terras, where nothing about the cities made sense. Long after she left it she had learned to appreciate Port, where the rectangular pattern of streets and avenues, paved with hard black composite, intersected in a completely predictable way with the radiating boulevards, which were paved with whitish basalt. And traffic directors aiding the flow of electric cars through every complex intersection. Yes, it was an intelligent design for a city. As the crew took a car through the crowded streets to the Port Concourse she said complacently to Dent, “I’m a socialist at heart, you know. Those outer terras aren’t my style.”

  “Why do you live out there, then?” Dent asked.

  Margaret didn’t reply; she didn’t really know. Instead she said, “There’s something here about the feel between the people, of cooperation. Like we’re all part of the same team, you see? Ah, you edgefolk—I doubt you’d understand.”

  “It seems rather dull, actually,” Dent said. “All these stone buildings placed so regularly … not very spontaneous,” he explained, seeing Margaret’s expression.

  “No,” Margaret said. “But I like it. I was going to work here, you know.” She pointed. “Like her. I was going to be a traffic cop.”

  Dent smiled. “You got your wish, in a way.”

  In the two days before the Iapetus concert Margaret enjoyed herself, renewing acquaintances with old friends, visiting parks and museums that she remembered liking, showing the curious Dent (whom she liked better for his curiosity) what their version of Martian socialism could achieve, and speaking Russian again. It made her quite unexpectedly happy, and she wondered at herself; it had been fifteen years since she had last been on Iapetus—when she had left she was twenty-four, now she was thirty-nine—and she supposed that the explanation was that she had forgotten what it was to have a home, in her outer world of roving isolatoes. The very concept had escaped her.

  But on the day of the concert when she went to the old Port Concourse, the managers brought her bad news. Computer fraud was suspected in the sale of some tickets for the concert; it could be that some seats had been sold twice.

  “The Concourse’s capacity is twenty-five thousand?” Margaret asked, though she knew the figure.

  The manager confirmed it.

  “Get me Gregor Kammerer in the Office of Fire and Safety, down at the Government Complex,” Margaret ordered, and hurried off to the gates.

  The Concourse was a big indoor arena, oval in shape, with entrances at both of the long ends of the oval. The main entrance, where people were now filing in to hear the concert, was a curve of tall panels of stained glass, with the doors at the bottom of the middle panels. Margaret went to the head ticket-taker and checked her little master counter, which clicked over rapidly. Already the counter registered sixteen thousand, and looking out the open doors Margaret could see six lines of people stretching off across Port Plaza and down Westport Boulevard; no end of them in sight. Karna was across the foyer overseeing the security checks and Margaret told him to send her Marie-Jeanne. When Marie-Jeanne arrived Margaret said, “Get out there and estimate how many people are left in the lines. I want it within a hundred—close as you can make it.” Marie-Jeanne nodded and hurried away.

  The concourse manager waved her over to his phone. “I’ve got Kammerer on the line.”

  Margaret took the phone and looked into it. “Gregor, we’ve got a problem down here at the Concourse. I need your help.”

  “What is it?”

  “Apparently the Concourse people have oversold our concert by some significant figure. People are piling into the Plaza, and the Concourse is almost full. When it fills and there’s still a lot of people out there with tickets, it’s going to get ugly.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’ll have to approve filling the place beyond the normal safety code.”

  Her old schoolmate’s face wrinkled with displeasure. “I don’t have the authority to do that, Margaret. Particularly with this concert.”

  Margaret scowled. “Who do you need to okay it?”
>
  “Probably the Minister of Public Works. Or the Mayor, I’m not sure. How much is it oversold?”

  “They don’t know yet,” Margaret said. The manager tapped her on the shoulder, and Margaret turned to her.

  “We think there were fifteen thousand tickets duplicated.”

  Margaret swore. “And you find out now.” She looked into the phone at Kammerer. “They say fifteen thousand.”

  The man whistled. “That’s a lot. I don’t know where they’d all fit.”

  “Just get me the minister, Gregor. I know that’s the best you can do, but you’d better get on it and do something. If fifteen thousand people with tickets are shut out they’ll wreck the whole plaza area—there’s a lot of offworlders out there who came a long way to see this, and they don’t give a damn about Port. And everyone paid a fortune for those tickets.” Kammerer nodded. “The minister is still Johnson?”

  “Yes,” Kammerer said.

  “Get him over here.” Margaret clicked off. “How did you ever sell fifteen thousand extra tickets?” she demanded savagely.

  The manager blanched. “It was sabotage. One of the terminals had its guard broken into without keying off the security network. I don’t know exactly how it was done, but it happened, and they’ve just been finding the duplicates and tracing the selling source today.”

  Margaret pounded a fist against one hip, wondering if the tour had been attacked by its unknown enemy yet again. “You shouldn’t have sold through computers. This concert is too important for computers, didn’t you know that?”

  “How else?” the man asked, baffled.

  Margaret sighed. “You print up a finite number of physical tickets ahead of time, and sell those. Like cash, understand?”

  The manager nodded. “We’ve never done that.”

  Margaret blew out a long breath, went to take a look at the counter. Twenty-three thousand. Still no end to the lines outside. She went to discuss the matter with Karna, but as she approached him Marie-Jeanne joined them.

  “There’s about twenty thousand people out there!” Marie-Jeanne said, looking flushed. “I hurried at the end, and the lines all bulged out into a big crowd that filled the boulevard, but I know there are at least that many.”

  Karna said, “If Wright gets the reaction he did in Lowell…”

  Margaret pursed her lips, thinking hard.

  “Usually I love these indoor things,” Karna said. “Security is so much easier.…”

  “I wonder who actually oversold this thing,” Margaret said absently. “You know.”

  Karna nodded. “The manager’s got some people for you over there.”

  Margaret went to greet them, and shifted back to Russian; Kammerer introduced her to Johnson, the Minister of Public Works, a portly man who squinted about him suspiciously. The foyer was very crowded. “We can’t overfill the facility,” Johnson said. “It’s against the law, and in this case it’s an obvious danger. We’ve heard about what happened in Lowell and Titania. If that happened here it would be catastrophic.”

  “We had a very peaceful show on Grimaldi,” Margaret said. “Things are calming down.”

  “Grimaldi is just a bunch of treehouses. This is a city like Lowell and Titania, with a mixed audience from all over the Saturn system. There are a lot of ship workers out there, and if they riot—”

  “Look,” Margaret said, pointing out the doors, “they might riot inside, but they are sure to riot outside if you keep them out when they’ve got tickets.”

  “The worst scenario results from trapping forty thousand people into a twenty-five thousand person venue and then subjecting them to Wright’s type of music.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions about Wright’s music,” Margaret said. “Wright plays a different program every concert. If I explain the situation to him he’ll respond accordingly. And you could announce the situation to the crowd and urge everyone to cooperate.” The doubting look on the minister’s face made Margaret angry. “Look, you’re the ones who oversold the place. All I’m trying to do is trying to save your city from a beating.”

  The minister hesitated. “Well,” he said, “this really goes outside my authority.…”

  “Who does have the authority?” Margaret demanded, moving toward the phones.

  “We should hear the Prime Minister’s opinion, I suppose.”

  “You’re going to ask the Prime Minister about—okay—never mind—let’s get him, then. We don’t have a whole lot of time here.”

  So they went to the phones and began making calls, threading their way up through the bureaucracy. When they got the Prime Minister’s administrative assistant, she took in the situation and made a quick chopping motion with her hand. “Ms. Nevis, can you guarantee a program that will keep things calm in the Concourse?”

  “Wright will play an appropriate program,” she said, mouth suddenly dry. “I promise.”

  The administrative assistant looked past Margaret to Johnson. “Let everyone with tickets in. Broadcast the situation inside and at the doors, and call in all the reinforcements you can.”

  Johnson nodded, and Margaret took off, running around the oval of the outer halls to the backstage doors. There one of Karna’s people let her in, and she hurried through the backstage rooms, cursing heartily. She had really stuck her neck out this time: if anything went wrong, it would be her fault. She passed Vaccero and his lighting crew at their main console, and stepped onto the tall, broad wings of the stage. The Orchestra filled the backstage; dim lights broke on its curved surfaces. It was set on a platform that would roll on tracks out onto the main stage. Johannes paced the edge of the platform, staring up at his instrument. When Margaret blocked his way he looked at her; she wondered for a moment if he recognized her.

  “Johannes,” she said, “there’s a problem tonight!” She explained the situation. When she finished he stared at the Orchestra as if he hadn’t heard her. “Johannes!” she cried. “People are jammed together out there!” He continued to stare. She shivered; she hated to talk to him before concerts, he was always like this. But tonight it wouldn’t do. Angrily she grabbed him by the arm and yanked him around, put her face a few centimeters from his. “People will die tonight,” she said distinctly.

  “What’s this?” he said. “People … in the audience?”

  She explained the situation again, very loudly. “There’ll be no room for movement out there. They have to remain calm, or it will be deadly. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Margaret. Will the show be canceled?”

  “No! What I’m saying is, you have to play something calm, something different than you have so far. They can’t react like they did in Lowell.”

  “Ah,” he said, and walked over to the Orchestra.

  “So you’ll do it?” Margaret said, following him. “You understand what we need?”

  “Yes,” he said sharply. “Stop talking to me like I’m deaf!” He laughed at her expression. “I have to change a lot of the tapes, that’s all. I’ll need some time.”

  “Oh. But you can do it?”

  “Trust me, Margaret,” he said, looking at her with his non-eyes.

  She shivered again. “Good,” she said, backing away. “I’ll go tell the officials.”

  She ran back to the entrance to the Concourse. The knot of officials around Kammerer and Johnson had grown to a crowd. That was bureaucracy for you, Margaret thought; but at least it was something, at least there was a system there to deal with, however timid and redundant it was. The Minister of Public Works nodded wisely at her news, and instructed the Concourse manager to let everyone with tickets in. Loudspeakers inside were announcing the facts of the situation, and security people were seating people in the aisles, and in every passageway inside.

  Margaret returned backstage, and went to the wings. When she looked out at the concourse her heart pounded; the rising oval of humanity was jammed together so tightly that it was one great wave of heads. When the time came for the concert to b
egin, and the house lights dimmed, and the Orchestra rolled onstage in a great blaze of split light, she found herself holding her breath. But the thunderous applause died down, the sea of heads stayed in place; no one had room to rush the stage. She took a deep breath and tried to relax.

  Johannes played. Margaret could just catch glimpses of him moving about in the control booth; once she saw his face, and he looked blind. He was working more than he usually did, she thought. Soft tones filled the hall; he was playing in a chordal style, and all the chords were consonant, thirds, fifths, octaves, major sevenths, dominant ninths: up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down, until Margaret found her heartbeat was in pace with the rise and fall. Clear tones only, viola, clarinet, trumpet, flute, serving as the overtones for each other, but each playing as sweetly and clearly as the instruments were capable of playing. Johannes had understood. She saw his face again, blank as a mask, the strange eyes like the marble eyes of a statue, thrust into a human face. He looked very young. How old was he, she thought, twenty-six? Too young to know this much.

  The Planck Synthesizer began a duet with the godzilla, and the mercury tones slid in and out of the simple harmonics, alpha waves, theta waves, the brain seduced by the weave of sound. Margaret let it roll over her like a blanket. She had never listened to Johannes’s music with pleasure; in the concerts played so far the music had struck her as madness, more or less, except in certain passages. The Ten Forms of Change? Give her De Bruik any day. Everyone since had been scrabbling about in her remains, if you asked Margaret. But this … she realized that the crowd was as mesmerized as she was, and as the music grew more complex and difficult, it still retained a serenity that made her happy. As if for her in particular, the cellos swept to prominence, playing one of the melodies you feel must always have existed, and over it rose the sweet cutting descant of an oboe. Mercury drum and its oscillant keening …

  Afterwards, when the building was safely emptied, she was her usual self. Perhaps a bit less irascible than usual. She laughed at Dent as they looked out at the giant oval of empty seats.