The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “That would kill him,” Zervan said.

  “And they—they had communion with the sun. The sun spoke to them because … because they worshipped it. You say the sun is God—”

  “No,” said Zervan. “Icarus has ever been like this. And the Greys do not worship the sun. It is our destiny to interact with it, to use it for its energy. But we do not worship it.”

  “So you are not Mithraists?”

  “No.” Zervan shook his head. “Mithraism is long dead. We are Greys.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It is Grey. Very difficult to convey it in your language. We are priests of a knowledge that is not to be revealed. Perhaps that makes Grey an antireligion.”

  “But you revealed it to Holywelkin.”

  “… Yes.”

  “And you will reveal it to me?”

  For a long time the Grey stared at Johannes. “Yes.”

  “How long have there been Greys?”

  “The Greys are older than the Mithraists. They too began in Persia. Do you know the Eleatics? Parmenides, Zeno?”

  “They claimed there was only Being, and no Becoming. That the world was full, an absolute plenum in which change was impossible.”

  “Yes. And part of what they knew spread to others, to Democritus and Leucippus, and then to Epicurus and Lucretius.…”

  “And what did they know? What is it you conceal?”

  Zervan stared through him to the rock. “It is the nature of reality we conceal. Child, do you understand the implication of Holywelkin’s work, or where it stands in the history of human knowledge?”

  “I—I am not sure.” But all of his fears rushed in at him.

  “Bruno, Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Newton—all determinists, all Greys. Newtonian physics is deterministic. It is true that it fits into the larger framework of the probabilistic system of quantum mechanics. But quantum mechanics fits into the larger framework of Holywelkin physics; and Holywelkin physics is again deterministic. Do you understand?”

  “All motion is caused, and therefore occurs by necessity,” Johannes recited. It was just as he had suspected, reading Mauring and the notebooks of Holywelkin.…

  Zervan nodded. “Probabilistic systems already contain the secret, in that they are not random; laws are in operation, but are not known. Thus certain features of quantum mechanics, such as the so-called uncertainty principle, are artifacts of incomplete understanding. When the higher dimensions are taken into account the uncertainty can be bypassed. Holywelkin physics describes the atomic events first postulated by the Eleatics, acting in all ten dimensions. These events are the dynamic fabric of spacetime, and they move without chance. Each event in the ten dimensions of spacetime is determined by all the moments before and after it. And as we are nothing but aggregates of these events, our feeling that we exercise free will is nothing but an illusion of consciousness. Holywelkin obscures this with his later work, afraid of its meaning for human life. But it is nevertheless true. Therefore, those who fully understand Holywelkin’s real work … become Grey.”

  “So the world is determined.”

  “Listen to the heretic Grey Laplace. ‘An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists—supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis—would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.’”

  Johannes stood, feeling the tension over his stomach, the wind cutting at his skin. “That intellect could only be God.”

  “No. We couple our minds to the artificial intelligence we have built into Icarus, and use the sun’s energy to power it. And applying Holywelkin’s formulations … we see all.”

  “Not the future!” Johannes said.

  “We can. The future, like the past, exists eternally. But the analysis must be made, the calculation, you see. And it is a complex one. We can do it for certain events, and we do do it, sometimes.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Johannes said feebly. “So many things happen by chance, are random occurrences—”

  “To our perception. But glints move in the absolutely predictable mesh of the ten forms of change. When Holywelkin realized this he tried to deny it, to find a way out. God does play dice with the universe, he joked, desperately; for Einstein’s instinct was right, as was that of Democritus twenty-two centuries earlier.”

  Now Johannes began to understand the eccentric last years of Holywelkin more fully. He too instinctively looked for escape.… “But … if determinist classical physics rests within the probabilistic system of quantum mechanics, which rests within the determinist system of Holywelkin physics, then it may be like a set of Chinese boxes, so that a time will come when a more subtle physics will find that probabilities rule again, that certain events occur by chance.”

  Zervan shook his head. “No matter whether the ultimate entities are atoms, electrons, quarks, glints, or simple geometric points of force, their relationships among themselves are determined by the relationships obtaining before them. This will be true whether human understanding can encompass the relationships or not. And with glints we have come to those basic nodal points of being in non-being; we are on the floor of the universe, so to speak.…”

  “And so change—” Johannes paced the edge of the mountaintop, unwilling to face Zervan, dodging the implications as he had for months now.

  “Change is the illusion of time,” said Zervan. “And time is an illusion of consciousness. Consciousness exists in time, and to that extent time is real; but the universe is always there, past and future parts of a whole that is eternally complete. And because the universe is infinite, all moments in time occur forever, in endless recurrence. You and I have always had this exchange; it was fated to be billions of years before these planets rolled, in the eternity of Being.”

  “And so my future…” Johannes said, and then, fearfully: “You know it?”

  “It is still being calculated. But we are almost done. When we are done we will communicate it to you.”

  “Why?”

  “That much, we already know will happen.”

  Johannes struck his head with the palm of his hand: “I don’t understand! How can there be no such thing as time, and yet you are still working through, in time, the calculations necessary to foresee my future?”

  “Consciousness is trapped in time, at least through most of its existence; it lives in the illusion of Becoming. Why that is, we know not. There are intervals, how can we call them, parts of the pattern of consciousness, that obtrude into eternity. This experience is one that creates Greys, in fact. And this peak is one platform for the experience; we call it the Timeless Peak, and if you look closely you may see others, standing there eternally.”

  “I see no one,” Johannes said.

  Zervan touched Johannes on the wrist, and Johannes felt a prickling in the skin there. “Now,” Zervan said, “I will grant you the vision of eternity. You will exist there forever.”

  “But I want to live!”

  “Consciousness will struggle on through time. But you will exist here eternally, as you will come to understand.”

  Johannes stared about him desperately; the whitsun was low in the sky, rumpled mountains extended to every horizon, the valleys were in shadows that gave them all an immense depth, gave him an immense height, and all of it wavering, shimmering.…

  “Remember,” Zervan said. “For your consciousness, the nature of the vision will be exponential acceleration, to a speed far beyond that of light.”

  “Exponential acceleration,” Johannes repeated.

  “And you will see the universe itself in its aspect of eternal recurrence.”

  “Eternal recurrence.”

  The whitsun dropped like a stone over the western horizon, and the deep blue drained out of the sky. Black
night, and the network of stars above. Zervan took his hand, and led him to the edge of the peak, walked off it. They stepped up invisible stairs, endless steps. “We will break through the bubble,” Johannes said. “Will we be able to breathe?”

  “Look.” Zervan pointed down, and Johannes saw they were still sitting on the mountaintop in the sunset, far below. “We breathe not.” Johannes realized he felt nothing, that Zervan’s voice was merely a thought. A universe of thought, a great Gendankenexperiment. The little asteroid beneath them was white and green on its sunward side. Then, as Johannes watched, it pulsed, it stretched out, the crescent of white-green became a band extending across space. And everything blurred, everything fell away. The stars were streaks. There were more of them than he had ever seen. Nearby was what he took to be the sun, Sol, now a bar of light crossing the black space from end to end; and space was filled with other bars of light, each stretching as far as he could see. Looking harder at his solar system Johannes saw the planet-streaks spiraling around the white bar of light, some tight and close, others distant and spiraling more loosely. The gas giants were surrounded by faint helixes of their own.

  And now the line of the sun curved very clearly, crossing other curved lines. So many stars that the space here was more white lines than black space. He was passing among them. His sun was lost. Some of the starlines were bright red, others were surrounded by hundreds of dull planet-spirals. Double star system a tight double helix, like DNA strands of light. Novas big, scored, translucent cylinders. Black space filled with white curved lines, crowded by them—

  Then he was clear. Johannes saw the galaxy below him, a cylinder of spiraling lines so dense in its center that the lines formed a thick endless pillar. The galaxy resembled the sight of a single solar system, except that it was infinitely textured. The spiral-armed shape of the galaxy-in-time gave its timeless aspect the look of an endless white corkscrew; and hidden in it somewhere, invisibly, was Sol, the Earth, all human history.

  Other galaxies stretched across the black of space, some close, some far. White threads, scattered randomly. But no. Everything has its causes, and necessarily “becomes” next because it has always been that way: and all of the galaxy threads curved out away from, and came back to, a small white ball far below him. The threads burst away from the white ball in every direction, so that the ball’s true size was impossible to see; the threads extended outward, curved back toward the central ball, returned to it. At their maximum reach outward they bowed in graceful arcs, and all of them together made a pattern; the curving white lines appeared somewhat like the outlines of the edges of flower petals. A bit spherical black flower, its petals outlined in white, its center a bright white knob. The universe.

  And Johannes kept rising. The only thing in the cosmos moving, he drifted beyond the highest curving galaxy lines. The universe looked like an infinitely petalled chrysanthemum. Spherical white bloom there on its velvet black field, eternally pulsing in and out.

  He looked away from the chrysanthemum universe blooming at his feet, and his invisible body reeled, his soundless voice cried out, his mind rebelled; there were more spherical tracery blooms, scattered around him. It was as if he stood on a rolling black hillside covered by white chrysanthemums. A hillside of flower universes, all fixed forever, all recurring eternally, unchanging; he found his universe body choked with harsh, painful laughter. And there above him—a black sky filled with white chrysanthemums. As his vision gained power the white blooms covered the black hillside, filled the black sky, sparked in every patch of darkness; in the endless expanse of infinity every possible universe existed eternally, filling all Non-Being with Being. And he looked up into a sky that was pure white. And the hillside below him was pure white. And around him all was white, pure white, pure white.

  Chapter Seven

  MARS THE PLANET OF PEACE

  the ten forms of change

  Retrogradation is the reverse ordering of a sequence of notes. From a listener’s point of view this procedure completely obscures the original melody; hear the final fugue of Beethoven’s Hammerclavier Sonata (the mad energy of the universe) for an example of this. Inversion is turning upside down—the substitution of higher for lower tones, or ascending for descending lines—as when trees are reflected in a lake. Retrograde inversion, then, is the operation that makes a sequence both upside down and backwards.…

  Augmentation is the arithmetical or proportional enlargement of interval; diminution is the arithmetical or proportional reduction of interval; these operations are used to create increased breadth, or increased intensity. Inclusion is the expansion of a set of events by the addition of elements. Some forms of inclusion are interpolation, the insertion of new elements into a series; corrective interjection, the interruption of a phrase to insert an altered fragment of the whole; and free absorption, moving one part of a phrase to the background while bringing another to the fore. Other types of inclusion are prefixing, appending horizontalization, and imitation.

  Textural change is the shift of a phrase from one texture (monophonic texture is an unsupported melodic line; homophonic, a melodic line supported by chords; polyphonic, several interweaving melodic lines) to another texture. Partition is the division of a phrase by interposed silences, in the same way that phrases of consciousness are divided by sleep. Interversion is the diverting of events another way during repetition by changing the internal order of elements; this operation is also known as transposition. And exclusion is the shortening or logical simplification of a set of events, by a selective removal of elements. Some forms of exclusion are decapitation, elision, verticalization, ellipsis, synopsis, and curtailment—

  the plot of the irregulars

  Back to the world, dear Reader, back to the plane of the planets and our cast of principals. The Orion orbited Mars like a third moon, and the tour crew descended to the planet and waited, until some few weeks later they made their rendezvous with the voyagers to Icarus, in the great city of Burroughs.

  When Dent Ios rejoined his three friends, and heard their stories about the adventures on Icarus, he was hard pressed to believe them. “You say you met your grandfather?” he demanded of Karna; Karna nodded emphatically, and Margaret nodded too.

  “My dead grandfather, there in the air telling me to walk up to him. And at the time it seemed like what I had to do, no question about it. And I stepped up and walked on air. Just chose my slope and it became solid.”

  “Or it was already. Maybe there was some of that nonreflective glass that Anton and Susan are using as stage props.”

  “Yeah,” said Karna without conviction. But Margaret shook her head.

  “Nothing that simple,” she said.

  “Maybe they just heavily drugged all three of you—gases in the air, you know.”

  “Maybe. But there I was skipping along ten meters above the ground, talking with my old grandpa who’s been dead years now, when he grabbed me and spun me around him. He had some sort of fulcrum and I didn’t.”

  “Another sign of trickery.”

  “He let go and I went sailing off—lost sight of Johannes and Margaret, and didn’t fall for kilometers. Didn’t ever fall, really—I grabbed the top of a passing pine tree and climbed down!” Karna rolled his eyes.

  “Sounds like an interference pattern, creating a layer of zero gee a few meters above the ground.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, it took me most of a day to walk back to the runway we landed on, across some pretty mountainous terrain. First I met this—well—it would take too long to tell all of it. I met a lot of strange things, dream projections they must have been. Like dreams. When I got to the runway I was exhausted. A Grey met me there and I was going to throttle him, but he told me to go to sleep and I did.”

  “Drugged.”

  “Maybe. Then Margaret woke me, who knows how long later, and told me we were leaving. We had to carry Johannes into the ship.”

  Margaret nodded, and when Dent looked at her she shrugged uncomfo
rtably. “Nothing so unusual happened to me … well.… Anyway—I got separated from Johannes by trying to go after Karna, and when Karna flew off and I ran back to Johannes, he had turned into my dead brother.”

  “What?” Dent cried. “A pattern here, I’d say.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” said Karna.

  “Yes. He came to Mars and volunteered for the whiteline jump experiment. Have you heard of that? They’ve been dropping little one-person ships into uncapped whitelines, and they think the ships are reappearing instantaneously some light years away. So they’ve asked for volunteers to pilot these ships, and bring them back to us with all the instruments intact, to see what’s going on.”

  “Ah,” Karna said.

  “Has anyone come back?” Dent asked, looking shocked.

  “No. But it’s legal, so … a lot of suicides like it.”

  The two men were silent.

  “So I saw him, but I knew something was wrong, and I … hit him, and he ran off. And then I just wandered around collecting animals, as far as I can recall. I was perfectly happy doing nothing but that.”

  “Now that doesn’t sound like you,” Dent said. “You must have been drugged.”

  “Perhaps I was. But what we really need to know is what happened to Johannes! Presumably what they did to us was just to get Johannes alone.”

  “And what happened to him?” Dent asked.

  “We don’t know! He won’t say!” Margaret clenched a fist and lightly pounded her chair arm, thump thump thump thump. “I have grilled that man—I waited until he recovered from the catatonia or whatever it was, I waited until we were here on Mars! And then I asked him what had happened. ‘We need to know if we’re going to protect you,’ I told him. I begged him, I bullied him, I threatened to quit, I quit, I raved—and all for nothing. He sat there like a lump with those dead eyes and that look on his face that I hate, that ‘I’m the Master of the Orchestra and I can’t be bothered with anything less than the ultimate destiny of music’ look.”

  Dent laughed despite himself, and even Karna let a small smile twist his features.