The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  In the bottom of the bowl was a holo image of the Orchestra, beams of light converging from the surrounding towers to form it. There stood Margaret near it, her hair blue-black like a raven’s wing. The floor of the bowl slid away—holo Orchestra floating on air—and then the real Orchestra slid up into its image. Delighted applause. The bowl was only half filled at the most. Apparently the rest would listen from their thronging on the plazas. Speakers were there.… The music began, familiar quick clicking weave, the first loose ends of the grand tapestry. The talking continued, all around him. Dent groaned; wouldn’t they listen? “Shhhhh!” Chatter, chatter. Too much of that sniff. Dent pulled the bulb from his coat pocket, examined it, dropped it on the floor. It rolled down to the next tier and someone there gave it back to him. Listen! But he didn’t say anything to them. He was afraid of them.

  The music was so slow. Here, for this audience, it was too slow. And the different strains, coming from every part of the plaza—bouncing around off the towers—so that when the moment came and each of the speakers played the entire Orchestra, it was too dense. Cacophony. And at the same time diffuse, diaphanous—millions of gossamer strands, a sound like cobwebs on your face. Overwhelmed by the response of the Terrans around him—sharing it—Dent thought, Get to the good part! The good part at the end! People were talking. The crew was sitting down at the bowl’s bottom, tiny crouched figures looking around them, confused, apprehensive, frightened. Like Dent their response to the music had been appropriated by the Terrans’. “Louder,” Dent mumbled. All this talk around him. Although the music did seem rather … jumbled. Find the pulse of it, the pulse. Now each speaker voiced a hundred Orchestras, in the gyre of interlocked melodies, and the pulse caught them all up, so much so that it seemed all possible pitches and timbres were being played at once in rapid runs, and only the rhythm, the dance of it, was within human apprehension. And even then only with a lifetime’s music to teach one how to listen; for these throngers, these rulers? Noise. They didn’t want to be taught anything. And yet too quiet, volume itself might overwhelm them, what was Johannes thinking?

  There—there—the part where it all came together: trumpet shout of triumph, shift of chords announcing the coda, back into time over the thundering at the bass end of hearing, yes! Yes! That got them quiet, damn them, that shut them up and made their hearts quiver and their stupid aristocrat minds wonder what they were witnessing! Yes yes yes! That made them listen!

  Over. Over? Yes. Hesitant applause, many voices. Lights broke his sight everywhere, he saw behind him and before him all at once. Streaming up out of the bowl, all the voices, the glossy perfect hair like caps of jewels. Dent stood and climbed out, hunching his shoulders. Chinese lantern world, “Oh! Sorry! Excuse me!” Illusion towers like lightning bolts, people staring at him. Into a bar. “I need a clarifier,” to the bartender. “I am too shattered, I need something to clear my head, a laser or the like. Do you understand?” The bartender understood. “Try this,” she said with a smile. “Anaconda.” Dent paid for the bulb, took it, sniffed hard. Both nostrils. Immediately his brain froze. He sniffed some more. Much better vision. Back outside. Lifeless revelry; it shocked him to see all the mannequins jerking about and laughing. Crushed by the burden of the past, so that there was no strategy by which a culture could become original, have worth: these pathetic governors had no culture but the sterile creation of images, juxtaposed together without sense, without history. And yet this was the Earth! The real world! The terras were so much dust, no more than projects, little experiments in space. If an artist from Pluto failed to move the culture of Earth, who was out of the center? Dent grimaced. Johannes had hit Earth as fast as a free glint, but with as much effect: fly right through. Never even noticed. And so the Earth—humanity’s home—dead. Laughing mannequins. History ended.

  New clarity of vision. Immense clarity. Across the bowl, Margaret’s face over a circle of Terrans, light years away. Dent strolled over to see what was happening. He stood at the outer edge of the group. Cultural Under Undersecretary, et cetera. Many congratulations, coming from right and left. There was Ekern with his smarmy self-satisfied expression, standing right by the Under. Dent circled the group and approached Margaret. “Where’s Johannes?”

  “I don’t know.” Margaret was furious. She knew what had happened.

  Ekern heard them. “But this party is for him,” he said, smiling. Redbeard … the boss of his foe Red Whiskers, certainly. The red whiskers a sign of it.

  And that thought sobered Dent like nothing else could have. He took a deep, deep breath. “We should have him brought to us,” Ekern was saying. Dent stared at him, looked away. I’ve got you, he thought, I know your plot. He had to get away; Ekern would notice there was something wrong with him. “… Has asked us to do six more concerts in the continental capitals. We can happily comply with his request, can’t we Ms. Nevis?”

  “Johannes will decide that.”

  Dent turned, pushed his way through the growing crowd. Idiot faces. “Excuse me, God damn it.” The expression on her face: whew! Enough to kill them all.

  Over there—“Marie-Jeanne!”

  “Hello, Dent.”

  “You know—do you know where Johannes is?”

  “Uh—he’s still in the Orchestra, Karna said.”

  “But it…” Falling motion with hand.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do I get to where it is?”

  “At the bottom of the amphitheater there are stairs leading below.”

  “Thanks.” All right, remember that. Back into the bowl, down to the bottom. Huge bowl, hundreds of tiers. At the bottom, a sort of stage trap door, stairs leading down. Down into gloom. Quiet, dark, around a corner. Afterimages bounced in Dent’s sight over the dimness. It was dark like a cave.

  Ahead of him stood the Orchestra. A wedge of light from a hallway off to the side fell on it. Some streaks, rich brown wood of the double basses, gold gleam of the French horn bells. Dark. Little night light at the heart of it. Stop. Dent stared sadly, swallowed hard. “No defeat is made up entirely of defeat,” he whispered, but couldn’t remember the rest of it. What could he say? Be quiet, don’t intrude. (Between us all, that discontinuity.) Little night light on the solitary. Lit the nest in the tree in the cave in the side of the world.… A plucked string sounded clearly. A swirl of mercury dipped down, up. Down, up. Breath through a flute.

  Dent turned and walked quickly away, back toward the surface.

  Chapter Nine

  MERCURY AND PROMETHEUS

  onward

  Margaret endured the rest of their stay on Earth with a bad patience. When Johannes asked her to arrange for their early departure she was happy to oblige, and she got a particular enjoyment out of telling the U.N. Cultural Affairs people that their plans were cancelled. Once into space and well on their way to Mercury, she called Karna and Yananda and Dent aside and led them down a few floors of the Orion, to an empty conference room. Orion was only half full now, so that empty rooms were easy to find; and seated before a window facing aft, they could see that only a few ships followed them. For many, the Grand Tour had ended on Earth.

  But not for them. Dent spread out the collection of documents he had stolen in Germany. Karna and Yananda had of course heard of them from Dent already, many times. “The infamous plans,” Yananda muttered, fingering through them and drawing out a diagram with more print than most. “Dimensions. Is the Orchestra that big? I suppose so.”

  “Listen,” Dent said, after they had perused the documents for some time. “Margaret tells me that in Lowell, right after the first concert, Ekern came down to crew quarters and took Johannes away for a talk. Johannes never told you what they said, but afterwards he was very distracted.

  “Now I was attacked by a man on Lowell, who was also the man who attacked Johannes on Titania. The same man was seen when I trailed our so-called Grey informant Charles. And now I find him carrying these plans for another Holywelkin Orchestra, commissioned by t
he Institute—which means Ekern. Only Ekern would have the power to do something like this without all the members of the board of directors knowing.

  “Now—wait, Karna, I’m not done yet—Anton told Johannes about the so-called Greys you saw on Grimaldi. Those Greys led Johannes to the Fairfax House on Iapetus, and from there he went to the Holywelkin museum, and then he wanted to go out to Icarus. So the source of that strand was Anton, who was working for someone. And Anton, like all the rest of you, was hired for his job by Ekern! Both strands lead back to Ekern. The Greys appear not to have any direct involvement.”

  “No,” Karna objected. “I think we met true Greys on Icarus. Nothing else explains what happened while I was there. Nothing.”

  Dent frowned. “Anything that happens can be explained in more than one way. And I think it’s clear that Ekern is behind all the interference on this tour. He has some plot to ruin Johannes, and maybe the Orchestra too, and then this second one will be ready when it has to be.”

  Margaret nodded. “Dent makes a good case.” She saw the blush of pleasure on his cheeks, and grimaced. “It may not explain Icarus, but it makes it pretty clear that Ekern is behind a lot of this. And so we have to act.”

  “But how?” Karna said.

  “Well,” Margaret said slowly, acknowledging the difficulties. “We should start tracking Ekern. His ship The Duke of Vienna is somewhere in that pack.” She waved out at the reduced tail of their Orion comet. “He’ll be on Mercury with us. One of our people should follow him always. This will probably lead us to the others we should follow—Dent’s nemesis, and anyone else he meets privately. We follow those too. Meanwhile Marie-Jeanne will keep the bodyguard on Johannes at full alert. Close physical protection at all times, no matter what he says.”

  “What he says…” said Dent.

  “I know. We’ll have to talk with him. If we can convince him that Ekern is behind these events … it may change everything.” Margaret hesitated. “Dent, you and I will talk to him.”

  “If we can.”

  “You and I! And other than that—” She let out a long sigh, suddenly tired. “We have to act. Now that we know what’s going on—”

  “Maybe,” said Karna heavily.

  “We have to act.”

  the anomaly

  Dear Reader, Newton’s inverse square law of gravitation—

  where M is the mass of the central body, G is the universal constant of gravitation, and F is the gravitational force on the body of mass m at a distance r from the central body, and the unit vector moves away from the central body, so that the negative sign indicates that the gravitational force attracts to the central body—is a marvel of physics, a law of tremendous power and elegance. Taking into account the fact that all the bodies in the solar system attract all the others (so that the total force on any planet is F = S + P, where S is the attraction of the sun and P is the perturbing force of the other bodies), the elliptical orbits of all the planets can be calculated very precisely. All of the planets, that is, except for Mercury. As Le Verrier showed in 1859, Mercury’s perihelion has an anomalous advance; the gravitational perturbation of the other planets accounted for part of the advance, but Le Verrier’s work made it clear that Mercury’s perihelion advanced forty-four seconds of arc per century faster than could be accounted for by the inverse square law of gravitation. And this was a serious discrepancy—a true anomaly. Various explanations were made, according to different strategies. Some ignored the anomaly. Others proposed that there were bodies perturbing Mercury’s orbit that were not known; thus the proposal of the existence of the planet Vulcan, orbiting too close to the sun to be seen, and later (as Vulcan could not be found), rings of coronal dust, or asteroids. Others proposed subtle changes in the inverse square law, adding factors to the equations that would account for the anomalous advance. None of these changes in the law were satisfactory.

  None, that is, until Albert Einstein revealed his theory of general relativity in four lectures in November of 1915. One of the four lectures was devoted to the Mercury anomaly; as Einstein explained, Mercury’s orbit had an anomaly because there was no such thing as absolute Newtonian space. Laws of physics are dependent upon our position in space and time—and Mercury’s perihelion advanced more quickly than it should because Mercury, being so close to the great gravitational mass of the sun, moved in spacetime that was sharply curved by that gravity.

  So, as the Grand Tour of Holywelkin’s Orchestra rocketed down the gravity well through the new asteroid belt to Mercury, they dove over the steeper part of the well’s final curve, where spacetime was perceptibly, measurably different from the spacetime inhabited by those further away from the sun. And in this different curvature of the fabric of the real they found that the anomaly was everywhere.

  exclusion

  So Dent and Margaret went to Johannes to talk to him. They found him in the Orchestra, sleeping on the floor of the control booth. Margaret clicked her tongue off the roof of her mouth. “For hours and hours he sat, and never hit a single key.”

  “Only when he’s asleep,” Dent said, not understanding her comment. “When he’s awake, he’s playing.” He leaned over, shook Johannes gently by the shoulder. The man awoke with a start, a groan, a fearful blind stare around him—“Johannes,” Dent said. “It’s just us. Margaret and Dent. We thought you’d need some food.”

  Johannes nodded, sat up stiffly. “We will go to the commons together,” he said, and giggled.

  Dent looked to Margaret, who was scowling. “Wake up, Johannes,” she said impatiently. “You need food.” She took him under the arms and pulled him to his feet. They ducked down the glass steps and out of the Orchestra.

  In the commons Johannes would eat only apples. Afterwards Dent undertook to speak with him.

  “We know who has mounted this assault on you during the course of the tour.”

  “Do you?” Johannes said, with an ironic smile. His artificial eyes seemed never to focus on either one of them; it made Dent nervous to try to meet his gaze.

  “It’s been Ernst Ekern,” Dent said. “We are certain of it. Even your encounters with the Greys have been staged by Ekern.”

  Johannes stared through him, then shook his head. “You don’t understand. I have had encounters with the Greys that no man could stage.”

  “But we have the evidence,” Dent insisted, pulling out the notes he had made for their talk, and the reproductions of the plans he had stolen.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Johannes said. “What I have seen could only have come from … the Greys.”

  “Nonsense!” Margaret said bitterly. “You’re just easily impressed.”

  Johannes stared at her, looking surprised at her anger.

  “You went and talked with Ekern that night after the first concert,” Margaret went on. “You know what he said there, how that fits into the rest of this. We don’t. And still we can see his hand everywhere in this thing, now. He arranged for the attack on you in Titania, and the meeting you had with his own fake Greys on Grimaldi.…” She recited the sequence of events that Dent had so recently reconstructed in an emphatic voice that Johannes couldn’t ignore. Dent was certain that her anger would break the wall of indifference Johannes had built around himself; but when she was done, he just shrugged.

  “No matter what Ekern may have done, it has nothing to do with what has happened to me,” he said. “It’s impossible, don’t you see? I know it because of … what I know. And because of the music. Ekern is too small, too ignorant—”

  “But look what he’s doing!” Dent exclaimed, desperation shifting to anger. “Look—” He shoved the diagrams for the Orchestra onto Johannes’s plate. “He’s having another Orchestra built. He plans to destroy you and the real Orchestra, don’t you see? Everything you have learned has come from him. Even the parts that you think transcend him, he set the conditions for … and after that, they came from you yourself.”

  Johannes shook his head. “Not from me, I tell y
ou.” But his eyes stayed on the diagrams, and he picked one up. Dent glanced at Margaret while he inspected it; she was staring at him furiously, mouth twisted into a scowl.