The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Do you see?” she asked him when he put the blueprint down. “Do you see the shape of his plan? He’s going to have another Orchestra ready when you’re done!”

  “Yes,” Johannes said blankly. He was staring through them, black eyes focused for infinite distance. For a long time he just sat there and stared. Then he said, “It’s rather comforting, isn’t it.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Margaret snapped.

  “Don’t you be self-righteous with me,” Johannes said. He pointed a shaking finger at her: “You were on Icarus—you know just as well as I do that Ekern had no part of what happened there. To pretend that you do believe that is just an attempt to escape the truth. But I can’t escape.”

  “Or you won’t,” Margaret said weakly.

  “Anything that can be conceived can be executed,” Dent repeated. “It only takes the right drugs, the right sensorium—”

  Johannes just shook his head, still pointing at Margaret. “Where did the music come from? No. You know more than you pretend, Margaret Nevis. You’re just too frightened to admit it.”

  “I’m frightened of an attempt on your life,” Margaret said viciously, but her face was pale.

  “Look,” Dent said, trying to calm them down, “let’s talk about the music for a while, Johannes. Tell me again how it connects to Holywelkin’s work, and … and what happened to it on Earth.”

  And so Johannes spoke—but the sounds that came from his mouth were nonsense tones, a fluid quick babbling. He looked right at Dent as if Dent were supposed to understand, and sang nonsense. “O lee ba doo eeen a free la la—” Dent swallowed, his stomach knotted with fear at the sight; he put a hand across the table and it was taken up in Margaret’s, squeezed.

  “Glossolalia again,” Margaret said.

  Johannes babbled on, oblivious to her commentary. Eyes bright as a bird’s he looked to Dent as if for an answer, head tilted; Dent choked down a cry, stood. Margaret stood as well, and circled the table to put a hand gently over Johannes’s mouth. “Let’s go back upstairs,” she said wearily.

  They took him back upstairs to their floor, and released him in his room. He sang on. Dent watched Margaret’s face twist into a scowl so fierce he thought she might hit something, or start to cry. He didn’t know what to say. “It must be part of his music.”

  “Damn his music,” Margaret said.

  “I doubt he can help himself at this point. I think he’s just trying to speak to us, and it comes out this way.”

  Margaret shook her head. “I hope he comes out of it. He’s got to function on Mercury.”

  But he didn’t come out of it. He wandered the halls between the Orchestra’s room and his own, singing wordlessly at the crew in a language of vowels, or sometimes shouting abuse at them, but in a harsh melody that strained the edges of his tenor range. Naturally this upset everyone, and even when Johannes was sequestered in the Orchestra, the rest of them holed up in their rooms, as nervous as the subjects of a mad king. Dent felt it at every meal, in every concert and conversation; the tour had been going on for months, under difficult circumstances. People were at the ends of their tethers, faces pale, eyes ringed with dark exhausted skin, voices tired or vibrating with nervous tension. Then one day Johannes seemed to come out of it; he spent a morning in the dining commons chatting with the lighting crew, and across the room Dent watched them pretend that all was as it always had been. But as he left the commons Delia crossed paths with him in the doorway, and he said hello: “Johannes,” she exclaimed, “you’re feeling better!” And he struck her across the mouth, shoved her into the wall, shouted incoherent roars, banged her against the wall until the others dragged him off. Karna had to protect him from attack by his own crew. He spoke only in his private language, and no one understood him. Dent held one of his arms as they walked him down to the Orchestra. Dent was shaking with distress at his friend’s behavior, and desperately he tried singing the melody that had poked out of the Ten Forms on Mars, the melody so close to the one he had loved in his youth. Johannes stared at him with a lunatic gaze, and laughed. Even his laugh seemed a wild descant to some wild song. Against his own will (for he had been determined to continue until Johannes acknowledged him in words), Dent stopped. And they let him duck up into the Orchestra, into his cave. Dent dragged back to their floor with the rest of the distraught crew, feeling depressed and angry. I went to great lengths to get you those plans! he wanted to say. I actually did something! But it would have been talking to an empty house.

  One evening, while returning from his solitary supper, Dent got into the elevator and found Johannes already in it. He nodded.

  “How are you, Dent?”

  He was careful not to make Delia’s mistake. “I’m fine, thank you. Listen, I flew from Cyprus to Munich to look for something at the Telemann Works. I chased a man who once beat me on Lowell, and sedated him with a dartgun, and took his briefcase from him. He was working for Ekern, apparently. And he had commissioned the Telemann Works to construct a whole new Orchestra.”

  “I doubt it can be done,” Johannes said calmly. “Holywelkin built much of it by hand.”

  “He left plans, though. And my real point is, Ekern is plotting against you! I went and found proof!”

  The elevator door opened and Johannes held his hand over the light to keep it open. “So you ventured out and found these plans, and now you think you know the truth. But that isn’t necessarily so, Dent. Think about it. Forget your pride in your accomplishment, and think about it clearly.”

  “But I have!” Dent said. “And I think if you would tell me all that you know or think you know, I could help!”

  Johannes shook his head, and led Dent out of the elevator. “That’s because you don’t know. Come on, Dent. Leave me be for a time. I want to rest from all this—even from your help.”

  In the tone of his voice, in its music, Dent recognized a mood he had often felt, and he had to acknowledge it. They walked down the hallway in silence, side by side. As they passed the “Bull Room,” as it was now called, they heard two voices humming in harmony. They stopped, looked in the door. A circle of people, seated around a single candle. The voices were ending a bridge passage, shifting back to a major key as they returned to a theme; it was “Greensleeves,” played on a single recorder. Dent located the player, Marie-Jeanne, sitting with her back to them. Karna sat beside her, with a guitar bumping her shoulder; then there was Delia, with another recorder, Sara with a flute, Sean with a guitar, Nikita with a fat bass recorder. Margaret was sitting on the far side of the circle, holding a big four-stringed guitar. Marie-Jeanne played. She had a clear tone. Dent fell under the spell of the sturdy, sweet old melody, a tune continuously popular for over sixteen centuries. Something in it made him smile; his family had sung it for a winter’s song, when he was a child. Johannes nudged him with an elbow and they stepped over and sat behind the circle.

  “Greensleeves.” They played it as a sort of canon, taking turns with the melody, wandering away from it into Renaissance interludes, coming back to it at different tempos, different keys and moods, but always back to the simple melody at its center, again and again, until Dent was in a sort of trance. Someone in the candlelight handed back a guitar to him, and he played the tune in a duet with Delia, strumming the chords that the others hummed as accompaniment. When it was Johannes’s turn, he took the recorder from Marie-Jeanne and played it with utter clarity, avoiding embellishment of any kind, but expressing the lifts and drops with a cleanness and accuracy of pitch that was like a perfect grace. Dent played the accompanying chords with all the sweetness he was capable of, trying to speak to Johannes with every chord, to tell him that this was what music was, and this, and this—just this perfection of melody, harmony, volume and timbre—not any complex metaphysic, but just this elegant power, this power that was as much power as humans should ever want or need. But Johannes knew, surely; his playing showed that he knew, Dent thought, there was in it a very ordinary, reedy sanity … or so
it seemed. Margaret must have felt something similar—something—well, that was the thing about music—it spoke so powerfully, but in a language that could not be translated—so that Dent knew what she felt most exactly, but could only sing to himself the emotion. She wanted Johannes to know it too, Dent saw; she was speaking in music just as he had so often recently, and speaking directly to him. And Johannes knew it, too. She sang the melody all the way through, with no words, only vowel tones; and every lilt she put in the old tune left its mark on Johannes’s open face. She had a contralto voice, slightly husky, slightly Russian even in vowels. The second time around she sang the final verse with the ancient words:

  “Thou couldst desire no earthly thing,

  But still thou hadst it readily;

  Thy music still to play and sing,

  And yet thou wouldst not love me.

  Greensleeves was all my joy,

  Greensleeves was my delight;

  Greensleeves was my heart’s one song,

  Yet I sing all alone of my Greensleeves.”

  Then the others joined in and sang along, mixing verses and languages, fitting together the harmonies that had stood at the heart of music for so many years. And Johannes sang with them. After that each round had fewer players; and finally Marie-Jeanne was left to play the last time alone, a single recorder piping in a darkened room, rustling the candle flame at the top of its paraffin spire. When she finished they sat together silently for a long time.

  terminator

  Fall with the Grand Tour down the gravity well to swift Mercury. There it floats, big in the windows, the sunward crescent brilliant as molten glass, the night side just a rust shadow against the vacuum. In the shuttle craft, before landing at a spaceport on the nightside, look out the window and see on the planet’s surface a tiny band of silver wires extending out over each horizon. Know, Reader, that this band circumnavigates the planet, like a narrow wedding ring tossed over the northern hemisphere, defining a latitude. And in the dawn terminator, where white and black clash in unrelieved contrasts, where the mounds, crater rims and escarpments stand ablaze under the white corona of the rising sun, while the valleys and shaded slopes are as black as anywhere on nightside—in the dawn terminator a city rolls over the dozen cylinders that form the planet’s encompassing band, rolling at the same slow pace as Mercury turning on its axis. The city Terminator is a monument to a technology long since superceded; in that sense it is like the tent city Utopia, Mars, or the sublunar city of Tsiolkovsky, or certain ancient cities of Earth, such as Dubrovnik or Macchu Pichu. In the Twenty-second century the city provided the power for much of the rest of civilization. Exposure to the sun caused an expansion in the alloy cylinders that not only drove the city forward onto the nightside; resistance to this pressure could be converted to energy and microwaved across space to Mars, Earth and Luna, and the lost one. In the Holywelkin Age this energy was no longer needed, and most of the generators were shut down. But the city rolled on, moving at just under four kilometers every hour, circling the planet once every eighty-eight days.

  When the Grand Tour landed on the baked plains of the spaceport, the crew saw Terminator loom over the eastern horizon like a big green lamp, or a Faberge egg lit from within. The sunward side of the city was a tall curving shield, called the Dawn Wall; extending away from the Dawn Wall was a long clear oval dome, covering the rest of the city. Under the clear dome they could make out red tile roofs, and the tops of hundreds of trees. They were guided into a small car that drove them over the flat plains to the city’s tracks, which they now saw were giant silver cylinders, standing ten meters above the surface on short thick silvery pylons. The car drove into a small station placed permanently on the edge of the outside cylinder; they were ushered upstairs to a broad platform with one flat wall, and when the city strolled by, the wall slid back. They stepped over the juncture of the two floors, and stood in Terminator.

  into the maze

  Ernst Ekern was also in Terminator, pacing through the narrow streets and staircase alleyways that connected the terraces of the interior slope of the Dawn Wall. Diana had rented one of the villas on this slope for the order, but at this point Ekern could scarcely stand the company of his fellows. He had arrived on the shuttle from The Duke of Vienna just hours before the tour crew, and after locating the order’s villa and greeting the other playwrights, he had made his excuses and ventured into the streets alone. First he hiked up to the highest terrace, just under the Great Gates of the city, which were set in the top of the Dawn Wall to let shafts of sunlight in on ceremonial occasions. On this highest terrace, Ekern had been told, the Orchestra would be placed during the concert. He looked across the tile rooftops of the city and tried to imagine performing for such an audience. A whole city … impossible. He descended the narrow stairs of an alleyway again. Troops of lithe little monkeys swung from tree to tree. The stone steps of the staircases bowed in their middles, where centuries of feet had worn them down. The marble streets were bowed in the same way. Every villa on the slope of the Dawn Wall had an extensive, overgrown garden, with huge ancient trees spilling onto each other: magnolias, oaks, cypresses, willows, eucalyptus, pine, juniper.… The city was a rolling garden, with almost half of it terraced up against the Dawn Wall, so that many of the street corners and plazas had vistas across a variety of tree greens, and the oranges and tans of roof tile. Colorful old town.

  But Ekern was not pleased. Terminator was a city full of Greys. He regarded them with distrust. There were too many Greys here. Every third or fourth person he passed was dressed in the light grey pants and tunic, hair all cropped, eyes attentive but at the same time vacant. He would have to approach some of them, find the Lion of Mercury, ask questions, even favors. It would be a test. “What are you,” he muttered as he passed a knot of them. “Insects you are, with some insect knowledge to scare the weak-minded.”

  Still they knew something. And it was not the knowledge he had put in their mouths (or so he hoped): he had used them as an empty sign, but they signified something of their own as well. And his design … under the vacant stares of individual Greys he felt his design waver unsteadily, threaten to fly apart in his hands. He had written the lost journal of Holywelkin for Wright to find—written it in a frenzy of invention and pleasure, calculating the effect on the musician and on him alone. All well and good; he considered it his masterpiece. But now he recalled the bizarre dreams that had haunted him during the composition of the journal: dreams of walking under a sky of fire, of confrontations that smelled of danger, with strangers who frightened him though he never knew why, in terse tense conversations that he could never quite remember. Had he really written the journal, or had he been merely the conduit? Had the dreams dictated the tale? Had Holywelkin actually visited Icarus, and done all that Ekern wrote down, so that Ekern had “invented” the truth? Or had someone tampered with his dreams, as he had tampered with Wright’s? Dream suggestion was a chancy business, each dream was a wild steeplechase over the ground of the stimulus; but it could be done. Ekern had done it himself. And he did not doubt that someone could do it to him; someone like Atargatis, say. Or, more likely, the Greys themselves. The Greys, working in a circular fashion, rendering metadrama out of the metadramatists, exerting the highest control possible.…

  He nearly collided with someone standing still in the street. A Grey, looking up at him curiously. “I—” But he could not speak to the man. The possibility that he was part of some larger drama.… We are all players in each other’s metadramas. Who had said that? He stumbled away, found a plaza, sat on the fountain’s rim at its center. His pulse was fast, his skin hot; he felt a bit feverish. The spray from the fountain was cooling. “A clamp on this hysteria,” he said between his teeth. “We must act!”

  Dogs frolicked in the basin of the fountain. In the corner of his eye—he turned to look—Jan Atargatis, in the company of a Grey. They had seen him. He stood, waved. They approached. Atargatis smiled his quick bright smile. Ekern
nodded stiffly at them, squashing all his fears.

  “A beautiful city for the worship of the sun, is it not?” Atargatis said in greeting.

  Ekern agreed, saw his opening. “Still, not as appropriate as one of the power stations. On those the sun worshipper has ascended to the highest altar.”

  “It’s true!” Atargatis cried. “Are you planning a visit, Ernst?”

  “I would like very much to visit,” Ekern said solemnly. He made a tiny bow before the Grey, who wore a floppy red cap. “Have I the honor of addressing the Lion of Mercury?”

  The Grey nodded. “Welcome to Terminator, Master Ekern.”

  “Thank you. I want … I want to take the Grand Tour to one of the power stations.”

  “You anticipate our wishes,” the Grey said quietly.

  Atargatis smiled. “Which one, Ernst? Vulcan, Apollo, Hyperion, Prometheus?”

  The Lion of Mercury said, “He will come to Prometheus.”

  “Prometheus will do very well,” Ekern said stiffly, and held fast to his calmness until the laconic Grey left.

  With an ironic smile Atargatis said, “Your apprentices are dying off on you like flies in this play, aren’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you know? Your apprentice Bloomsman, the one who looked like Death—he was found murdered in Munich.”

  “Ah.” What to say, what to say? “Atargatis, you must help me in this drama.”

  “It does not appear that you need my help,” Atargatis said, smiling still. “Or at least, not from this point on. I have convinced the Lions here to let the tour onto Prometheus. You should be pleased—the Greys have not let others onto one of the stations in as long as I can remember.” And with a playful slap to the arm he was gone, and Ekern was free again. He sat back down on the fountain’s edge, and plunged his hands into the water, trembling slightly. Who were these Greys? And how far up in their councils did Atargatis really move? And what did they know, thus to control access to the power stations? And what was happening to his play? Who controlled it, if he did not?