The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Don’t talk,” Margaret will say in a new tone, her hand on your arm. The pained dissonance of tightened throat muscles around the vocal cords … the blackness will subside, leaving you trembling slightly. Lights will blink from your home overhead, and the two of you will stand in silence together for a long time, shoulder to shoulder, looking up at the Greys who will move so slowly and so ceremoniously around your home.

  “What are they,” Margaret will say, flat revulsion in her voice.

  “They are many things,” you will say. “Few of them know what they are.”

  “And do they worship the sun?”

  “They use the sun.” You will gesture up, and Margaret will follow your gesture to stare at the Greys who will be forming a circle around the Orchestra, chanting in response to the voice of a red-capped Grey standing on the sphere generator.

  “They stand between our civilization and its source of power,” Margaret will say. “They can become the high priests that they think they are.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You would think the Earth would intercede.”

  “Earth doesn’t care.”

  “But the outer terras?”

  “These Greys rule them all.”

  “Not Mars, though. Mars could be free.”

  “Perhaps…” But you will see the circle of Greys look down at you, calling you with their chant, and the blackness will sweep through the room again, and your body will straighten up, step back. “I have to go now,” you will whisper.

  “Will they have control of that sphere when it’s outside?” Margaret will ask, and you will realize that she has understood nothing, that the word control, the word will that we use so often, the word time itself, all refer to ghosts of our consciousness, and through the blackness you will say, “No—I will control it at that time.” And with a quick ducking nod your body will move through its paces in the dance, it will start to walk past her toward one of the glass staircases. She will reach out a hand and hold you by the arm, supporting you, as always: “Please,” she will say, “don’t,” and your body will whisper through the constricted throat, “Margaret,” it will plead, “I can’t bear not to.” In her desperation she will keep her hold on you, attempt to stop you; but with a single glance she will fall back, her face twisted with fright. And with a shudder you will walk helplessly away, up the crystal corridors of eternity.

  the unacknowledged legislators of the world

  For Margaret it was like conducting a conversation with a machine. She had never seen Johannes behave in quite that way before; all his quickness of speech and fluidity of expression were gone, and what was left was slow, calm, insect-eyed—utterly estranged. Sometimes when he answered her there was such certainty, such conviction in his face that she became frightened. Had he penetrated Ekern’s game to something deeper—some fundamental truth underlying human senses, known only to the highest echelon of the Greys? She remembered the transcendant peace she had felt by the pool in the mountains of Icarus, when every object had chimed together in one large chord of being.… But no, she thought, such mystical moments were not beyond the human realm, they were a state of feeling, experienced many times in many places, and even if Johannes had experienced one more profound than hers, it was not enough to justify becoming an automaton. Her fear shifted to anger at his folly, at his complete indifference to anything she could say. Such calm, slow, measured speech! How could he bear to be such a creature? But that thought in itself was frightening.… Those eyes—what in other people were the windows to the soul, were in him black walls, barriers that defeated her every effort at penetration, connection … banging her head against a wall, useless, frustrating, painful. Her friend was mad. She should have stopped him.

  As he walked away from her, and turned up the glass spiral staircase to the level above, she watched him. Watched his back; suddenly she remembered when he had turned around her brother. All her muscles were tight. Then he was up on the clear floor of the level above, surrounded by Greys. She couldn’t stand to watch. She took off down the hall and up the endless white curve of it, white floor, white walls, white ceiling, with frequent breaks in the walls to the left for doors that gave onto rooms walled with black glass, black glass burst to light by the sun that was actually on her right.… She was disoriented and did not know if she was walking the shorter arc of the circle to their suite, or the longer. The concert would begin soon and it was important that she get back to her people before it did. She looked at the small numbers embossed by the doors … 279, 280 … and what was their suite number? Nearly zero. She hurried on. Now in the rooms to her left there were groups of them, chanting “uhhh, uhhh, uhhhhhhh.” From every open door came the sound. Now and again she passed a small group of them in the hall, hurrying in the opposite direction, red caps bobbing comically, and each one that she saw increased the tension in her jaw muscles, until it felt as if her teeth might explode. These people! What were they? “Ekern led us into this trap, and he made up a lot about the Greys. He may even have made up the metaphysic that has Johannes so frightened—he may have taken us on Icarus and drugged us and put us in a sensorium and run us through all that, it’s possible I suppose. Or the Greys may be a mystical order of some sort, and it was they who took us on Icarus.” Gasping as she hurried down the halls. “But in the end it doesn’t matter—all that metaphysical crap—because in the real material world, these Greys have us all in the palm of their hand! A cabal ruling the world in secrecy—and not exactly in secrecy, even—rather with a sort of contemptuous open control—say nothing, merely act—the world can remain ignorant or not, they don’t care!” Bitter hatred welled up in her and she had to stop for a minute and lean against the wall of the corridor, feeling cold in the blast of invisible sunlight. Here she had solved the mystery to her satisfaction, and there was no one left to tell it to, nothing left to do with it.… Her friend was mad, she and her companions were cast in a maelstrom, swirling over a vast whirlpool of light, pierced by billions of glints per second, nailed to the wall.…

  By the time she returned to the crew’s suite, Johannes was already in their view. Above them in the black window the wheel of the station arced up and around and back to them; the sunward side was a brilliant white band. On the night side black windows alternated with the white gates of the synchrotron, where the streams of glints poured invisibly to the round ball of the singularity sphere, as in the Ice Cream Cone Theorem of Reimann where all lines converge at a single point. Deep in this cone of sunwashed space floated a shining white bubble: a sphere of some unusual weave, reflecting the sun’s light, so that the Orchestra within it could scarcely be seen, a flicker of black tracery and no more. From their viewpoint it appeared to hang upside down. Speakers in the two sides of the room pulsed with music, a quiet mesh of sound. And perhaps we have come far enough together, dear Reader, to be able to describe this music adequately; particularly since, as it seemed to Margaret, the music expressed all that was happening at that moment. You know that chords have density: within a given span between the highest and lowest note (an octave, ten octaves), there are a certain number of notes bunched; and the more there are, the denser the chord. Now Johannes was playing tall, dense chords, a cluster of notes at the lowest audible pitches—perhaps this was the sound of the sun; then an ever-revolving series of harmonies in the middle range of hearing, changing the character of the entire chord in modulation after modulation—the station, perhaps; and at the highest reaches of human hearing, and beyond, tremolo notes flying in and out of nothing—just as the whitelines did to the eye. So these chords shifted again and again, reminding Margaret of early music, of that other Johannes, the Bach of the organ music, except that this tall, slow, simple changing chord was more ethereal, lighter and calmer than any music Margaret had ever heard. She listened to it closely, with a grim attention to every note. Across the chord, she noticed, the faintest melody danced; a single oboe, nearly drowning in the quietly insistent wall of sound, played up and down t
he full extent of its range, in and out of the chords, fluttering, swooping, crying out in a subdued way that could barely be heard. Could only Margaret, with her fierce attentiveness, hear that voice? Did she alone understand who that was, singing under the giant chords generated by the world around them? She found she was trembling, she walked to the wall beside the door and leaned back against it, looking up all the while. The Orchestra’s protective sphere was a tiny white gossamer bubble out there, blinking in the light. Behind her was the brooding roiling mass of the monster sun, tugging at them all, dominant, tonic, dominant, a world of fire, a gravity well, a fountain of light, a god. The music changed and changed and changed, inexorably; at the top of the chord the serene swirl of the mercury drum recalled to Margaret the Martian symphony, and she shivered hard, cold in the harsh light.

  She was the only one who noticed that in the lazy spinning of the brilliant white bubble there was a certain drift. Shimmering within the bubble like the faintest black web, now upside-down, now on its side, now upright, the Orchestra was drifting deeper into the cone, in toward the singularity sphere where all the whitelines found their direction. The chords shifted up continually, in a progression slow and majestic and serene, but Margaret heard that oboe cry out in falling arcs of muffled sound, falling, falling through the rising chords that were one sign of the Martian coda. One could hear in the weave of sound that it would end soon. She thought of him out there alone, looking back at the wheel of fire with its black windows, each a rectangle hiding hundreds of grey figures.… She was cold, cold, cold. The coda pressed on her like ten gravities, the metamorphosis of the chord accelerated, rose in pitch so that there were no bass notes anymore, and few in the middle range—

  “Look!” Sean cried. “He’s moving toward the singularity!”

  A deathly frozen stillness as the crew stared up; only the chords moved—

  “They’re killing him!” Delia cried, but Margaret shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “He’s got control of it.”

  “No,” Delia moaned.

  “He’s going to fall into the singularity!” Sean said. “It’s not much further—” Other voices cried out—

  “Quiet!” Margaret said, and they all jumped. She had shouted it. The music was arching up, the tones of certain instruments peeling up and away out of the range of the audible, and Margaret focused all her mind on it, thinking hear, hear, hear, and then, captured by the unearthly beauty of the falling upward, hearing, hearing, only hearing. The Orchestra, now nothing but obscure tracery in its blinding white bubble, drifted to the point of the cone, spinning lazily. From the corner of her eye Margaret saw Delia’s upturned face, blind like a fish, open-mouthed—

  And the oboe fell in with the rest of the attenuated high chord, singing a single note along with the rest, a beautiful simple major chord, floating with only the lightest vibrato, the oboe so lost in it that Margaret felt it spoke only to her, a light high voice with its thick reedy timbre hidden in the center of the final endless chord.

  Afterwards the members of the crew argued about the actual moment of the end. Some said that the white bubble dropped into the singularity and disappeared without a trace; others claimed that when the bubble was still outside the singularity it burned away, so that the black tracery of the Orchestra was outlined perfectly for a moment, before flaring into the white fusion. Margaret, her eyes clamped shut, saw nothing. She only heard the music; and as the others gasped and everything stopped, frozen still for that one moment of time, the final chord still sounded clearly in her ears, and she caught her breath to hear it—but it drifted out and away, sounding as if it came from outside the window, from inside her mind. And then it was gone.

  * * *

  And they were alone, and left to start up again as best they could. Delia was weeping; Sean and Nikita, distraught themselves, put their arms around her. Others stood about the room like statues, staring up through the window still, as if they could not believe what they had seen. Marie-Jeanne held herself up against the wall, tears rolling down her broad cheeks.… Margaret, unsurprised and aching with cold, could not feel anything. For a long time they stood scattered in a stunned silence.

  The door to their suite opened, and Ernst Ekern walked in.

  His eyes protruded, his face was flushed a bright pink, and his curly graying hair was in disarray. He swayed unsteadily on his feet as he surveyed them, sniffing and breathing wildly. He lifted a hand, as much for balance as for their attention, and spoke.

  “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight—” But his voice broke, and he had to stop. He took a few steps toward Margaret, staggered, stopped, looked out at the singularity sphere.

  “You killed him,” Delia said.

  “I killed him!” Ekern repeated, and laughed stridently. “He killed himself, didn’t he? Rode Holywelkin’s Orchestra out into a singularity, so that now he is projected out to all the whitsuns in this quadrant of the solar system! At this very moment he shines on a thousand worlds! Was it not a magnificent death? Can you imagine Johannes Wright dying a better death?”

  Silence. Margaret stared at him closely, thinking of those whitsuns.

  “I’m glad he took the Orchestra with him,” Sean said bitterly.

  Ekern stopped short in his drunkard’s walk, looked to see who had spoken. “Took the Orchestra, you say. Do you think I would let him destroy Holywelkin’s Orchestra?” He started walking again, circling the room with erratic steps. “I knew he was going to do this, you see. I knew it all, I have known it for years. He was not entrusted with the real Orchestra, you see. I had another made.” He looked around at their faces, shouted, “He toured with a copy! I kept the real Orchestra for myself, for myself alone! Now Johannes Wright is dead, and I am the Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra! Cut is the branch—” His voice broke again, his breath caught in his throat like a sob. “Now I am the Master.”

  Margaret stepped in front of him and stared down at his livid face. He looked up at her.

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” he shouted furiously. He took a step back, lowered his voice until it was tight, furious, knotted. “In fact, Nevis, your job is done. I’m in control here. You little people—you’d better leave, yourself.”

  Margaret hit him in the face, hard.

  He stumbled back, collided with the wall. She followed him. Only his harsh breathing broke the shocked silence in the room. He looked up at her, hysterical anger contorting his face. Margaret felt some heat leak into her at last. She could see he wanted to kill her then and there. Her fists were painfully bunched, her teeth were about to burst; she welcomed the chance to fight, she wanted to hit him again, over and over, and she saw that he could see that in her eyes. She stepped toward him, and the fury on his face changed to panic; with a moan he turned, and slipped out the door.

  Margaret slowly straightened out her fingers. Her right hand hurt. She flexed it repeatedly, feeling a stab of pain each time. All her feeling was in that hand. Marie-Jeanne was holding her. Rudyard looked stunned; Margaret put her left hand on his head. She pulled the corner of her mouth back wryly for Sean and Nikita, who were still supporting Delia. “Why did he do it?” Delia said as she wept. “Why did he do it?”

  Margaret made her way to Delia, taking care to touch every person on the way. Hand to hand. Hand to head. She pulled Delia to her feet.

  “He had trouble with his vision,” she said shortly. “Come on, now.”

  She led them all down the hall. Up one of the elevators to the shuttle center at the hub. The Greys there looked surprised to see them. “Put us out on the ship to Mercury,” she told them, ready to kill. But the Greys were like machines; they did what she said passively, faces blank. They were locked into a shuttle, fired out of Prometheus Station into space. Guided to the small ship that was sailing just above the great wheel of the station. Once inside the little ship Margaret went to the bridge. “To Mercury,” she ordered the
crew. “Now.” Again they were automatons, subservient to her will. They nodded. “Set up our couches on the bridge,” she said, and they did. The tour crew lay on the couches; the Greys reset their own chairs so they would be supported.

  “To Mercury,” one of the Greys said, and the acceleration began.

  The pressure was pain; Margaret could see it in her crew’s faces. “Did you record that concert?” she asked Delia.

  “I recorded all of them,” Delia said. “Every single concert, all the way down the system.”

  “And so they can be transcribed and scored, and played again. By ordinary people on ordinary instruments, as a communal act.”

  Quickly the force of the acceleration grew. The throbbing in Margaret’s hand lanced up her arm, through her heart. The bridge was hushed. Her thoughts were broken and confused. To fill the aching silence she said, “Johannes is dead, and scattered through whitsuns all over the system. When the story of his death becomes known, all the worlds lit by those whitsuns will change. The people of those worlds will learn the legend, and act accordingly.”

  The acceleration continued to mount. She was pinned to her couch, her poor hand throbbed, tears ran back into her ears. With a furious thrust she elbowed herself up from the couch, held herself out where she could stare at her companions. “And we will stay together to see that his music gets played, by full human orchestras.” Sean and Delia and the rest twisted awkwardly to look at her, not understanding. “It’s Mars I’m speaking of, do you see?” she cried, fighting for breath. “Mars can break free of these Greys, I tell you, and Johannes will help them do it. You all remember the Areology. We’ll make it happen again. We’ll play his music and get them to join, in Burroughs and Syrtis and Argyre, and on Olympus Mons.”

  The acceleration increased at an accelerating rate, and she collapsed back onto her couch, she was crushed into it. The little rocket trembled as they powered away from the sun, faster and faster, faster and faster, faster and faster. Gasping for air, face smashed back against her skull, Margaret said, “Back to Mars.”