The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I will,” Dent said. “I certainly will.”

  The group took off down the trail. The boy holding the flashlight called back, “I liked the Orchestra!” And they were gone.

  Dent stood there, wind ruffling his hair. The gun in his hand was a constant reminder of the danger he was in, dashing his contemplations. The wind in the grass disguised a host of lesser sounds, and it was chill enough to give him goosebumps. Windy, dark, chill, vast … When his night vision returned he began to hike back down the path to his village. Near the plains he heard some beast’s eerie cough, and he spun around with the gun at the ready. Leopard? Perhaps it had been a hyena. But hyenas were carnivores too. With a fearful shiver he hurried down the trail, stumbling and tripping awkwardly. The village that had been below him now bulged in the gloom to his right. He stopped momentarily to observe it in its slumber. Like a tree village at dawn: why not? In every thing the dance of glints was present. Dent felt once again the scope of Wright’s music, its power. Inaccurately he hummed and whistled snatches of the great composition; he needed a hundred voices, and with his one warbled up and through all of them. The ten forms of change. Seeing stars through the upper branches of the village gave him an idea, and he took a small notepad from his breast pocket and scribbled a triplet in it hastily, holding the dartgun delicately between his teeth.

  A music leads the mind through the starry night

  And the brain must expand to contain the flight

  Like a tree growing branches at the speed of light

  the convocation of the greys

  Once again Johannes found himself dropping further into the blue fugal state, in which instants of blue clarity overlapped, or reversed their order.… To simplify matters Johannes left the small party in Margaret’s room. Among the top branches of the baobab they were housed in was a small deck, reached only by a single long rope-railed ladder. Ascending it Johannes felt the exhaustion in his limbs. On the deck he stood in the wind and looked out at the dark earth, the midnight sky black overhead, blue on the horizons. Villages in the distance sparked like clouds of fireflies. Breezes rustled the baobab leaves in tight ellipses of movement; Johannes leaned out over the rope railing to pull a leaf down to him, luxuriating in the multifarious clicking of the rustle. He stared long at the veins in the waxy surface, as if they were a score that could tell him his music. A leaf of life, patterned so clearly in shades of blue, what was it telling him?

  A head popped over the edge of the ladder-hole in the platform. Old schoolmate Anton Vaccero, red hair spiraling in tight curls. “Strange thing, Johannes,” he said, scrambling onto the platform. “A man wanted to give you a message, but he refused to come up in the tree. He was a Grey, I think.”

  Greys always watched him with a curious intensity. “What did he say?”

  “He said, the Greys meet on Grimaldi’s gravity generator tonight, and—because of Holywelkin, he said—you should attend. I don’t know what he meant. He said the code for the elevator doors is Grimaldi.”

  “Holywelkin went to Icarus once.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, Holywelkin went to Icarus once. Did you know that?”

  “No,” Anton said. “I didn’t.”

  “Greys on Grimaldi … this is peculiar, Anton. Perhaps I will visit these mysterious Greys, and learn what I can of them.”

  “Perhaps I should come with you.”

  “Perhaps I should come with you,” said Karna Godavari, sticking his head out of the ladder-hole. Anton jumped at his voice. Karna rose through the hole smoothly, like a dark spirit. “What did this messenger look like, Anton?”

  Vaccero cleared his throat. “He was short, light-haired, dressed in ordinary traveling clothes, a one-piece, but it was the cult’s grey. I don’t know. Nothing distinctive.”

  “You are to report all incidents of this kind directly to me, Anton,” Karna said softly. “Do you understand?”

  Vaccero nodded, looking down.

  “I want to see them,” Johannes told Karna.

  “But they could be the ones who attacked you in Titania.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “… People have said the Greys are interested in you.”

  Johannes thought, That is true.

  “Somebody wishes you harm,” Karna continued. “It may be them.”

  “I want to see them anyway,” Johannes said. “Come with me; you can protect me. You may learn something too.”

  “I’ll join you,” Vaccero said.

  “No,” said Karna sharply. “I only want to guard one person.”

  Johannes descended the steep steps of the stair ladder. “Come along,” he said up to Karna. “Anton, I’ll tell you what happens tomorrow.” Down steps of wood whose grain was etched in long ellipses, through the shadows in the mesh of branches, onto the broad catwalk that bulged into a promenade, down the broad staircase spiraling about the thick knobby treetrunk. Across the infinite complexity of the blue grass. In the center of the village was a low concrete blockhouse, with a single steel door. By the light of a few lanterns in the trees around, Johannes and Karna inspected a panel displaying the letters of the alphabet. Karna tapped out GRIMALDI and the door chimed. He turned the handle and pulled it open.

  “Simple enough,” Johannes said.

  “The lock must be to keep strangers out.” Karna entered, and Johannes followed him. Darkness. A narrow cone of light from Karna’s flashlight illuminated another panel. He tapped out the eight letters again, and the door of a well-lit elevator slid open, spilling yellow all through the chamber. Inside there were only two buttons, UP and DOWN. Karna pushed DOWN, the door closed, and they felt the initial drop.

  “Journey to the center of the earth,” Johannes whispered. The descent took a long time. Then they came to a halt, and the door slid open, spilling light over a dim hallway. Karna stepped out, a small pistol held in his right hand. “Come on. Nobody home.”

  Johannes stepped into a hall that curved down sharply, over the relatively small sphere that they now walked on. Floor, walls and ceiling were made of some dull metal, and all showed the curve of the two spheres they walked between. Square orange lights were set high in the walls every ten or twelve meters. The air was hot and humid, and the only sounds were their metallic footfalls and the distant whoosh of an air duct, sounding like the breeze on the terra’s surface. The sharp downward curve of the hallway prevented them from seeing very far in either direction.

  Karna led the way forward, gesturing with the pistol for Johannes to follow. Johannes hesitated, and noticed that although only a few meters away Karna stood upright at a slightly different angle than he did. Suddenly he felt how near to the gravity station they were; their hallway must be just over the cavity that contained the generator.

  Some distance along the curve in the hallway the floor changed to a thick clear glassy material. Now below their feet they saw the planetoid’s heart: a big spherical cavern, carved out when Grimaldi was settled. The rough nickel-iron walls of the cavern were ribbed with thick, curved steel bands; from these bands massive steel girders extended in to the center of the cavern, holding there a large sphere of banded concrete. Inside the hollow ball of the terra, the hollow ball of the concrete sphere; and inside the concrete sphere, the gravity generator. In that generator a singularity was created, controlled, sustained; and the singularity drew this whole little world to it with one gee, pulling with that force all the way out to the bubble discontinuity that was another of the generator’s effects, where it ended abruptly.

  A few orange lights were set into the wall of the cavern, and by the dim light Johannes saw that their floor opened up ahead of them, dropping by steps to a clear platform that ended in a steep metal staircase, which descended (looking like a steel strut that had buckled under the stress) to the surface of the concrete sphere. And down there—marching around from the other side of the concrete shell, marching sideways as it seemed to Johannes and Karna—came figures, people
in robes that appeared dull orange. Ten of them appeared, marching with a long slow stride until they had formed a circle around the bottom of the staircase that led up to Johannes and Karna. Greys, Johannes thought. And they knew he would be there.

  Karna was looking at him. “What should we do?” he whispered.

  “If we can hear them, let’s stay up here.” They edged forward to the clear platform, stepped down onto it. They were well in sight of those below, but none of them were looking up. Warm air rising out of the cavern carried a scent like cinnamon. Johannes put his hand on Karna’s arm, feeling a bit dizzy. Dim orange light in a dark blue cavity, thick girders extending across curved space; it was disorienting. Only the powerful pull of the concrete globe kept him from spinning.

  One more Grey appeared around the curvature of the globe, weaving upside down between the girders. When the others saw him they began to sing a chant of vowels, in low tones. Echoes gave the chant thick metallic overtones, as if the girders were resonating with the sound. The new figure raised a hand over his head (almost pointing up at Johannes) and from the inner wall of the planetoid a thin beam of packed light burst on, appearing like one of the massive girders turned to fire. A whole forest of shadows sprang to life, redefining the dimensions of the entire cavern. The beam sizzled between the lamp and the pointing figure, whose robe now glowed in an ivory blaze. Under a deep ivory hood the figure wore a flat black mask; it made him only the outline of a human figure, standing like white stone while the figures around him chanted the vowels, and bitter cinnamon swirled in the air. The brilliantly lit cavern pulsed in a sharp chiascuro, and once again Johannes lost his sense of spatial relationships. Echoes from the chant were more reliable for basic orientation than the black-and-white vibrations reported by his photoptic cells, and Johannes thought, You’re a blind man, depend on your strong sense.

  Two women dressed in grey robes appeared around the globe, holding a big red rooster by neck and feet. The chanting grew in volume and split into a dense polyphony, in which words of a language unknown to Johannes were perhaps being sung; or perhaps it was just glossolalia. A man in a bright blue robe came next, holding a large glass bowl.

  The figure caught in the beam of packed light moved to the two women; the rooster flapped desperately in the hands of its captors. With a sudden quick movement the fowl’s head was neatly cut off. Light red blood fountained into the glass bowl; the women held it over the bowl until the body had drained. Then the bowl was held overhead by the lit figure. Over the confused chanting he sang like a cantor, “Te Cauterizo, i Saturn, i Atar, i Opi, amesha spentas.” The cavern’s acoustics were strange, the chant washed over the lead figure’s voice from time to time, and Johannes could not be certain what he heard, what he missed, what he imagined. “And end aforeknowlia,” the figure warbled in falsetto, “an end to aforeknowlia, by which we see a symmetry of time.” Or had he said “asymmetry of time”? “Felix qui potuit rerum cognisceri causos. Causa aequat effectum. Ahura-Mazda be with us now, Ahura-Mazda be praised before all.”

  The bowl was passed among the figures, and each drank from it. Johannes swallowed convulsively, imagining the taste of the blood. And the lead figure, with the beam of packed light following him, began to step up the stairway toward Karna and Johannes. Karna stiffened.

  The figure stopped; his head tilted back, and the flat black mask appeared to be looking straight at them. The chanting dropped to a pianissimo murmur.

  “Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra!” the figure called, in a muffled voice. “Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra!”

  Johannes took a step forward; Karna held him by the shoulder, restraining him. Everyone stopped; time stood still; Johannes, knowing not what to say, remained silent.

  “Master of the Orchestra, grace us with your presence.”

  “I do,” Johannes said.

  “Master, you search for Holywelkin … you search for Holywelkin. We knew him on Iapetus, at Fairfax House … Fairfax House, look there. Holywelkin whom Ahura-Mazda blessed remains there still. Master of the Orchestra, with your presence grace us. Ahura-Mazda follows you.”

  And the figures answered, “Aaaaaaa—eeeeeeee—oooooooo—uuuuuuu.”

  With that the ceremony, or communion, was over. The Greys marched sideways around the globe, the leader retreated down the steps and walked upside down around the globe. The packed light disappeared, leaving the dim orange glow no more than a kind of darkness.

  Karna took a deep breath. “Could you hear what he said? I couldn’t understand a word of it in all that chanting.”

  “Most of it,” said Johannes, deep in thought. Holywelkin had met the Greys on Iapetus, at one of that world’s great old mansions. And he was there still? In some symmetry of time?

  “So they knew you would be here,” Karna said. “I don’t like that.”

  “They told me to come.”

  “I don’t like that either.”

  “Let’s get back to the surface. I can’t see down here. Everything looks wrong.”

  The curving metal hallway was empty; apparently the Greys had taken another exit from the generator’s cavity. Just as the elevator doors closed, however, a man in a grey tunic ran by, staring into their little elevator chamber wildly. But they were on their way up, and could not stop the process. The elevator pulled them away from the singularity like a rocket.

  The Greys had something to do with the sun. Had something to do with Holywelkin. Had something to do with Johannes Wright. He could not understand it. Happy are those who can know causes? Or not know causes? He wasn’t sure. Causes equal effects, he was sure of that phrase. And Ahura-Mazda was a name for Sol. But in the universe of his ignorance, diffuse galaxies of the known, scattered at random, told him only so much and no more.

  “Always bring me along for anything of that sort,” Karna was saying. “These Greys could be dangerous.”

  “Yes.”

  And then they were on the surface. Under the trees it was chilly. Johannes ascended the circling stairs of his baobab, more tired than ever, black cracks in the blue, round and round ascending as in the spiral of life.… He was high among the main branches when he nearly collided with Dent Ios. He scarcely recognized him. They stood for a moment still as stones, each staring as if the other were a ghost; then without a word Johannes walked on and climbed to bed.

  the irregulars disperse

  “All right,” Margaret said, when Karna had reported the previous night’s events to her. “Now we act.” She pointed a finger at Karna. “See if you can find these Greys, on Grimaldi or in the ships following us.”

  Karna nodded, and behind him Yananda, Marie-Jeanne and Dent nodded attentively.

  “Yananda, when you get to Ganymede, do whatever you can to learn more about the Greys. Join them if you have to.”

  Yananda said, “I will.”

  “They want something from Wright,” Karna said. “And that wall drawing in our suite, of the bull being sacrificed—that sounds like their work as well.”

  “What about the attack on Titania?” Dent said.

  Karna nodded. “It’s possible. They’re a religious cult of some kind—”

  “Sun worshippers,” Yananda said.

  “And they make animal sacrifices. Maybe they were trying to sacrifice Johannes on Titania. Or doing it symbolically. Anyway if they’re sun worshippers they may use Holywelkin in their religion somehow, and so Johannes is brought into it because of the Orchestra. We can’t be sure until we know more about them.”

  “Enough,” Margaret said. “The truth is we don’t know enough to speculate. But we know enough to act, because you can act in ignorance. Yananda, get on that shuttle to Jupiter. The rest of you get to work finding out what you can about the Greys. I know every one of you has a network of some sort of information.”

  Her listeners nodded their agreement, feeling heartened by her determination. Then Dent said, “Remember, the Greys are so secretive—it would be easy to pretend to be Grey.”
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br />   And the irregulars stared grimly at him.

  Chapter Four

  THROUGH THE DISCONTINUITY

  anton’s whiteline

  In his dream the ship was dark, figures rustled as they scurried past him in the halls, in one black corner Ekern seized him by the elbow and told him to murder everyone on the tour. But how? he croaked. And why?

  Someone was calling his name. Better hide! He pulled his pillow over his head and that taught him where he was. Groggily he sat up, his stomach filled, as it was every morning, with a big knot.

  “Anton!” His assistant Sara Eagleton stuck her head in the doorway.

  “What?” He pulled the sheet up to his chest.

  “We’re passing Spandel’s whiteline, and we have a good view from our suite window. You said you wanted to see it.”

  “Last thing I want to see,” Vaccero muttered.

  “What?”

  “Be there in a minute.”

  His crew laughed affectionately as he staggered past them to the bathroom. “You shouldn’t get so bent every night,” Rudyard called. Anton nodded, smiled briefly at them. Good crew, all comfortable with each other and with him. The stomach knot began to untie. Back from the bathroom he joined the lighting crew in the suite lounge, where one wall was a window. Sean and Ngaio were fiddling with a small telescope on a stand. Sara handed Anton a cup of steaming lemon tea. The window was still packed with stars, but Rudyard and Angela were sure the whiteline would appear soon.

  “There is what’s left of Vermeer,” Sean said quietly.

  Out in the vacuum, tumbling in the middle distance between them and the stars, were chunks of rock, some big, some small, all jagged: a little school of fresh rough asteroids. Anton didn’t want to think about Spandel and his incredible revenge, but his crew discussed the case with relish. Spandel had been kicked off his terra Vermeer for opposing the state; it had been a sort of Fourier communalism, and Spandel had insisted upon raising his own child. For that he had been exiled, into a decade of bitterness and insane plotting: long voyage downsystem, complicated sabotage at Vulcan Station, and Vermeer’s whitsun had veered into the little world’s center, destroying it and its hundred thousand inhabitants instantly. Spandel had committed suicide at the same moment.