The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “We’re already working on that,” said Margaret. “Karna has sent an agent down to Jupiter to learn more about them.”

  Johannes shook his head. “I wonder if it will be possible on Jupiter.”

  Margaret regarded him. “Come on, let’s go home. You look tired.”

  * * *

  And on the drive back home, as Margaret guided the craft and thought about the long night’s action, Johannes slumped over and fell asleep, tilting until his head was resting firmly on Margaret’s broad shoulder. She smiled a little, and left it there. Up to this point she had thought of Johannes as a prima donna, a problem, quiet enough but very difficult in his own way: absent-minded, distant, demanding by his very assumptions, obscure and pretentious in his art. Now.… The music he had played in Port echoed in her memory. She slowed the craft to a crawl so that when it clicked onto the Disraeli track, his head wouldn’t be pulled off her shoulder. And smiled at herself.

  the gaze of the greek chorus

  Now leave the Grand Tour for a while, Reader, and come with me to Jupiter, King of the Planets. Light is provided by the many whitsuns directed into Jupiter’s space, and by the ruddy light of the planet itself; and by Sol; in the Jupiter system it is always day. And this Olympus of space is jammed with courtiers: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto make their orbits, each a full world in its own right; all of the smaller moons have gravity generators at their centers, bubbles encasing them, whitsuns following them; and great numbers of asteroids have been drawn closer to the king’s fire, to become terras in its system; so that all in Zeus’s court is activity and light.

  Now imagine a gravity generator, orbiting the banded gas giant somewhere outside Callisto. The concrete shell has been painted the black of space, and even specked with “stars,” so that it is almost impossible to see. The bubble encasing it is invisible. Struts of clear glass hold three broad platforms of clear glass a short distance off the black generator, so that the only things clearly visible in this area of space are people, dressed in robes of the seven primary colors, standing (it appears) freely in space, on three different levels. Ernst Ekern and the fellows of his order stand on this invisible platform, and survey the spangled scene, preparing to add one more ceremony to the system of ceremonies knitting the vacuum slopes of the new Olympus.

  Ekern paced on the middle platform and stared up at the swirled bands of the Jovian surface, hoping to distract himself. Jupiter, its surface textured like thick oil paint, filled a big chunk of the sky. But Ekern could not keep his attention on it. This meeting of the dramatists had been called to hear his prospectus; it was his performance.

  Atargatis stepped down the wide clear staircase, greeting Ekern with a broad smile. Atargatis was dressed in grey, the grey of the cult; he was the only Magus not dressed in a primary color. Ekern frowned. “Why are you so garbed? I will not have my drama mocked, Atargatis.”

  “I am a Grey, Ernst,” Atargatis said, his bright brown eyes gleaming with mirth. “I am the Lion of Jupiter, in fact, and in this space I wear the cloak.”

  So Atargatis would know how Ekern’s drama shaped the Greys … Ekern’s mind spun with the ramifications of this shocking news, the difficulties and dangers: “But you are a playwright as well,” he said, making the statement a host of questions.

  Atargatis understood. “There are many different kinds of Greys, Ernst. For me the metadrama is life itself.”

  “And so—” Ekern stopped; perhaps he should consider the situation further, but in the lightning flux of metadrama it was often necessary to act on impulse, to let the instincts determine what course to take. This man could perhaps be co-opted into the drama, and thus controlled. And Ekern wanted to control this mysterious, irritating rival. “And so you will help me?”

  Atargatis nodded. “I will do what I can for you. The Greys are appropriate to your drama.”

  “I know.”

  “They are more appropriate than you know.” That small wry smile. “But Zervan, the Father of Fathers, lives on Icarus. And here I am ignorant; I do not know if anything can be done there without his awareness of it.” Ekern stared at him, scorning the notion of clairvoyance. Atargatis lifted his eyebrows, shrugged. “I do not know. I will do what I can. Now come give your metalogue. The rest are waiting, and you know what a poor audience the Magi are—so impatient, so critical.”

  Spurs, deliberately applied. Ekern brushed the barbs away. “Go join them, and I will follow.”

  Atargatis climbed back up the barely visible glassy steps. After a suitable interval Ekern hitched up his red robe, thinking, all life is a performance, a hundred performances a day, I am the Duke of Vienna, in secret control of all my kingdom, I rule those poor fearful fools above me. As he ascended the clear staircase he started to feel faint. He concentrated on the red gleam in the glass, walked more deliberately, breathed more deeply. Wright, Atargatis, Vaccero, Nevis, surely this was the hardest thing any of them had to do in the drama: to speak before the Magus Diana and her order.…

  Once on the upper platform he looked around. Six men, six women; the twelve members of the order stood in a crescent, facing a glassy dais. Ekern’s mouth tasted bitter. He cleared his throat, quietly. Diana waited until he was on the dais, then said in a clear voice, “Go under the real to the heart of the real: metalogue for a play in progress.”

  Ekern saw the metalogue in his mind. It took the form of a sestina, the most highly controlled stanzaic form; six end words revolved in a strict pattern, so that each six-line stanza was determined by the pattern of the first one; thus he meshed form and content, in a principle of all life: “The early phases of acts imply the later phases.” Retrodictive, predictive, his metalogue would shape all their lives; and so he was in control. Calmed, he spoke in a clear firm baritone.

  “Glints sail from point to point like boats on water,

  Thrust here and there by winds and current—No.

  Like nothing else. Glints are where the change

  Takes place, the ten forms on them act

  In strictest combination—musically,

  It might be said glints dance to tunes through time.

  “It’s hard to say there’s no such thing as time,

  For if not what moves there across the water

  At dusk, what moves downstream so musically?

  It is no leaf, no paper boat, no—no—

  It is an endless line and not an act,

  And so there is no chance, no choice, no change.

  “You wish those scenes could be undone, you change

  The past each night in dreams, that darkling time

  You sang your song as if it were an act:

  Your eye saw light break onto water

  At that second, and you forgot to know

  A single thing but that; light dancing musically.

  “Not that the world is murdered musically.

  Note follows note—the score will never change—

  In this same way synapses trigger, no

  Plan planned, control exerted; glints in time

  Determined like a wave’s sweet flow through water.

  You think your thoughts like ocean currents act.

  “You saw the curtain rise to start an act,

  A woman crossed the stage quite musically

  And paused to dash her brow with steaming water,

  And though there was no sign to mark the change,

  You suddenly remembered Earth—the time

  They turned their heads and said, distinctly, ‘No.’

  “But did you choose to recollect? Oh no?

  And did you ever really choose to act?

  That all belongs to ‘Once upon a time,’

  Doesn’t it now? It works more musically

  Than that, it’s not a thing your thoughts can change.

  Look at it closely. Take a drink of water.

  “Ten laws know glints, musically

  They ring, it’s time to note the always-change

  That make
s you act like boats held fast to water.”

  He was done. The euphoria of power filled him, power like a drug, a bursting free of all restraint. The poem determined the play. The play determined Wright. Wright determined the music. And the music—

  “We will attend this drama to its close,” Diana called, and the fellows of the order moved together until their spectrum of robes was unbroken (a patch of grey). The ceremony was done.

  Chapter Five

  THE SUN ON OLYMPUS

  kang la

  Back to the Grand Tour, which piled into great Orion and its pilot fish, and swam across the space between Saturn and Jupiter, and descended upon Europa.

  Reader, know that Europa is an ice-encrusted moon; up to one hundred kilometers of water ice covers its rocky core. Spheres generated a short distance under Europa’s surface created hemispheres of discontinuous ice, which were then melted and partially drained, leaving behind round lakes of liquid water, held in great bowls in the ice. Above and below the surface of a hundred of these lakes the cities of Europa were built, on floating islands and in submarine chambers. Kang La was one of the biggest of these new Venices: a great mass of moored islands, bridges, waterways, raft neighborhoods, submarine power plants, and lake bottom villas, all surrounded by a circular city wall of white ice, all sloshing about in the tides created by the giant banded planet that dominated the sky.

  In Kang La they played the first Jovian concert to a crowd of two hundred thousand roaring fans, who, deafened by their own shouting, could not have heard more than a few notes played by the Orchestra. When the concert was over Dent Ios wandered backstage at the city stadium (an island unto itself), disturbed by the music’s reception, and by what he had seen of Kang La. In one corner dressing room Karna and Margaret were in conference, and Dent joined them. “I’m off to meet Yananda,” Karna told them. “He says he’s got a contact in the Greys, and we’re to meet him out in our old neighborhood on one of the western islands.”

  “Why there?” Margaret said.

  “I’m going to keep Yananda away from the tour,” Karna said. “In case we’re being watched. I think it’s important that he be able to do his work without whoever is opposing us knowing it.”

  Margaret nodded.

  “Can I come with you?” Dent asked. Karna and Margaret looked surprised; Dent was a little surprised himself. But the memory of Titania spurred him, and he wanted to do something.

  “Sure,” Karna said. He stood up. “Are you ready?”

  Dent nodded resolutely, and ignoring Margaret’s quick grin (she thought so poorly of him!) he followed Karna out of the room.

  Outside the stadium it was still crowded. The stadium was a gigantic cement oval structure, and against one long side wall was an elevated train station, its metal floors black with grime and cluttered with trash, its air hot and noisy. They got into one of the many lines and looked at the raucous crowd around them until let on one of the train cars. When the line finally moved, people filled the car until no one else could get on. Some of the passengers were dreamwalking, their heads encased in helmets, their eyes jerking wildly. The two women next to Dent had plug-in jacks surgically implanted in the sides of their necks, and the pupils of their eyes were no bigger than pinholes. With a jerk the train was off and rolling through Kang La.

  Out the train window Dent caught glimpses of the city: far below their tracks the water in the canals shimmered under packed light, and the tops of heads were everywhere. The buildings were filled with windows, each skyscraper a glass house, and the lower windows were filled with pulsing displays of goods for sale. “Commercial district,” Karna said, looking down. The skyscrapers extended right up to the sphere above them, and sometimes broke through it. Their track wound through a latticework which extended five or ten stories above and below them; other trains, looking like thin dirty worms, zipped by in other directions, and occasionally Dent caught sight of a face in another train window, looking across at him impassively.…

  “It’s enormous,” he said. “How big…?”

  Karna shrugged. “It’s big. We Indians, we build cities until they collapse in on themselves. And then we keep on building.”

  Dent nodded, staring down into the street canyon to the canal at the bottom. Below the water’s surface he could see the lit windows of submarine buildings. Waving beams of bent light sent ellipses of red and green roving over the skyscrapers and their glass windows. “And this is where you grew up?” he said.

  “No. On one of the outer islands. Not really the same, as you’ll see.”

  The train entered a tunnel—a building, Dent surmised—and only the train’s cabin lights shone on them. Old men in seedy clothes slumped in the ripped seats of their car. Youths in trailing robes prowled from car to car restlessly. Dent wrinkled his nose, disturbed by the smell of poverty and desperation. Again he noticed the dreamwalking passengers sprawled in the seats across from him. Then lazed light fractured the gloom and they were over an industrial island of the city, where networks of tanks and tubes connected long, low factories. On the water surrounding the island light danced in long squiggles.

  Past the factories the train ran on a long pontoon bridge just above the roofs of hundreds of flat long rooftops, set on big square islands. “Here’s my Kang La,” Karna said. “The neighborhood. Several million here, working all over Europa. The indentured, you know.”

  They rattled over the long dormitories as if over big track ties, stopping every fifty or so. At one stop Karna rose to leave the train, and Dent followed him. Out on the streets he was assaulted by hot air that smelled strongly of spices and grease. The narrow streets between the dorms were concrete, covered here and there with a scruffy green plastic turf. Karna walked down the middle of one of these streets easily, negotiating a path between the clumps of loiterers with ease. He even smiled at Dent, though his eyes were not amused. “It never changes. This is the oldest part of Kang. They even put the old Tin Can here, as a museum thing. See that building over on the corner?”

  Dent saw where the usual collection of corner shops was replaced by a low black plastic dome, badly pitted. “That’s the first Jovian colony,” Karna said.

  “Is it really?” Dent cried. “Is it open? Can we take a look inside?”

  “Sure.” Karna consulted his watch. “A quick look, then.” They approached it. “See, it says here by the door. Established 2175, occupied until the activation of the sphere in 2985. Average population eight thousand.”

  “But it’s so small.”

  “A lot of it was taken apart, and besides, it’s mostly below the surface.”

  “Still!” The whole population of his terra Holland did not exceed eight thousand. “It is terribly small.”

  “True. They really packed in.”

  They entered the little dome. Inside there were no windows; just rooms, low-ceilinged and narrow. Dent could hardly believe how cramped and drear it looked. Even the shabby streets above were filled with air and light … And here, he thought, in this grounded space tug and others like it, human beings had lived out their existences for nearly eight hundred years. Over eight hundred years. It was beyond belief.

  Dent stopped moving from room to room and just stared into one closetlike bedroom. A whole life spent in this chamber, establishing the foothold in space. In these compartments every representative art brought memories of Earth, and therefore they brought pain. Music was the only art that did not remind them of their sensory deprivation; music, the expansion of the one sense left to them. Looking around Dent could feel the importance music must have had, he could feel the intensity of those strange Jovian composers, with their tiny foregrounds and their vast backgrounds.… “No wonder,” he said to Karna. “No wonder the Accelerando burst out of here with such manic force. Imagine living in such an attenuated culture, and then being given all those worlds.” Karna nodded. Dent felt a quiver of claustrophobia. “This explains a lot.”

  “It explains the Accelerando, that’s f
or sure,” Karna said, leading the way out. “Now let’s go meet Yananda.”

  Back on the bright hot street Dent said, “After that even these dorms look spacious.”

  Karna laughed sourly. “That’s why they leave the old Tin Can there.”

  They crossed a narrow canal and turned up a street more crowded than the rest. Men and women in cheap one-piece oversuits carried parcels wrapped in plastic. Children darted around laughing and shrieking, jumped off dorm steps, chased each other. Empty plastic bags tumbled across the intersections, propelled by air shoved out of street vents. The smell of spicy fried food filled the air. A group of young men and women stood in a circle, plugged into each other via the computer jacks surgically implanted in their necks. And here and there bodies lay like corpses in the gutters, their heads completely encased in plain metal boxes: an obscene sight. “Sensoriums,” Karna said, seeing Dent’s expression. Dent stared at them, still shocked by the sight of people who allowed their bodies to be mechanically invaded. Cyborgs—they were no more than sensational rumors in the outer terras. Looking back at one he almost tripped over an old woman in a long black coat, sitting in the gutter. Hastily he caught up with Karna.

  At one intersection there was an open area, too small to be called a plaza. It was ringed by cafes and small markets, and people sat in circles on the old green plastic carpet. Karna led Dent into one of the cafes, and they sat down and ordered drinks. “See anyone you know?” Dent asked.

  “No.” A small smile stayed tucked under Karna’s black moustache. “I left Europa twenty years ago. Broke my indenture. By now everyone I know will have been transferred to different cities.”

  “Why?”

  “They do it to disrupt the communities. Look—there’s Yananda, outside with someone. Here, Dent, sit at this next table and watch us. Pretend you’re not with us. Just drink your White Brother and listen until they go or until I tell you differently. And if all three of us leave together, follow.”

  Dent plopped down at the table behind Karna’s. Yananda came in with another man and greeted Karna warmly. “Karna, this is Charles. Charles is a Grey.”