The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  A moment of silence. Dent had to force himself to keep looking down at his table.

  “How come you aren’t wearing the right clothes?” Karna asked.

  “I have a dispensation,” Charles said hoarsely, and sat. “I am to observe, to be eyes, to seek out corruption.”

  “Well, you’ve found it here,” Yananda said easily, ordering a drink as he sat beside Charles.

  “Where else have you found it?” Karna asked.

  “In the Greys themselves,” the man croaked. “There is corruption in the Greys, and who shall I then report to? Zervan is too far removed, I cannot reach him. Yananda here suggested I report to you, that you might be able to do something.”

  “I might,” Karna said. “I can certainly help you. Tell us about this corruption.” He ordered a bottle of the White Brother, and the waiter brought over three little glasses and a bottle filled with the milky fluid that Dent was already drinking.

  “The Greys are Mithraists,” Charles croaked, and wiped his mouth. “We are sun worshippers, and our religion has its roots in the dawn of history, in Persia. We believe Sol to be a god, an all-powerful sentient being who creates us from his own essence and then controls us, and everything else in the system.”

  “I thought Mithraism died out under the Roman empire,” Yananda said, “when the emperors became Christian.”

  “Into hiding we went,” said Charles. “From the fall of Rome to the establishment of the Mercury colony, we were hidden. Thus one source of our trouble; parts are hidden from other parts still. But on Mercury we came out into the open again.”

  “Pythagoreans, Phoenixes, Kirlians—all these secret religions,” Karna said. “Why did you choose to join the Greys, Charles?”

  “I was called.” Voice hoarse, low, croaking with pain. “So I joined and I thought, I will learn their secrets and sell them on the outside. Like I am to you now. But now my motive has changed. I am truly a Grey, now, and I am … disturbed at the corruption, outraged by the perversion of the order. There are hierarchies, levels on levels … the highest is on Icarus, but no fox will ever reach Icarus. Everywhere else, disruption of what should be. This worship of your musician Wright—”

  “What’s this?” Yananda said. Karna silenced him with a sharp glance.

  “There are two manifestations of the sun among us, Mithras and Sol. Mithras is Zervan, the Father of Fathers, who rules Icarus. Sol—his is a secret task, he wanders from being to being. Now the Lion of Jupiter and the exiled Lion of Mars and their followers say that your musician is Sol. The rank and file Foxes—we must obey and follow, although we have very wise leaders of our own who tell us this worldly involvement is foolish, and dangerous. Some of the Foxes tried to kill Wright to save our religion from this.… The Lion of Oberon had them executed.”

  “Hmmm.” Karna and Yananda took sips of the White Brother. Dent nervously ordered another glass for himself from a passing waiter, and when it came he drank some of the fiery liquor in a big gulp.

  “So some important Greys think Wright is Sol,” Karna said. “And they’re following him downsystem. To what end?”

  Charles said, “I only know I am part of a contingent of Greys ordered to Mars. I am to learn more on Mars.”

  “Can we meet you there?”

  “I know not. I believe we will attend the concert on Mars; this will take us to Olympus Mons.”

  “We’d like to see you before that.”

  “The Greys have no home on Mars. I know not where we’ll be.”

  “Could you call us?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Good enough. This will be our number in Burroughs. If we don’t hear from you before, we’ll expect to see you at the Festival.”

  Scraping chairs, they all stood. Dent glanced up and saw that Charles was a portly long-haired man, his black hair shot with strands of white. The three said farewells. Then Karna said out of the corner of his mouth, “Follow him, Dent.”

  “What?”

  “Follow him”—with a hard kick at his chair. Dent stood, found the White Brother had quite a punch. “We’ll pay your bill,” Karna said, lips still motionless. “Get after him.”

  How far? Dent wanted to ask, but the look in Karna’s eye discouraged idle curiosity. He left the cafe and looked around the little square. Shock of black and white hair—he hurried after the man, saw it was a long straight street, crossed it and followed the man at a slower pace, looking down or at the buildings beside him as much as he dared. Observing the man while not looking at him: Dent could not quite get the hang of it, and his head swivelled in ceaseless motion, down at the pavement, up at Charles, then quickly away to other passersby, to the windows facing him, quickly back to Charles, and so on. Anyone watching him would have suspected something immediately. And Charles did take a few looks back, especially after making turns at intersections. But he appeared not to notice Dent.

  They crossed a bridge and were on the long pontoon island of the elevated train. Inside the train station Dent got into line just eight people behind Charles, and bought a ticket for the commercial district. Up on the trash-littered, noisy waiting platform Dent sat down against a wall, where old circles of spit dripped hard dry tailings over the faces of advertising celebrities. Dent had just noticed this and was busy sitting upright when Charles was joined by a tall man. After a quick glance around, Charles began to tell the man something, gesturing back at the slums. The man nodded and spoke, and as Dent watched him he felt a terrible jolt of recognition. Tall, bony face; if the man had red whiskers painted across his cheeks—yes! It was him! Dent slumped over and stared intently at his shoes. A train rumbled in, rolling the lighter rubbish over the dirty decking. Dent ventured a single eyeball-wrenching look up, and saw Charles and the tall men get on the train. When the train had whooshed out of the station Dent breathed at last, stood up and hurried back down to street level. He would have to tell Karna immediately.

  Then it struck him that the street he was walking down looked just like all the other streets in this district. No street signs, either. Just dorm after dorm after dorm, all covered by the harsh smell of burning pepper oil. How would he find them?

  And this street—it wasn’t as crowded as the rest had been. Only small knots of men standing on stoops here and there, watching Dent walk by. Dent picked up his pace, and noticed that one of the groups was now trailing down the block after him. In these regular streets he could never outrun them—besides, now three of them stood ahead of him. Dent swallowed hard, his pulse racing. He glanced from side to side, without a plan, and was forced to a halt by the three men in front of him. They were linked by cords that ran from neck to neck, and two of them had metal boxes for hands. The men behind him fanned out.

  “What are you doing here?” one of them said.

  Dent cleared his throat. “I came here with a man who lived here. Karnasingh Godavari. We were going to look at the Tin Can.”

  “We show you another Tin Can.”

  “But I thought there was only one,” Dent said.

  “We show you another,” the man said, but stopped, distracted by something behind Dent. Dent turned, and relief rushed into him like air; Karna was hurrying up to them. Still, there must have been ten or twelve men surrounding him.… Karna just walked through them to Dent’s side, and surveyed them one by one. They stepped back. Dent glanced up at his friend, and understood. It wasn’t just that Karna was big; at this moment he also looked distinctly insane, his gaze cross-eyed or somehow unfocused (or focused on all of them at once), with a foolish little smile lighting all his features.… These men had to respect the possibility that he might be one of those machine humans, death rays in his fingertips, painkiller for blood … they were fairly common in this most degraded planetary system, and these men had probably seen such cybernetic killers in action before. Only Dent knew that it was just plain old human Karna beside him, flexing his fingers and grinning like a moron berserker to keep the little band of thugs at bay. With another chill
ing look around Karna led Dent out of the group and down the street. At the next intersection Yananda ran up—“He found you!” he panted—and they continued on to the train station. Dent stammered out what he had seen. “It was Red Whiskers! That Charles met Red Whiskers, only the whiskers are gone now, but it was him—I recognized him.”

  Karna frowned. “We’ll talk about it when we get back.” He looked mystified. “Good work, Dent.”

  * * *

  When the three men reported what they had seen and heard to Margaret, she scratched her head. “Yananda, how did you meet this Charles? In detail.”

  “I came to Kang La and went to the home the Greys keep out on one of the dorm islands. They have enough people to control a block and the little square at the intersection, and when I was there they were having some sort of ceremony in the square. When they were done they all started to leave the square. One of them that passed me was crying, so I thought, here’s one that’s upset, maybe he’ll want to talk. He said the meeting had been very upsetting. That Greys were killing Greys in the Uranus system, and that he feared for the order. He said, ‘It’s breaking into factions.’ I told him I was very curious and wanted to hear more—I told him I had a friend who would pay very highly to hear more, because he was concerned about the Greys too, as apparently they had tried to kill his friend Johannes Wright. At that he declared that the attack had been heresy, and we deserved an explanation. So I called up Karna and set up the meeting for when you all got here.”

  “And then he went off with the man who robbed Dent.” Margaret shook her head. “I don’t like it. But this man Charles is our key, no matter who he’s working for. He’s our entry point, understand?”

  “Exactly,” Karna said.

  “So make sure you find him on Mars, and follow him all the way back to his source.”

  inclusion: free absorption

  For Johannes the tour of the Jovian moons was a blur of broken light over broken sound. He tinkered with the taped portions of his work during the long hours off, worked on the programs and read Holywelkin’s notebooks, and tried to figure out just what was missing. During the concerts he could scarcely hear, and his live contribution consisted of desultory, almost random explorations, until he roused himself and exerted some discipline. One did not have to be able to hear to compose music; there were enough examples of the deaf composers who had come before him, dealing with theoretical patterns weaving through time. Glints: as they blew away from each other in the ultra-high energy collisions in the Great Synchrotron, they left patterns on the plates like nautilus spirals, or hyperbolas, or knuckleballs. Take the plates as the score and the progression of notes was clear; a composition could be written that was the precise musical analogy of the experiment. But that was only a start. The real task was to compose the precise musical analogy of glints in the real world, outside the experiments. He could program the computer with Holywelkin’s interminable equations, without understanding the equations themselves. And then certain initial situations could be programmed, such as solar energy hitting one of the power stations, being transformed to a whiteline, emerging in a whitsun, casting light on one of the outer worlds. The result was quite a beautiful score. But what instrumentation was called for? What was the sound of a glint? Tonal qualities, range of pitches, what did this mean on the sub-subatomic scale? Every concert he gave was a meditation on the topic, and it angered him that the roars of the crowds altered the acoustics so drastically. Something was wrong with the response to music around Jupiter: desperate dionysiacs, they had lost that balance with the apollonian that made Pluto the ideal musical culture. Still, this round of concerts gave him a chance to work intensively, and he felt he was closer to the method to be used in the Ten Forms of Change, even though he was not sure what more he needed to do, what else the work required of him. He was tired.

  But by and by the tour came to Ganymede, Holywelkin’s moon; before Holywelkin moved to Pluto in 3013, he had lived in a little house hidden by a garden off the Hapsburgstrasse in Wien, Ganymede. Now the house was a dusty museum, and as Master of the Orchestra Johannes was welcomed and given the run of the place. In one of the back rooms were stacks of notebooks, the actual artifacts themselves. Margaret sat and waited for him in the sunny kitchen, playing with some kittens and the red silk-tasselled rope that kept visitors from handling the various crockery and utensils of the great man. Johannes sat down at a table and picked up the first pile of notebooks. “A lot of Orchestra people have been here to see the place,” said the ancient woman who served as curator. Margaret looked into the room curiously. “What’s that?” Margaret said.

  “Are all these notebooks transcribed into the data banks?” Johannes asked urgently, looking at the stacks.

  “All of them, yes. Took twenty years.”

  Johannes’s head ached with the effort of focusing the photoptic cells. “And all of them were transcribed.”

  “Yes. There’s scribbling on the covers, though—see there?—patterns, holophone numbers, little faces, appointment times. Now most of that was left out of the computer record, naturally. Here—they fit the slip covers perfectly if you’re careful. Is there one in particular you want to look at?”

  “No. I want to browse a bit. Do they have titles?”

  “Some do. Others only have numbers. We’ve catalogued them ourselves, you see. Arthur just left them piled in here when he moved to Pluto.”

  “In a hurry, no doubt.”

  “Oh no,” the old woman said. “At least—I don’t think so.”

  “Just joking.” He set to the task of looking through them. Checking the catalogue, digging the appropriate notebook from its case, going through it; it took time. There was no listing for Fairfax in the catalogue, no listing for Icarus. Under Travels he found several notebooks filled with what appeared to be close descriptions of life on Mars. Nothing about Icarus. He replaced those notebooks and went back to the catalogue. In this kitchen doorway he saw Margaret’s foot, tapping slowly in the air as she patiently waited. Already it had been hours.

  He looked up the Orchestra, and again was referred to several notebooks. The first on the shelf was free of dust. Inside were descriptions and pictures of old orchestrions, orchestrinas, player pianos, synthesizers mechanique. Then notes, instruction to the glassworks, programs, sketches. Hundreds of sketches. Once Holywelkin had thought to place the control booth outside the thing. In other sketches the keyboards were arrayed around a crow’s nest in the statue’s top. Finally it came to the form Johannes knew. Electrical blueprints looked like drawings of the nervous system of some mythological creature, a dragon or medusa. Then a thick file of correspondence with the Telemann Works, the Terran instrument makers Holywelkin had dealt with. Johannes began to understand that the greater part of Holywelkin’s fortune had gone to the construction of the Orchestra. This kind of material could have kept him occupied for days; but it was in the computer, and he had a specific story to search for. He closed the notebook.

  There on the cover—Master 9, in a big solid inky scrawl. He felt the skin of his neck goosepimple, and shivered convulsively. Above it: How To Tell, and a long scrawl leading down to that large Master 9. This among random words and numbers scribbled on the cover; in that it resembled all the other covers, for they were Holywelkin’s reminder pads, palimpsests of the daily routine. But this one—in darker letters:

  Johannes roused Margaret from a catnap, and they left the museum after thanking the old woman. “Find anything?” Margaret asked.

  “No.” He was afraid to talk about it; he wished Margaret didn’t even know of his search, he wished he had never started it. Margaret took his arm to help him along the street, as he was missing curbs. How many years had passed since Holywelkin had scribbled that message on his notebook’s cover, there among the appointments and numbers and odd phrases he had scratched down? Three hundred years, almost to the year. Writing a note to a man three hundred years in the future.…

  “Watch out, Johannes,�
�� Margaret snapped. “You’re going to get bowled over if you don’t.”

  “Aren’t we almost there?”

  “Yes. Here.”

  “Thanks, Margaret. I’ll join you in a while.” He hurried through the bright yellow and chrome halls of their hotel. Blast of bent light from one chromatic room; someone inside, reading the tarot. Onto the tour floor, where there was some singing, and a chess game. Around back of the hotel was the big basement storage chamber. Marie-Jeanne and several other security people were at the doorway, sitting against the wall or standing around.

  Johannes said, “Don’t let anyone else in.”

  It was almost dark inside, and Johannes stretched the muscles that would help the photosensitive opening of the apertures of his eyes. Orchestra in the center of the room, reaching at the ceiling. Tree growing up through the cellar, break into the house, strangle the inhabitants, steal their lives, live their lives for them. He approached and climbed through the piano bench entrance. After all the schools and all the traveling, this was the doorway to his one true home. He had spent more hours here than anywhere else. Glass tree the material counterpart of his tangled soul. Up the glass steps, twisting and ducking at all the right places, not seeing the tiny bass and treble clef signs inlaid in every step.…

  But this time there was something unknown there, in one of the boxes. Transmission box, full of transmitters and microchip boards and wires; the piano, harpsichord, celesta; three synthesizers, the choirbox, the godzilla. Other than that, only the little pulley boxes at the joints in the glass branches, holding wires so that they looked like the bridges of cellos. No room there.

  He climbed up out of the control booth, up the small footholds on one of the main arms. Out over the forest of basses; a fall could be dangerous. He opened the top of the harpsichord and found it empty. Back down, then, to the piano, the synthesizers. Nothing in the piano, no room for anything in the synthesizers. He climbed again, up beyond the control booth, the thick glass arms, up into the network of delicate branchings, where a dim night light reflected from a thousand surfaces. The celesta: white box of polished wood, cast among the flutes and clarinets as a sort of counterbalance to the big instruments below. Opening the soundbox revealed a shortening row of metal bars, there for the hammers’ striking. No one would ever tune those bars: a good hiding place. And there it was, held against the side of the box by two small brackets. A notebook very like the ones at the museum.