The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Ekern shoved his sunglasses back up his nose and observed the others in the pool. His fellow playwrights; some U.N. officials, ignorant of the fact that they were attending another convocation; a few nudes, lolling about in the shallows to suit Diana’s sense of the picturesque.… One of the U.N. people, the ambassador from Europa, waded over from the pool bar with one hand above the water. “Have a bulb of this, Ernst,” she said.

  “What is it?” He took the bulb.

  “It’s new. From South America, of course. Called the Anaconda.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ekern put the bulb down on the pool’s blue tile decking. Some of the woman’s friends drifted to their end of the pool, and Ekern was congratulated more than once. “Extraordinary Grand Tour.” “One of the best in history, I’m sure.” He could feel the eyes of the order on him. “Yes,” he said with a small smile, “it has gone well so far.”

  “That concert on Mars,” the ambassador said. “We’ve heard it stunned the entire little planet.”

  “Yes,” Ekern said, and despite himself he quivered; immersion in the water gave him the uncanny sensation of floating as he had floated over the site on the flank of Olympus Mons, and brief bright images overcame even the glarey scene before him, like holos flashing on the inside of his sunglasses, each to be quickly suppressed, that agony on the floor of time—

  He picked up the bulb, stuck the open end up one nostril, squeezed. Immediately his head felt colder. “We can’t wait until the Orchestra arrives and we can hear it ourselves,” one of the women said. “It will be marvelous.”

  Ekern nodded, concealing his contempt with a large smile. Now he was cool, very cool. Under his forearm the rough texture of the caulking between the blue tiles gleamed in the light, little chunks of pure white as in a painting by Vermeer.… “Yes,” he said, “it has gone well so far.” His eye was caught by a movement at the far end of the pool. Atargatis, slim and brown, dove into the water with a neat clip of a splash. Ekern sniffed from the bulb again. Fluid dark shapes making quantum jumps under the rippled surface: Atargatis came up beside the ambassador, giving her a start. Ekern offered him the bulb and he refused it. “I see you’re in your element,” Atargatis said to the ambassador, referring to the water world she had probably not visited in years. She nodded, unamused, and Atargatis laughed outright, so that with a curt nod she waded away. Ekern put his chin on the decking and stared at the white city in the distance, and the ambassador’s friends slowly followed her away.

  Atargatis laughed. “Enjoying the home world, Ernst?”

  Ekern felt the coldness behind his nose. “Very bright place,” he said, inspiring Atargatis to more laughter.

  “I see the locals love you.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the Grand Tour proceeds according to script?”

  “Yes. They are on Cyprus now, about to follow me here.”

  Atargatis picked up the drug bulb, sniffed at it, put it down. “I know what happened to your apprentice,” he said softly.

  Ekern felt his heartbeat quicken. “Yes?” With tinted contact lenses masking his bright eyes, it was impossible to gauge the expressions dashing about Atargatis’s face.…

  “He took the whiteline jump,” Atargatis said slowly. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “I knew,” Ekern lied. “But how did you discover it?”

  “I have my ways. He jumped into a whiteline. Was that part of your play, Ernst? Did you truly know what happened to him?” He laughed again, loudly this time. People at the other end of the pool turned to look at them.

  “I knew he would commit suicide, and I knew when,” Ekern said coldly. “The method—that was his improvisation, obviously.”

  “Of course, of course. You are as clever as Fowles, Ernst. Every part of the tour is under your control always.”

  “That’s right.”

  This brought forth more peals of laughter from Atargatis.

  “Be quieter, or they’ll come down here to listen to the jokes I tell you.”

  “Jokes indeed,” Atargatis said. “You are using materials for your metadrama that you don’t fully understand, Ernst. Do you realize that?”

  Ekern stared at the man coldly. “You don’t know what I understand.”

  “Oh but I do! I do. More things occurred on Mars that were out of your control than the death of Vaccero. The concert on Olympus Mons—”

  “I was there,” Ekern interrupted. “I saw what happened.”

  “But do you understand it? You are unleashing certain … forces, Ernst.” Suddenly the man’s mobile face was serious, even grim. “The Greys exist for a real purpose. They are like us in that sense. They are not a joke. Now they have been exiled from Mars, and that concert.… Well. They conceal what they know from humanity for the good of both parties, understand? If Wright has learned what they know, and if he reveals it to all, then you won’t be in control of the results, Ernst. No one will. Your play will burst to chaos.”

  “That won’t happen.” Ekern stared off at the glaring green jungle, trying to read Atargatis, his words, gestures, laughs and grimaces.… He appeared deadly serious; and what did that mean? He had to enlist the man, control him, use him. “With your help, we break him here. After this he won’t reveal anything—he won’t have the power no matter what he knows.”

  Atargatis’s mouth twisted down. “Perhaps.” He tossed the drug bulb over the railing.

  “You will help?” Ekern asked, involuntarily allowing a trace of tension to push at his voice. Why this stupid fear?

  Atargatis nodded. “I will help.” A small smile: “We are all actors in each other’s metadramas, are we not?” Then he was grim again: “I only hope we are not too late.”

  Then he swam away, over to the small circle of members of the order surrounding Diana. Diana was watching him—with a quick shudder Ekern turned again and looked down at the hedge maze in Diana’s broad park. Light green grass, dark green hedge, both manicured to a geometrical perfection.… He noticed that one of the hedge lines was unbroken. He followed it around again. Yes. No way to the center of the maze. He closed his eyes, opened them, waded off in search of another bulb.

  flying over earth

  The tour crew left Cyprus in a big jet-powered airplane. Looking down at the island after a loud, vibrating, frightening ascent, Margaret saw that it might perhaps be as small as the maps showed it to be. While on Cyprus she hadn’t quite been able to believe it. But now she saw the curve of the shoreline, the tops of the inland mountains, and it seemed at least possible, if not likely, that the other features of the Earth’s surface were scaled in proportion to Cyprus as the maps showed. That was the meaning of ocean, continent; they were bigger even than this giant island, this island that would hold twenty of the hemispheres on Iapetus … so that Iapetus, she now knew, was a small island indeed.

  Almost all of the crew had drugged themselves to avoid motion sickness on the jet flight across the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Atlantic. Margaret stayed to herself; she thought people were strange on the turbulence drugs. She missed Dent, and missing him she worried about him. She had dispatched a couple of the security people to Munich when she found Dent’s note, but if they couldn’t find him … he would have to take care of himself. Their timid critic (her friend) taking off on missions of his own; their musician withdrawing ever more, day by day it seemed, until he was as likely to sing nonsense as to speak—Margaret sighed. Long tours always became difficult; but this one was a category unto itself.

  It was a very bumpy ride, and Margaret moved down the jet to speak to Johannes, to keep his mind off the vibrations if they were bothering him. On the contrary, he appeared to be enjoying himself. Upon questioning he smiled, looking through her like a blind man. “It’s like traveling in a drum, rat-a-tat-a-tat.” Margaret nodded shortly and looked past him out the window. Cyprus was gone. The finely rippled blue sea rolled under them. It seemed the vibrating jet was
very fast. Then, as they crossed Africa, and passed over field after field of grain, out of the sight of any ocean, it seemed that the jet was slow. Very slow.

  When they arrived in Nueva Brasilia there was still a week before the concert was to take place, and Johannes said he wanted to get away from the crowds in the big U.N. city. The new capital was isolated and inland, far from Macchu Pichu or Cape Horn, the places he wanted to visit. Margaret explained this to him. Despite her explanation he decided he wanted to travel south, in the direction of the Cape. Margaret chartered one of the hydroplanes that ran up and down the coast of Argentina. “Some of us will have to come along,” she said to Johannes.

  “Of course,” he said, as if there had never been any question about it. Margaret sighed and began organizing the trip. In the end Karna, Delia, Sean, Sara, Rudyard and a few others joined them on the speedy train to Buenos Aires, and they boarded the chartered hydroplane together.

  at the telemann works

  Dent’s airplane arrived in Munich late in the evening; Dent debarked quite sick and disoriented. It was difficult to find assistance, call for a hotel room, find his way to the taxi line at the airport entrance, check into the hotel, and climb the short flight of steps to his room. Once there he collapsed on the bed and told himself that the vibrations were only the reverberations in his middle ear, that he was at rest at last. Very discouraged, and heartily sick of Earth’s antique modes of transportation, he fell asleep thinking that his madcap adventure had all been a horrible mistake.…

  Several times in the next few days he had good cause to repeat this judgment. He took the train out to Zorneding, a town to the east of Munich, and from the town center took the tourist bus out to the Telemann Works, a large complex of industrial buildings set in the woods south of town. Dent was one of only three offworlders in the small group of tourists that followed the English-language guide through the giant complex; he stood behind the other two as they moved from one building to the next, and said nothing. They were shown how the metal was rolled, shaped into tubes, bent into the intricate curves of horn tubing; they stood on balconies and looked down into workshops where craftspeople assembled the string instruments; they watched electrical engineers and computer specialists as they tinkered with the hardware of synthesizers. Every step in the making of musical instruments was shown to them in turn, and despite his ulterior motives Dent found it fascinating. Still he kept a close watch on their progress through the complex, and surreptitiously marked out a rough map on the pamphlet he had been given at the beginning. There were at least a score of long buildings in the complex, but it was a thorough tour, in the Germanic style; they visited seventeen before they were through. As the guide was leading them back across the parklike grounds, Dent spotted one near the edge of the complex that he was sure they had not visited. “I wonder what’s in that one,” he said to the pair of Titans, and just as he hoped, one of them sung out to the guide, “What’s in that building there?”

  The guide looked at her questioner briefly, and then said to them all, “Telemann Works is often contracted by other instrument makers to build special projects, which they wish to keep confidential. The special projects are created in that facility, which is guarded twenty-four hours a day.”

  “So,” Dent said, staring at the building with the rest. Further curiosity would be perfectly natural, he thought, and with a gulp he started to ask the guide another question, but one of the Terrans beat him to it:

  “Can you tell us who you’re building an instrument for now?”

  “Often these contractors are out to get a jump on the rest of the musical world—you understand,” the guide said easily. “Therefore that information is confidential, I’m afraid.” And then they were back to their starting point in the visitor’s center, and she bid them farewell. Free to wander the center’s museum, Dent did so for a while (the serpentine and the hurdy-gurdy looked like lovely instruments), then went out to the picnic grounds. He bought cheese and wine from the concession there, and took them to the far corner of the picnic area, where he had a view of the forbidden building. “Well,” he said to himself, “that was relatively easy.” He was pleased with himself for his detective work. On the other hand, there were the posts of an electric alarm system placed around the special projects building. And the entire complex was surrounded by a high wire fence … so … what was he to do? He stared off into the ancient hardwood forest, ate his lunch. When the tourist bus arrived to take them back to Zorneding, he got on it, utterly at a loss.

  In his room that night he mulled it over. He went for a walk in the nearby English Garden, and watched a small brass band play ancient tunes under a tall pagoda, and considered it some more. Nothing occurred to him, and he grew angry at himself. All the way to Munich, to confirm that the Telemann Works did indeed make musical instruments! And yet he couldn’t break into the complex; that simply wasn’t within his competence.…

  The next day he returned to the Telemann Works and took the tour in French. The names of the instruments were beautiful in French. As they returned to the visitors’ center he wandered off to look in the door of the forbidden special projects building, as if out of random curiosity. A worker opened the door to leave the building; peering in Dent saw a hallway and another craftsperson. Then he was collected by the guide, who patiently answered Dent’s mangled questions while he was led back to the picnic grounds.

  So much for that. The next day Dent bought a pair of binoculars, and packing a lunch and the tranquilizer dartgun he had kept since the debacle in Burroughs, he rented a car. The small electrically powered thing was slow and easy to drive, and the autobahn between Munich and Zorneding was nearly empty. He drove into the parking lot at the Telemann Works, then waited until no one else was around, and walked back out the front gate. A low knoll to the south of the complex was covered by very climbable oak trees, and he selected one and ascended it. Climbing a tree reminded him of his boyhood, when he had climbed maples, a real challenge. A good network of branches gave him a seat, a foothold, an armrest for the binoculars, and a leafy view of the forbidden building. He settled down and watched. Occasionally a craftsperson went in or out. He ate lunch, then watched the workers enter or leave until it was nearly closing time. His car was one of the few left in the visitors’ lot, but no one noticed him drive away.

  There were five more days until the concert in Nueva Brasilia. Feeling foolish, Dent booked a flight for the fourth day, and then returned to his perch in the oak tree. His back and bottom got sore; craftspeople went in and out of the forbidden building; he got bored. Certain individuals he decided were officials of the company (a small building housed them), and occasionally they visited the forbidden building, but … Dent ground his teeth and kept on watching, refusing to think about what a fool he was being. Ironic that Dent Ios, having made his momentous decision, should follow a course of action that would lead him to such a lot of pure, motionless contemplation.…

  But on the afternoon of the third day a man arrived in a rented electric car. He went past the visitors’ center to the executives’ building, carrying a large briefcase. When he emerged again a group of the executives were with him, and they led him directly to the forbidden building. Dent shoved the zoom on his binoculars to highest magnification, and held the glass firmly on the man. Long narrow face, bony cheekbones; Dent trembled, held himself steady, looked again. The man looked up his way, as if aware he was being watched, and Dent looked him straight in the eye. Red Whiskers. Dent’s branch swayed under him. He struggled down from his perch, nearly fell, slowed his progress. The gravity here was enough to bring one to harm.… He slipped between trees, hopped into the parking lot as unobtrusively as possible, and hurried to his car. Inside he tried to compose himself, to slow his heartrate by deep breathing. He went through his plans, and checked the dartgun to make sure it was loaded. Some mix of tranquilizer and truth drug. Well …

  The man was escorted out to his car by a pair of the executives. He was s
till carrying the briefcase. Dent started his car and when Red Whiskers drove out, he followed. He kept his distance on the country road leading in to Zorneding, then on the autobahn he closed on the man’s dark green car. As they drove into Munich Dent became more and more nervous. He kept cars between them to avoid being too obvious, then closed up when the fear of losing the man grew to something like panic.

  Down in the old quarter of town, near St. Peter’s Church, the man drove slowly over a cobblestone street and pulled up to a curb. Dent drove past him, double-parked his car and leaped out. Red Whiskers was already walking the other way, briefcase in hand. Dent skipped down the sidewalk, his heart racing like the percussion in De Bruik’s Madness. He took the dartgun from his pocket, hid it inside his coat flap. Now he walked behind Red Whiskers. He hesitated, then remembered the attack on Lowell, the kick to his ribs. He aimed the dartgun at the man’s neck and fired five times, click click click click click. Red Whiskers exclaimed, turned around, saw him, looked confused. Dent glanced around; no one watching. Red Whiskers was reaching into his coat pocket. Dent shoved him and he tumbled back, sat down hard. He could barely lift his head. Dent put the dartgun back in his pocket, grabbed the man’s briefcase in both hands, tugged it away from him. The man could only mutter feebly, head back on the pavement. Dent raced to his car. Someone shouted. He leaped in and pushed the accelerator to the floor, nearly ramming a car ahead of him. His heart was beating too fast, he could feel the pressure of his blood making his eyes pop, his hands tremble. Around a corner, another, another still. The image of Red Whiskers struggling feebly on the sidewalk came to him again, and he groaned; he might have killed the man! Who knew what that many darts would do?

  He drove to the car rental and returned the car. Walking back to his hotel with the briefcase he recalled that Red Whiskers had seen him. So it was at least possible that he knew who Dent was. Name tracing.…