The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I want to know who is attacking Johannes,” Margaret said.

  Karna shrugged. “We all want to know that. But how?”

  “What about this thing you heard in Lowell about the Greys?”

  Marie-Jeanne spoke. “I was just outside the power plant, checking to make sure we had people at all the entrances. A man wearing a grey tunic and grey pants approached me. I’ve only seen a few Greys, and I didn’t really think anything about his dress at first. He said, ‘Are you with the Grand Tour?’ and I said yes, and then he said, ‘The Greys will kill the Master this time.’”

  Dent, who was hearing this for the first time, gulped and said, “Oh my.”

  “So who are these Greys?” Margaret demanded.

  Karna looked to Yananda. Yananda, a small swarthy Indian who had worked with Karna for years, shrugged apologetically and said, “Very little is known about them. Their world is Icarus, a natural asteroid with an irregular orbit that comes very close to the sun. In fact it’s said in the Jupiter system that they are sun worshippers, and I think it may be true. But no one knows for certain. There are a lot of them on Mercury, I’ve heard, and some around Jupiter.” He shrugged again. “Another of the secret religions, like the Phoenixes, or the Magi, or the Rosicrucians.”

  “But why would they want to kill Johannes?” Margaret said.

  No one ventured a response.

  “And if they did want to kill him, why would one of them tell us about it?”

  “There may be different factions within the Greys,” Yananda said. “I heard a woman on Callisto claim that, a few years ago. She said the whole cult was in the midst of a civil war.”

  “Or it could be part of something else,” Margaret said. “A threat.”

  “It does seem like they’re trying to scare us, more than kill him,” Karna said. “That hot light on Titania—all they would have had to do was aim it right, and Johannes would have been dead. Missing him like that—it almost had to have been deliberate.”

  “Unless there was a struggle at the source of the hot light,” Yananda said.

  Margaret shook her head. “More likely it was deliberate. And that vandalism in our lounge—it’s all calculated to terrorize. But to what end? Dent, tell us again what happened to you.”

  Hesitantly Dent described his first encounter with Red Whiskers in Lowell, and then how he had caught sight of the man again in Titania. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to be seen by me,” Dent said. “He was slipping away when I saw him, and there’s no way he could have known I would be watching.”

  “Perhaps,” Margaret said. They considered what little they knew in silence. Then Margaret said, “We have to act. We can’t sit back passively and wait for the next attack, and then try to defend ourselves. We have to find out who they are, and what they’re after, and deal with them. Pre-empt them.”

  Karna and Marie-Jeanne were nodding. “Let’s go after them,” Karna said. “But we won’t be able to do that cooped on this ship.”

  “Unless they’re aboard,” Dent said, looking around the Alnilam Chamber.

  “That’s true,” said Margaret. “The vandalism shows they were aboard once.”

  “But it would help to get an outside investigation started,” Karna said. “There’s a ship leaving Grimaldi for the Jupiter system direct. I was already going to send down some people to look into security on Ganymede.”

  “All right,” Margaret said. “You’d better stay here and help me coordinate things. Yananda, you go down to Jupiter and learn what you can.”

  “Good,” said Yananda. “I’ve got friends there who will help.”

  “I’d like to help as well,” Dent said timidly.

  Margaret regarded him with skepticism. His face was still misshapen from the cut and bruise on his cheek, and Margaret thought, here’s an offer of help from a man beaten up by a sheep. But she said, “You can help us here. Maybe we can arrange some kind of trap for whoever is aboard.” She thought about it, looking disgusted, and suddenly she struck the arm of her chair. “On a tour like this we are our own police. No one plays games with me and gets away with it.”

  floating worlds

  Meanwhile great Orion blazed onward, leading its comet’s tail of followers, and as they shot across the vacuum they passed many of the scores of terras that orbited in the huge ring between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn. From the Rigel Room or the Alnilam Chamber, or through the roof of Bellatrix Hall, the passengers of Orion could occasionally spot three or four of them at once: whitsuns like stars, in a binary twirl with a little light blue soap bubble; and in each bubble discontinuity, a green world. Some of the terras grew to the size of lamps in the windows of their spaceship, where they could be closely observed by the curious travelers. Marveling in this way the voyagers rocketed past Da Vinci, which displayed a geography reminiscent of Ptolemy’s world map, in that the long boot of Italy curved over the middle of the world, and the rest of the Mediterranean surrounded it, so that the people there could live in a replica of the Renaissance; and they sped past Dvorak, whose people were steadily preparing the terra to become a starship, by stockpiling goods and creating ecospheres until their world was a little Earth, and they were ready to spin out of the solar system to meet the universe, linked only by their whiteline to home; and past The Fortunate Isles, a water world whose ocean was broken only a few times by archipelagoes, so that hardy seafarers sailed from island to island perpetually, trading under a tropical whitsun, telling the solar system’s greatest tales, and avoiding the worldwide storms that spun about the terra and whipped up waves that could even swamp the isles, and certainly could sink ships, so that one could die in The Fortunate Isles; and past Samadhi, a terra of devout Buddhists who had sculpted their land to resemble the steep misty mountains of Chinese landscape paintings, where they could sit in pavilions and drink rice wine as they contemplated the source of the peach-blossom stream; past Lebedyan, a terra founded by the utopian Anya Lebedyan, where the wishes of children were paramount in the affairs of state, and the people shared communal dorms or ventured to isolated cabins, at the whim of their children; past Reiphantasy, where the citizens grafted themselves to machines, forming cybernetic creatures that even in the Jupiter system would have been thought perverted, for very few people anywhere wanted their humanity tampered with; and past Tycho, where a people who called themselves the natchvolk expiated some ancient sin by living without a whitsun, in huts on a bare rock asteroid, in perpetual night; and past Sappho, or While-away, or An-Athos, where a civilization of women lived by themselves.

  These terras the passengers on Orion were able to recognize; others passed in the distance like marbles thrown by their faces. Little worlds, separated from the void by invisible bubbles, simple discontinuities—I suppose you, dear Reader, coming as you may from a civilization that believes in phlogiston, or from a civilization that speculates that action at a distance is accomplished by the vibration of the ether, or from a civilization that imagines it impossible to determine simultaneously both the location and the velocity of an electron—I suppose you may find such a discontinuity in the fabric of the real difficult to believe in. But consider it, Reader: do we not often see discontinuities as radical as this? Between hopes and achievements—pasts and futures—lives and deaths? And consider it, Reader: inside your skull is another bubble called the dura, a tough bag enwrapping your brain. Inside this shell is your consciousness; outside this shell is the world; methinks there is no discontinuity more radical or strange than that. Are we not all little terras, separated from the universe by bubble discontinuities? And so you see the technological achievements of our Holywelkin Age are not without a match in the world you know.

  grimaldi

  Then came the day when the soap bubble world circling its whitsun was Grimaldi. Orion braked in a fiery burst, and its passengers shuttled through Grimaldi’s bubble discontinuity to the terra’s surface.

  Anticipation filling him, Dent Ios walked out of the tiny terminal i
nto bright sunlight. He led the tour crew and even the local guide to one of the Grimaldi villages, a stand of thirty-two pruned and shaped baobab trees, planted in a star-shaped pattern of Grimaldi’s design. Long ago on Mars the utopian philosopher had had a vision of starfolk living in the environment of the African savannah, in tribal groups; here Grimaldi’s followers had made it real. In his heightened mood Dent immediately felt the rightness of the philosopher’s vision. The intense blue sky, the bright whitsun, the burnt yellow grass on a broad plain, the stands of baobab, the dark hills in the distance, the far-off herds of antelope or zebra—something about the sight was instantly familiar, instantly reassuring. The eons of human evolution had grown brains connected to this landscape, so that people’s neural patterns were aligned to it; so Grimaldi had claimed, and Dent could only nod his agreement and skip to the baobab habitat happily. He could live here. And to hear Johannes Wright in such a place …

  The crew and a group of locals ate a meal together on a deck set in the interwoven branches of two trees. From there they could see villages in the distance, against the dark brown hills. On the savannah foraged herds of zebra and gazelle, and the villagers told them of giraffes, elephants, baboons, and lions. After the meal the others went out to the granite amphitheater to prepare for the concert, and Dent was left in the milling crowd of offworlders. He wandered under the village, looked up at catwalks and open decks and box rooms set in the very highest branches of the trees. The treehouse village had the sort of intricacy that would please a child; it was all on the surface, ingeniously entwined with the trees.

  Out on the savannah the big sink holding the amphitheater was filling with people: offworlders in their variety of height, coloring and costume; the local residents small, dark, sun-burnt, and dressed in bright clothes that included liberal amounts of red. They danced to the tunes of pan pipes, and spoke English with a broad flat inflection. Four villages were visible from the edge of the ravine containing the amphitheater. In his wandering, absorbed by the sights and sounds of the crowd, Dent was scarcely aware of time passing. The rain-washed air conveyed images with perfect clarity; each blade of yellow grass called for Dent’s attention, and he stared at the clouds and people’s clothes as if newly alive. Quickly it was late in the day. People pointed at the stage of the amphitheater; Johannes was climbing into the Orchestra, into his own baobab, the tree where man was born. Dim yellow lights illuminated the glass statue, and in the twilight it stood forth clearly, in a fuzzy sphere of amber in the dusk. When Grimaldi’s whitsun touched the western horizon the Orchestra began very slowly to spin: and Johannes Wright played.

  * * *

  How does music mean? Not, you can be sure, in words. Music is a language untranslatable, it is too direct, too subtle, too … other for words. Music moves directly from the inner ear to the lower brain stem, where our emotional lives are generated; and nothing can stimulate the complex response that music does, except music itself.

  So Dent sat on his knoll above the amphitheater and listened to Johannes Wright play, as the late afternoon shaded into evening; he listened with all his mind focused, his flesh quivering slightly in the cooling air. But you, dear Reader, cannot be told what Dent heard. Words cannot describe this music.

  Still, be not annoyed with me. All is not lost. The mind is always singing, and somewhere inside each one of us pure music always flows. It flows from our bodies, the biologic symphony—heart pumping, blood pulsing, breath filling and then leaving us; it flows from the wave motion of the brain’s electrochemical activity, as thoughts fire synapses and engender their own pitch, timbre, duration, motion; it flows from the spirit’s transcendant reach, for the world beyond the world. The lush chords as you fall out of dream, the chants you hum to get you through work, the melodies spinning you off to sleep, they are greater than you know; listen to the embryo De Bruik within you, Reader, listen at last! Hear your music—hear it singing, in unforced creation—and know then that the music vibrating the twilight air on Grimaldi was somewhat like that interior majesty.

  * * *

  So Dent listened, and when the concert was done, too full of thought to talk, too full of energy to sit, he hiked off into the hills. In the cool air faces rushed by. The people of Grimaldi had watched the performance in perfect silence, and when it was over they had applauded and headed back to their villages; the offworlders were subdued by the example of the locals, and were equally quiet. Dent followed small groups through the blue-violet dusk, over nearly invisible paths. The villages were dark groves against the silvery starlit savannah grass. Voices called out softly. Fireflies blinked and left their trails of light. The pattern of village, farm, and savannah gave way to a range of low hills; here the curving trail was lighter than the surrounding ground, and Dent followed it easily. Overhead the map of the stars was dominated by a big bright one—Sol itself—and by its dim illumination Dent could see over the dark hills for kilometers. He looked at the blazing star as he climbed a low knoll. “The sun,” he said, in a voice choked with the questions only God could answer. He was completely alone now, and there was no sound but the low sough of the wind in the grass. There had been a moment in the concert, godzilla whistling over a bass susurrus, that fit this moment precisely.…

  Had it been a dream? What had happened to him down on that primeval landscape? What you give to music, music gives back tenfold; while he listened time had curved to fit the rhythm, there had been intervals when duration had expanded to infinity, and in concentrating with all his being on the dense texture of sound he had fallen into seconds as long as years. In some of those stretches he had lost all sense of self, in others he had become acutely aware of his place, he had felt himself stuck by artificial gravity to the side of a tiny asteroid orbiting the sun far beyond Saturn, in the thirty-third century after Christ.… Had it finally happened? After all the years of toil and pain, war and waste, at this late date in history, had someone finally made a music that spoke the eternal?

  The questions overwhelmed Dent, and he sat among rocks. He tried to recall what Johannes had said about his music. Dent had found the musician’s theories obscure at best, and in his confusion he had nodded and pretended to understand in order to draw Johannes on; but at the time he had assumed this was merely another sort of program music. Rather than representing the sea or the starlight or some human drama, the music was meant to represent the micro-universe, a realm understood only by the most brilliant physicists. It had not seemed to Dent an important difference. Now he recalled what Johannes had said about accurate analogy, about using Holywelkin’s actual equations to help generate the score for the music. “If that is the way the world works,” he whispered, “then it is beautiful.” Beautiful right down to its fundament. Beautiful, and something more disturbing than that—something that he couldn’t grasp in words.

  Down where the hills levelled into plain lay a village, looking like the last remnant of some great world-circling forest. There were a few lanterns lit in its trees, creating irregular globes of lit green leaves. A child’s laugh wafted by on the breeze. Dent stood and stared at the grove curiously. They had taken in the concert with such equanimity! He wanted to run down to the village and shout to them the import of what they had heard, to exhort them into the hills to dance and rejoice, to glory in the sight of the distant Sol—

  Voices from the nearby trail startled him. A group of four were traversing the hills. Their red capes looked black in the gloom. One of them carried a flashlight pointed down, bobbing a beam before them.

  “There’s someone up there,” he heard one of them say. A woman’s voice. They stopped, and the flashlight beam leaped up to shine on him.

  “Hello!” he called.

  “Hello,” the woman answered, after a pause. The flashlight beam swept down, and the four approached. “Are you lost?” the woman asked.

  “No,” Dent replied. “I thought I’d hike up where I could get a view.”

  The boy holding the flashlight turned it u
p and covered it with his hand. In the ruddy glow Dent could make out the faces of the four, watching him curiously.

  “Not much to see at night,” a short, thick man said. “You’re from offworld?”

  “Yes. I’m here with the Orchestra.”

  “Thought so.” The man’s eyes gleamed. “Have you got a dartgun?”

  “No!” Dent said. “Why?”

  The man’s teeth flashed as he grinned. “There are leopards in these hills, man. At night we cross in groups, with tranquilizer dartguns. You’d better take one of ours. You don’t want to get eaten up here.”

  “True,” Dent said. “But I don’t want to take your gun. I wouldn’t know how to get it back to you.”

  “It’s not mine,” the man said. “Just turn it in at the village when you get back. And don’t stay up here too long alone like this. Leopards are fierce beasts.”

  “I won’t,” Dent said, looking over his shoulder. The man handed him a small pistol, and the group turned back toward the trail.

  “We enjoyed the music,” the woman who had first seen him said.

  “Did you?” Dent said curiously, following them down the hillside.

  “I like the Orchestra,” the child said.

  “We did indeed,” said the woman. “We were talking about it before we saw you. It reminded me very much of dawn in our village. We have big flocks of doves, and crows, and mockingbirds, and—well—” She laughed uncertainly. “Tell us, does he play something different for every terra?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dent said. “I think he’s still working out what he wants to play.”