The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It was a minor affair compared to the big accident, of course, but this had been deliberate, and in the outer terras the shock of the news eventually shifted to a morbid fascination: Spandel of Vermeer was remembered ever after in songs, programmatic symphonies (pogrommatic symphonies, Vaccero called them sourly), operas.…

  “And here’s the whiteline that did it,” Sean said, pointing at the bottom of the window.

  “You’d think they’d have shut it off for good,” said Sara.

  “It provides the whitsun for Tortuga as well,” Sean replied. “There, see it?”

  Whitelines are so named for the distortion of the stars seen through them; the lines themselves are invisible pencil beams of higher dimensions, in which the laws of the macro-world no longer obtain. Inside the beam they now looked at, free glints escaped the tight curvature of the higher dimensions and snapped to their moment of fiery emergence in the whitsun at the end of the beam. But starlight seen through the beam stretched with it, in an effect similar to a gravitational lens, so that the beam appeared a transparent white line, and as the ship moved, shifting the crew’s viewpoint, stars nearing the line suddenly stretched and disappeared into it, while other stars suddenly coalesced out of the line and popped back into the network of constellations. Strange sights. Perhaps it was the strangeness of whitelines that caused the constant speculation concerning them; or perhaps it was their evident power. For whatever reason, tales concerning the powers of whitelines were common. Some said that too close an approach to a whiteline would duplicate the spaceship and everyone on it; others said that material objects placed in an uncapped whiteline would be instantly transported an immense distance across the universe—a theory that was actually being tested on Mars; while others said that if this latter story were true, it meant that the objects were being projected into the past.…

  “I’m going to get something to eat,” Vaccero said, disturbed at the visible proof of such discontinuities in the real. He left the suite, walked down the halls toward the elevator. He wasn’t really hungry. Passing one of the practice rooms a voice called him—“Anton!”

  It was Johannes. Vaccero stopped in the doorway, and watched the slight powerful hands bounding up the keyboard of a black piano. Johannes smiled at him. Always the same, Vaccero thought, cheerful and unconcerned, friendly, not very perceptive.… Johannes waved at the empty piano backing his. “Anton! Do you want to play?”

  Vaccero swallowed convulsively, shook his head. “Work to do, Johan, I’m on my way to it.”

  “Ach,” Johannes said, but Vaccero was already off down the hall, the knot tighter than ever in his stomach, pursued by quick descending arpeggios that mocked his retreat; and he heard again, in two voices, the child’s and the man’s, “Anton! Do you want to play?”

  For they had been schoolmates. Childhood friends.

  They had both attended the Vancouver Conservatory, in the town of Vancouver on the far side of Pluto, up at the head of the Plenka Valley. Vancouver was a pleasant string of green half-globes, a quiet town on the edge of the night, as far away from Lowell as one could get on Pluto. At the conservatory they were very serious and thorough; everyone on Pluto learned music in their home, often under quite rigorous instruction, and so to justify its existence the school had to do more. Learning several instruments, and the elements of composition, was just the beginning. It was an old school with a long tradition (the third Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra had been trained there, as they always said) and the work was hard. Anton, one of the lucky children accepted to the school, had gone planning to become the next De Bruik; he was certain he had in him a whole world of new music. He had arrived on the same day as Johannes Wright, and so they were given adjacent rooms in the dorm. In the next room was a girl named Elyse.

  In the years that followed they became fast friends. But early on the work began to oppress Anton; he found he was barely up to it, and he became frightened sometimes. His friends were a comfort. In the evenings when they each practiced alone in their soundproofed rooms it occurred to him that they were actually composing trios in some telepathic way. He was sure the trios were beautiful. When he mentioned the idea to the other two, Johannes insisted they tape their practices and then play the tapes all at once; they did it, and Johannes and Elyse laughed madly the whole hour.

  Then Anton changed, and found he was in love with Elyse. He gave her significant looks and self-conscious caresses, and her response was accommodating enough to allow him to think she felt as he did, although it took some imagination. Johannes, now, was still in love with music only. Anton imagined Elyse and him performing together during the annual recital week; playing the principles in that year’s opera, The Lovers of Phobos; being acknowledged a serious couple.

  It hadn’t turned out that way. One day after their deeplearning class they were led onto the roof porch, still disoriented by the drugs and the subliminal imagery. Anton had determined to ask Elyse to play with him during the recital week, and he followed her. Persephone’s light shattered in her thick yellow hair, and in his ears the chattering voices still sounded, as they were meant to: Music is the relation between the sound, the listener, the emotion evoked, and the context. We call the sound the sign, the emotion the signification; but all parts contribute to the whole.… As always when the deeplearning drugs were used, Anton was in a highly wrought state in which everything was striking and significant; the whole world sang to him. A stiff breeze raked the rooftop, one of Vancouver’s innumerable flocks of swallows turned all at once in the air over him—magic!—and his fellow students’ faces were wide-eyed, attentive to inner trains of thought, to the voices. Beyond the hemisphere of air over Vancouver the surface of Pluto was blacker than the night sky. Anton approached Elyse, asked her, “W-will you play a duet with me during recital week? I’ve written a four-handed thing for us.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Johan and I are playing, and that will take up all my turns.”

  The pit of his stomach had risen to clutch at his heart. He turned away. Johannes stood on a rooftop corner, facing the wind and singing nonsense syllables, up and down, up and down. Persephone blared on them, the other students wandered in circles, the wind made his eyes water and suddenly everything was stripped clear, the flagstones of the rooftop sharply individuated, everything painfully bright.

  And so the recital week occurred just as he had imagined it, only it was Johannes with Elyse, at every point. Anton hated them both; but it was a piteous hatred, mixed with envy and jealousy, and the desire that things return to the way they had been, and it made him miserable.

  But that was just the start. Everyone suffers disappointments of this sort, in the throes of adolescence; a year or two later and Anton hardly remembered it, although underlying all of his interactions with Johannes there was now an undercurrent of dislike. And this was reinforced by something even more serious than the affair with Elyse; for musically Johannes was surging off into realms of his own, astonishing classmates and teachers alike; while Anton could barely keep up with the required work. Anton knew he had the greater potential, but this knowledge began to slip under the pressure of the real. Subtleties of compositional theory escaped him, and he began to recall with great bitterness his childhood certainty that he would become the next De Bruik. It had been, apparently, only a foolish dream. And at the same time he had to watch the meteoric progress of his hated friend! He felt as though his music were being stolen from him. He got so far behind in his work that the school took him in hand and forced him through the deeplearning classes that would allow them to graduate him. They gave him a degree and sent him away.

  After that he was sick of music, and he became a lighting technician in Lowell. New problems beset him. He heard that Johannes had been named apprentice to the Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra, and even at his remove in time and space the news cut him. He entertained black fantasies of musical revenge, of becoming the renegade genius, the Partch of the age. When he heard of Johannes
’s troubles with the Orchestra’s board of directors he realized that Johannes had usurped that role as well. It seemed nothing was left for Anton to be! One day he was reading a life of Keats (he loved Keats for his burst of genius, for his darkly romantic end; he felt he was a Keats of sorts, living beyond his own death), and he came across a passage in one of the poet’s letters:

  My dear fellow I must let you know that as there is ever the same quantity of matter constituting this habitable globe—as the ocean notwithstanding the enormous changes and revolutions taking place in some or other of its demesnes—notwithstanding Waterspouts whirlpools and mighty Rivers emptying themselves into it, it still is made up of the same bulk—nor ever varies the number of its Atoms—And as a certain bulk of Water was instituted at the Creation—so very likely a certain portion of intellect was spun forth into the thin Air for the Brains of Man to prey upon it—You will see my drift without any unnecessary parenthesis. That which is contained in the Pacific and lie in the hollow of the Caspian—that which was in Miltons head could not find room in Charles the seconds—he like a Moon attracted Intellect to its flow—it has not ebbed yet—but has left the shore pebble all bare—I mean all authors of the present day—who without Miltons gormandizing might have been all wise Men.

  Thus Anton realized what had happened to him. He had been born into the Age of Johannes Wright—Johannes had drawn to himself all the available creative genius of the time, like a singularity bursting all its bubbles and sucking everything in—and there was nothing left for Anton to do but to try to forget all his dreams, all his hopes.

  This strand of thought never left him, even when it was overlaid with more adult problems and disappointments, which threatened to overwhelm him in their turn. The disastrous marriage to Janet, her desertion, these had to be coped with, and it was hard. One day talking to Janet on the holo he had truly forgotten the medium and tried to embrace her, to hold her to him; falling through her he suffered a breakdown of a kind, and had to be helped away.

  Then one day on the commons of Lowell he had seen Janet, whom he had thought on Triton. He had chased her, and when he caught her and pulled her around by the arm she had melted before his eyes into Johannes Wright, breathing fire at him. The apparition had run off laughing, and Anton had collapsed, the fear of insanity stabbing through him. Then soon after that, in another holo room, he had sat like a stone, delaying his responses so that that awful Olga would think he had left Lowell for Copernicus, as he claimed to have done … delaying all of his responses the full ten seconds, and then when he did speak he told her that he loved her and that she should come to Copernicus to be with him … So that when Olga had left Lowell for Copernicus and he was out of danger (the woman had been mad!), he had felt the power of the lie, the exhilaration of deception; and when the bearded stranger approached him and explained that he had been deceived into practicing the deception, that Olga had acted her part … along with his anger he had felt an incredulous admiration. Here was a deception even more powerful than his, an art of it.… That was his introduction into metadrama, made for him by Master Ekern. The vision of Janet becoming Johannes had been metadrama as well. He had been supposed to learn that Janet was evil for him, Johannes as well. “And you see it was an act to flay you to life,” Ekern said intently. “In this world we live behind veil after veil of illusion, we cushion ourselves from reality in great tissues of lies, until we live like mummies, already dead. The work of the order is to trick these lies away, to strip away all illusions and sorrows and make all these poor players see what a world they live in.”

  So Anton had become apprentice to Master Ekern, in the secret art; and so began another sequence of wrenching, bitter, anxious days.

  … In the hallway of the great Orion Vaccero shook his head hard, clearing it of shadows. Out a little hall window he could still see the whiteline, bending starlight. And there was the whitsun burning at its end, illuminating the faery lamp of Tortuga’s blue bubble, there amongst the stars in the pulsing blackness of space. What a world they lived in, how strange and mysterious!—and yet suddenly Vaccero saw the analogy on which it had all been constructed. For the giant Sol was like the greatness of the human heart, bursting with heat and life; and whitelines were like human desires, firing invisibly away from the heart; and the scattering of whitsuns were like human goals, blazing off in the distance, illuminating the perfect little worlds of our dreams. And with an inchoate solar flare of pain arching out of the sun in his chest, Anton Vaccero realized that for him the whiteline machinery was broken beyond repair.

  ten dimensions

  “What about these ten dimensions,” Dent said to Johannes one day. “Just what does Holywelkin mean by them?”

  They were in the Alnilam Chamber, looking at the broad tapestry of stars; the constellation that was their ship’s namesake stood before them, perpetually taking aim with the arrow that would never fly. Johannes pursed his lips at Dent’s phrasing.

  “It’s not just what Holywelkin means by them,” he said. “They really exist, you know.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “And you see the evidence for them all around you. You have lived in them all your life.”

  “The whitsuns, you mean.”

  “The whitsuns and all the other manipulations of the higher dimensions.”

  “But what are they? And how did we discover them?”

  Johannes shoved his hands in his pockets, looked at the floor. “It began long ago, when a mathematician named Theodor Kaluza tried to explain electromagnetism by introducing the idea of a fifth dimension to the geometry of spacetime. Mathematically it was interesting, but as no fifth dimension could be found, the idea was abandoned. Then a Swedish physicist named Oskar Klein proposed that the fifth dimension was so tightly curved that any particle that moved in that direction would return to its starting place after moving only a microscopic distance. This would explain why we did not perceive the fifth dimension, and mathematically it also helped very much to explain quantum jumps of various kinds.”

  “You mean particles were jumping in the fifth dimension.”

  “Yes—or to be more exact, they would take short flights in the fifth dimension, and return in a slightly different place, and so look as if they had pulsed from one position to the next.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, mathematically, if one dimension like that could be postulated, any number could, and all sorts of movement on the subatomic scale could be explained as something more than an arbitrary given of Nature. In those early years there were mathematicians who proposed that there were as many as nine hundred and fifty dimensions! But for the physicists, as the years passed, the number necessary to explain subatomic motion was pared down. Mauring finally made the fullest theoretical model with her geometry of ten dimensions, five macro and five micro. But all this time, remember, it was uncertain whether these dimensions really existed, or were just useful mathematical tools. Only the immense energies made available to the Great Synchrotron and the Orbital Gevatron made it possible to find actual evidence of the micro-dimensions. And even then only Holywelkin recognized the data for what it was. But he did, and so here we are. Those whitelines we pass are discontinuities where, to put it simply, the sixth and seventh dimensions are penetrating our familiar four. A Holywelkin sphere is a bubble of the eighth dimension interacting with ours, and a whitsun is the energy of Sol bursting out of the higher dimensions into our world. And by these signs we know those dimensions are real.”

  “Amazing,” Dent said. “But what about the fifth macro-dimension? Why can we perceive the other four macro-dimensions, and not that one?”

  “An interesting question,” Johannes said with his inward smile. “And one with no clear answer. Mathematically, the fifth dimension is fairly straightforward, or so I am told. But explaining it in words has proved very difficult, and sometimes the explanations contradict each other. But what Mauring said, and Holywelkin generally agreed with her, is that the fift
h dimension is a sort of reverse time. The fourth dimension, time as we usually think of it, moves in one direction, while the fifth, which Mauring called Antichronos, moves in the opposite direction, and it is the interaction of the two that gives time as we know it its particular pace, from moment to moment.”

  “So that if the fifth dimension were stronger, time would be … slower?”

  “Yes, it’s not an impossible concept, the speed of time. Physicists have a smallest quantum unit of time flow, called the hadon—there are about ten to the twenty-fourth of them in every second. Presumably if time were slower, hadons would be longer, or something like that. The perceptual difficulties here are tremendous, and that is one reason discussion of the fifth dimension is so problematic. Holywelkin became quite mystical about it at the end, you know. He claimed that the peculiar force exerted within the discontinuity of a whiteline was such that the balance between the fourth and fifth dimensions was upset, so that a whitsun’s fire appeared before it was generated in the power station.”

  “But that’s crazy!” Dent objected.

  “True,” Johannes said, nodding. “Still, if a physicist’s mathematics work so well in the real world, one has to wonder if their metaphysical ideas might not be equally accurate. Or at least, more accurate than anyone else’s.”

  “But effects appearing before their causes act!”

  “I know. But people are testing aspects of the idea on Mars, with these whiteline probes—hoping to discover a mode of faster-than-light travel, and in my opinion murdering people in the attempt.…”

  “I’ve heard of that,” Dent said. “I’m surprised anyone would act on such an insane idea.”