The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Johannes took it down to the control booth, turned on a reading light, opened the notebook. He read for a while, skipped pages, read, skipped pages, read again, all helplessly. Pages of spare black handwriting:

  … proceeded from Mercury to intercept Icarus on its approach to perihelion, when it will halve the distance from sun to Mercury, and spin only thirty million kilometers from the star. This close approach is apparently what drew these people here. And I? Drawn by these strange people, and their invitation: “seen close enough Sol provides the solution to your problem,” this followed by exactly the formulations that stopped me for over four years. How did they know? Could they be working along similar lines?

  At first sight the asteroid seems uninhabited. Roughly spherical, about fifty kilometers in diameter, banged hard at one end recently, good fresh crater there, quite large and flat. Landed at a spaceport on cracked blackened basaltic achondrite. Big plates of this overlaid the usual carbonaceous chondrite mounds. Crater rims, low hummocks, scattered boulders, from pebbles to rocks the size of city hall.

  So I was dropped off the ship like a pack of goods and left on the pad. Shooed off to one side so that the ship could take off again. Light smattering of dust and it was gone. I walked off the edge of the pad onto the dust, feeling the near absence of gravity. A push with the toes, and off into space—pirouette—touch down lightly, in a puff of dust. The horizons all just a short hike away, lumpy and baked black. Hexagonal cracking on the flat basalt plain: melted by the sun? Rotation period a couple of weeks, thus a week in the sun, at thirty million kilometers … six hundred degrees K for the top centimeter, three hundred K for ground under the dust. I nosed around picking up chunks all burnt and crumbly, feeling like the Little Prince. Where were they?

  Sun began to rise. Breaking over the whole horizon before me all at once, like the end of an eclipse when you are standing on the eclipsing body. Adrenaline terror of death by radiation, I dropped behind a boulder and shoveled the dust over me, insane child in a sandbox digging deeper in incandescent sand. Even with eyes clamped shut the world was white on white on white.

  … they lived in a structure like an empty cyclotron, dug into the rim wall of the biggest crater, with narrow slitted windows, heavily shuttered, overlooking the central crater floor, which was cracked and flat, with the usual central dimple knob. Each room the arc of a torus, bare, flat-bottomed, curved walls like the sides of barrels, ceilings bowed down somewhat. The people wear grey cotton pants, grey tunics or coats, and some of them wear dark red caps. All of them barefoot. Several days after my arrival I was taken to the room occupying the largest single arc of the torus; from one end of the room you couldn’t see around to the other. Once again left alone. Explored room to both ends—around ninety degrees of the crater’s rim, I guessed.

  Returning to the first end of the room I came on a man sitting on the floor. The usual grey clothes, a longer red cap than most. I sat beside him. “Why did you send for me?”

  “By your own efforts you have come near to knowing what only Sol can tell us. This we judge to be your yearning for the grey, working inside you as in every human being—but in you showing fruit. You, Arthur Holywelkin, are a sort of … you know them as … idiot savant. And we would teach you.”

  “What would you teach me?”

  The old man looked at me. Burnt, wrinkled cheeks; wet eyes filled with odd humor, anticipating me somewhere. “The sun is a god, Arthur Holywelkin. The sun is god.”

  “And by that you mean?” Feeling let down.

  “Sol is a manifestation of the spirit of Mithras. Spirit controls the radiation emanating from the thermonuclear ball, and that spirit controls all that happens in the space around it. Life began on Earth, spread through the system, and now engages in discourse with the Creator; all willed by the thought of Mithras.”

  I shrugged, and he spoke of my work. The mathematics of convection currents under the sun’s surface, those that cause the great whirlpools known as sunspots; these could not be made consonant with the model accounting for the curious lack of neutrinos that escaped from the currents. Now the old Grey reconciled them for me, drawing out formulas on the floor with white chalk. For what seemed hours we conversed in mathematics principally, punctuated only by “You see,” “But,” “Then,” “… yes.”

  “Who are you?” I said, much later.

  “I am Zervan, Father of Fathers. King of the Greys.”

  I nodded; this didn’t answer what I wanted to know. “And how came you by this?” Gesturing at the floor covered with the cryptography of our discourse.

  “Mithras told me,” he said. “Mithras controls me even as I speak; and you as well.”

  Nothing to say to that. “With what we have here,” I said, looking about me, “I can finish my work. The forms of change will encompass all that we have observed within the micro-dimensions.…”

  “Do you understand what that implies?” Zervan said.

  I did not catch his meaning. Even in the heightened state of awareness that I had risen to, in which the chaotic movement of glints was as clear as a pavane to me, I could not catch it. I squinted. He saw into me and smiled.

  “We turn to Sol. This is as close as Icarus comes to Sol, this very day.” He stood with the slowest, most fluid of movements. “Follow.”

  … in lock that opened on the central crater plain. Shutter up, and even with my protective goggles I was blinded. Total white-out, nothing but hot light. “I cannot see.”

  “Look closer. Forms remain.” Zervan stood ahead of me. Gradually a world coalesced out of the varying incandescences of white. Chanting from behind me, oddly speeded then slowed down, a chorus of Greys shouting vowels.

  It occurred to me I heard from within a daysuit. Speakers in helmet, I presumed.

  “Come,” Zervan said. He started to the lock door.

  “Wait! You’ve forgotten your suit!”

  He smiled, shook his head. Unzipped the grey tunic, pulled his arms out of it, let it fall. Unzipped grey cotton pants, let them fall. Naked scrawny old man, white hair on chest, belly, crotch, legs. He walked to the lock door. “My God!” I said.

  The lock door slid up and away. The air pushed by us. Blinded again I reached for Zervan—already gone. Vaporized? I stepped to the slot where the lock door fit. My legs refused to go further. Out there on the crater floor—naked old man, walking slowly toward the shimmer of the central knob. I stepped out after him.

  Running after him I expected to collapse and die at any step. Thirty million kilometers from sun, its light only a minute before had been in the furnace itself, and so the radiation must necessarily have been melting my suit my skin my brains my blood my bones, all of me instantly scrambled. But there walked the old man ahead of me, stark naked. Feet on dust six hundred degrees Kelvin. He looked back at me, gestured me on.

  Caught up to him. He said, “Do you see now?”

  I saw nothing. But the whiteness was reduced, the crater rim encircled us like a wall, we stood on the floor of the universe itself. The sky was the sun, the sun the sky—nothing above the crater walls but roiling white fire, licks of the corona that seemed to lance down like lightning in a saner world, forming temporary pillars between the two worlds of white and overwhite. Panic danced around him: “How can this be?”

  No answer. And he began to fumble at the latches under my helmet. I struck at his hands and he said “Be still” and I was still. Suit or no I was broiled to a crisp, why care? And my limbs refused to move. Beginning of the end, I thought. He unlatched the helmet and took it off. Now we faced each other in the vacuum. I breathed it in, breathed it out. “How…?”

  “Mithras shifts the vibrations in this space to accommodate us. All is vibration, you see. Different vibrations interacting, and nothing material at all. Mithras can alter the vibrations if it has always been that way.”

  This meant nothing to me. And meanwhile he uncoupled the pieces of my daysuit, pulled them away from me. Even my boots off. Dust on my
toes like any other dust. “What…?”

  “All we sense is vibration, nothing is material. Mithras is a sentient, powerful creator, willing to discourse with those who learn the way. There is no choice. Look up.”

  Up. Neck craned back. Up. White light rumbling like a great loud generator, twisting, twisting, twisting. Fire. And in the fire, shapes, visions, what was that—a face?—no—a tree—and music from the crater rim, from every atom in me, but originating from that tree of sound in the center of Sol’s fire.

  “You hear his voice. He speaks to you! No chance, no choice, no change.” Zervan’s voice a tiny tendril in the great white tapestry of sound-fire. “Note follows note in Sol’s eternal score, and all our destinies are written there, billions and billions of years before these pebbles rolled in the night. And so you see God eye to eye, he speaks to you, he allows you to come to him naked, without harm; and sends you away with the sound of his voice forever in you.” The swirling tree, white glassy currents in the thermonuclear ball, emanating pitches, melodies just on the edge of understanding—if only clear of Zervan’s descant—I raised a hand and Zervan fell silent and in a time without time I knew what it was to be a bronze man, immortal, part of the sun for all eternity.

  “We must return. Back now, or never again,” Zervan said. And destiny moved my feet for me, I stepped away still looking up. “Now you see your part,” Zervan said, “your part in the preparation for the one that will follow. Your mathematics the expression of the mind of Mithras. Your orchestra the model of the voice of Sol. And when the one who understands your orchestra shall come—”

  “It will be the ninth master,” I said, looking down the future as it slipped between the sun’s white corona and the white hills of Icarus. “He will come to you, and then on Mars—”

  “On Mars,” Zervan said,

  Clap Johannes slammed the notebook shut. It slid between his shaking hands and fell to the control booth floor. A small notebook on a glass floor inlaid with tiny French horn figures—Holywelkin’s Orchestra—Johannes hardly dared to touch it! What to do with it? Fearfully he picked it up, seized it so that it could not burst open in his hands … nowhere in the control booth would do.… In the end he climbed uncertainly back up to the celesta, slipping several times, once so seriously that he almost lost his grasp on the notebook, and it fell partway open—No chance, no choice, no change—banged it shut again, and shoved it back in the brackets against the celesta’s inner wall, holding it as if he had a wolf by the ears. Then down, half sliding half falling, damaging a pulley joint. He didn’t care. Out of the Orchestra he fell, and from the storeroom he ran through the hotel, heedless of witnesses, to collapse on the spurious and very transitory comfort of a hotel bed.

  bent in her own generator

  Margaret heard of this bizarre behavior, and she went to his room an hour or so later to see what was up. She found Johannes seated before a diagram of the inner solar system on his computer terminal, face pale, mouth tight and determined.

  “Look here, Margaret,” he said without preamble. “When we cross the asteroid belt to Mars we will be traveling very near the aphelion of Icarus, the Greys’ world. Icarus will be pretty near its aphelion, crossing the plane of the planets almost.”

  Margaret inspected the colored display. “Well. It’ll be nearer Mars than the sun, but it’s still pretty far above the plane, isn’t it?”

  “I must go there before we go to Mars.”

  She had never heard him sound so forceful. At the same time it seemed to her that he was terrified; it was a disturbing mix. He stared at her as if to ignite her to the same fiery emotion that burned like a whitsun inside him.…

  “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I have to go to Icarus before the Martian concert.”

  She shook her head; no one threatened her. “I must know what happened, or I won’t allow it.”

  He burst to his feet. “I run this tour! I am Master of the Orchestra! I say where we go!”

  Margaret nodded. “All right, then. I must know what’s happened, or I will resign, and leave the managing of the tour to you.” Suddenly she was angry. “I don’t know what those Greys mean to you, and I don’t much care. I am trying to run a very complicated tour, and everything you have done has made it harder. Now you’re following Grey mysteries, visiting their world—come on, Johannes! Can’t you pursue this issue some other time?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  She took a step toward the door.

  “I can’t, Margaret,” he said miserably. “I have to do it now. The music depends on it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It has to do with Holywelkin. He went to Icarus before building the Orchestra. What he learned there is crucial for playing the Orchestra, and for everything I want to do. I can’t complete my work until I’ve talked with them. Do you understand?”

  “I do not.” Margaret turned aside, to avoid the pitiful sight of the blind man begging. “We don’t know enough about the Greys to risk visiting them.”

  “We will never know enough until we do visit them! You can act in ignorance, Margaret, I’ve heard you say it yourself. You said we have to act in ignorance—we have no other choice.”

  “Still we choose our acts,” Margaret said desperately. “I didn’t mean it made sense to do something stupid.”

  “There is a month before the Martian festival. The Orchestra and everyone else on the tour can go straight there on Orion, as you did from Pluto to Uranus. You can discuss the matter of our visit with the Greys here, and come to an agreement—you could be sure I would be safe. You could even come along to see that I’m safe! You and Karna and I could charter one of the asteroid liners and go to Icarus, and then on to Mars. I must do it, Margaret!”

  “You are creating your own problems,” she said, and the bitter cutting tone of her voice surprised her. He was overwhelming her, convincing her against her better judgment, and she knew it, but she couldn’t bring herself to change. He was.… In her mind she relented a bit; it wasn’t completely his fault he was unbalanced. Some strange things had happened to him. Now the Greys. Somehow they had enticed him into demanding this voyage to Icarus … something had happened.

  “You found something out at the Holywelkin museum,” she said abruptly. “You found something there that led you to Icarus.”

  A long pause. He nodded once. “Yes.”

  That gave Margaret a funny feeling. Something scratched at the back of her memory, something she had noticed at the museum … she sighed. She couldn’t remember.

  Angrily she walked to the door. Prima donnas she had dealt with before, but this … this was something new, something different. Suddenly she felt inadequate to it—a foreign feeling, one she didn’t like. “Damn it!” She struck the door open. “In my next life I will stay on Iapetus, and be a traffic cop, and never leave my little street corner.”

  Chapter Six

  OUT OF THE PLANE

  A small spacecraft left the Grand Tour and arced up out of the plane of the planets, carrying Johannes, Margaret and Karna toward Icarus, the home of the Greys. During the voyage Johannes was withdrawn, and Margaret sensed in him an intense apprehension. Margaret spent her time piloting the craft, playing Go with Karna, and catching up on her sleep. And then a blue soap bubble swam into view, far away in the starry black. They stood before the broad bridge window and watched the bubble grow.

  From just outside the sphere of air they saw that the surface of the asteroid was mountainous: ranges folded on ranges, split by canyons and watersheds that indicated a long history of weather and erosion. “That’s not how Holywelkin described it!” Johannes said.

  “It’s been terraformed,” Karna said. “Pretty expensive job, too. Nothing left of the original surface, as far as I can see.”

  “What did Holywelkin say?” Margaret asked Johannes. “Where did he ever write about Icarus? Why won’t you let me read it?”

  “I don�
�t have it with me,” Johannes said. “He wrote it in one of his notebooks. He said it was a cratered asteroid, a large impact crater at one end.”

  “Terraformed now.” Karna said. “Nice job, too.”

  “Persia was mountainous,” Johannes said.

  A shuttle popped through the discontinuity and floated up to them; it moved out of the window’s framing, and they felt the gentle bump of the coupling. Minutes later three Greys filed onto the bridge, chattering to each other in their own tongue. One of them had a face like a skull papered with skin, and his cheeks were scarred. They chattered at the three visitors and pointed and led them through the ship to the lock connecting it to the shuttle. Ducking their heads the three visitors pulled through, into the Greys’ world.

  Descent. In the portholes the sky snapped from black to deep blue. They landed on a short white concrete runway, placed in what appeared to be a high U-shaped glacial valley. They walked through the open door and down a staircase onto the runway. Surrounding the white strip was a carefully manicured green lawn, flat and circular. Beyond the lawn the expanse of shattered, speckled white granite rose on both sides to steep, serrated ridges. The air was thin and cold, the whitsun directly overhead. Margaret shivered as the chill goosepimpled her skin. In the thin air the mountains seemed very close, and Margaret could distinguish with unnatural clarity boulders, cracks, ridge edges, and the jumbled surfaces of talus slopes. There was not a single sound; the air was so still that she became aware of the sound of her breathing, of Karna’s breathing. Absolute quiet. Then, off in the distance, down the glacial valley, from over the ribbing of a low moraine, came a floating thread of voices, tiny voweled warbling in echoes off the exfoliated valley walls. And over the moraine appeared a line of figures, trudging across the granite to the landing strip. Grey cotton pants, long grey coats; and on their heads bright, floppy red caps. Six of them. Their clothes blended with the speckled diorite of the granite, rendering them shadows or apparitions; but the red caps bobbed along steadily, up what might have been a trail.