The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I—I wanted to see how he would react to the threat of being taken to Zervan,” Dent said, crestfallen. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was quite a dramatic response! He simply flew away!”

  “Don’t say that,” Karna said sourly. “Say, he ran off quickly.”

  “Sorry,” Dent said. “In any case, I lost him.”

  “All right,” Margaret said. “We’ll just have to search for him. I want all of you circulating during this festival, to look for these faces we keep seeing. Now I’ve got to talk to a woman from the Martian government.”

  The meeting dispersed, and Karna and Yananda went to get something to eat. Dent said, “Interesting how many members of the governments are women. All through the system. I suppose since women were kept out of the halls of power for so long, more of them want to wield it now.”

  “I suppose,” Margaret said.

  “This makes it nice for the men of our time, as we can assume society will be competently run, and go on to more interesting things.”

  “Men like you,” Margaret replied caustically, and left to find the official.

  On the way Johannes joined her. “I want to ask her some questions about acoustics.”

  The Martian official was very tall. Margaret led the group back to the porch balcony. “We hope you will enjoy your stay on Mars,” the official said to Johannes. “It’s an exciting time here.”

  No answer from Johannes; something out there in the city had stolen his attention. Margaret said, “I suppose the audience at your festival will be as large as all our other audiences on this tour combined,” speaking directly to Johannes.

  “That large?” he said.

  “Oh yes,” said the official. “For many generations nearly the entire population of Mars made it to the Areology. Nowadays that’s impossible, of course, but this year almost four million people will attend.”

  “They’ll all be able to hear?” Johannes said.

  “We’ll do the amplification following your instructions,” the woman replied. “The Olympus Mons slope in the Areology grounds area is a very broad arc of a conic section. For all practical purposes, a flat downslope about six degrees off the horizontal.” Johannes asked her a few questions about the air density at the high altitude, and she smiled as she answered his questions. Even her teeth were taller, Margaret thought. Then the official changed the subject.

  “This year the Areology is only a week before the planetary elections, so there will be vigorous campaigning by all the parties. It’s an important election.…” She hesitated, glancing at Johannes to gauge his interest. Difficult to tell with those eyes, as Margaret well knew. “Elections are infrequent, and this one will help to reshape the planet’s terraforming policies.…” Johannes was staring past her at the city, and abruptly she halted. “This campaigning will only add to the excitement and color of the festival, you understand. There will be added security, and as long as nothing inflammatory happens.…”

  She was referring to the first two concerts, and perhaps to a couple of the Jovian affairs. Johannes paid no attention to her. Margaret said, “We’ve had experience with large crowds. We know how to handle them.”

  “You’ve never dealt with a crowd of this size before,” the woman said coldly, annoyed that Johannes was ignoring her. Or had Margaret slighted the Areology somehow?

  Suddenly Johannes spoke: “The more people there the better.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Margaret watched him—saw that his cheeks were flushed, his fists clenched; he paced by the railing, not meeting their eyes with his own dark ones.… He had thought of something, by God. Something to do with the sight of the huge city, or the official’s description of the concert site. He was humming to himself, producing a sound so strange that it seemed the whirr of his intense vitality. Margaret directed the insulted official away from him, so that she could close the odd meeting by herself.

  backstage

  Riding down the glass elevator box on the outside of the tour’s hotel, Anton Vaccero observed the florid Martian dawn. The sky to the east glowed the color of blood, and a whitsun burst over the horizon brighter than the lost morning star had ever been. Vaccero shivered. A call from the desk had awakened him from disquieting dreams; someone in the lobby to see him. “An Edgar to see you, sir.” One of Ekern’s messengers, here to charge him with yet another impossible task of acting. And yet within his dread Vaccero still felt the fierce little spark of anticipation central to all metadrama—he was about to be sent onto the stage again by a master playwright, there to do and say who knew what.…

  No one in the lobby. He stepped outside, walked down the broad greensward of the boulevard. Vendors here and there under the white cherry blossoms were setting up their stands. The boulevard itself was empty, and the grass was gray under the sheen of dew and the dull light of the dawn. Tracks in the frosty dew led across the boulevard to a little copse of cherry trees that stood alone in the center of an intersection; acting on a hunch Anton followed them, keeping an eye out for one of the various messengers, the tall one with the skull face, the woman who had once played Olga in his initiation—

  “Ha!”

  Vaccero jumped. It was Ekern himself, hopping from behind a cherry tree, red beard glowing in the ruddy light. Vaccero wiped the annoyance from his face and felt his pulse begin its uncontrollable accelerando.

  “Master!” he said. “I am surprised to see you here.”

  “I know.”

  “On Mars?”

  “Yes, Anton. We are on Mars.” Ekern laughed, pulled hard at the ends of his graying red sideburns, where they flowed forward into beard. With a jerk forward he grabbed Vaccero by the shirt front, and shouted, “But where is Wright?”

  He released him with a shove, backed away, turned and paced around a cherry tree, stopped before the astounded Vaccero once again.

  “He is here,” Vaccero said shakily. “In the hotel.” He gestured back at it.

  Ekern waved a hand dismissively. “This much all know, Anton, Anton, I mean, where is Wright’s mind? What is he thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” Vaccero said. “I’m not his confessor, he says little to me. I hardly see him. He spends most of his time in the Orchestra now. How am I supposed to know!” he cried, throwing out a hand to ward off another grab by Ekern.

  “I want you to talk to Wright,” Ekern said, “talk to him as you should have been all along. You’re letting down your part, Anton, your performance is questionable.… I want you to talk with him and find out what happened to him on Icarus.”

  “Icarus!” Vaccero said. “He won’t talk about that to anyone! I’ve talked to Nevis and Godavari, and he won’t even tell them what happened to him, and they were there with him!”

  “Perhaps they are too close to him, and to the experience.” Ekern chopped at the air: “Metadrama would be of no interest to the creative individual if there were not challenges like this one. Find your way into his confidences, Anton, negotiate whatever turns or twists are needed, and be with him. Learn what he has learned, extract from him this portion of his past.”

  “But I can’t,” Vaccero said. “He doesn’t talk to me about anything.”

  “And your vaunted friendship? Your ties that go back to childhood, to schooldays?” Ekern approached him again, his face darkening to a shade near that of his beard. Anton took another step back.

  “That never amounted to anything,” he said bitterly, and felt the truth of it in his stomach. “The man doesn’t have friends, don’t you understand that yet? He lives in a world of his own.”

  “Not anymore. He lives in my world, on my stage, and as he becomes aware of the action on it, his thoughts necessarily follow. But Icarus! Icarus! I must know!” He chopped at the air, held his breath. “I must know what Wright thinks happened to him, in order to conduct the rest of the drama most artfully … you as my only apprentice must help me in this, if you wish to advance in the order.… If you can�
�t engage a subject in conversation it shows a lack of ability, of imagination, this is the simplest of manipulations, one practiced by ordinary mortals every day of the week—”

  “Not with Johannes Wright,” Vaccero said. “You know that. Even ordinarily he is a world to himself, but now—well—whatever happened to him on Icarus, it was a shock. I can give you all his reactions—”

  “Not enough!”

  “How would you accomplish—” Vaccero began, but Ekern chopped him off with a slash of the hand and a shout:

  “Just do it!”

  And with that he was off striding down the broad boulevard, leaving Vaccero to contemplate his situation in the growing light of day.

  composing

  Johannes himself woke in the moment when the voices of the chorus split into an infinity of echoes— Quickly he forgot the bulk of the dream. He dressed and left the hotel, meandered through the streets watching the morning traffic pick up and swirl around him. A rosy morning light lay over everything like dust. Poster world. His artificial sight seemed to have been damaged permanently—perhaps over-exposure. So many moments where motion appeared to be arbitrary. There was dust in the air, swirling randomly as a trolley dingdonged by; but looking closely he saw the Coriolis effect, the pull of gravity, the shove of heated air off the grass and the paving of the street … causes everywhere, for everything.

  Down in the river district the streets were narrower. Walking was like floating. Alleyways in X patterns, blocks in the shape of diamonds so that every corner house was a wedge-shaped oddity, and narrow points in the alleys were bridged three or four stories overhead by broad arches of carved rust stone, with keystones of dark purple. Johannes wandered like a bishop on a chess board, watching the people move. He was a short man and every Martian seemed a giant, some of them gawky beanpoles, some of them fluid greyhound people, with enlarged ribcages and long lithe limbs … and they were all in a dance in the dusty alleys, dodging and pirouetting to avoid collisions, stopping to talk, or buy vegetables at a corner stand, or watch the games of chess in the park, or listen to music or a soapbox speaker under a tree, or look at a giant horse (the police were on horses, and many of the street vendors used them); all of them playing their notes in a score written for them … eternally. It was difficult to believe. But he remembered in his flesh the experience of the vision on Icarus. And he walked on feeling that he was dancing with a perfect effortlessness.

  Down by the river the alleys opened onto a boulevard and then a strip of park edging the river’s bank. Cherry trees again, flanking both banks as a line dividing boulevards from parks; a line of white-pink brilliance, blooms bouncing up and down in a slow imitation of the bees among them. Johannes let himself be taken up by a swirl of people crossing the boulevard and entering the park. Once there he sat down under a cherry tree, lay back and looked up into it. Limbs of a tree in two-fifths of a gee, boldly crooking out in every direction. Dust motes in the air like red cells of blood floating in the plasma. The air was full of them, dancing between the jade grass and the quartz flowers and the sandstone sky. Bands of the sun’s light slanted down and lit cones of the dust, transforming most of the motes to gold, the rest to metallic reds, greens, blues. Some rose on air heated by his body, others were suspended, others fell from the cooler air of the shadows above the sunbeams into the light, on wafts of the river breeze. Children’s voices, over the stream. Dust motes: each was lit by quanta of light pulsing away from the sun. Take the motes as representations of quanta, which were themselves representations of … events in the micro-dimensions. Reality was so much different from the material world of the senses. And yet Johannes only understood reality by analogy to something within the realm of his senses. He thought: as we see dust motes, we can imagine quanta of light, and muons and gluons and quarks, and even the glints dancing in every quark. And as we can hear music … we can imagine the movement in the smallest world, and understand how tones can both be played and have always been played, because of the idea of the performance and the score. Analogy to the realm of the senses, the five windows in the cave; the dance of music in the air more closely resembled the actuality of the micro-universe than any visual representation possibly could. Music was the clearest and most powerful analogy because it came closest to pure idea. And the universe was a sort of music of ideas. So that it was more than an analogy; ignoring the vast difference in magnitudes, there was an identity there. The universe was a music of ideas. And he could write that music.

  For a long time Johannes lay on the riverbank looking up into the cherry tree and thinking about what Holywelkin had written in the equations of the Ten Forms. As had become his habit during his mathematical studies, he recalled the equations using his own musical notation system, and the mnemonic device became confused with what he remembered, so that the contemplation of the dust motes seemed to lead to an understanding of Holywelkin that was all confused with a continuous music in his head, music sounding clearly as he understood Holywelkin more fully than ever before. As each of the ten forms acted on the wave pattern of sound in his mind it became more complex; the cone of moving dust motes would no longer have been an adequate score, the music was too densely patterned for that. The melody of each particle overlaid the next with a peculiar, dissonant logic, and at times the part of Johannes that was still listening heard only a surging chaos; but Holywelkin’s work showed there was order to it: patterns, rhythms, a progression of various harmonies, a thickly textured network of rising and falling musical lines.…

  Awkwardly he got to his feet, feeling a sudden urgency, and dashed across the riverside road into the net of alleys. Solo glint in dense interference pattern: he had to dance aside and around the growing business of the day, trolley, woman, fruit stand, tree. Once he failed in a moment of difficult execution (But could you say that? he thought as the man railed at him. Isn’t that part of the dance?) He smiled at the man and tried to speak and found himself singing a glissando that tried to go both up and down at once, and nearly succeeded, until he choked. “Must go to voice!” he squeaked, and ran on. Out of the alley and onto the big greensward that climbed the hill to their hotel. Climbing, and his thighs remembered Icarus, the music in his head sang and whistled … into the hotel. Following the path through the maze of hallways that had always been followed, back to his voice, his home, the other node he was bound so tightly to in the pattern, the singularity that he glinted through again and again.

  He circled the perimeter of the Orchestra, looking up into shifting angles of glass and shadow, all reduced to a two-dimensional pattern of black and white, light and dark. The poster world. He climbed into the control booth with the music surging through his every vein and nerve, singing in him and controlling his movement, so that once in the control booth he went straight to the computer and started to program the part of the whole that was most prominent at the time, moving to keyboards for reference to timbre. The part of him that was still listening and watching all this—the part that stood like a third party at the back of his mind, looking over his shoulder—realized that of course since there was no such thing as human agency or free will, since he was performing a dance completely scored and choreographed, he could let the music compose itself. The music comprehended itself. Johannes went at the orchestration of the music with an ease and unself-consciousness that he had never felt before. A different recording for each strand of the whole, each equation-symphony programming one trio or sextet or chamber orchestra of its own, all taped for the simultaneous playing, the larger piece that he could hear perfectly, as if it were a cathedral he could walk around in and inspect at his leisure. Everything was to be taped before the concert; the musical coursing of the universe through time since the big bang; then successive diminutions of scale, until the composition would represent perfectly April 23rd 3229 A.D. on Olympus Mons on Mars; then augmentations back to the cosmic scale. During the concert Johannes himself would play whatever was destined to come to him; and that illusion of improvi
sation would be by definition his strand of consciousness in the great mesh of the universe beyond. If he wanted to he could even hear what that strand would be, he could hear the score extending away in both directions eternally in his mind, even as he heard the pulse of it beat by beat, in time. But he returned his attention to the work at hand, programming it accurately, choosing the instrumentation, the tempi, the clefs. Groan of mercury drum, wail of wind machine, all the percussive pops and bams of the world, all the rich timbres that tones and overtones combined to create, employed in each their appropriate moment.

  There came a knock at the door. And straightening up Johannes discovered in his muscles what he had not been aware of: the passage of time. Reader, this poor string of words has given you analogies for the storm of thought and music that rushed through the mind of Johannes all that day long; but you know from your own attempts to write down your thoughts what an approximate, elliptic, synoptic and clumsy tool language is for that task; and you can imagine the hours and hours that must necessarily have passed as all this music came to Johannes and was played by the Orchestra.

  So his back was stiff, his fingers tired, his bladder full. He stopped to consider; looked at the numbers on the computer screen, heard within him the polyphonic chorus. And he knew that it would all stay with him forever.

  The door opened and Dent Ios entered, staring up at the Orchestra without seeing Johannes. Johannes said, “Dent,” and climbed down to the piano entrance. Standing on the glass step holding the bench he could look Dent straight in the eye.

  “Johannes,” Dent said. “We’ve been learning more about the Greys, and I want to talk to you about it.”

  “All right.” Johannes gestured and Dent stepped up to join him; they sat on the piano bench and looked down at the keyboard and its eighty-eight glass fingers. “What have you learned?”

  “Johannes, they are not a single coherent organization. There are factions within the Greys, and there are groups pretending to be Greys when they are not. And so Margaret and Karna and I are worried that … we think that you shouldn’t take to heart whatever happened to you on Icarus.”