The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Inside it was bright and colorful. A prominent sign on the wall said, We Are a Licensed Branch of the Whiteline Jump Exploration Foundation. A woman behind a desk at the far end of the room looked up apprehensively. The room seemed to telescope down to her. Vaccero approached.

  He said, “I want to go.” His voice cracked midsentence. He didn’t care.

  “Very good,” said the woman with a smile. “There is a three-day waiting period, you understand—”

  “I want to go now.”

  “Well … that is fairly common. We’ll have to have you sign these extra release forms.” She opened a drawer and pulled out two packets. “Read these in their entirety, please, and then sign each.”

  There were about fifteen forms. Without bothering to read them Anton sat and wrote automatically: Anton Vaccero, Anton Vaccero, Anton Vaccero … empty syllables. Hollow words for the hollow man.

  “Now read this pamphlet, please,” the woman said. “You’ll be in command of a complex vehicle, and even though we’ve made it simple to control, your survival may depend on knowing these facts.”

  “You have no idea what my survival may depend on,” Vaccero said harshly. The woman pursed her lips, put the pamphlet in his hand. His fingers closed on it. She walked into the next room. He let the pamphlet drop to the floor.

  She returned, led him into a small chamber. “You’ll be going on the ultimate voyage,” she said brightly, with effort. Perhaps she had had a hard day. “We’re more certain than ever that the whiteline jump will place you without measurable time lapse somewhere from nine to sixty light years away. We get more responses from volunteers all the time, some from people who left over a century ago. It should be quite an adventure.”

  A memorized speech, made up of lies. Vaccero decided to give her a break, and just nodded. Surely she knew why people volunteered to pilot the whiteline craft. He hated her suddenly, her and her near-tears; she was like all the rest of them.

  “Show me where to sit and get me going,” he said.

  She nodded, blinking. It was probably a hard job. “We’re in your craft now. Sit here during the jump.” She indicated a big chair, somewhat like a dentist’s chair, he thought. What a way to go. He sat in the chair. The woman strapped him in. From the door she said, “The initial acceleration will be the boost down the sled jump and off planet. You’ll intersect with a Hyperion whiteline within seconds. You’ll know you’ve jumped when the viewscreen comes on.” She left.

  He sat in the chair waiting. Despite himself he thought of the festival, the concert. Wright’s music. A house built on sand. All of that work, all of that faith, all of that music—all for a lie. Built on Ekern’s lies. He tried not to think but it was impossible. He hoped the jump would kill him; he hoped for it more than he had hoped for anything in his life.

  Chapter Eight

  TIME PASSES

  the irregulars at the wake

  A few days later, as the Grand Tour was about to leave Mars for the crossing to Earth, Karna brought the news back from the communications center. Anton Vaccero had volunteered to pilot one of the whiteline probes, late on the evening of the Olympus Mons concert, and he had been launched soon afterward.

  Although everyone was shocked by the news, the lighting people were the most affected. On board the Orion Rudyard, Sean, Sara, Ngaio and Angela sat stunned in their rooms for a couple of days, ignoring the departure from Mars space. Eventually Margaret and Delia and Karna went down to their suite with their recorders, and as cheerfully as possible instituted a wake. Quickly Margaret found that the lighting people were as troubled by incomprehension as by grief. “But why would he do it?” Sara kept saying. “And after the concert made everyone else so…”

  “I asked the same question about my brother,” Margaret said brusquely. “And you’ll never get an answer now. As for the concert—music affects different people different ways.” She tooted on her recorder and they played some mournful off-key little tunes. Anton’s elegy. And when they left the lighting people alone again the wake had given their mourning expression, so that after a time it might dissipate; but still no one understood. And it is understanding we want in these matters, understanding more than anything else.

  Margaret said to Karna and Dent, “Anton must have had a reason to jump.”

  Karna and Dent nodded. “That music?” Karna said.

  Margaret wasn’t listening. “I’ve put some people to work behind us. One of them tells me there are no Greys on Grimaldi.”

  “So they were fakes,” Dent said.

  “Or they might have been Greys just visiting Grimaldi,” Margaret said. “But it was Anton who told Johannes about them. He said he had been approached by a Grey in one of those villages, right? But no one else ever saw that Grey. And whoever vandalized our rooms on Orion knew when everyone would be in the lounge, where Anton was reading fortunes. And this mysterious Charles knew who among us to contact. I think someone in our group was working for them. And that it was Anton.”

  Karna nodded. “Maybe Anton was a Grey.”

  “Maybe,” said Margaret. “But if he were, why take the jump just then? No. Anton was trying to tell Johannes something—he said he knew what had happened on Icarus. But Johannes wouldn’t listen.”

  Karna said, “But maybe Anton was a Grey, and knew what happened on Icarus—remember, we were met by two sets of Greys there—or so it seemed.”

  “Yes.” Margaret frowned.

  “I think someone is using the Greys as a cover for their operations against Johannes,” Dent said. “And who’s a better candidate than Ernst Ekern? Yananda and I saw Ekern in the audience. And they’ve hated each other for years, or so you’ve told me.”

  Karna shook his head. “It still could be the Greys. No one knows what they want, what factions they’re split into. Anton could have been a Grey. So that he committed suicide for some religious reason.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dent replied. “They’re too convenient a cover. And if you were right, we’d have to postulate two Greys going heretic around us, Anton and this Charles. Also, Charles is connected to the man who attacked Johannes on Titania. No. It feels like a cover to me. And now we know that Ekern is trailing the tour, so I think it’s he who’s using the Greys as his cover.”

  “But why?” Karna cried. “What’s his purpose?”

  Dent was silent.

  Margaret shrugged. “Obviously we don’t know enough yet. But I have some ideas. I’d like to talk to that Charles about them.…”

  “We may never see him again after the way Dent scared him,” Karna said.

  “He’ll show up again,” Margaret predicted. “And then we’ll act.”

  earth fable

  Each hour they came closer to the Earth, and everyone felt it. The point of origin common to them all, the home world—the home world! They watched the tiny blue crescent grow in the windows, and in each of their hearts grew a tiny crescent of unease. They were approaching the home they had never seen, a world so big that most of their terras would sink in its oceans like pebbles.

  During the long evenings of the approach they told each other Earth stories. One night Delia said, “I went there once when I was a child, with my parents. We visited Alaska because that’s where my father came from. He took us in a little hydroplane down the coast south from Nome, just our family, and we stopped in bay after bay after bay. It was early spring, and still very cold. One day we went iceskating on the frozen surface of one of the inlets. It was a clear day and the sun was bright, low in the sky and ringed at times by ice rainbows. And then we came across something none of us had seen before, even Father. Around the shore of the inlet the ice became clear—still thick ice, I mean, but for some reason it was transparent rather than white. We could see straight to the bottom, which was yellowish sand four or five meters below us. And there were big purple starfish all over the sand. Bright yellow sand, bright purple starfish, and us skating right over them.

  “Well, one of the clear p
atches was near the mouth of a stream and the ice turned out to be thin, and my brother broke through. For a while it looked like we weren’t going to be able to do a thing about it—Mother was screaming, I was terrified.… Finally Father jumped in and just swam and pulled him through the thin ice to shore. So they were both soaked, and really cold. Mother and I had to get the heaters off the boat, and we built a fire and rubbed them dry, and it still took us all day to get them warmed up. Then the next day it snowed, and the storm kept us in our tent for three days. The tent turned into a snow cave. Finally Father piloted us back to Nome through a big swell—waves that almost swamped us, and we knew how cold that water was. And then—when we got to Nome, and told people what had happened to us, they didn’t even lift an eyebrow! What happened to us was nothing to them—things more dangerous than that happened to them every day!”

  approaching: the names

  Johannes was seldom seen by the rest of the passengers of the Orion. Occasionally Dent or Margaret or one of the others saw him going to or from the Orchestra during the night hours when the lights in the halls were dimmed or turned off; but he would not speak. Once Margaret stopped him by stepping in front of him and putting her hands on his shoulders. She told him what had happened to Anton. He grimaced. “He should have listened. I told him to listen.” Margaret let him go on. Other times, when Dent tried to speak to him, he answered in wordless little melodies, and cocked his head at Dent as if surprised Dent did not reply. Dent abandoned the attempts at conversation, and only nodded when he saw him. Dent knew that Johannes was still composing; the Orchestra’s computer was scoring Wright’s daily work, and Dent pored over the scores note by note, attempting to find the music he had heard on Olympus Mons. He couldn’t. On the page it was too dense, too complex to transpose into an imagined sound. Once Johannes walked in on him while he was inspecting the scores from the computer. “Johannes, wasn’t there a moment in the Olympus Mons concert when the sound coming from any given speaker multiplied from one instrument to all the instruments?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then that process happened again, so that there was about a ten-thousand-fold multiplication of melodic lines?”

  “Using the big bang as the start of the symphony solves the problem of origin,” Johannes said, and hummed a bit. “History of universe sung in its largest outline, adequate until our moment of time, when I wanted more detail. Slowed it up, broadened it out, augmento la da ee o say—o la da ee o say fran ee so eeeeee na,” and so on, singing with a slightly pained smile as he took the scores away from Dent.

  And they were getting closer. Helplessly they watched the blue crescent and its white companion crescent, growing in the windows. Underneath the tiny white swirls of cloud they could now make out the miniature shapes of the continents, and the names sounded in their minds as if thickly echoing choirs were singing them: Asia. America. Africa. Europe. Such rich, bursting, mythic names, each evoking a million images, each a whole world unto itself! And yet at times, under the beautiful shifting patterns of cloud, they could see parts of all of them at once. And for the first time their senses made them confront a fact they thought they had always known: the Earth was real.

  two martians

  Margaret joined the passenger orchestra in the Bellatrix Room for the hundred and ninety-fourth evening concert of Orion’s plunge downsystem; they played Shimatu’s Double Concerto for Godzilla and Harp, and she plucked at her cello with a fierce pizzicatto, playing the weird dream harp echoes as if pulling bowstrings, firing arrows at her unseen enemies. The passenger orchestra was now composed almost entirely of Martians and Terrans, so that Margaret felt as if she were playing in a band of giants and dwarfs. She spotted Dent across the orchestra playing his guitar—in one dream sequence they even had a sort of duet, revolving behind the solo harp—and so when the concert was over she joined him, and they walked down to the dining commons to get a meal.

  “What’s that book you’re carrying?” Dent asked.

  “A thing on Holywelkin.”

  “Why are you reading that?”

  Margaret sighed. “I’m hoping to understand Johannes better.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I know. But it does bring up some interesting points.”

  After piling salads high over beds of tabouleh they sat at an empty table and ate. “I don’t understand that Shimatu,” Margaret said between bites. “And it hurts my fingers to play him.”

  “You have to admit it’s sort of fun, though,” Dent said.

  “Umph. I suppose. Still I like something traditional. Give me De Bruik any day.”

  “Well—she’s good, all right. But you have to give the rest a chance—”

  “And it didn’t make any difference!” the woman sitting at the table behind Dent said loudly. He looked around—Margaret looked over his shoulder briefly—two Martians, their meal finished, were conversing, oblivious to the rest of the commons.

  “It didn’t make any difference,” the woman repeated. “The Reds won the election, and that’s what the polls said would happen all along.”

  The man facing her said, “There wasn’t time for the Areology to change enough votes. It takes time to translate an emotional thing like that into political action.”

  Margaret and Dent glanced at each other, and Margaret lifted her eyebrows. They looked down at their plates and continued to listen as they ate.

  “If it was going to have any effect at all it would have been immediate,” the woman said. “The further in the past it gets, the harder it will be for you to remember it. Or believe in it, from what you say.”

  “I don’t agree. If you were there you’d know that you could remember it for as long as you had to.”

  “Maybe. But it seems to me that in the context of day-to-day life the power of such an experience will fade.”

  “That’s because you weren’t there.”

  “All right! I wasn’t there.” The woman was annoyed. “Obviously there was something special about this year’s festival, but I had to work.”

  “Yes,” the man said after a pause. “There was something special. During Johannes Wright’s concert we … I saw … I felt what will come to pass on Mars. I don’t know how to put it! I felt it. And—it’s good, it really is.”

  “No one knows the future, John.”

  “So I would have said, but I saw it. Truly! Mars is already the best society in history. And everyone felt that at the same moment in the concert, they all saw what I saw. It was extraordinary.”

  The woman made a sound between her teeth.

  After another long pause, the man said, “It’s a hard thing to talk about.”

  “Let’s not, then.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait until I can say it better.”

  “You do that. Are you done eating? Let’s go, then.”

  The two got up and left. Margaret and Dent watched them leave the commons, then looked at each other again.

  “Well?” Margaret said, somewhat defensively.

  “See?” Dent replied. “Something did happen on Olympus Mons.”

  “I know that. I was there, remember? Believe me, I know it. For a while there I felt like the performance knob was thrusting right out into space! I felt like I did on Icarus. Completely peaceful and happy. But with a wider focus—more aware. I never denied it.”

  “But you said it was just music.”

  “It was just music. Johannes finally put all the parts of his composition together, and it’s a good one. What more do you want me to say? It’s a great one, a work of genius. I hope he can do it again on Earth.”

  “But it’s more than just that. There is some sort of transcendental effect to it! That music takes the listener outside of time.”

  Margaret shook her head. “I don’t believe that at all. The mind can enter funny states. You know that, Dent. And music is one of the strongest instruments of mental change.”

  Dent nodded. “All right, all right. Say it’s only that. I don’
t really know, and that’s the truth. But still, you heard those two just now. That man was saying he thought the whole structure of Martian life might be changed by that concert!”

  “And the other one was denying it.”

  “Well, okay. But what if he’s right?”

  “If he’s right, then maybe the Greens will start winning the elections on Mars. And Mars will break ties with Earth, and with the whiteline stations, and it’ll drop out of the system.”

  “Is that what the Greens really want?” Dent shook his head. “Yananda and I talked with one of their campaign workers at the festival, and she sounded as if all they wanted was to wean the planet from dependence on the sphere technology.”

  Margaret nodded. “Independence from the whiteline stations, and from Earth. I suppose it depends on what you think of those goals. I really don’t know enough to form an opinion.”

  “And neither do I,” Dent agreed. “But think about what that man just said. And just think—what if Johannes had played three, four, ten concerts all over Mars? What if all the Martians had heard him play like he did on Olympus Mons?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Who can say? In the worlds of what could have been, my friend, I frame no hypotheses.”

  partition

  The crossing from Mars to Earth was going too fast. The members of the Grand Tour had gotten used to a certain rhythm: a week’s activity, incessant and exhausting; then a month of rest, leisure, boredom. Around Jupiter, it is true, the ceaseless action of concert-giving had lasted nearly a month in itself; but afterwards there had come the long voyage, and the chance for recuperation. Now they were only ten days away from Mars, and all that had happened there was still fresh in their minds. And yet there, growing in the windows, were the blue-white ball and its big white moon, the binary system with the hypnotic ability to draw the eye, to crowd the window rooms with spectators; and getting bigger every minute, bigger at a speed that seemed to these travelers from upsystem a bit … unnatural. Clearly in the steep lower part of the gravity well things had to move faster, to keep from falling into the sun.