The Memory of Whiteness

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Dent grasped the trombone slide with both hands and got down to work.

  retrograde inversion

  Now, dear Reader, to say that two events occur at the same time is no simple matter. In the Newtonian universe, there is an absolute gridwork of space and time, within which the material phenomena of existence fluctuate; and measuring against that gridwork one can of course say that any two given events are occurring at the same absolute time. In the curved continuum of the Einsteinian universe, however, there is nothing but the material phenomena of existence; there is no underlying gridwork to measure against, and so you cannot say two events separated by space occur at the same time, because there is no clock that can encompass both of them—their time is inextricably bound up with the other three dimensions that locate them. This idea was expressed long before Einstein, by Heraclitus: “You cannot step in the same river twice.”

  But in the Holywelkin universe that we inhabit, Reader, the absolute gridwork has returned, has moved within the material phenomena of being; every event is fixed to all the rest in a newly discernable pattern, and this great Whole ticks along hadon by hadon, everywhere the same. So that once again it becomes possible to say two events occur at the same time.

  And I will say it: Dear Reader, at the same moment that Dent and Karna and Yananda entered the lock of The Duke of Vienna, Ernst Ekern, inside Prometheus Station on the other side of the sun, left his chamber. And in the same moments that the three intruders floated through the halls of Ekern’s ship, Ekern himself walked the curved hallways of the great torus, passing Grey after Grey; so that from here to the end, you yourself can time the simultaneity.

  As Ekern walked the curved hallway, he was shaken by the sight of so many Greys. Nowhere to look where there wasn’t a Grey. He had provided “Greys” for so much of the tour—and yet to Prometheus he had brought only the rest of his order. They were wearing grey and walking the hall as well, following the groups of chanting mystics, so that every fiftieth face he saw was familiar, smiling a little tucked Mona Lisa smile; but then he saw the smile on every other face that passed him, faces watching him from the corners of their eyes until he wanted to smash one of them with his fist, in warning to the rest. At one point or another on the great wheel were the quarters of the station’s governor; Ekern knew the number and yet as he checked the numbers on the doors he passed (they went from 1 to 360), it kept slipping around in his mind, 66 or 99 or 369, no it was 99, 99, 99. Here he was at 180, working his way down the small metal plates next to every door, and the face of Iris, one of the members of his order, passed him for the second time in five minutes, impossible though that was—it would take over an hour to circle the station even if running. Ekern stopped his progress and considered chasing her down, forcing the truth of the situation from her. But that would be part of their plot. He was in control here, he disdained all attempts to disturb his concentration for the final act.

  At room 99 the door was open and a whole suite of rooms was revealed, Greys in the window room standing before the darkened glass looking out at the whiteline sphere and singing a lilting chorus in a language Ekern had never heard before; and two rooms down another windowed chamber, smaller, empty and lit only by the strange flickering light of the newly created whitelines. Not empty; against the wall hardest to see stood the station’s governor (Ekern had been greeted by him on his arrival) and Atargatis, Atargatis staring at him coolly, both of them still as if part of a tableau.

  With a distinct exertion of will Ekern determined to wait them out. He stood and stared at them; they stared back. Ekern stalked to the window, looked up at the blur of white over black. He turned on a heel and pointed a finger at Atargatis. “Well?”

  “The concert begins in an hour,” the Grey governor said.

  Atargatis smiled. “Ernst knew that. He wants to know what will happen, don’t you, Ernst?”

  “Will you present the musician in your usual fashion?” Ekern said, battening down the hatred that he felt for his fellow playwright.

  The Grey nodded. “No room in the Great Wheel will contain all of us. Those who speak to us all, do so from a sphere that floats inside the cone of whitelines. The sphere is visible from the window rooms all around the wheel.”

  Ekern nodded; all would proceed as he had foreseen. This was the customary way that the Lion or any other speaker addressed the population of Prometheus. He had learned this long ago, he had counted on this, and now it was confirmed. Now Atargatis and his bright smile could be stared down with impunity. What did he know, what did he think he knew? What was his real standing with the Greys if he was the Lion of Jupiter, what was his relationship to this Lion of Prometheus, what…? Ekern’s mind spun along an upcurved hallway of questions, and choking off the whole avenue of thought he resolved to choke Atargatis if he could, to murder him in the most dramatic fashion possible, this meddler in his work—

  He found himself outside the quarters, in the big white hall, floor curving up in both directions. Back to the order’s window chamber, away from all this indeterminacy. Past the faces left and right, hurrying onward, ignoring the interpenetration of his order and this mysterious order of strangers. How could they be in control here, at the station providing the power that made all civilization possible? What were they? What were they?

  And there stood Johannes Wright before him, dressed in grey tunic and pants. Ekern shook his head convulsively but the sight remained. Because of the odd black eyes Ekern could tell nothing from Wright’s face, not even whether the meeting was something Wright had sought. In any case there he stood. Ekern shifted his feet, squinted for signs of a weapon. No weapon; only those eyes.

  In the white wall of the curving hallway there was an open door. Wright walked to it, looked back at Ekern. “Come along,” Wright said. Helplessly Ekern followed him, and they entered the room.

  In this room a great curving black window formed half the ceiling and all of one wall. Ekern stood in the room’s center. He looked up; over him beyond the transfer hub arched the giant torus, on which other black windows alternated with the blazing squares emitting the new whitelines. Through the black windows the population of Prometheus would observe the Orchestra, which would float in a strengthened bubble that only the Greys could weave, inside the cone of space created by the converging whitelines. Now these lines flickered between torus and singularity sphere, giving the silent room its only illumination. Ekern glanced around, jumped—there in the corner slumped a figure in grey, head tilted to the side so that it was almost buried in its grey hood. The head shifted, the face looked up slowly, as if it were a corpse reanimated: Diana. The Magus Diana. No recognition in her flickering eyes, only an idiot stare. Ekern pulled his gaze away from her, forced his heart to pound less violently (it was working to escape from his chest, to burst free), and looked at Wright again. Wright paced back and forth under the dark glass of the window, turning in to mark a little crescent around Ekern. It reminded Ekern of something he could not call to mind, something long ago, in a different age of this his ageless life—

  “What have you done to her?” he asked.

  “What have you done to me?” Wright said.

  Ekern’s heart made another escape attempt. He stared up at the whiteline sphere, rolling along with them out there in the streaming sunfire. Threats, attacks, kidnapping, drugging, tampering with dreams—lies, deceptions, illusions of every kind—what had he not done to him? Looking down at the little man Ekern stroked his red beard and shrugged slightly. What could he say? It was a question beyond answering, he would have had to answer it with his whole life.

  “You thought you were going to deceive me,” Wright said quietly, his eyes as shiny as the dark glass he was staring at. “You thought to lead me toward a secret that doesn’t exist, you thought that the Greys held an emptiness at their center that you could fill with your own fear. That they were an order similar to your own little one.” Wright looked over at Diana, slumped in the corner. Then he looked out the w
indow again. “Or you thought you could discover the Greys’ knowledge without exposing yourself to it directly, by using me as your probe. Isn’t that right? But you worked from fear, and ignorance. You don’t know what they know on Icarus. You don’t know what happened to me on Icarus. Isn’t that right? You don’t even know what happened to Holywelkin on Icarus. The journal of his that you wrote, and hid for me to find—what made you write what you did? You don’t know. You don’t know what you cast me into, do you? Nor do you realize how far you can be pulled along with me.… If you had been on Olympus Mons, you might have learned.”

  Ekern cleared his throat. “I was on Olympus Mons.”

  The black alien eyes stared through him, and he shivered.

  “Then you know,” Wright said.

  “Know what?”

  Wright laughed shortly. He paced to Ekern’s left side. “You know that I could tell you all your future. I could sing to you in the language I have learned and forever after you would step through every step of your life like a mechanism.”

  “No,” Ekern said, stepping back once. This was his own dream come true; in the long months of planning, of reading Wright’s notebooks and their sources in Holywelkin, he had invented this horrifying determinism—in the months when the dreams had compelled him to write the false Holywelkin journal, when his mind had perhaps been invaded and not his own—“No—” The little black-eyed man pursued him step by step, his heart was going to leap out his throat, he had to play his part here, Diana was on the floor watching—if it was still Diana—

  Then Wright opened his mouth and a melody rebounded. Ekern came to with his hands clamped over his ears, wedged in the corner across from Diana. He could not remember how he had gotten there. Fear, fear pulsing in every vein with every hard knock of his heart.… Had one of his plays turned on him and become real? Had he by some awful chance guessed the truth of the Greys?

  “What—” he croaked. “What have you done. Why have you done—”

  Wright turned away from him, and then with a jerk pointed at him, with a forefinger that seemed to extend all the way across the room. “There is no such question! Note I never ask you why you led me down this road. Your whole life led you to it, each act determined by all that came before. Our destinies lead us step by step, and you, pathetic in your illusion of control, creating a weird simulacrum of the truth, step in the utter darkness of ignorance. I might force the truth into you, but if I did, it would be because I have always done it. And so it gives me no satisfaction. Why … why always has the same answer. I’m done with you.” He turned toward the door, mouth twisted with disgust. Almost at the door he stopped, rushed back at Ekern:

  “When this is over you will have no Orchestra, you will have no metadrama, you will have no future, you will have nothing as you understand it now.” He straightened up, took a step back. “I give you that in return for what you give me. You will be master of nothing.” He walked to the door, disappeared.

  “G-good work,” Ekern muttered, as much for himself as for Diana. “You r-really had him deceived. He thought you believed him, there. And so he will think—he will think he has broken through to the real. Good performance. Good performance.” But his whole body shook, he remembered the moment on Olympus Mons when he had seen something on Prometheus Station, something very like this, something that this was, perhaps, the prelude to.

  “Break through the real,” Diana whispered, staring through the black glass at nothing.

  cut is the branch

  And if you are Johannes Wright, following yourself and your shattered senses around the curved hallways of Prometheus, you will forget the encounter with Ekern, you will succumb to the death of feeling that has been creeping up on you ever since the visit to Icarus, and all that occurs to you will be perceived but dimly, as if you are the unwilling witness to someone else’s dream. You will proceed to the room where Orchestra is being transformed into spaceship, you will feel the sunlight burst through the cracks around closed doors, bend around the hallway that seems part of the underlying synchrotron, smash and rebound against the walls surrounding you.… Sunlight will become the visible manifestation of the blind force driving through everything, driving everything to movement, and you will begin to understand the Greys in a detached way that explains nothing. In sun’s light is the power of the dance.

  You will come to a section of the hallway roofed in glass; spiral staircases lead from the floor of the station’s curving hallway up into this chamber, which is filled with computers, display boards, control consoles and their blinking lights, a maze of silver pipes, a forest of bulky tall boxes. In a cleared area above you you will see the Orchestra, resting on the big square shape of a sphere generator. Figures in grey will scurry around it, bolting the instrument down to the generator, wiring a control box for the sphere into your booth. Your body will turn away from that sight, it will pace of its own accord in a widening spiral, a gyre contained by the circle of the hallway. In sun’s light is the form of the gyre.

  Margaret will appear, and you will regard her as you would an important figure from your childhood. She will join you, she will say, “Don’t play this concert, Johannes.”

  How will you speak of it? “I have to,” you will say.

  “You don’t have to!”

  “I do.”

  “But why? Why?”

  How will you speak of it? “Why anything?” Because there was, in the beginning, a big bang under certain laws, the thought experiment of some unimaginable god working its way out, and in the infinity of time and space it held in its circle of eternal recurrence.…

  “If you don’t talk to me about it now,” Margaret will say grimly, “then when will you?”

  You will regard your old friend with an understanding generated by the timbre of her voice, its anxious hoarse buzz. “On Icarus, and then on Earth, I was taught the true nature of time and space, Margaret. It is there in Holywelkin’s work and I stood on the verge of knowing. And then I knew.”

  “Ekern has pushed you to this extremity. What you think you know is just his insanity.”

  “Impossible. Ekern may have led me to the Greys, but then he was left behind. This transcends him. You were on Icarus, Margaret, you know that.”

  “Maybe so.” She will have to admit the truth of that. “But no matter what the Greys know—no matter what you think you know, you can’t be sure of it. That’s what it means to be human. Our powers are finite, our ability to know is limited, and all our truths are relative.” The dense texture of rasps in her voice will rise in pitch as she grows more insistent. “That’s what it means to be human, Johannes! We’re trapped in our selves, we are not gods.”

  “Being human is enough to know it.”

  “It is not!” she will exclaim angrily. “To destroy yourself for something you think you know is foolish arrogance. Holywelkin’s math, the knowledge of the Greys, all our models are no more than models. They’re no more than stabs in the dark, and a new one will replace the old as sure as anything. How many times have they fallen through? A determinate system held in an indeterminate one, which is enclosed by a determinate system of new power—which is then found to be part of a larger, more comprehensive model that is indeterminate. And so on through history. This determinism you believe in so strongly is just the model of the moment—and even less than that—it comes from a misreading of Holywelkin. Think about it, Johannes,” she will say desperately, voice tearing, “if the true reality is a timeless whole, determined forever, then where does the illusion of succession come from? Why should our consciousness be moving forward into the future, when everything else in the universe is static and complete? It’s absurd! The mistake you have made, Johannes, you and whoever led you to this, is to spatialize time. You are thinking of time as just another dimension of space, which Holywelkin’s equations can map precisely. But it would be more accurate to temporalize space, to speak of a timespace continuum rather than a spacetime continuum, to admit that there are ma
ny more possibilities than actualities, that contingency exists everywhere in this indeterminate world of becoming,” and meanwhile, all the time she is saying this, you will be standing in the crystal halls of eternity, watching past and future curve up and away in spirals extending off immovably, forever. How will you explain that to her? How can you explain yourself and still protect her illusions, which, flimsy as they are, make her life bearable? Soon she will shout at you, she will pummel you with her fists, and all you will want to do is calm her, comfort her, thank her, tell her that you love her, in a language that you will be fast forgetting. You will understand the impossibility of any discourse about your acquaintance, the real.

  “You don’t listen to people, Johannes, and it’s going to be the end of you. You didn’t listen to Anton, you didn’t listen to Dent, and now you aren’t listening to me.”

  You will say, “I am listening to you, Margaret. I am listening as hard as I can. And I answer with my music, always. I thought my music would make it clear.” Your body will have difficulty making these words and you will be stopped short, realizing that in every crucial moment of your life you have chosen to speak the language that is more expressive and powerful than any other, but which no one understands. “I asked Anton to listen to the music.”

  “He did.”

  And a great blackness will sweep through the corridors, blocking for a time the blast of indirect sunlight. You will be lost in this darkness.…