The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance Read online

  He approached a smallish woman standing alone. “What did you think of the concert?”

  A bank of polychrom lights snapped on and suddenly the woman’s round face and long braids were broken into primary colors, as if Dent had stepped too close to a pointillist painting. She looked awful, and Dent supposed he looked the same. “Truly a disgrace to the Orchestra,” the woman said. “Wright’s technique was sloppy and he overused the tape systems dreadfully. It’s a sad contrast to Yablonski, who played every instrument live. And the music was no more than reworked De Bruikian polyphony.” She nodded emphatically, shifting her facial colors in a way that made Dent almost sick. He marvelled that there was so much green in flesh tone.

  A trio of Martian bagpipers ran from the building behind the trees, skreeling like banshees. With a howl members of the crowd raced after them, chasing them around the trees and into Dent and the woman. Dent leaped back. The trio’s assailants were attempting to stop them, but the Martians were half again as tall as their hunters, and they kicked out in a Highland dance made martial art, keeping the crowd at bay. Then one was tackled and the other two went to his aid, and the piping stopped. A woman in a long red coat broke into a wild Arabic ululation, and dove into the melee swinging her fists. “My God!” Dent cried, and skittered away, startled by the violence. Something was wrong with this festival—he bumped into someone and turned, ready to run. He was facing a tall skinny man with a bony face, on which were painted red “whiskers.” The man grinned wolfishly and the red lines across his cheeks folded in.

  Dent stepped back nervously. “What did you think of the concert, sir?”

  “Why do you want to know?” the man said.

  “Well—I missed it, and it’s left me in sort of a gray area. I am a correspondent—”

  “You are not,” the man growled. “Why do you want to know!” he shouted, and pushed Dent hard in the chest.

  Dent tumbled backwards onto the grass. “Excuse me,” he said, crawling rapidly away. “Just curious—I have a right to ask—”

  And was shoved off his knees onto his side. A kick to the midriff and his breath was gone. While he lay gasping rough hands pulled at his coat, searched the pockets, tore his wallet away. “We’ll find out who you are right enough.” “Gaaa—” Another kick and he was beyond speech.

  After a while he sat up. Enprism lights scattered the scene before him into several illusory dimensions. The oak trees seemed leaved with emeralds. Someone was pulling at his arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Need police,” Dent said.

  “There are no police on Lowell,” said the bearded man he had spoken to earlier.

  “But—how do you get help?”

  “I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

  “But what if you’re attacked?”

  “Then you defend yourself. What, lose a fight?”

  “I was robbed.”

  “Ah.” The man pulled him up by his elbow, and Dent stood, hunched over. “That’s bad. Here, need a hand somewhere?”

  “Thanks. I’m all right.” Dent took a few exploratory steps.

  “They’ll be able to identify you at the spaceport. You shouldn’t have any problem. You weren’t carrying anything valuable?”

  “No. Thanks again.” Dent hobbled off. He tacked back down the boulevard like a boat in a storm: voices howled like the wind, shouts cracked like thunder, banks of light burst over him like bolts of lightning. A Martian in a purple dress loomed over him and chanted, “Holywelkin didn’t mold it for play, there’s too much chance in music today!” A man behind her pointed at Dent and shouted, “He’s the one who did it! He’s the one!”

  “Not me,” Dent bleated, and staggered into a side street. Here alleys were coiled like the tracks of positrons, and he lost himself. It seemed hours of walking and dodging passed before he could relocate the boulevard. By the time he saw the spaceport entrance he could barely walk. Persephone, Pluto’s whitsun, broke over the eastern horizon like another bank of lights. Suddenly the air of the city glowed a real blue, and one by one the banks of altered light were shut down. Looking north Dent could see all the way to Tombaugh Square. Everyone around him spoke in a language he didn’t recognize. It was dawn: only bonfires and the limpid blue sky lit the town now. A great roar of protesting voices washed over them all. Exhausted, hurt, Dent hobbled to the spaceport; its facade flickered under the dusky yellow light of a dying bonfire. In the doorway he turned for one last look. The shouting was like the roar of high seas on a beach.

  inversion

  Johannes Wright—remember him, dear Reader?—the musician who glimpsed his destiny?—Johannes Wright was tired. He sank back into the couch against the wall of a lounge in the power plant, and let everything wash over him. Voices of Marie-Jeanne and Rudyard, chatting quietly with Margaret. His old friend Anton Vaccero, laughing nervously over a game of cups, played with two of Karna’s security people. Grainy texture of light as he allowed the photoptic cells to unfocus. He looked at the blur that was Margaret: raven blue-black hair tossed in a reflexive gesture over a shoulder. The ophthalmologists had told him the photoptic cells would enable him to distinguish about a thousand colors, as opposed to the six million gradations visible to the natural eye. The cell was as sensitive as the retina, they said, but the connection to the optic nerve was inferior. A poster world: it could be beautiful. Even if seven or eight hundred of the thousand colors were some shade of blue. He faded into the grainy blue-out drowsily. The wall behind Margaret yellow, yellow-green, aquamarine, and yet on it a dark blue stain … her shadow, of course. A certain processing problem there. Some time during his seven months of blindness, he thought, he had forgotten how to see; and now eyes meant nothing to him, sight was an alien sense. What if you could suddenly distinguish the gases in the air around you, or feel magnetism like static electricity, or see the gravity created at the center of a sphere? It wouldn’t do you any good, not without a teacher. Looking at the world of the wall Johannes saw that inanimate objects were formed always as false parallels, while all living things were stacks of intersected ellipses. Or else he had been reading too much Mauring geometry in his attempt to understand Holywelkin. Margaret’s powerful shoulders, a field of ellipses, slumped against the couch back: in the extremity of blue-out he felt he could see all her veins. He drifted off toward sleep, the shutter of all the senses.

  Anton’s familiar laugh cut off abruptly. Wright focused his eyes.

  Ernst Ekern stood in the doorway. The room was silent. Wright struggled up out of the couch and stood. “Yes?”

  Ekern stepped farther into the room, looked around. He was nearly as short as Wright, a thick man running to fat. To Johannes he jumped out of the grainy blue because of his coloring: curly white hair on top of his head shaded to white-gray curls at the back, and whitish sideburns shaded to a reddish-brown beard. Redbeard, Johannes had called him in the days of his apprenticeship. Round puffy nose, sharp intelligent brown eyes.

  Redbeard said, “I want to speak with you, Johannes.”

  His crew roused themselves as if to leave. “No,” Ekern said to them. “Stay here.” He said to Johannes, “There’s another lounge across the hall.”

  Johannes followed him, and together they entered an empty, dim lounge. A rustle came from behind a large mirror and in his poster vision, blue on blue, he saw clearly that it was a window as well. He turned to face Ekern. He was too tired for the passions, and their stormy history seemed silly to him now, the squabbling of children for dominance. He had never understood Ekern’s dislike of him; it had no cause, no motive. Ekern paced the other side of the room, wall to wall, slowly as if to some adagio march. All his ellipses were squashed to a near perfect circularity, the effect of tremendous control exerted. Yet such an effort could never be successful, and Johannes almost laughed: hernia as the elliptical result of crushing ellipses to roundness. Then Ekern stopped and faced him, and smiled. And that smile was the crack in the wall, it split all the pretenses of civility; thro
ugh it seeped all Ekern’s long-tended hatred. Johannes stiffened and woke up fully at last.

  “So you have begun your first Grand Tour,” Ekern said quietly, and commenced pacing again. His voice was a fine baritone, exquisitely modulated, with a touch of roughness in its timbre. It had the sound of a great cat’s purr.

  “Yes,” Johannes said, fumbling. “Yes.”

  “And it was quite a beginning.”

  Meaning what? Johannes shook his head. Fragments, the barest part of the whole. He had a lot of work to do. It would take more study, and some sort of … key. Yet even now he pushed at the edge of his understanding.

  “You were not satisfied?” Ekern asked.

  “No.”

  “Then we have something in common,” Ekern purred, and paced. In the dim blue light his red beard glowed. Johannes felt a draft, and shivered. What was this man in the shadows after?

  “You play only your own compositions,” Ekern said, with a quick glance.

  “That is what the Orchestra is for.”

  “You play only your own compositions. Work unknown to the public. You base your compositions on Holywelkin’s mathematics—on his Ten Forms of Change, in fact.”

  “Yes,” said Johannes, surprised. “How did you know?”

  “I have studied you.” Ekern stopped pacing, stared at Johannes curiously. “I have had to study you, Johannes Wright, to know what to do with you. And now I know more about you than you do.”

  Johannes shook his head, annoyed and fearful. “You know nothing,” he said. “No one knows anything of me.” Yet he had thought the basis of his work was known to himself alone. His notes—Ekern must have had his notebooks searched. There the broken twigs of his passage could be found, but what would they signify to an outsider? Nothing.

  “So you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule.”

  “We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another.” In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromolecule, an RNA strand, as a passacaglia, a ground base repeated again and again, in patterns of four that alternated regularly. This was a simple icon, a metaphor in which the repeated ground base stood for the repeated proteins in the RNA; fine. And the free radical’s part was a test for any trumpet player. But the problem always returned to the question of how to yoke together the two terms of the metaphor. What was the analogy between certain pitches of a certain duration, and strings of protein molecules? For De Bruik it had been no more than an impression, an instinctive metaphor made from scattered readings of, and the one crucial meeting with, the elderly Holywelkin—a matter of feeling. But Johannes was convinced it was possible to be more exact; he wanted to make a musical analogy for the world that was precisely accurate.…

  “… Music based on physics,” Ekern said. He had been speaking for some time, but Johannes had been distracted, and now he was at a loss. “It certainly sounds disturbing enough,” Ekern said. “It drove the crowd mad.” He cocked his head, as if understanding the music by that remark. “And here you are commencing a Grand Tour. With nothing familiar in your repertory. An unprecedented program.”

  “Hull the third Master and Mayaklosov the sixth Master played only their own work,” Johannes said. From behind the mirror-window, a rustle, a muffled cough.

  “Every third a sport, eh? But those were considered nadirs in the Orchestra’s history.”

  “Not by me.”

  Ekern smiled; another crack, another seepage. Johannes shook his head apprehensively. What did he want?

  Again Ekern paced. “You make your first Grand Tour. The Orchestra is famous everywhere, people will flock to hear you. Through the layers of history back to ancient Earth you will travel, playing your new composition, changing it as you go along, revising and completing it. On Mars there will be a festival to make Lowell’s look like a tea party; all the planet will gather at Olympus Mons for their Areology. And you will play music they have never heard. Then to ancient Earth and the awe of those capitals, in the homes of our minds; a triumph, certainly. But for whom? What will they make of you? What will become of the Grand Tours to come, of Holywelkin’s Orchestra?”

  Johannes shrugged, stepped toward the door, away from the darkness surrounding Ekern, red patch in the blues. “I choose the music played,” he said, feeling Ekern’s message in the oblique description.

  “So you do,” Ekern said. “You choose it. You compose it, and not the spirit of Holywelkin. Not the spirit of Holywelkin, do you understand me?”

  “No,” Johannes said, feeling a stab of fear.

  “Holywelkin’s influence would change your mind.”

  “No!” Johannes said. “I know Holywelkin better than you.”

  “Ah!” And Ekern paced in the gloom, back and forth, back and forth. Johannes felt the ominous silence. Shivering, he tensed his eye muscles to try to see his foe better. Red beard dull in the dark.

  “You have studied Holywelkin, then?” said the rough baritone voice.

  “Very well.”

  “Then you know.”

  “Know what?”

  A long pause, two turns, a sudden stop. Redbeard staring straight at him, shadowed eyes intent. “You know.”

  A shiver rippled up the skin over Johannes’s spine. What had he missed? What did Ekern mean, what did he know, thus to assume Johannes’s understanding? Holywelkin had been a strange man, secretive, eccentric, unpredictable—the Kepler of the Thirtieth century; everything one knew about him contradicted some other fact of his biography. It could be anything—

  Unless he meant the heart of things. The meaning of Holywelkin’s work.

  Johannes came to and saw that in the course of his pacing Ekern had approached him. He took a step back. Moved to the mirror, touched it. In the mirror world Ekern’s beard was a dull green, the room was flattened and the air was gray. Too much obscurity—he turned—

  Ekern pointed at him, finger like a gun. “I will change you,” he said, and hopped past Johannes out the door.

  Heart pulsing like a knock at the door. Johannes rubbed a cold hand over his chest. The dim room still seemed quite occupied. He left it with a shudder and walked down the hall, unwilling to face his road crew in this state of amorphous dread. Hallways, quiet and dim. All those years of dissension with Ekern … from the very first meeting he had been a bitter antagonist. Yablonski had introduced him, and Ekern had sneered: “So this is your apprentice.” And for no reason. There had been no cause for his hostility. The memory of it was so disturbing that Johannes willed himself to think of something else.

  He recalled his evening’s performance. He had programmed into the Orchestra’s computer the equations of two of Holywelkin’s ten forms, and then chosen tones in the bass to represent lazed glints, leaving the singularity sphere of one of the power stations orbiting the sun. The effect of two of the forms of change on these glints, scored for the bass instruments: inversion and retrogradation, vertical and horizontal reversals, made repeatedly until the score was sufficiently complicated. And very important forms of change they were, too. But until all of the forms were brought to bear simultaneously—as they were in reality—he would not be satisfied. There had been too many centuries of partial music already. Holywelkin had struggled with this problem before him; in his last notebook he had written, in the complete glint mechanics all apparent motion must be taken into account.…

  Considering these matters Johannes walked by the door to the storage room, where the Orchestra waited for the voyage to Uranus. He paused, but did not enter.

  the orchestra’s song

  And by not entering, missed what occurred inside: such turns, such unnoticed forks in unnoticed paths, determine all our lives.

  It was almost dark in the storage room; only a red light high on one wall illuminated the Orchestra, which nearly filled the chamber. Against the door stood a tall figure, limbs taut and ready for flight. When the footsteps in the hall outside receded, the figure moved into the room, toward the O
rchestra. The red light accentuated the color of his curly hair; it was Anton Vaccero, the lighting chief for the tour. In his left hand was a small bag, and on his face was a blank expression. He circled the Orchestra warily, found the entrance through the piano bench gap. Up and inside, then, and following the glass steps that made a twisting path to the control booth. But once there he continued to climb, past the row of saxophones, and the quartet of tympanis, up into the twisting glass branches where people rarely visited. At that height there were few steps, and Vaccero’s long, lithe arms and legs served him well as he stretched from foothold to foothold, spreadeagling as he climbed higher. The cloud of violas formed an obstacle that was difficult to get past; the big brown fiddles rested in delicate glassy carriages composed of bow-arms, finger tabs, pizzicatta pluckers, and tuning dials, so that they appeared oddly shaped fruit encased in a rime of reddish frost. Vaccero descended, took an easier path up. He shifted the bag from hand to hand according to need, and grasped the thick clear struts carefully. He was wearing thin gloves.

  Eventually he came to the celesta, with its white soundbox and its elegant ivory keyboard, encrusted with glass finger tabs. The arms holding the instrument were thick, and Vaccero stood on two of them to complete his work. The top panel of the soundbox rose easily, revealing the narrow steel plates that the instrument’s hammers struck. Vaccero put the bag on the plates and drew from it a pair of brackets and a short hammer. From his blouse pocket he took nails just bigger than tacks, and reaching into the soundbox he tapped away awkwardly until the brackets were nailed to the inside of the box. Then he took from the bag a small notebook, with stiff plastic covers. He glanced at the pages with a quick riffle; they were filled with a spidery handwriting. He slid the notebook into the brackets, shook it to make sure it was firmly in place. Then he let the top of the soundbox down, and descended as quickly as he could through the maze of glass.