The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance

  Margaret found she was holding her breath, and breathed. Karna was trying to look in all directions at once, head swivelling like an automatic scanner’s; it would have made Margaret smile, but she was too nervous. The Greys who had piloted their shuttle came down the staircase, wearing red caps that flopped to one side, over their ears. The six Greys on the trail reached the edge of the grass and she could make out their severe brown faces: three men, she guessed, and three women. With the three from the shuttle they walked to the perimeter of the grass circle, until they were evenly distributed and facing inward. And so there were—Margaret counted—ten of them? She counted again. Ten of them. Where…? Karna looked grim. Johannes was locked in a gaze with the Grey standing directly in front of him, off at the edge of the grass. That Grey began to sing in a language of tones as serrated as the ridges above, while the other nine Greys chanted vowels in slow low chords. Ten tones, the top one a jagged ridge in time. Then they stopped and the silence of that high mountain valley was so empty and pure that it became a tangible gel containing them, and Margaret could feel her thoughts roaring in it. Clumps of moss were strewn like scraps of green carpet over level spots on the banks of the small stream that gurgled through the jumbled moraine down the valley—and now she could hear the distant threnody of the creek’s voice, where she hadn’t before. And there were small juniper trees struggling for life, flattened by existence in the wind, humming softly.

  The Grey across from Johannes sang, “Welcome to Icarus, Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra.” He pointed down the valley, back the way he had come. “There is your path—”

  And they all froze. They all stopped chanting, the speaker continued to point like an utterly inert statue, and it appeared that not one of them breathed. Karna took a step toward them. “What…”

  And then another shuttle popped over a ridge like a great hawk. As it fell toward the strip it grew wings and tilted back to land like a puff of down. It slowed and rolled to a stop just behind the first shuttle. The door opened, the staircase descended: metallic squeaks in the airy silence, squeak, squeak, squeak, clunk. Down stepped a single tall man, dressed in grey pants and tunic, his wrinkled face the color of a walnut, framed by a whitish beard. He approached them in an easy long stride. “Do you wish to see the Father of Fathers?” he called, tilting his head in a bemused fashion.

  Johannes said, “Yes, I do. But what about these?”

  The man shrugged. “I thought they were with you.” And, seeing Margaret’s and Karna’s expressions: “They are not Grey. I have affixed them momentarily to inquire your purposes and theirs.”

  “We do not know theirs,” Johannes said. “We thought they were the Greys come to greet us. No one specified to us what form our greeting would take. Now you come and say you are the true Grey here. How are we to know?”

  The man gestured. “Inspect these still figures around you. Their blood does not pulse, their heart does not beat, they do not bleed; yet when I release them they will live. No one but we of Icarus can do that. Now, come see Zervan. He wants to speak to you.”

  Johannes nodded, and when the tall Grey turned and walked up the glacial basin, Johannes followed him. After one stricken look at Karna, Margaret followed, and Karna brought up the rear.

  The trail was no more than a line where the rocks had been walked on many times, until the cracks between them filled with gravel and dust. It led them all up the glacial valley. The sides of the valley rounded in and met at the cleft of a long tumbling whiteline of water. The trail switchbacked next to the stream, so that as they hiked the twisting path they heard the stream’s rushing voice recede and return, time after time. Work and the bright whitsun warmed Margaret’s neck, then all of her. Wafts of juniper scent were blown out by the waterfall. Blotches of lichen colored the large boulders protruding from the slope, in patches of yellow, red, green, black.

  Glaciers carve U’s in the valleys they course through, and the bigger valleys fill with more ice and are carved deeper. Side branches of these glaciers are smaller and do not carve as deep, and so where they meet the larger glacier there are discrepancies, revealed when the glaciers melt away as hanging valleys, cirques, and cirquelike heads for every valley branch: waterfalls abound. Now they were climbing up the big valley’s side wall to one of these hanging valleys, and when they came to the top of the switchbacks they found themselves entering a broad basin like a giant granite bowl cut in half. Small lakes dotted the bottom of the basin, and a hundred trickles fell down the steep basin walls. In the jagged horseshoe ridge edging the bowl there was a dip somewhat to the left of the horseshoe’s middle, and in places on the basin wall short strands of the whitish trail were visible, switchbacking up to that dip. The Grey led his three visitors up the trail, taking the switchbacks with a long graceful stride. Margaret hiked behind Johannes, and began to sweat. She turned her head to speak to Karna, who hiked behind her: “I wonder what the air is made of?”

  Karna sniffed. “Lot of oxygen. And the pressure—maybe six hundred millibars? Hard to say. It’s thin, though.”

  At last they came to the dip, and were in a pass. Behind them was their basin—before them another basin, longer, narrower, deeper, a string of finger lakes down its bottom. The ridges rose on both sides; to the left they rose to a thick, tall sawtooth peak. The pass was composed of fat rounded blocks of rough granite, split and cracked in a million ways. Moss grew in some of the splits, and lichen starred the speckled grey rock with color. Margaret felt her pulse tap in her neck. “This is a small asteroid. They’ve left a lot of open space.” The horizons were close, but from their height they saw nothing but range after range.

  “There must not be very many people living here,” said Karna.

  Johannes stood by the tall Grey, observing him in silence while the Grey stared at the thick peak, as if looking for something on it.

  In the distant sky a speck winged toward them. “Bird,” Margaret said, and Karna nodded. The sky seemed a darker blue than before, and above them the whitsun glared. No wind; no sound of the waterfalls below. Every rock on every slope and basin gleamed individually at them. And the speck flew up the far basin and grew until they saw that it was spinning rather than flapping wings, and then it was too large to be a bird and they saw it was a man, cartwheeling flat on his back through the air. Margaret stepped back, then went to Johannes’s side and held him by the arm.

  The flying man tilted into a vertical cartwheel and spun up the valley’s headwall to the pass. And then he spun in place above them and up one ridge, and slowed his revolutions, and came to a stop floating upright, arms and legs extended outward in the position of the Da Vinci anatomy drawing. He wore only a white loincloth, and his skin was the walnut color of their guide’s face. His hair was jet black and he had a hooked nose. He crossed his arms and smiled.

  Margaret heard Karna gasp, and it was a sound so unlike him that she tore her gaze from the levitating man to glance over at him. Karna’s mouth hung open foolishly, and his face was gray and bloodless. He cried out in Hindi, and to Margaret’s astonishment the floating man replied in the same language, his voice high and nasal, like a vocal model for the oboe. Karna stepped past Johannes, past Margaret and her restraining hand. He spoke in a strained, harsh tone. “Who is he?” Margaret cried. Johannes put his hand to her shoulder. “What are they saying?” she said, frightened. Johannes shook his head, gaze on Karna. She knew that Johannes knew what they were saying, and jerked his arm. The floating man drifted up the ridge, and Karna followed him by leaving the trail and hopping up recklessly from rock to rock. “Karna!” Margaret shouted, and ran a few steps after him. She halted and looked beseechingly at Johannes; but Wright was staring at the tall Grey, his expression as blank as his eyes. Margaret groaned and climbed laboriously from rock to rock after Karna, who was leaping up at a swift clip just below the floating man. The two were still conversing. As she caught up to them Karna skipped up twice and hopped into the air, rising without effort to the levitato
r’s side. Remaining there. Margaret stopped, blood washing through her like boiling water. The two men embraced in midair, pulled apart. With hawklike swiftness the levitator grabbed Karna’s wrists and yanked him around, spun him and spun him like a man tossing the hammer, until they were both horizontal and twirling above Margaret. The levitator let go (sudden flash of Karna’s surprised face) and they flew off in opposite directions, spinning still, each disappearing in a few seconds over the ranges on the horizon.

  Margaret looked back to Johannes. He was walking up the other ridge edge that rose from the pass, accompanied by the tall Grey. “Johannes,” she cried, and raced down the rocks, along the spine of the pass, up the other ridge. Johannes turned down a spur trail dropping into the new basin the pass had revealed to them, and she followed him down. Closing on his back she felt a surge of relief and anger. What did he think he was doing? But when she reached him the fear grabbed her again—he seemed tall—he turned. It was her brother. She gasped as if hit and stumbled to a halt, scraping a knee on the rocky ground. The sight of his face, looking just as it had during his life, made her burst into tears. Karl had committed suicide by volunteering for the whiteline jump experiments on Mars; “Karl,” she said, and instantly she thought of Johannes and remembered where she was. She squinted and dashed the tears from her eyes, “You’re not Karl!” she said furiously, and shouted, “What have you done to Johannes?” She grabbed the figure’s shoulders roughly, intending to shake the truth from him, but touching him melted her will, and with a small smile the Karl man touched her cheek. She was crying again. “Where is he? Why did you do it?”

  A great calm filled her. “Where is he, Karl?” she repeated, but Karl didn’t answer. But it wasn’t him. She remembered again, saw that his face was wrong. They were putting her in some kind of trance—she struck the man in the face and he staggered back. It had been a hard blow. “Come on, Grey,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve done with him before I beat you up.” She felt light but cool-headed. The man lunged forward and slapped her; she punched him hard, and he rolled away on the ground and got up running pell mell down the steep trail away from her. He dropped like a goat and no matter how reckless Margaret was she couldn’t descend the steep rocky trail any faster. She cursed in frustration as her prey reached the basin floor and dashed away. When she reached the basin floor he was nowhere to be seen; big boulders stuck up like houses here and there on the rumpled basin meadow, glacial erratics dropped at random. He could have hidden anywhere. As she wandered down the meadow she noticed the twisted low shapes of the junipers, struggling to hunker down in their little nooks and crannies. Grass patches, mounds of dull heather sparked by flower colors, granite a rich reddish tan, specked with chips of black and white and yellow. She walked down to the basin’s crease, where the first pond formed. Around it neat moss lawns tucked into the rock surrounded the dark blue water. And there across the pond, a bighorn sheep, horns spiraling like the shape of all creation: still but alert, head up, ears trained her way. She walked slowly around the pond, keeping eye contact with the bighorn at all times. She had been sent often as a child to recover hurt wildlife, it was a talent she had. The sheep had all its sharp hoofs on one flat rock. It clattered off the rock and then submitted to Margaret’s steady approach, until she laid a hand on its bony spine. Then it led her down the stepped boulders flanking the pond’s exit creek. Little falls over stones alternated with rushing straight spills until the stream fell into the next pond, a larger one. They walked together to a patch of meadow grass at the pond’s edge. Clumps of grass, gritty granite sand, alpine flowers like little fountains of color. A marmot, startled by their appearance, bounded past them; Margaret caught it up and stroked it, but it was frightened and jerked out to nip at her cheek. She patted and cooed and soon it was as calm as the sheep. A little blood dripped down her cheek. She sat down and placed the marmot beside her on the grass. The stream poured into the pond, which appeared to be tilted so that the stream was higher where it left the pond than where it entered. Over the smooth sheet of water there was movement. Margaret looked at a particularly large boulder, standing at the pond’s mouth; behind it appeared a big light brown hunting cat. Mountain lion, cougar, puma. Margaret gasped with delight. Icarus was like the outer worlds, inhabited by animals.… Now the cat circled the pond, each step rippling the fur over its massive shoulders. The bighorn and marmot watched it, unblinking and unafraid, because Margaret was there. And … perhaps there was something about this pond. The little clicks of water falling, and no other sound. The granite basin, holding them as in a bowl. Everything she saw, heard, felt, smelled, everything was peaceful. The cat stepped off a rock onto their little lawn, and touched noses with bighorn and marmot. It was making a sound like a deep purr; it was purring. Margaret laughed with delight. It came to her and licked the blood from her cheek. Its tongue was like a fine wet rasp. She threw her arms around its thick neck and hugged it, face deep in the clean-smelling tan fur. The cat sat, extended forward until it lay sphinxlike on the meadow. The four of them sat, filled by the rhythmic buzz of the cat’s low purr, a cycle of breath that Margaret and the bighorn fell in with; the marmot breathed in double time. The three pairs of eyes watching her were so calm, so calm. Contentment washed through Margaret like a buzz of the purr; she stood and took off her clothes, and sat back down on the rock, an animal among animals. The whitsun’s light gleamed on her dark brown skin. She thought, we know we are beautiful because animals give us such reverence. The breeze brushed her skin; the whitsun was warm on her back and legs. The smell of the stunted pines across the pond wafted by, and the cougar purred. A bloom of rock jasmine tumbled into the pond with the stream, and floated toward them. Margaret kneeled and reached out over her reflection to pluck the flower from the water. The bloom had a velvety surface, and its deep pink was all shot with tiny veins of red. An oval green leaf clung to the stem below the flower; it had a waxy surface, and its veins were a darker green than the rest of it. Her dim reflection looked out of the leaf at her, and she frowned; something was not right. She showed the cougar its reflection, forgetting the thought, filling again with the great peaceful harmony that nature in certain eternal moments sings.

  * * *

  There was a faint, narrow trail running up the very edge of the ridge, and Johannes Wright trudged up it after the Grey. The ridge rose at a steep angle; their trail wound around knobs to avoid vertical jumps in the ridge (gendarmes standing watch), and sometimes they walked on ledges in the sheer slopes of steep cirque walls, under the gendarmes’ sides. But always they returned to the ridge edge higher than they had been before, and hiked onward, up toward the thick sawtooth peak at the highest point of the ridge.

  The whitsun hung in the western sky, pouring light onto them. A series of lakes lay across the floor of the basin below like a string of jewels, aquamarine around their edges, cobalt in their deep centers. Johannes stopped often to look at them and at the curving tiers of scored and jumbled granite. He had never been in mountains like these before, and the immense prospects were overwhelming; sometimes his head swam in the thin air, and he had to look down at his feet and concentrate; one foot after another, trudging it out, step by step, thighs pumping, quadriceps aching like overworked rubber bands … sweat pouring down the forehead, stinging the corners of the eyes.… Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is hard and unremitting. And the questions are the same as always: What are you doing? Is it the right thing? Should you go back? — Nothing up here but the same answers, stripped bare of all complication: Just walk. Keep hiking. That’s all you can do. That is your destiny.

  The Grey was faster, and over the next hour’s struggle up the trail he drew ahead, until Johannes occasionally lost sight of him in a dip, or around a knob. The ridge widened, became like a rounded road at the top of the world, a ramp to the peak. Hours p
assed, and the whitsun dropped lower in the western sky. The basins to the east were in shadow.

  And then he was there, standing under the final bastion of the peak. An angled slot like a chimney broke the sheer wall of the peak knob, and Johannes pulled himself up it. From its upper end he merely had to hop up a short series of ledges, and he was on top. Nothing higher; the whole world below him, flowing in fractal ranges to the jagged horizons.

  The Grey was sitting on a boulder, looking as if he had been there a long time. Not waiting for Johannes, but just there on his own, taking in the view. Johannes sat down and leaned back against a low boulder. He looked at the Grey, and saw that the brown eyes in the wrinkled walnut skin were cold and distant; they seemed to look through him to the rock itself. “Who are you?” Johannes said.

  “I am Zervan.”

  “And why have you brought me here?”

  “Why have you come?”

  “Because—because Holywelkin came here, before he built the Orchestra. Before he finished his work on the Ten Forms of Change. I want to…” He swallowed. “I want to learn what he learned.”

  “What did he learn?”

  “I don’t know. The Icarus he visited wasn’t like this. It was a cratered asteroid. They took him out into the sun at perihelion, with no protection. Naked.”