The Light of Other Days

Chapter 13 Walls of glass

Kate was in remand, waiting for her trial. It was taking a while to come to court, as it was a complex case, and Hiram’s lawyers had argued, in confidence through the FBI, that her trial should be delayed anyhow while the new past-viewing capabilities of WormCam technology stabilized.

In fact, such had been the wide publicity surrounding Kate’s case that the ruling was being taken as a precedent. Even before its past-viewing possibilities were widely understood, the WormCam was expected to have an immediate impact on almost all contested criminal cases. Many major trials had been delayed or paused awaiting new evidence, and in general only minor and uncontested cases were being processed through the courts.

For a long time to come, whatever the outcome of the case, Kate wouldn’t be going anywhere. So Bobby decided to go find his mother.

Heather Mays lived in a place called Thomas City, close to the Utah-Arizona state line. Bobby flew into Cedar City and drove from there. At Thomas, he stopped the car a few blocks short of Heather’s home and walked.

A police car silently cruised by, and a beefy male cop peered out at Bobby. The cop’s face was a broad, hostile moon, scarred by the pits of multiple basal-cell carcinomas. But his glare softened with recognition. Bobby could read his lips: Good day, Mr. Patterson.

As the car moved on, Bobby felt a shiver of self consciousness. The WormCam had made Hiram the most famous person on the planet, and in the all-seeing public eye, Bobby stood right at his side.

He knew, in fact, that as he approached his mother’s home a hundred WormCam viewpoints must hover at his shoulder even now, gazing into his face at this difficult moment, invisible emotional vampires.

He tried not to think about it: the only possible defence against the WormCam. He walked on through the heart of the little town.

Out-of-season April snow was falling on the roofs and gardens of clapboard houses that might have been preserved for a hundred years. He passed a small pond where children were skating, round and round in tight circles, laughing loudly. Even under the pale wintry sun, the children wore sunglasses and silvery, reflective smears of sunblock.

Thomas was a settled, peaceful, anonymous place, one of hundreds like it, he supposed, here in the huge empty heart of America. It was a place that, three months ago, he would have regarded as deadly dull; if he’d ever found himself here he probably would have hightailed it for Vegas as soon as possible. And yet now he found himself wondering how it would have been to grow up here.

As he watched the cop car pass slowly along the street, he noticed a strange flurry of petty law-breaking following in its wake. A man emerging from a sushi-burger store crumpled the paper his food had been wrapped in and dropped it to the floor, right under the cops’ noses. At a crossing, an elderly woman jaywalked, glaring challengingly through the cops’ windscreen. And so on. The cops watched tolerantly. And as soon as the car had passed, the people, done with thumbing their noses at the authorities, resumed their apparently lawful lives.

This was a widespread phenomenon. There had been a surprisingly wide-ranging, if muted, rebellion against the new regime of invisible WormCam overseers. The idea of the authorities having such immense powers of oversight did not, it seemed, sit well with the instincts of many Americans, and there had been rises in petty-crime rates all over the country. Otherwise law-abiding people seemed suddenly struck by a desire to perform small illegal acts — littering, jaywalking — as if to prove they were still free, despite the authorities’ assumed scrutiny. And local cops were learning to be tolerant of this.

It was just a token, of liberties defended. But Bobby supposed it was healthy.

He reached the main street. Animated images on tabloid vending machines urged him to download their latest news, for just ten dollars a shot. He eyed the seductive headlines. There was some serious news, local, national and international — it seemed that the town was getting over an outbreak of cholera, related to stress on the water supply, and was having some trouble assimilating its quota of sea-level-rise relocates from Galveston Island — but the serious stuff was mostly swamped by tabloid trivia.

A local member of Congress had been forced out of office by a WormCam exposure of sexual peccadilloes. She had been caught pressuring a high-school football hero, sent to Washington as a reward for his sporting achievements, into another form of athletics… But the boy had been over the age of consent; as far as Bobby was concerned the Representative’s main crime, in this dawning age of the WormCam, was stupidity.

Well, she wasn’t the only one. It was said that twenty percent of members of Congress, and almost a third of the Senate, had announced they would not be seeking re-election, or would retire early, or had just resigned outright. Some commentators estimated that fully half of all America’s elected officials might be forced out of office before the WormCam became embedded in the national, and individual, consciousness.

Some said this was a good thing. that people were being frightened into decency. Others pointed out that most humans had moments they would prefer not to share with the rest of mankind. Perhaps in a couple of electoral cycles the only survivors among those in office, or prepared to run for office, would be the pathologically dull with no personal lives to speak of at all.

No doubt the truth, as usual, would be somewhere between the extremes.

There was still some coverage of last week’s big story: the attempt by unscrupulous White House aides to discredit a potential opponent of President Juarez at the next election campaign. They had WormCammed him sitting on the john with his trousers down his ankles, picking his nose and extracting fluff from his navel.

But this had rebounded on the voyeurs, and had done no damage to Governor Beauchamp at all. After all, everybody had to use the john; and probably nobody, no matter how obscure, did so now without wondering if there was a WormCam viewpoint looking down (or, worse, up) at her.

Even Bobby had taken to using the lavatory in the dark. It wasn’t easy, even with the new easy-use touch-textured plumbing that was rapidly becoming commonplace. And he sometimes wondered if there was anybody in the developed world who still had sex with the lights on…

He doubted that even the supermarket-tabloid vendors would persist with such paparazzi exposure as the shock value wore off. It was telling that these images, which would have been shockingly revealing just a few months ago, now blared multi-coloured in the middle of the afternoon from stands in the main street of this Mormon community, unregarded by almost everyone, young and old, children and churchgoers alike.

It seemed to Bobby that the WormCam was forcing the human race to shed a few taboos, to grow up a little.

He walked on.

The Mayses’ home was easy to find. Before this otherwise nondescript house, in a nondescript residential street, here in the middle of classic small-town America, he found the decades-old symbol of fame or notoriety: a dozen or so news crews, gathered before the white painted picket fence that bordered the garden. Instant access WormCam technology or not, it was going to take a long time before the news-watching public was weaned off the interpretative presence of a reporter interposing herself before some breaking news story.

Bobby’s arrival, of course, was a news event in itself. Now the journalists came running toward him, drone cameras bobbing above them like angular, metallic balloons, snapping questions. Bobby, this way please… Bobby… Bobby, is it true this is the first time you’ve seen your mother since you were three years old?… Is it true your father doesn’t want you here, or was that scene in the OurWorld boardroom just a setup for the WormCams?… Bobby… Bobby…

Bobby smiled, as evenly as he could manage. The reporters didn’t try to follow him as he opened the small gate and walked through the fence. After all, there was no need; no doubt a thousand WormCam viewpoints were trailing him even now.

He knew there was no point asking for respect for his privacy. There was no choice, it seemed, but to endure. But he felt that unseen gaze, like a tangible pressure on the back of his neck.

And the eeriest thought of all was that among this clustering invisible crowd there might be watchers from the unimaginable future, peering back along the tunnels of time to this moment. What if he himself, a future Bobby, was among them?…

But he must live the rest of his life, despite this assumed scrutiny.

He rapped on the door and waited, with gathering nervousness. No WormCam, he supposed, could watch the way his heart was pumping; but surety the watching millions could see the set of his jaw, the drops of perspiration he could feel on his brow despite the cold.

The door opened.

It had taken some persuading for Bobby to get Hiram to give his blessing to this meeting.

Hiram had been seated alone at his big mahogany effect desk, before a mound of papers and SoftScreens. He sat hunched over, defensively. He had developed a habit of glancing around, flicking his gaze through the air, searching for WormCam viewpoints like a mouse in fear of a predator.

“I want to see her,” Bobby had said. “Heather Mays. My mother. I want to go meet her.”

Hiram looked as exhausted and uncertain as at any time Bobby could remember. “It would be a mistake. What good would it do you?”

Bobby hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t know how it feels to have a mother.”

“She isn’t your mother. Not in any real sense. She doesn’t know you, and you don’t know her.”

“I feel as if I do. I see her on every tabloid show…”

“Then you know she has a new family. A new life that has nothing to do with you.” Hiram eyed him. “And you know about the suicide.”

Bobby frowned. “Her husband.”

“He committed suicide, because of the media intrusion. All because your girlfriend gave away the WormCam to the sleaziest journalistic reptiles on the planet. She’s responsible.”

“Dad.”

“Yes, yes, I know. We had this argument already.”

Hiram got out of his chair, walked to the window, and massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I’m tired. Look, Bobby, any time you feel like coming back to work, I could bloody well use some help.”

“I don’t think I’m ready right now.”

“Everything’s gone to hell since the WormCam was released. All the extra security is a pain in the arse…”

Bobby knew that was true. Reaction to the existence of the WormCam, almost all of it hostile, had come from a whole spectrum of protest groups — from venerable campaigners like the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, all the way to attempted attacks on this corporate HQ, the Wormworks, and even Hiram’s home. An awful lot of people, on both sides of the law, felt they had been hurt by the WormCam’s relentless exposure of the truth. Many of them seemed to need somebody to blame for their travails — and who better than Hiram?

“We’re losing a lot of good people, Bobby. Many of them haven’t the guts to stick with me now I’ve become public enemy number one, the man who destroyed privacy. I can’t say I blame them. It’s not their fight.

“And even those who’ve stayed around can’t keep their hands off the WormCams. The illicit use has been incredible. And you can guess what for: spying on their neighbours, on their wives, their workmates. We’ve had endless rows, fistfights and one attempted shooting, as people find out what their friends really think of them, what they do to them behind their backs… And now you can see into the past, it’s impossible to hide. It’s addictive. And I suppose it’s a taster of what we have to expect when the past-view WormCam gets out to the general public. We’re going to ship millions of units, that’s for sure. But for now it’s a pain in the arse; I’ve had to ban illicit use and lock down the terminals…” He eyed his son. “Look, there’s a lot to do. And the world isn’t going to wait until your precious soul is healed.”

“I thought business is going well, even though we lost the monopoly on the WormCam.”

“We’re still ahead of the game.” Hiram’s voice was getting stronger, his phrasing more fluent, Bobby noticed; he was speaking to the invisible audience he assumed was watching him, even now. “Now we can disclose the existence of the WormCam, there is a whole host of new applications we can roll out. Videophones, for instance: a direct-line wormhole pair between sender and receiver; we can see a top-end market opening up immediately, with mass-market models to follow. Of course that will have an impact on the DataPipe business, but there will still be a need for tracking and identification technology… but that’s not where my problems lie. Bobby, we have an AGM next week. I have to face my shareholders.”

“They aren’t going to give you a rough ride. The financials are superb.”

“It’s not that.” He glanced around the room warily. “How can I put this? Before the WormCam, business was a closed game. Nobody knew my cards — my competitors, my employees, even my investors and shareholders if I wanted it that way. And that gave me a lot of leverage, for bluff, counterbluff.”

“Lying?”

“Never that,” Hiram said firmly, as Bobby knew he had to. “It’s a question of posture. I could minimize my weaknesses, advertise my strengths, surprise the competition with a new strategy, whatever. But now the rules have changed. Now the game is more like chess — and I cut my teeth playing poker. Now — for a price — any shareholder or competitor, or regulator come to that, can check up on any aspect of my operation. They can see all my cards, even before I play them. And it’s not a comfortable feeling.”

“You can do the same to your competitors,” Bobby said. “I’ve read plenty of articles which say that the new open-book management will be a good thing. If you’re open to inspection, even by your employees, you’re accountable. And it’s more likely valid criticism is going to reach you, and you’ll make fewer mistakes…”

The economists argued that openness brought many benefits to business. Without any one party holding a monopoly of information there was a better chance of closing a given deal: with information on true costs available to everybody, only a reasonable level of profit-taking was acceptable. Better information flows led to more perfect competition; monopolies and cartels and other manipulators of the market were finding it impossible to sustain their activities. With open and accountable cash flows, criminals and terrorists weren’t able to squirrel away unrecorded cash. And so on.

“Jesus,” Hiram growled. “When I hear guff like that, I wish I sold management textbooks. I’d be making a killing right now.” He waved his hand at the downtown buildings beyond the window. “But out there it’s no business-school discussion group.

“It’s like what happened to the copyright laws with the advent of the Internet. You remember that?… No, you’re too young. The Global Information Infrastructure — the thing that was supposed to replace the Berne copyright convention — collapsed back in the nought-noughts. Suddenly the Internet was awash with unedited garbage. Every damn publishing house was forced out of business, and all the authors went back to being computer programmers, all because suddenly somebody was giving away for free the stuff they used to sell to earn a crust.

“Now we’re going through the same thing all over again. You have a powerful technology which is leading to an information revolution, a new openness. But that conflicts with the interests of the people who originated or added value to that information in the first place. I can only make a profit on what OurWorld creates, and that largely derives from ownership of ideas. But laws of intellectual ownership are soon going to become unenforceable.”

“Dad, it’s the same for everybody.”

Hiram snorted. “Maybe. But not everybody is going to prosper. There are revolutions and power struggles going on in every boardroom in this city. I know, I’ve watched most of them. Just as they have watched mine. What I’m telling you is that I’m in a whole new world here. And I need you with me.”

“Dad, I have to get my head straight.”

“Forget Heather. I’m trying to warn you that you’ll get hurt.”

Bobby shook his head. “If you were me, wouldn’t you want to meet her? Wouldn’t you be curious?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I never went back to Uganda to find my father’s family. I never regretted it. Not once. What good would it have done? I had my own life to build. The past is the past; it doesn’t do any bloody good to examine it too closely.” He looked into the air, challengingly. “And all you leeches who are working on more exposés of Hiram Patterson can write that down too.”

Bobby stood up. “Well, if it hurts too much, I can just turn the switch you put in my head, can’t I?”

Hiram looked mournful. “Just don’t forget where your true family is, son.”

A girl stood at the door; slim, no taller than his shoulder, dressed in a harsh electric blue shift with a glaring Pink Lincoln design. She scowled at Bobby.

“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re Mary.” Heather’s daughter by her second marriage. Another half-sibling he’d only just found out about. She looked younger than her fifteen years. Her hair was cut brutally short, and a soft-tattoo morphed on her cheek. She was pretty, with high cheekbones and warm eyes; but her face was pursed into a frown that looked habitual.

He forced a smile. “Your mother is…”

“Expecting you. I know.” She looked past him at the clutch of reporters. “You’d better come in.”

He wondered if he should say something about her father, express sympathy. But he couldn’t find the words, and her face was hard and blank, and the moment passed.

He stepped past her into the house. He was in a narrow hallway cluttered with winter shoes and coats; he glimpsed a warm-looking kitchen, a lounge with big SoftScreens draped over the walls, what looked like a home study.

Mary poked his arm. “Watch this.” She stepped forward, faced the reporters and lifted her shift up over her head. She was wearing panties, but her small breasts were bare. She pulled the shift down, and slammed shut the door. He could see spots of colour on her cheeks. Anger, embarrassment?

“Why did you do that?”

“They look at me the whole time anyway.” And she turned on her heel and ran upstairs, her shoes clattering on bare wooden boards, leaving him stranded in the hallway.

“…Sorry about that. She isn’t adjusting too well.”

And here, at last, was Heather, walking slowly up the hallway to him.

She was smaller than he had expected. She looked slim, even wiry, if a little round-shouldered. Her face might once have shared Mary’s elfin look — but now those cheekbones were prominent under sun-aged skin, and her brown eyes, sunk deep in pools of wrinkles, were tired. Her hair, streaked with grey, was pulled back into a tight bob.

She was looking up at him, quizzically. “Are you okay?”

Bobby, for a few heartbeats, didn’t trust himself to speak. “…Yes. I’m just not sure what to call you.”

She smiled. “How about ‘Heather’ ? This is complicated enough already.”

And, without warning, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his chest.

He had tried to rehearse for this moment, tried to imagine how he would handle the storm of emotion he had expected. But now the moment was here, what he felt was…

Empty.

And all the while he was aware, achingly aware, of a million eyes on him, on every gesture and expression he made.

She pulled away from him. “I haven’t seen you since you were five years old, and it has to be like this. Well, I think we’ve put on enough of a show.”

She led him into the room he had tentatively identified as a study. On a worktable there was a giant SoftScreen of the finely grained type employed by artists and graphic designers. The walls were covered with lists, images of people, places, scraps of yellow paper covered with spidery, incomprehensible writing. There were scripts and reference books open on every surface, including the floor. Heather, brusquely, picked a mass of papers up off a swivel chair and dumped it on the floor. He accepted the implicit invitation by sitting down.

She smiled at him, “When you were a little boy you liked tea.”

“I did?”

“You’d drink nothing else. Not even soda. So, you’d like some?”

He made to refuse. But she had probably bought some specially. And this is your mother, asshole. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

She went to the kitchen, returned with a steaming mug of what proved to be jasmine tea. She leaned close to give it to him. “You can’t fool me,” she whispered. “But thanks for indulging me.”

Awkward silence; he sipped his tea.

He indicated the big SoftScreen, the nest of paper. “You’re a filmmaker. Right?”

She sighed. “I used to be. Documentaries. I regard myself as an investigative journalist.” She smiled. “I won awards. You should be proud. Not that anybody cares about that side of my life any more, compared to the fact that I once slept with the great Hiram Patterson.”

He said, “You’re still working? Even though.”

“Even though my life has turned to shit? I’m trying to. What else should I do? I don’t want to be defined by Hiram. Not that it’s easy. Everything has changed so fast.”

“The WormCam?”

“What else?… Nobody wants thought-through pieces any more. And drama has been completely wiped out. We’re all fascinated by this new power we have to watch each other. So there’s no work in anything but docusoaps: following real people going through their real lives — with their consent and approval, of course. Ironic considering my own position, don’t you think? Look.” She brought up an image on the SoftScreen, a smiling young woman in uniform. “Anna Petersen. Fresh out of the Navy college at Annapolis.”

He smiled. “Anna from Annapolis?”

“You can see why she was chosen. We have rotating teams to track Anna twenty-four hours a day. We’ll follow her career through her first postings, her triumphs and disasters, her loves and losses. The word is she’s to be sent with the task force to the Aral Sea water-war flashpoints, so we’re expecting some good material. Of course the Navy knows we’re tracking Anna.” She looked up into the empty air. “Don’t you, guys? So maybe it isn’t a surprise she got an assignment like that, and no doubt we’ll be getting plenty of mom-friendly, feel-good wartime footage.”

“You’re cynical.”

“Well, I hope not. But it isn’t easy. The WormCam is making a mess of my career. Oh, for now there is a demand for interpretation-analysts, editors, commentators. But even that is going to disappear when the great unwashed masses out there can point their own WormCams at whoever they want.”

“You think that’s going to happen?”

She snorted. “Oh, of course it is. We’ve been here before, with personal computers. It’s just a question of how fast. Driven by competitive pressure and social forces, the WormCams are going to get cheaper and more powerful and more widely available, until everybody has one.”

And perhaps — Bobby thought uneasily, thinking of David’s time-viewing experiments — more powerful than you know.

“…Tell me about you and Hiram.”

She smiled, looking tired. “Are you sure you want that? Here, on planet Candid Camera?”

“Please.”

“What did Hiram say to you about me?”

Slowly, stumbling occasionally, he repeated Hiram’s account.

She nodded. “Then that’s what happened.” And she held his gaze, for long seconds. “Listen to me. I’m more than an appendage of Hiram, some sort of annex to your life. And so is Mary. We’re people, Bobby. Did you know I lost a child, Mary, a little brother?”

“…No. Hiram didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. Because it had nothing to do with him. Thank God nobody can watch that.”

Not yet, Bobby thought darkly.

“…I want you to understand this, Bobby.” She looked into the air. “I want everyone to understand. My life is being destroyed, piece by piece, by being watched. When I lost my boy, I hid. I locked the doors, closed the curtains, even hid under the bed. At least there were moments when I could be private. Not now. Now, it’s as if every wall of my house has been turned into a one-way mirror. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“I think so,” he said gently.

“In a few days the attention focus is going to move on, to burn somebody else. But I’ll never know when some obsessive, somewhere in the world, will be peering into my bedroom, still curious even years from now. And even if the WormCam disappeared tomorrow, it could never bring Desmond back.

“Look, it’s been bad enough for me. But at least I know this is all because of something I did, long ago. My husband and daughter had nothing to do with it. And yet they’ve been subject to the same pitiless stare. And Desmond.”

“I’m sorry.”

She dropped her gaze. Her tea cup was trembling, with a delicate china rattle, in its saucer. “I’m sorry too. I didn’t agree to see you to make you feel bad.”

“Don’t worry. I felt bad already. And I brought the audience. I’ve been selfish.”

She smiled, with an effort. “They were here anyway.” She waved her hand through the air around her head. “I sometimes imagine I can disperse the watchers, like flapping away insects. But I don’t suppose it does any good. I’m glad you came, whatever the circumstances… Would you like some more tea?”

…She had brown eyes.

It was only as he endured the long drive back to Cedar City that that simple point struck him.

He called, “Search Engine. Basic genetics. Dominant and recessive genes. For example, blue eyes are recessive, brown dominant. So if a father has blue eyes and a mother brown, the children should have…”

“Brown eyes? It’s not quite as simple as that, Bobby. If the mother’s chromosomes carry a blue-eyes gene, then some of the children will have blue eyes too.”

“Blue-blue from the father; blue-brown from the mother. Four combinations.”

“Yes. So one in four of the children will be blue-eyed.”

“…Umm.” I have blue eyes, he thought. Heather has brown.

The Search Engine was smart enough to interpolate his real question. “I don’t have information on Heather’s genetic ancestry, Bobby. If you like I can find out.”

“Never mind. Thank you.”

He settled back in his seat. No doubt it was a stupid question. Heather must have blue eyes in her family background.

No doubt.

The car sped through the huge, gathering night.

Chapter 14 Light years

Hiram stalked around David’s small room, silhouetted by picture-window Seattle night-time skyline. He picked up a paper at random, a faded photocopy, and read its title. “’Lorentzian Wormholes from the Gravitationally Squeezed Vacuum.’ More brain-busting theory?”

David sat on his sofa, irritated and disturbed by his father’s unannounced visit. He understood Hiram’s need for company, to burn off his adrenaline, to escape the intensely scrutinized goldfish bowl his life had become. He just wished it didn’t have to be in his space. “Hiram, do you want a drink? A coffee, or…”

“A glass of wine would be fine. Not French.” David went to the refrigerator. “I keep a Chardonnay. A few of the Californian vineyards are almost acceptable.” He brought the glasses back to the sofa.

“So,” Hiram said. “Lorentzian wormholes?” David leaned back in the sofa and scratched his head. “To tell the truth, we’re nearing a dead end. Casimir technology seems to have inherent limitations. The balance of the capacitor’s two superconducting plates, a balance between the Casimir forces and electrical repulsion, is unstable and easily lost. And the electric charges we have to carry are so large there are frequent violent discharges to the surroundings. Three people have been killed in WormCam operations already, Hiram. As you know from the insurance suits. The next generation of WormCam is going to require something more robust. And if we had that we could build much smaller, cheaper WormCam facilities, and propagate the technology a lot further.”

“And is there a way?”

“Well, perhaps. Casimir injectors are a rather clunky, nineteenth-century way of making negative energy. But it turns out that such regions can occur naturally. If space is sufficiently strongly distorted, quantum vacuum and other fluctuations can be amplified until… Well. This is a subtle quantum effect. It’s called a squeezed vacuum. The trouble is, the best theory we have says you need a quantum black note to give you a strong enough gravity field. And so…”

“And so, you’re looking for a better theory.” Hiram riffled through the papers, stared at David’s handwritten notes, the equations linked by looping arrows. He glared around the room. “And not a SoftScreen in sight. Do you get out much? Ever? Or do you SmartDrive to and from work, your head in some dusty paper or other? From the moment you got here you had your FrancoAmerican head stuck up your broad and welcoming backside, and that’s where it has remained.”

David bristled. “Is that a problem for you, Hiram?”

“You know how much I rely on your work. But I can’t help feel that you’re missing the point here.”

“The point? The point about what?”

“The WormCam. What’s really significant about the ’Cam is what it’s doing out there.” He gestured at the window.

“Seattle?”

Hiram laughed. “Everywhere. And this is before the past-viewing stuff really starts to make an impact.” He seemed to come to a decision. He put his glass down. “Listen. Come take a trip with me tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“The Boeing plant.” He gave David a card; it bore a SmartDrive bar code. “Ten o’clock?”

“All right. But.”

Hiram stood up. “I regard myself as responsible for completing your education, son. I’ll show you what a difference the WormCam is making.”

Bobby brought Mary, his half-sister, to Kate’s abandoned cubicle in the Wormworks.

Mary walked around the desk, touching the blank SoftScreen lying there, the surrounding acoustic partitions. It was all clinically neat, spotless, blank. “This is it?”

“Her personal stuff has been cleared away. The cops took some items, work stuff. The rest we parcelled up for her family. And since then the forensics people have been crawling all over.”

“It’s like a skull the scavengers have licked clean.”

He grimaced. “Nice image.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes. But…”

But, he thought, there was still some ineffable Kateness about this anonymous desk, this chair, as if in the months she had spent here she had somehow impressed herself on this dull piece of spacetime. He wondered how long this feeling would take to fade away.

Mary was staring at him. “This is upsetting you, isn’t it?”

“You’re perceptive. And frank to a fault.”

She grinned, showing diamonds — presumably fake — studding her front teeth. “I’m fifteen years old. That’s my job. Is it true WormCams can look into the past?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Well, is it?”

“…Yes.”

“Show her to me.”

“Who?”

“Kate Manzoni. I never met her. Show her to me. You have WormCams here, don’t you?”

“Of course. This is the Wormworks.”

“Everyone knows you can see the past with a WormCam. And you do know how to work them. Or are you scared? Like you were scared of coming here.”

“Up, if I may say so, yours. Come on.”

Irritated now, he led her to the cage elevator which would take them to David’s workstation a couple of levels below.

David wasn’t here today. The supervising tech welcomed Bobby and offered him help. Bobby made sure the rig was online, and declined further assistance. He sat at the swivel chair before David’s desk and began to set up the run, his fingers fumbling with the unfamiliar manual keys glowing in the SoftScreen.

Mary had pulled up a stool beside him. “That interface is disgusting. This David must be some kind of retro freak.”

“You ought to be more respectful. He’s my half brother.”

She snorted. “Why should I be respectful, just because old man Hiram couldn’t keep from emptying his sack? Anyhow, what does David do all day?”

“David is working on a new generation of WormCams. It’s something called squeezed-vacuum technology. Here.” He picked out a couple of references from David’s desk and showed them to her; she flicked through the close-printed pages of equations. “The dream is that soon we’ll be able to open up wormholes without needing a factory full of superconducting magnets. Much cheaper and smaller.”

“But they will still be in the hands of the government and the big corporations. Right?”

The big SoftScreen fixed to the partition in front of them lit up with a fizz of pixels. He could hear the whine of the generators powering the big, clumsy Casimir injectors in the pit below, smell the sharp ozone tang of powerful electric fields; as the machinery gathered its huge energies, he felt, as always, a surge of excitement, anticipation.

And Mary was, to Bobby’s relief, silenced, at least temporarily.

The static snowstorm cleared, and an image — a little blocky, but immediately recognizable — filled up the SoftScreen.

They were looking down over Kate’s cubicle, a couple of floors above them here at the Wormworks. But what they saw now was no cleaned-out husk. Now, the cubicle was lived-in. A SoftScreen was slewed at an angle across the desk, and data scrolled across it, unremarked, while a frame in one corner bore what looked like a news broadcast, a talking head with miniature graphics. There were more signs of work in progress: a cut-off soda can adapted as a pencil holder, pens and pencils scattered over the desk with big yellow legal pads, a couple of hard-copy newspapers folded over and propped up.

But what was more revealing — and heartbreaking — was the kipple, the personal stuff and litter that defined this as Kate’s space and no other: the steaming coffee in a therm-aware cup, scrunched up food wrappers, a prop-up calendar, an ugly, angular 1990s-style digital clock, a souvenir portrait — Bobby and Kate against the exotic background of RevelationLand — tacked ironically to one partition.

The chair was pushed back from the desk, and was still rotating, slowly. We missed her by seconds, he thought.

Mary was staring intently at the image, mouth open, fascinated by this window into the past — as everybody was, the first time. “We were just there. It’s so different. It’s incredible.”

…And now Kate walked from offstage into the image, as Bobby had known she would. She was wearing a simple, practical smock, and a lick of hair was draped over her forehead, catching her eyes. She was frowning, concentrating, her fingers on the keyboard even before she had sat down. He found it hard to speak. “I know.”

The Boeing VR facility turned out to be a chamber fitted with row upon row of open steel cages — perhaps a hundred of them, David speculated. Beyond glass walls, white-coated engineers moved among brightly lit banks of computer equipment.

The cages were gimbaled to move in three dimensions, and each of them contained a skeletal suit of rubber and steel, fitted with sensors and manipulators. David was strapped tightly into one of these, and he had to fight feelings of claustrophobia as his limbs were pinned in place. He waved away the genital attachment — which was absurdly huge, like a vacuum flask. “I don’t think I’ll be needing that on this trip…”

A female tech held a helmet up before his head. It was a hollowed-out mass of electronics. Before it descended, he looked for Hiram. His father was in a cage at the other end of a row a few ranks ahead of him.

“You seem a long way away.”

Hiram raised a gloved hand, flexed his fingers. “It won’t make a difference once we’re immersed.” His voice echoed in the cavernous hall. “What do you think of the facility? Pretty impressive, huh?” He winked.

David thought of the Mind’sEye, Bobby’s simple headband apparatus — a few hundred grams of metal which, by interfacing directly to the central nervous system, could replace all this total-touch-enclosure Boeing gadgetry. Once more, it seemed, Hiram had a winner.

He let the tech drop the helmet over his head, and he was suspended in darkness…

…which cleared slowly, murkily. He saw Hiram’s face hovering before him. It was illuminated by a soft red light.

“First impressions,” Hiram snapped. He stepped back, revealing a landscape.

David glanced around. Water, a sloping gravelly ground, a red sky. When he moved his head too rapidly the image crumbled, winking into pixels, and he could feel the helmet’s heavy movement.

The horizon curved, quite sharply, as if he were viewing it from some great altitude. And on that horizon there were low, eroded, hills, whose shoulders reflected in the water.

The air seemed thin, and he felt cold.

He said, “First impressions? A beach at sunset… But that’s no sun I ever saw.”

The “sun” was a ball of red light, fading to a yellow orange at its centre. It was sitting on the sharp, mist-free horizon, and was flattened to a lens shape, presumably by refraction. But it was immense: much bigger than the sun of Earth, a red-glowing dome covering perhaps a tenth of the sky. Perhaps it was a giant, he mused, a bloated, ageing star.

The sky was deeper than a sunset sky, too: intense crimson overhead, scarlet around that hulking sun, black beyond. But even around the sun the stars shone — in fact, he realized, he could make out glimmering stars through the diffuse limb of the sun itself.

Just to the right of the sun was a compact constellation that was hauntingly familiar: that W shape was surely Cassiopeia, one of the most easily recognizable star figures — but there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag.

He took a step forward. The gravel crunched convincingly, and he could feel sharp stones beneath his feet — though he wondered if the pressure points on his soles matched what he saw on the ground.

He walked the few paces to the water’s edge. Ice glinted on the rocks, and there were miniature floes extending out into the water a meter or so. The water was flat, almost still, heaving with a soft, languid slow motion. He bent and inspected a pebble. It was hard, black, heavily worn. Basalt? Underneath there was a glint of a crystalline deposit-salt, perhaps. Some bright star behind him brought out yellow-white highlights on the stone, even casting a shadow.

He straightened up and hurled the rock out over the water. It flew long but slow — low gravity? — eventually hitting the water with a feeble splash; fat ripples spread in languid circles around the impact point.

Hiram was standing beside him. He was wearing a simple engineer’s jumpsuit with the Boeing roundel on the back. “Figured out where you are yet?”

“It’s a scene from a science-fiction novel I once read. An end-of-the-world vision.”

“No,” Hiram said. “Not science fiction. Not a game. This is real… at least the scenery is.”

“A WormCam view?”

“Yeah. With a lot of VR enhancement and interpolation, so that the scene responds convincingly if you try to interact with it — for instance when you picked up that stone.”

“I take it we’re not in the Solar System any more. Could I breathe the air?”

“No. It’s mostly carbon dioxide.” Hiram pointed to the rounded hills. “There’s still some volcanism here.”

“But this is a small planet. I can see the way the horizon bends. And the gravity is low: that stone I threw… So why hasn’t this small planet lost all its internal heat, like the Moon? Ah. The star.” He pointed to the glowing hull on the horizon. “We must be close enough for the tides to keep the core of this little world molten. Like Io, orbiting Jupiter. In fact, that must mean the star isn’t the giant I thought it was. It’s a dwarf. And we’re close to it — close enough for liquid water to persist. If that lake or sea over there is water.”

“Oh, yes. Though I wouldn’t recommend drinking it. Yes, we’re on a small planet orbiting a red dwarf star. The ‘year’ here is only about nine of our days.”

“Is there life?”

“The scientists studying this place have found none, nor any relics from the past. A shame.” Hiram bent and picked up another basalt pebble. It cast two shadows on his palm, one, grey and diffuse, from the fat red star ahead of them, and another, fainter but sharper, from the light source behind them.

…What light source?

David turned. There was a double star in the sky: brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth, yet still reduced to pinpricks of light by distance. The points of light hurt his eyes, and he lifted his hand to shield his face. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

He turned again, and looked up at the constellation he had tentatively identified as Cassiopeia, that bright additional star tagged onto its end. “I know where we are. The bright stars behind us are the Alpha Centauri binary pair: the nearest bright stars to our sun, some four light years away.”

“About four point three, I’m told.”

“And so this must be a planet of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star of all. Somebody Has run a WormCam as far as Proxima Centauri. Across four light years. It’s incredible.”

“Well done. I told you, you’re out of touch. This is the cutting edge of WormCam technology. This power. Of course the constellations aren’t changed much; four light years is small change on the interstellar scale. But that bright intruder up in Cassiopeia is Sol. Our sun.”

David stared at the sun: just a point of pale yellow light, bright, but not exceptionally so — and yet that spark of light was the source of all life on Earth. And the sun, the Earth and all the planets, and every place any human had ever visited, might have been eclipsed by a grain of sand.

“She’s pretty,” Mary said.

Bobby didn’t reply.

“It really is a window into the past.”

“It’s not so magical,” Bobby said. “Every time you watch a movie you’re looking into the past.”

“Come on,” she whispered. “All you can see is what some camera operator or editor chooses to show you. And mostly, even on a news show, the people you’re watching know the camera is there. Now, with this, you can look at anybody, any time, anywhere, whether a camera is present or not. You’ve watched this scene before, haven’t you?”

“I’ve had to.”

“Why?”

“Because this is when she’s supposed to have committed her crime.”

“Stealing virtual-reality secrets from IBM? She doesn’t look like she’s committing any crime to me.”

That annoyed him. “What do you expect her to do, put on a black mask?… Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know this is difficult. Why would she do it? I know she was working for Hiram, but she didn’t exactly love him… Oh. She loved you.”

He looked away. “The FBI case is that she wanted to get some credit in Hiram’s eyes. Then Hiram might accept her relationship with me. That was her motive, says the FBI. So, this. At some point she was going to tell him what she had done.”

“And you don’t believe it?”

“Mary, you don’t know Kate. That just isn’t her agenda.” He smiled. “Believe me, if she wants me she’ll just take me, whatever Hiram feels. But there is evidence against her. The techs have crawled all over the equipment she used. They restored deleted files which showed that data about IBM test runs had been present in the memory she used.”

Mary gestured at the ’Screen. “But we can look into the past. Who cares about computer traces? Has anybody actually seen her open up a big fat file with an IBM logo?”

“No. But that doesn’t prove anything. Not in the eyes of the prosecution, anyway. Kate knew about the WormCam. Perhaps she even guessed that it would eventually have past-viewing capabilities, and she could be monitored retrospectively. So she covered herself.”

Mary snorted again. “She’d have to be a devious genius to pull off something like that.”

“You haven’t met Kate,” he repeated dryly.

“And anyhow, all this is circumstantial… Is that the right word?”

“Yes. If not for the WormCam she’d be out of there by now. But she hasn’t even come to trial yet. The Supreme Court is working on a new legal framework governing admissibility of WormCam evidence, and meanwhile a lot of cases — including Kate’s — have been put on hold.”

With an impulsive stab he cleared the ’Screen.

“Doesn’t this trouble you?” Mary asked now. “The way they are using the WormCams?”

“They?”

“Big corporations watching each other. The FBI, watching us all. I believe Kate is innocent. But somebody here surely spied on IBM — with a WormCam.” With the certainty of youth, she said, “Either everybody should have WormCams, or nobody should.”

He said, “Maybe you’re right. But it isn’t going to happen.”

“But the stuff you showed me, the next generation, the squeezed-vacuum approach.”

“You’ll have to find somebody else to argue with.”

They sat in silence for a time.

Then she said, “If I had a time viewer, I’d use it all the time. But I wouldn’t use it to look at shitty stuff over and over. I’d look at nice stuff. Why don’t you look back a bit further, to some time when you were happy with her?”

Somehow that hadn’t occurred to him, and he recoiled.

She said, “Well, why not?”

“Because it’s gone. In the past. What’s the point of looking back?”

“If the present is shitty and the future is worse, the past is all you’ve got.”

He frowned. Her face, so like her mother’s, was pale, composed, her frank blue eyes steady. “You’re missing your father.”

“Of course I’m missing him,” she said, with a spark of anger. “Maybe it’s different on whatever planet you come from.” Now her look softened. “I would like to see him. Just for a while.”

I shouldn’t have brought her here, he thought.

“Maybe later,” he said gently. “Come on. The weather’s fine. Let’s go to the Sound. Have you ever been sailing?…”

It took him long minutes of persuasion to make her come away.

…And later, after a call from David, he learned that some of the references and handwritten notes on squeezed-vacuum wormholes had gone missing from David’s workstation.

“Actually it was Disney,” Hiram said, matter-of-fact, standing there in Proxima light. “In partnership with Boeing they’ve installed a giant WormCam facility in the old Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. Once they assembled Moon rockets there. Now, they send spy cameras to the stars. Quite something, isn’t it? Of course they mostly rent out their virtual facility to the scientists; but the Boeing management let the staff play here during their lunch breaks. Already they’re peering at every bloody planet and moon in the Solar System, without leaving the air-conditioned warmth of their labs.

“And Disney is cashing in. The Moon and Mars seem likely to turn into theme parks for virtual WormCam travellers. I’m told the Apollo and Viking sites are particularly popular, though the old Soviet Lunokhods are a competing attraction.”

And, David thought, no doubt OurWorld has a piece of the action.

Hiram smiled. “You’re very quiet, David.” David explored his emotions: wonder, he supposed, but laced with dismay. He picked up a handful of rocks, let them fall; their slow low-G bounce wasn’t quite authentic. “This is real. I must have read a hundred fictional dramas, a thousand speculative studies, about missions to Proxima. And now here we are. It is the dream of a million years to stand here and see this. It’s probably a dream rich enough finally to kill off spaceflight. Pity. But that’s all this is: a dream. We’re still in that chilly hangar on the outskirts of Seattle. By showing us the destination, without requiring of us the enervating journey, the WormCam will turn us into a planet of couch potatoes.”

“You don’t think you’re being a little excitable?”

“No, I do not. Hiram, before the WormCam, we deduced the existence of this planet of Proxima from minute displacements of the star’s trajectory. We calculated what its surface conditions must be like; we pored over spectroscopic analyses of its smudged light to see if we could deduce what it was made of; we strove to build new generations of telescopes which would give us some map of its surface. We even dreamed of building ships which might come here. Now we have the WormCam, and we don’t need to deduce any more, to strive, to think.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No!” David snapped. “It is like a child turning to the answers at the back of an exercise book. The point, you see, is not the answers themselves, but the mental development we enjoy through striving for those answers. The WormCam is going to overwhelm a whole range of sciences — planetology, geology, astronomy. For generations to come our scientists will merely count and classify, like an eighteenth-century butterfly collector. Science will become taxonomy.”

Hiram said slyly, “You forgot history.”

“History?”

“You were the one who found out that a WormCam that can reach across four light-years could just as easily reach four years into the past. Our grasp in time is puny compared to space; but it will surely develop. And then all hell’s going to break loose.

“Think about it. Right now we can reach back days, weeks, months. We can spy on our wives, watch ourselves on the john, the coppers can track and watch criminals in the act. Facing your own past self is hard enough. But this is nothing, personal trivia. When we can reach back, years, you’re talking about opening up history. And what a can of worms that is going to be.

“Some people out there are preparing the ground already. You must have heard of the 12,000 Days. A Jesuit project, on the orders of the Vatican: to complete a comprehensive firsthand history of the development of the Church — all the way back to Christ Himself.” Hiram grimaced. “Much of that won’t make pretty viewing. But the Pope is smart. Better the Church should do this first than somebody else. Even so, it’s going to make Christianity fall apart like a sandcastle. And the other religions will follow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hell, yes.” Hiram’s eyes gleamed in red light. “Didn’t Bobby expose RevelationLand as a fraud dreamed up by a criminal?”

Actually, David thought, though Bobby helped, that was Kate Manzoni’s triumph. “Hiram, Christ was no Billybob Meeks.”

“Are you sure? Do you think you could bear to find out? Could your Church bear it?”

…Perhaps not, David thought. But we must fervently hope so.

Hiram had been right to drag him out of his monkish academic ceil, he realized, to see all this. It was wrong of him to hide away, to work on the WormCam with no sense of its wider implications. He made a resolution to immerse himself in the ’Cam’s application as well as its theory.

Hiram looked up at the hull of the sun. “I think it’s getting colder. Sometimes it snows here. Come on.” He began to work the invisible abort buttons on his helmet.

David peered up at the splinter of light that was distant Sol, and imagined his soul returning home, flying from this desolate beach up to that primal warmth.

Chapter 15 Confabulation

Bobby found the interview room, in the bowels of this ageing courthouse, deeply depressing. The dingy walls looked as if they hadn’t been painted since the turn of the century, and even then only in government-issue pale green.

And it was in this room that Kate’s privacy was to be flayed, piece by piece.

Kate and her attorney — an unsmiling, overweight woman — sat on hard plastic chairs behind a scuffed wooden table, on which sat an array of recording devices. Bobby himself was perched on a hard bench at the back of the room, there at Kate’s request, the only witness to this strange tableau. Clive Manning, the psychologist appointed by the court to Kate’s case, was standing at the front of the room, tapping at a SoftScreen fixed to the wall. WormCam images, dimly lit and suffering a little fisheye distortion, flickered as Manning sought his starting point. At last he found the place he wanted. It was a frozen image of Kate with a man. They were standing in a cluttered living room, evidently in the middle of a heated row, screaming at each other.

Manning — tall, thin, bald, fiftyish — took off his wire spectacles and tapped the frame against his teeth, a mannerism Bobby was already finding gratingly irritating, the spectacles themselves an antiquated affectation. “What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience — as perhaps he was. “It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a storytelling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain’s neural structure.

“And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.

“In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and re-creates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it’s true to say that everything I remember is false.” Bobby thought a note of awe entered Manning’s voice.

“This frightens you,” Kate said, wondering.

“I’d be a fool not to be frightened. We’re all complex, flawed creatures, Kate, stumbling around in the dark. Perhaps our minds, little transient bubbles of consciousness adrift in this overwhelmingly hostile universe, need an inflated sense of their own importance, of the logic of the universe, in order to summon up the will to survive. But now the WormCam, without pity, will never again let us evade the truth.” He was silent for a moment, then smiled at her. “Perhaps we will all be driven mad by truth. Or perhaps, stripped of illusion at last, we will all become sane, and I will be out of a job. What do you think?”

Kate, wearing a drab black one-piece, sat with her hands tucked between her thighs, her shoulders hunched. “I think you should get on with your show-and-tell.”

Manning sighed and replaced his glasses. He tapped the ’Screen’s corner, and the fragment of Kate’s vanished life began to play itself out.

On-screen Kate hurled something at the guy. He ducked; it splashed against the wall.

“What was that? A peach?”

“As I recall,” Kate said, “it was a kumquat. A little overripe.”

“Good choice,” Manning murmured. “You need to work on your aim, however.”

…asshole. You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?

What’s it to do with you?

It’s got everything to do with me, you piece of shit. Why you think I’m going to put up with this I don’t know…

The man on the ’Screen was called Kingsley, Bobby had learned. He and Kate had been lovers for several years, and had lived with each other for three — up to this point, the moment at which Kate had finally thrown him out.

Watching was difficult for Bobby. He felt he was participating in voyeurism of this younger, different woman who hadn’t at the time even known he existed, events of which she’d told him nothing. And, like most WormCam-recorded slices of life, it was hard to follow, the conversation illogical, meandering and repetitive, the words designed to express their users’ emotions rather than to progress the encounter in any rational way.

A century and more of scripted TV and cinema had been poor training for the reality of the WormCam. But his real-life drama was typical of life: messy, unstructured, confusing, the participants groping like people in a darkened room toward an understanding of what was happening to them, how they were feeling.

The action shifted from the living room to a catastrophically untidy bedroom. Now Kingsley was cramming clothes into a leather bag, and Kate was grabbing more of his stuff and throwing it out of the room. All the time they maintained a screaming dialogue.

At last, Kingsley stormed out of the apartment. Kate slammed the door shut behind him. She stood rigid for a moment, staring at the closed door, before burying her face in her hands.

Manning reached over and tapped the ’Screen. The image froze on a close-up of Kate’s face, hidden by her hands, tears visibly leaking between her fingers, her hair a tangle around her forehead, the whole surrounded by a faint fish-eye-distortion halo.

Manning said, “I believe this incident is the key to your story, Kate. The story of your life, of who you are.”

The real Kate, bleak and subdued, stared at her younger self woodenly. “I was framed,” she said evenly. “Over the IBM espionage. It was subtle, beyond the reach even of the WormCam. But it’s nevertheless true. And that’s what we should be focusing on. Not this barroom psychoanalysis.”

Manning drew back. “That’s as may be. But evidentiary issues are beyond my competence. The judge has asked me to come up with a framework for your state of mind at the time of the crime itself. Motive and intent: a deeper truth than even the WormCam can offer us. And,” he said with a trace of steel, “let’s remind ourselves that you don’t have any choice but to cooperate.”

“But that doesn’t alter my opinion,” she said.

“What opinion?”

“That, like every shrink I’ve ever met, you are one inhuman asshole.” The attorney touched Kate’s arm, but Kate shook her off.

Manning’s eyes glittered, hard behind his spectacles; Bobby realized Manning was going to enjoy exerting power over this willful woman.

Manning turned to his SoftScreen and ran through the brief breakup scene again. “Let me recall what you told me about this period in your life. You’d been living with Kingsley Roman for some three years when you decided to try for a baby. You suffered a late miscarriage.”

“I’m sure you enjoyed watching that,” Kate said bleakly.

“Please,” Manning said, pained. “You seem to have decided, with Kingsley, that you would try again.”

“We never decided that. We didn’t discuss it in that way.”

Manning blinked owlishly at a notepad. “But you did. February 24, 2032, is the clearest example. I can show you if you like.” He looked up at her over his glasses. “Don’t be alarmed if your memory differs from the WormCam record. It’s common. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s normal. Confabulation, remember. Shall I go on?

“Despite your stated decision, you don’t conceive. In fact you return to the regular use of contraceptives, so that conception is impossible anyhow. Six months after the miscarriage, Kingsley begins his affair with a colleague at his place of work. A woman called Jodie Morris. And a few months after that, he is careless enough to let you find out about it.” He studied her again. “Do you remember what you told me about that?”

Kate said reluctantly, “I told you the truth. I think Kingsley decided, on some level, that the baby was my fault. And so he started looking around. And besides, after the miscarriage, work was starting to take off for me. The Wormwood… I think Kingsley was jealous.”

“And so he started to seek the attention he craved from somebody else.”

“Something like that. When I found out, I threw him out.”

“He claims he left.”

“Then he’s a lying asshole.”

“But we just saw the incident,” Manning said gently. “I didn’t see any evidence of clear decision-making, of unilateral action by either of you.”

“It doesn’t matter what the WormCam shows. I know what is true.”

Manning nodded. “I’m not denying that you’re telling us the truth as you see it, Kate.” He smiled at her, owlish, looming. “You aren’t lying. That isn’t the problem at all. Don’t you see?”

Kate gazed at her caged hands.

They took a break. Bobby wasn’t allowed to be with her.

Kate’s treatment was one of many experiments being run as the politicians, legal experts, pressure groups and concerned citizens worked feverishly to find a way to accommodate the WormCam’s eerie historical reach — still not widely known to the public — into something resembling the existing due process of the law, and, even more challenging, into natural justice.

In essence it had suddenly become radically easier to establish physical truth.

The conduct of court cases seemed likely to be transformed radically. Trials would surely become much less adversarial, fairer, much less dependent on the demeanor of a suspect in court or the quality of her representatives. When the WormCam was available at federal, state and county levels, some commentators were anticipating savings of billions of dollars annually: there would be shorter trials, more plea bargains, more civil settlements.

And major trials in future would perhaps focus on what remained beyond the bare facts: motive and intent — hence the assignment of a psychologist like Manning to Kate’s case.

Meanwhile, as WormCammed law enforcers went to diligent work over unresolved cases, a huge logjam of new cases was heading for the courts. Some Congressmen had proposed that to maximize the clear-up rate a general amnesty should be declared for crimes of lesser severity committed up to the last full calendar year before the WormCam’s invention — an amnesty, that is, in return for waiving of Fifth Amendment protection in the relevant case. In fact, evidence gathering was made so much more powerful, thanks to the WormCam, that Fifth Amendment rights had become moot anyhow. But this was proving highly contentious. Most Americans did not appear to feel comfortable with losing Fifth protection.

Challenges to privacy were even more contentious — made so by the fact that even now there was no accepted definition of privacy rights, even within America. Privacy was not mentioned in the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights spoke of a right against intrusion by the state — but it left a great deal of room for manoeuvre by those in authority who wished to investigate citizens, and besides offered citizens virtually no protection against other bodies, such as corporations or the press or even other citizens. From a welter of scattershot laws at state and federal levels, as well as a mass of cases in common law to provide precedent, a certain common acceptance of the meaning of privacy had slowly emerged: for instance a right to be “let alone,” to be free from unreasonable interference from outside forces.

But all of this was challenged by the WormCam.

Legal safeguards surrounding WormCam use were being promoted, by law-enforcement and investigation agencies like the FBI and the police, as a compensating balance to the loss of privacy and other rights. For example WormCam records intended for legal purposes would have to be collected in controlled circumstances — probably by trained observers, and notarized formally. That wasn’t likely to prove a problem, as any WormCam observation could always be repeated as many times as required simply by setting up a new wormhole link to the incident in question.

There were even suggestions that people should be prepared to submit to a form of “documented life.” This would effectively grant the authorities legal access to any incident in an individual’s past without the need for formal procedures in advance — and it would also be a strong shield against false accusation and identity theft.

But despite protests from campaigners against the erosion of rights, everybody seemed to accept that as far as its use in criminal investigation and prosecution was concerned, the WormCam was here to stay; it was simply too powerful to ignore.

Some philosophers argued that this was no bad thing. After all, humans had evolved to live in small groups in which everybody knew everybody else, and strangers were rarely encountered; it was only recently, in evolutionary terms, that people had been forced to live in larger communities like cities, crammed together with friends and strangers alike. The WormCam was bringing a return to older ways of living, of thinking about other people and interacting with them.

But that was little comfort for those who feared that their perceived need for curtailage — a defined space within which they could achieve solitude, anonymity, reserve and intimacy with loved ones — might no longer be met.

And now, as the WormCam’s history-view facilities deepened, even the past was no refuge.

Many people had been hurt, in one way or another, by the revelation of the truth. Many of them blamed not the truth, or themselves, but the WormCam, and those who had inflicted it on the world.

Hiram himself remained the most obvious target.

At first, Bobby suspected, he had almost enjoyed his notoriety. Any celebrity was good for business. But the hail of threats and assassination and sabotage attempts had worn him down. There were even libel actions, as people claimed Hiram must somehow be fabricating what the WormCam was showing about themselves, their loved ones, their enemies, or their heroes.

Hiram had taken to living in the light. His West Coast mansion was drenched in light from floods powered by multiple generators. He even slept in brilliant illumination. No security system was foolproof, but at least Hiram could ensure that anybody who got through would be visible to the WormCams of the future.

So Hiram lived, skewered by pitiless light, alone, scrutinized, loathed.

The gruesome procedure resumed.

Manning consulted his notebook. “Let me set out some of the facts: incontrovertible historical truths, all properly observed and notarized. First, Kingsley’s affair with Ms. Morris wasn’t his first in his time with you. He had a short, apparently unsatisfactory fling with another woman beginning a month after he met you. And another six months later.”

“No.”

“In all, he seems to have had six consummated relationships with other women before you challenged him over Jodie.” He smiled. “If it’s any consolation he’s also cheated on other partners, before and since. He seems to be something of a serial adulterer.”

“This is ridiculous. I’d have known.”

“But you’re also human. I can show you incidents where evidence of Kingsley’s unfaithfulness was clearly available to you, yet you turned aside, rationalizing it away without even being aware of what you were doing. Confabulation.”

She said coldly, “I’ve told you how it was. Kingsley started to cheat on me because the miscarriage screwed up our relationship.”

“Ah, the miscarriage: the great causal event in your life. But I’m afraid it wasn’t like that at all. Kingsley’s behaviour patterns were well established long before he met you, and were barely altered by the miscarriage incident. You’ve also said that you believe the miscarriage gave you a spur to working harder at developing your own career.”

“Yes. That’s obvious.”

“This is a little more difficult to establish, but again I can demonstrate to you that the upward trajectory of your career began some months before the miscarriage. Again, you were doing it anyhow; the miscarriage didn’t really change anything.” He studied her. “Kate, you’ve constructed a kind of story around the miscarriage. You’ve wanted to believe that it was significant beyond itself. The miscarriage was a horrible trial for you to endure. But it actually changed very little… I sense you don’t believe me.”

She said nothing.

Manning steepled his fingers and put them to his chin. “I think you’ve been both right and wrong about yourself. I think that the miscarriage you suffered did change your life. But not in the rather superficial way you think it did. It didn’t make you work harder, or cause cracks in your relationship with Kingsley. But the loss of your child did wound you deeply. And I think you’re now driven by a fear that it might happen again.”

“A fear?”

“Please believe I’m not judging you. I’m merely trying to explain. Your compensatory activity is your work. Perhaps this deeper fear has driven you to greater achievement, greater success. But you’ve also become obsessive. It has only been your work that has distracted you from what you see as a terrible darkness at the centre of your being. And so you’re driven to ever greater lengths.”

“Right. And that’s why I used Hiram’s wormholes to spy on his competitors.” She shook her head. “How much do they pay you for this stuff, Doctor?”

Manning paced slowly before his SoftScreen. “Kate, you’re one of the first human beings to endure this — umm, this truth shock — but you won’t be the last. We are all going to have to learn to live without the comforting lies we whisper to ourselves in the darkness of our minds.”

“I’m capable of forming relationships: even long lasting, stable ones. How does that square with your portrait of me as a shock trauma victim?”

Manning frowned, as if puzzled by the question. “You mean Mr. Patterson? But there’s no contradiction there.” He walked over to Bobby and, with a murmured apology, studied him. “In many ways, Bobby Patterson is one of the most child-like adults I have ever encountered. He is therefore an exact fit for the, umm, the child-shaped hole at the centre of your personality.” He turned to Kate. “You see?”

She stared at him, her colour high.

Chapter 16 The water war

Heather sat at her home SoftScreen. She entered fresh search parameters. COUNTRY: Uzbekistan. TOWN: Nukus…

She wasn’t surprised to see an attractive turquoise blockout appear before her. Nukus was, after all, a war zone.

But that wouldn’t stop Heather for long. She had found reason in her time to find ways past censoring software before. And having access to a WormCam of her own was a powerful motivation. Smiling, she went to work.

When — after much public pressure — the first enterprising companies started offering WormCam access to private citizens via the Internet, Heather Mays was quick to subscribe.

She could even work from home. From a straightforward menu she selected a location to view. This could be anywhere in the world, specified by geographical coordinates or postal address as precisely as she could narrow it down. The mediating software would convert her request to latitude-longitude coordinates, and would offer her further options. The idea was to narrow her selection down until she had reached a specification of a room-sized volume, somewhere on or near the surface of the Earth, where a wormhole mouth would be established.

There was also a randomizing feature if she had no preference: for instance, if she wanted to view some remote picture-postcard coral atoll, but didn’t care which. She could even — at additional cost — select intermediate views, so for example she could view a street and select a house to call at.”

When she’d made her choice, a wormhole would be opened up between the supplier’s central server location and the site of her choice. Images from the WormCam would then be sent direct to her home terminal. She could even guide the viewpoint, within a limited volume.

The WormCam’s commercial interface made it feel like a toy, and every image was indelibly marked by intrusive OurWorld logos and ads. But Heather knew that intrinsically the WormCam was much more powerful than it appeared, in this first public incarnation.

When she’d first mastered the system, she was inordinately pleased, and called Mary to come see. “Look,” she said, pointing. The ’Cam image was of a nondescript house, in evening summer sunlight; the image frame was plastered with annoying ad logos. “That’s the house where I was born, in Boise, Idaho. In that very room, in fact.”

Mary shrugged. “Are you going to give me a turn?”

“Sure. In fact I got it for you, in part. Your homework assignments.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Listen, this isn’t a toy.” Abruptly the ’Screen filled up with a soothing-colour blockout.

Mary frowned. “What’s wrong?… Oh. I get it. It comes with a nanny filter. So we’re still only seeing what they will allow us to see.”

The idea was that the WormCams couldn’t be used voyeuristically, to spy on people in their homes or other private places, or to breach corporate confidentiality, or to view government buildings, military establishments, police stations and other sensitive places. The nanny software was also supposed to monitor patterns of usage and, in case of morbid or excessive behaviour, to break the service and offer counselling, either by expert system or a human agent.

And, for now, only the remote-viewing facilities of the WormCam had been made available. Past-viewing was considered, by a whole slew of experts, to be much too dangerous to be put in the hands of the public — in fact, it was argued, it would be dangerous even to make the existence of the past-viewer facility widely known.

But, of course, all this cotton-wool wrapping would only be as effective as the ingenuity of the human designers behind it. And already, fuelled by Internet rumour and industry leaks and speculation, clamour was rising for much wider public access to the WormCam’s full power: to the past-viewers themselves.

Heather sensed that this new technology was by its very nature going to be difficult to contain…

But that wasn’t something she was about to share with her fifteen-year-old daughter.

Heather cleared down the wormhole and prepared to start a new search. “I need to work. Go. You can play later. One hour only.”

With a look of contempt, Mary walked out, and Heather returned her attention to Uzbekistan.

Anna Petersen, USN — heroine of a 24-by-7 WormCam docu-soap — had been heavily involved in the U.S.-led UN intervention in the water war raging in the Aral Sea area. A precision war was being fought by the Allies against the principal aggressor, Uzbekistan: an aggression which had threatened Western interests in oil and sulphur deposits and various mineral production sites, including a major copper source. Bright and technical, Anna had mostly worked on command, control and communications operations.

WormCam technology was changing the nature of warfare, as it had much else. WormCams had already largely replaced the complex of surveillance technology — satellites, monitoring aircraft and land-based stations — which had governed battlefields for decades. If there had been eyes capable of seeing, every major target in Uzbekistan would have sparkled with evanescent wormhole mouths. Precision-guided bombs, cruise missiles and other weapons, many of them no larger than birds, had rained down on Uzbek air-defence centers, military command and control facilities, on bunkers concealing troops and tanks, on hydroelectric plants and natural gas pipelines, and on targets in the cities, such as Samarkand, Andizhan, Namangan and the capital Tashkent.

The precision was unprecedented — and, for the first time in such operations, success could be verified.

Of course, for now, the Allied troops had the upper hand in WormCam deployment. But future wars would have to be fought under the assumption that both sides had perfect and up-to-date information on the strategy, resources and deployment of the other. Heather supposed it was too much to hope that such a change in the nature of war might lead to its cessation altogether. But at least it was giving the warriors pause for thought, and might lead to less meaningless waste.

Anyhow this war — Anna’s war, the cold battle of information and technology — was the war which the American public had witnessed, partly thanks to the WormCam viewpoint Heather herself had operated, flying alongside Petersen’s shapely shoulder as she moved from one clinical, bloodless scenario to another.

But there had been rumours — mostly circulating in the corners of the Internet that still remained uncontrolled — of another, more primitive war proceeding on the ground, as troops went in to secure the gains made by the air strikes.

Then a report had been released by an English news channel of a prison camp in the field, where UN captives, including Americans, were being held by the Uzbeks. There were also rumours that female prisoners, including Allied troops, had been taken to rape camps and forced brothels, deeper in the countryside.

Revealing all of this clearly served the purposes of the governments behind the anti-Uzbek alliance. The Juarez Administration’s spin doctors weren’t above highlighting the distressing idea of wholesome Anna from Iowa in the hands of swarthy Uzbek molesters.

To Heather this was evidence of a dirty, ground-level conflict far removed from the clean video game in which Anna Petersen had colluded. Heather’s hackles had risen at the idea that she might be playing a part in some vast propaganda machine. But when she sought permission from her employer, Earth News Online, to seek out the truth of the war, she was refused; access to the corporate WormCam facility would be withdrawn if she attempted it.

While she was in the Hiram’s-ex-wife spotlight she had to keep her head down.

But then the glaring focus public attention moved on from the Mayses — and she was able to afford her own WormCam access. She quit from ENO, took a new bill-paying job on a WormCam biography of Abraham Lincoln, and went to work.

It took her a couple of days to find what she was looking for.

She followed Uzbek prisoners being loaded onto an open UN truck and driven away through the rain. They passed through the town of Nukus, controlled by Allied troops, and on into the country beyond.

Here, she found, the Allied troops had established a prison camp of their own.

It was an abandoned iron-mining complex. The prisoners were held in metal cages, stacked up in an ore loader, just a meter high. The prisoners were unable to straighten their legs or backs. They were held without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the Red Cross or its Muslim equivalent Merhamet. Filth dripped from cages above through the grates to those below.

She estimated there must be at least a thousand men here. They were given only a cup of weak soup a day, Hepatitis was epidemic, and other diseases were spreading.

Every other day, prisoners were selected, apparently at random, and taken out for beatings. Three or four soldiers would surround each prisoner, and would beat him with iron bars, wooden two-by-fours, truncheons, After a time the beating would stop. Any prisoner who could walk would be thrown back for further treatment, and the beating continued. They would be carried back to their cages by other prisoners.

That was the general pattern. There were some particular incidents, inflicted on the prisoners almost in a spirit of experimentation by the guards; a prisoner was not allowed to defecate; a prisoner was forced to eat sand; another was forced to swallow his own faeces.

Six people died while Heather monitored the camp. The deaths were as a result of the beatings, exposure or disease. Occasionally a prisoner would be shot, for example when attempting to escape or fight back. One prisoner was actually released, apparently to take the news of the determination of these blue-helmeted troops to his comrades.

Heather noticed that the guards were careful to use only captured weaponry, as if they were determined to leave no unambiguous trace of their activities. Evidently, she thought, the power of the WormCam had not yet impinged on the imaginations of these soldiers; they weren’t yet used to the idea that they could be watched, any place, any time, even retrospectively from the future.

It was almost impossible to watch these bloody deeds, which would have been invisible, to the public anyhow, only a few months before.

This would be dynamite up the ass of President Juarez, who in Heather’s opinion had already proven herself to be the worst sleazebag to pollute the White House since the turn of the century (which was saying something) — and not to mention, as the first female President, a major embarrassment to half the population.

And maybe — Heather allowed herself to hope — the mass consciousness would stir once more when people saw war as it truly was, in all its bloody glory, as they had briefly glimpsed it when Vietnam had become the first television war, and before the commanders had re-established control over media coverage.

She even cradled hopes that the approach of the Wormwood would change the way people felt about each other. If everything was to end just a handful of generations away, what did ancient enmities matter? And was the purpose of the remaining time, the remaining days of human existence, to inflict pain and suffering on others?…

There would still be just wars, surely. But it would no longer be possible to dehumanize and demonize an opponent — not when anybody could tap a SoftScreen and see for themselves the citizens of whichever nation was considered the enemy — and there could be no more warmongering lies, about the capability, intent and resolve of an opponent. If the culture of secrecy was finally broken, no government would get away with acts like this, ever again.

Or maybe she was just being an idealist.

She pressed on, determined, motivated. But no matter how hard she tried to be objective she found these scenes unbearably harrowing: the sight of naked, wretched men, writhing in agony at the feet of blue-helmet soldiers with clean, hard American faces.

She took a break. She slept a while, bathed, then prepared herself a meal (breakfast, at three in the afternoon).

She knew she wasn’t the only citizen putting the new facilities to use like this.

All around the country, she’d heard, truth squads were forming up, using WormCam and Internet. Some of the squads were no more than neighbourhood watch schemes. But one organization, called Copwatch, was disseminating instructions on how to shadow police at work in order to provide a “fair witness” to a cop’s every activity. Already, it was said, this new accountability was having a marked effect on the quality of policing; thuggish and corrupt officers — thankfully rare anyhow — were being exposed almost immediately.

Consumer groups had suddenly gained power, and were daily exposing scams and con artists. In most states, detailed breakdowns of campaign finance information were being posted, in some cases for the first time. There was a lot of focus on the Pentagon’s more obscure activities and its dark budget. And so on.

Heather relished the idea of concerned private citizens, armed with WormCam and suspicion, clustering around the corrupt and criminal like white blood cells. In her mind there was a simple causal chain lying behind fundamental liberties: increased openness ensured accountability, which in turn maintained freedom. And now a technological miracle — or accident — seemed to be delivering the most profound tool for open disclosure imaginable into the hands of private citizens.

Jefferson and Franklin would probably have loved it — even if it would have meant the sacrifice of their own privacy…

There was noise in her study. A muffled giggling.

Heather, barefoot, crept to the half-open door. Mary and a friend were sitting at Heather’s desk. “Look at that jerk,” Mary was saying. “His hand keeps slipping off the end.”

Heather recognized the friend, Sasha, from the class above Mary’s at high school, was known among the local parents’ mafia as a Bad Influence. The air was thick with the smoke from a joint — presumably one of Heather’s own store.

The WormCam image was of a teenage boy. Heather recognized him, too, as one of the boys from school — Jack? Jacques? He was in his bedroom. His pants were around his ankles, and before a SoftScreen, with more enthusiasm than competence, he was masturbating.

She said quietly, “Congratulations. So you hacked your way through the nanny.”

Both Mary and Sasha jumped, startled. Sasha waved futilely at the cloud of marijuana smoke.

Mary turned back to the ’Screen. “Why not? You did.”

“I did it for a valid reason.”

“So it’s all right for you but not for me. You’re such a hypocrite, Mom.”

Sasha stood up. “I’m out of here.”

“Yes, you are,” Heather snapped after her retreating back. “Mary, is this you? Spying on your neighbours like some sleazy voyeur?”

“What else is there to do? Admit it, Mom. You’re getting a little moist yourself.”

“Get out of here.”

Mary’s laugh turned to a theatric sneer, and she walked out.

Heather, shaken, sat before the ’Screen and studied the boy. The SoftScreen he was staring at showed another WormCam view. There was a girl in the image, naked, also masturbating, but smiling, mouthing words at the boy.

Heather wondered how many more watchers this couple had. Maybe they hadn’t thought of that. A WormCam couldn’t be tapped, but it was difficult to remember that the WormCam meant global access for everybody — anybody could be watching these kids at play.

She was prepared to bet that in these first months, ninety-nine percent of WormCam use would be for this kind of crude voyeurism. Maybe it was like the sudden accessibility of porn made possible by the Internet at home, without the need to enter some sleazy store. Everybody always wanted to be a voyeur anyhow — so the argument went — and now we can do it without risk of being caught.

At least that was how it felt; the truth was that anybody could be watching the watchers too. Just as anybody could have watched Mary and Sasha, two cute teenage girls getting pleasurably horny. And maybe there was even a community who might derive some pleasure from watching her, a dry-as-a stick middle-aged woman gazing analytically at this foolish stuff.

Maybe, some of the commentators said, it was the chance of voyeurism that was driving the early sales of this home WormCam access, and even its technological development — just as porn providers had pushed the early development of Internet facilities. Heather would have liked to believe her fellow humans were a little deeper than that. But maybe, once again, she was just being an idealist.

And after all, not all the voyeurism was for titillation. Every day there were news lines about people who had, for one reason or another, spied on those close to them, and discovered secrets and betrayals and creeping foulness, causing a rush of divorces, domestic violence, suicides, minor wars between friends, spouses, siblings, children and their parents: a lot of crap to be worked out of a lot of relationships, she supposed, before everybody grew up a little and got used to the idea of glass-wall openness.

She noticed that the boy had a spectacular Cassini spaceprobe image of Saturn’s rings on his bedroom wall. Of course he was ignoring it; he was much more interested in his dick. Heather remembered how her own mother — God, nearly fifty years back — would tell her of the kind of future she had grown up with, in more expansive, optimistic years. By the year 2025, her mother used to say, nuclear-powered spacecraft would be plying between the colonized planets, bearing water and precious minerals mined from asteroids. Perhaps the first interstellar probe would already have been launched. And so on.

Perhaps teenagers in that world might have been distracted from each others’ body parts — at least some of the time! — by the spectacle of the explorers in Mars’s Valles Marineris, or Mercury’s great Caloris basin, or the shifting ice fields of Europa.

But, she thought, in our world we’re still stuck here on Earth, and even the future seems to end in a black hurtling wall of rock, and all we want to do is spy on each other.

She shut down the wormhole link and added new security protocols to her terminal. It wouldn’t keep Mary out forever, but it would slow her down a little.

That done — exhausted, depressed — she returned to work.

Chapter 17 The debunk machine

David and Heather sat before a flickering SoftScreen, their faces illuminated by the harsh sunlight of a day long gone.

…He was a private, a soldier of the first Maryland Infantry. He was one of a line which stretched into the distance, muskets raised. A drumbeat was audible, steady and ominous. They hadn’t yet learned his name.

His face was begrimed, smeared by sweat, his uniform filthy, rain-stained and heavily patched. He was becoming visibly more nervous as he approached the front.

Smoke covered the lines in the distance. But already David and Heather could hear the crackle of small arms, the booming of cannon.

Their soldier passed a field hospital now, tents set up at the centre of a muddy field. There were rows of unmoving bodies, uncovered, lying outside the nearest tent, and — somehow more horrific — a pile of severed arms and legs, some still bearing scraps of cloth. Two men were feeding the limbs into a brazier. The cries of the wounded within the tents were scratchy, remote, agonizing.

The soldier dug into his jacket and produced a pack of playing cards, battered and bound up with string, and a photograph.

David, working the WormCam controls, froze the image, and zoomed in on the little photograph, much thumbed, its image a crude black-and-white graininess. “It’s a woman,” he said slowly. “And that looks like a donkey. And… Oh.”

Heather was smiling. “He’s afraid. He thinks he might not live through the day. He doesn’t want that stuff sent home with his personal effects.”

David resumed the sequence. The soldier dropped his possessions into the mud and ground them in with his heel.

Heather said, “Listen. What’s he singing?”

David adjusted the volume and frequency filters. The private’s accent was remarkably broad, but the words were recognizable: …Into the ward of the clean whitewashed halls / Where the dead slept and the dying lay / Wounded by bayonets, sabres and balls / Somebody’s darling was borne one day…

A mounted officer came by behind the line, his black, sweating horse visibly nervous. Close up. Dress, there… Close up. His accent was stiff, alien to David’s ear -

There was an explosion, flying earth. The bodies of soldiers seemed simply to burst, into large, bloody fragments.

David recoiled. It had been a shell. Suddenly, startlingly quickly, war was here.

The noise level rose abruptly: there was cheering, swearing, a rattle of rifle-muskets and pistols. The private raised his musket, fired rapidly, and dug another cartridge from his belt. He bit into it, exposing the powder and ball, and particles of black powder clung to his lips.

Heather murmured, “They say the powder tasted like pepper.”

Another shell landed near the wheel of an artillery piece. A horse close to the gun seemed to explode, bloody scraps flying. A man walking alongside fell, and he looked down in apparent surprise at the stump which now terminated his leg.

All around the private now there was horror: smoke, fire, mutilated bodies, many men littered on the ground, writhing. But he seemed to be growing more calm. He continued to advance.

David said, “I don’t understand. He’s in the middle of a mass slaughter. Wouldn’t it be rational to retreat, to hide?”

Heather said, “He may not even understand what the war is about. Soldiers often don’t. Right now, he’s responsible for himself; his destiny is in his own hands. Perhaps he feels relief that the moment has come. And he has his reputation, esteem from his buddies.”

“It’s a form of madness,” David said.

“Of course it is…”

They didn’t hear the musket ball coming.

It passed through one eye socket and out the back of the private’s head, taking a palm-sized chunk of skull with it. David could see matter within, red and grey.

The private stood there a few seconds more, still bearing his weapon, but his body was shaking, his legs convulsing. Then he fell in a heap.

Another soldier dropped his musket and got to his knees beside him. He lifted the private’s head, gently, and seemed to be trying to tuck his brain back into his shattered skull -

David tapped his control. The SoftScreen went blank. He ripped his headphones from his ears.

For a moment he sat still, letting the images and sounds of the gruesome Civil War battlefield fade from his head, to be replaced by the composed scientific calm of the Wormworks, the subdued murmur of the researchers. In rows of similar cubicles all around them, people toiled at dim WormCam images: tapping at SoftScreens, listening to the mutter of ancient voices in headphones, making notes on yellow legal pads. Most had gained admittance by submitting research proposals which were screened by a committee David had established, and then selected by lottery. Others had been brought in as guests of Hiram’s, like Heather and her daughter. They were journalists, researchers, academics seeking to resolve historical disputes and special-interest types — including a few conspiracy theorists — with points to prove.

Somewhere, somebody was softly whistling a nursery rhyme. The melody made an odd counterpoint to the horrors still rattling around David’s head — but he knew the significance immediately. One of the more enthusiastic researchers here had been determined to uncover the simple tune said to have formed the basis of Edward Elgar’s 1899 Enigma Variations. Many candidates had been proposed, from Negro spirituals and forgotten music-hall hits to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Now, though, it sounded as if the researcher had uncovered the truth, and David let his mind supply the words to the gentle melody: Mary Had a Little Lamb…

The researchers had been drawn here because OurWorld was still far ahead of the competition in the power of its WormCam technology. The depth of the past accessible to modern scrutiny was increasing all the time; some researchers had already reached as far back as three centuries. But for now — for better or worse — the use of the powerful past-viewer WormCams remained tightly controlled, offered only in facilities like this, where its users were screened and prioritized and monitored, their results edited carefully and given interpretative glosses before public release.

But David knew that no matter how far back he looked, whatever he witnessed, however the images were analysed and discussed, the fifteen minutes of the War Between the States he had just endured would stay with him forever.

Heather touched his arm. “You don’t have a very strong stomach, do you? We’ve only scratched the surface of this war — barely begun to study the past.”

“But it is a vast, banal butchery.”

“Of course. Isn’t it always? In fact the Civil War was one of the first truly modern wars. More than six hundred thousand dead, nearly half a million wounded, in a country whose population was only thirty million. It’s as if, today, we lost five million. It was a peculiarly American triumph for such a young country to stage such a vast conflict.”

“But it was just…” Heather was working on the Civil War period as part of her research for the first WormCam-compiled TrueBio of Abraham Lincoln, funded by an historical association. “Will that be your conclusion? After all the war led to the eradication of slavery in the United States.”

“But that wasn’t what the war was about. We’re about to lose our romantic illusions about it — to confront the truth that the braver historians have faced all along. The war was a clash of economic interests. North against South. The slaves were an economic asset worth billions of dollars. And it was a bloody affair, erupting out of a class-ridden, unequal society. Troops from Gettysburg were sent to New York to put down antidraft riots. Lincoln jailed around thirty thousand political prisoners, without trial.”

David whistled. “You think Lincoln’s reputation can survive our seeing all that?” He began to set up a new run.

She shrugged. “Lincoln remains an impressive figure. Even though he wasn’t gay.”

That jolted David. “What? Are you sure?”

She smiled. “Not even bi.”

From the neighbouring cubicle he could hear a faint sound of high-pitched screaming.

Heather smiled at him tiredly. “Mary. She’s watching the Beatles again.”

“The Beatles?”

Heather listened for a moment. “The Top Ten Club in Hamburg. April 1961, probably. Legendary performances, where the Beatles are thought to have played better than they ever did again. Never filmed, and so of course never seen again until now. Mary is working her way through the performances, night after night of them.”

“Umm. How are things between you?”

She glanced at the partition, spoke in a subdued whisper. “I’m worried that our relationship is heading for a full-scale breakdown. David, I don’t know what she does half the time, where she goes, who she meets… All I get is her anger. It was only the bribe of using an OurWorld WormCam that brought her here today. Aside from the Beatles, I don’t even know what she’s using it for.”

He hesitated. “I’m somewhat dubious about the ethics of what I’m offering. But — would you like me to find out?”

She frowned, and pushed greying hair out of her eyes. “Can you do that?”

“I’ll talk to her.”

The SoftScreen image stabilized.

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here…

Lincoln’s audience — in their stiff top hats and black coats, almost all of them male — looked unutterably alien, David thought. And Lincoln himself towered above them, so tall and spare he seemed almost grotesque, his voice an irritatingly high, nasal whine. And yet -

“And yet,” he said, “his words still have the power to move.”

“Yes,” Heather said. “I think Lincoln will survive the TrueBio process. He was complex, ambiguous, never straightforward. He told audiences what they wanted to hear — sometimes pro-Abolition, sometimes not. He certainly wasn’t the Abe of the legend. Old Abe, honest Abe, father Abe… But he was living in difficult times. He came through a hellish war by turning it into a crusade. If not for Abe, who knows if the nation could have survived?”

“And he wasn’t gay.”

“Nope.”

“What about the Joshua Speed diary?”

“A clever forgery, put together after Lincoln’s death by the ring of Confederate sympathizers who were behind his assassination. All designed to blacken his character, even after they’d taken his life…”

Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality had come under scrutiny following the discovery of a diary supposedly written by Joshua Speed, a merchant in Springfield, Illinois, with whom Lincoln, as a young, impoverished lawyer, had lodged for some years. Although both Speed and Lincoln had later married — and in fact both had reputations as womanisers — rumours had developed that they had lived as gay lovers.

In the difficult opening years of the twenty-first century, Lincoln had been reborn as a figure of toleration and broad appeal. “Pink Lincoln,” a divided hero for a divided age. At Easter 2015, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, this had climaxed in an open-air celebration around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.; for a single night, the great stone figure had been bathed in gaudy pink spotlights.

“…I have notarized WormCam records to prove it,” Heather said now. “I’ve had expert systems fast-forward through Lincoln’s every sexual encounter. There’s not a single trace of gay or bi behaviour in there.”

“But Speed.”

“He and Lincoln shared a bed, those years in Illinois. But that wasn’t uncommon back then — Lincoln couldn’t afford a bed of his own!”

David scratched his head. “This,” he said, “is going to annoy everybody.”

She said, “You know, we’re going to have to get used to this. No more heroes, no more fairy tales. Successful leaders are pragmatic. Almost every choice they make is between bad options; the wisest of them, like Lincoln, pick out the least worst, consistently. And that’s about all you can ask of them.”

David nodded. “Perhaps. But you Americans are lucky that you are already running out of history. We Europeans have thousands more years left to witness.”

They fell silent, and gazed at the stiff images of Lincoln and his audience, the tinny voices, the rustle of applause from men long dead.

Chapter 18 Hindsight

After six months, Kate’s case was still held up. Bobby put in calls every few days to see FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens. Mavens steadfastly refused to see him.

Then, abruptly, to Bobby’s surprise, Mavens invited Bobby to come out to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Bobby hastily arranged a flight.

He found Mavens in his office, a small anonymous box, windowless and stuffy. Mavens was sitting behind his littered desk — feet propped up on a pile of file boxes, jacket off, tie loose — watching a news show on a small SoftScreen. He waved Bobby silent.

The piece was about the extension of the scope of citizens’ truth squad activities to the murkier corners of the past, now that — in response to a powerful and immediate clamour — past-viewing WormCam facilities had at last been made available for private use.

In the midst of poring over each other’s grubby past, in between staring at their own younger selves in awe or amazement or shame, people had been turning the WormCam’s unforgiving gaze on the rich and powerful. There had been a whole new spate of resignations from public office and prominent organizations and corporations, as various past crimes were disinterred. A whole series of old outrages were being turned over. The coals of the old scandal of the tobacco companies’ knowledge of, indeed manipulation of, the addictive and toxic effects of their products, were being raked once more. The involvement and profit-making of the world’s larger companies in Nazi Germany — many of them still operating, some of them American — had been even more extensive than imagined; the justification that de-Nazification had been left incomplete in order to assist economic recovery after the war looked, at this remove, dubious. Most computer manufacturers had indeed made inadequate provisions to shield their customers when microwave-frequency microchips had come on the market in the first decade of the century, leading to a rash of cancers.

Bobby said, “So much for the scare predictions of how we ordinary folk wouldn’t be mature enough to handle a technology as powerful as the past viewer. All this seems pretty responsible to me.”

Mavens grunted. “Maybe. Although we’re all using WormCams for the sleazy stuff too. At least these crusading citizen types aren’t just beating up on the government. I always thought the big corporations were a bigger threat to freedom than anything we were likely to do. In fact we in government were the ones holding them in check.”

Bobby smiled. “We — OurWorld — were caught by the microwave row. The compensation claims are still being assessed.”

“Everybody’s apologizing to everybody else. What a world… Bobby, I got to tell you I still don’t think we can achieve much progress on Ms. Manzoni’s case. But we can talk about it, if you like.” Mavens looked exhausted, his eyes black-rimmed, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.

“If there’s no progress, why am I here?”

Mavens looked unhappy, uncomfortable, somehow out of place. He had lost the brave youthful certainty Bobby remembered about him. “Because I have time on my hands, all of a sudden. I’m not suspended, in case you’re thinking that. Call it a sabbatical. One of my old cases has been under review.” He eyed Bobby. “And.”

“What?”

“I want you to see what your WormCam is really doing to us. Just one time, one example. You remember the Wilson murder?”

“Wilson?”

“New York City, a couple of years ago. A young teenager from Bangladesh — he’d been orphaned by the floods in ’33.”

“I remember.”

“The UN placement agency found this particular relocate, called Mian Sharif, an adoptive home in New York. A middle-aged, childless couple who’d taken one adopted kid before — a girl, Barbara — and brought her up successfully. Apparently.

“The story looked simple. Mian is killed at home. Mutilated, before and after death, apparently raped. The father was the prime suspect.” He grimaced. “Family members always are.

“I worked on the case. The forensics were ambiguous, and Wilson’s mind maps showed no particular propensity to violence, sexual or otherwise. But we had enough to convict the man. Philip George Wilson was executed by lethal injection on November 27, 2034.”

“But now…”

“Because of the demand on WormCam time for new and unresolved cases, the review of closed cases like Wilson has been a low priority. But now the public have gotten online to the WormCams, they are looking for themselves, and they are starting to agitate for some old cases to be reopened: friends, family, even the convicted themselves.”

“And now the Wilson case.”

“Yeah.” Mavens smiled thinly. “Maybe you can understand how I’m feeling. You see, before the WormCam, I could never be sure what the truth is in any given case. No witness is a hundred percent reliable. The perps know how to lie through forensics. I couldn’t know what happened, unless I was there.

“Wilson was the first convicted criminal to be executed because of my work. I knew I’d done the best I could to establish the truth. But now, years after the event, I’ve been able to see Wilson’s alleged crime for the first time. And I found out the truth about the man I sent to the needle.”

“Are you sure you ought to show me.”

“It will be in the public domain soon enough.” Mavens twisted the SoftScreen around so Bobby could see, and began to dial up a recording.

The ’Screen cleared to show a bedroom. There was a wide bed, a wardrobe and cupboards, animated posters of rock and sports stars and movie icons on the wall. A boy lay face down on the bed: slim, dressed in T-shirt and Jeans, he was propped up on his elbows over books and a primary-colour SoftScreen, sucking a pencil. He was dark, his hair a rich black mass.

Bobby said, “That’s Mian?”

“Yeah. Bright kid, lived quietly, worked hard. He’s doing his homework. Shakespeare, as it happens. Aged thirteen, though I guess he looks a little younger. Well, he won’t get any older… Tell me if you want to stop this.”

Bobby nodded, curtly, resolved to see this through. This was a test, he thought. A test of his new humanity.

The door opened outward, admitting a burly middle-aged man. “Here comes the father. Philip George Wilson.” Wilson was carrying a soda bottle; he opened it and set it down on a bedside table. The boy looked around and said a few words.

Mavens said, “We know what they said. What are you working on, what time does Mom get home, blah blah. Nothing consequential; just an ordinary exchange.”

Wilson ruffled the boy’s hair and left the room. Mian smoothed back his hair and went back to work.

Mavens froze the image; the boy turned to a statue, his image flickering slightly.

“Let me tell you what we thought happened next — as we reconstructed it back in ’34.

“Wilson comes back into the room. He makes some kind of pass at the boy. The boy rebuffs him. So Wilson attacks him. Maybe the boy fights back; if so, he didn’t do Wilson any damage. Wilson has a knife — which, incidentally, we don’t find. He cuts and rips at the kid’s clothes. He mutilates him. After he kills the boy, by cutting his throat, he may have performed sex on the body, or he may have masturbated; we find flecks of Wilson’s semen on the body.

“And then, cradling the body, covered in blood, he yells 911 at the Search Engine.”

“You’re kidding.”

Mavens shrugged. “People act in strange ways. The facts are that there was no way in or out of the apartment save for locked windows and doors, none of which were forced. The hallway security cams showed nothing.

“We had no suspects save for Wilson, and a lot of evidence against him. He never denied what he did. I think maybe he believed himself that he really had done it, even though he had no memory of it.

“Our experts were split. We have psychoanalysts who say Wilson’s knowledge of his appalling act was too much for his ego to bear. So he repressed it, came out of the episode, returned to something like normal. Then we have cynics who say he’s lying, that he knew exactly what he was doing; when he realized he couldn’t get away with the crime, he feigned mental problems to secure a softer sentence. And we have neurologists who say he probably suffers from a form of epilepsy.”

Bobby prompted, “But now we have the truth.”

“Yes. Now, the truth.” Mavens tapped the SoftScreen, and the recording resumed.

There was an air-conditioning grille in the corner of the bedroom. It popped open. The boy, Mian, got to his feet quickly, looking startled, and backed into a corner.

“He didn’t call out at this point,” Mavens said softly. “If he had…”

Now a figure crawled out through the open grille. It was a girl, dressed in a tight-fitting spandex ski suit. She looked sixteen, might have been older. She was holding a knife.

Mavens froze the image again Bobby frowned. “Who the hell is that?”

“The Wilsons’ first adopted daughter. She’s called Barbara — you remember I mentioned her. Here she was eighteen years old, and she’d been living away from home a couple of years.”

“But she still had the security code to get into the building.”

“Yeah. She came in disguise. Then she got into the air ducts, big fat ones in a building that age. And that’s how she got into the apartment.

“We used the ’Cam to track her back a couple of years deeper into the past. Turns out her relationship with her father was a little more complex than anyone had known.

“They got on fine when she lived at home. After she left for college, she had a couple of bad experiences. She wanted to come home. The parents talked it over, but encouraged her to stay away, to become independent. Maybe they were wrong to do that, maybe they were right. But they meant well.

“She came home anyway, one night when the mother was away. She crawled in bed with her sleeping father, and performed oral sex on him. She was the initiator. But he didn’t stop her. Afterwards he was full of guilt. The boy, Mian, was asleep in the next room.”

“So they had a row.”

“No. Wilson was distressed, ashamed, but tried to remain sensible. He sent her back to college, talking about putting this behind them, it’s a one-off. Maybe he really thought time would heal the wounds. Well, he was wrong.

“What he didn’t understand was Barbara’s jealousy. She’d become convinced that Mian had displaced her in her parents’ affections, and that was the reason she was shut out, kept away from home.”

“Right. So she tries to seduce the father, to find another way back…”

“Not exactly.” Mavens hit the SoftScreen, and the little drama began to unfold once more.

Mian, recognizing his adoptive sister, got over his shock and stepped forward.

But with startling speed Barbara closed on him. She elbowed him in the throat, leaving him clutching his neck, gasping.

“Smart,” said Mavens professionally. “Now he can’t call out.”

Barbara pushed the boy onto his back and straddled him. She grabbed his hands, held them over his head and began to slash at his clothes.

“She doesn’t look strong enough to do that,” Bobby said.

“It isn’t strength that counts. It’s determination. Mian couldn’t believe, even now, this girl, a girl he thought of as his sister, was going to do him real harm. Would you?”

Now the boy’s chest was bare. Barbara reached down with the knife -

Bobby snapped, “Enough.”

Mavens hit a button, and the SoftScreen cleared, to Bobby’s profound relief.

Mavens said, “The rest is detail. When Mian was dead she propped him against the door, and called for her father. Wilson came running. When he opened the door his son’s warm body fell into his arms. And he called the Search Engine.”

“But Wilson’s semen.”

“She stored it, after that night she blew him, in a cute little cryo-flask she liberated from a medical lab. She’d been planning this, even as far back as that.” He shrugged. “It all worked out. Revenge, the destruction of the father who had spurned her, as she saw it. It all worked, at least until the WormCam came along. And so.”

“And so the wrong man was convicted.”

“Executed.”

Mavens tapped the ’Screen and brought up a fresh image. It was of a woman-fortyish, blond. She was sitting in some dingy office. Her face was crumpled with grief.

“This is Mae Wilson,” Mavens said. “Philip’s wife, mother to the two adopted children. She’d had to come to terms with the death of the boy, what she thought of as her husband’s dreadful crime. She’d even reconciled with Barbara, found comfort with her. Now — at this moment — she had to face a much more dreadful truth.”

Bobby felt uncomfortable, confronted by this horror, this naked grief. But Mavens froze the image.

“Right here,” he murmured. “That’s where we tore her heart in two. And it’s my responsibility.”

“You did your best.”

“No. I could have done better. The girl, Barbara, had an alibi. But with hindsight it’s an alibi I could have taken apart. There were other small things: discrepancies in the timing, the distribution of the blood. But I didn’t see any of that.” He looked at Bobby, his eyes bright. “I didn’t see the truth. That’s what your WormCam is. It’s a truth machine.”

Bobby shook his head. “No. It’s a hindsight machine.”

“It has to be right to bring the truth to light,” Mavens said. “I still believe that. Of course I do. But sometimes the truth hurts, beyond belief. Like poor Mae Wilson, here. And you know what? The truth didn’t help her. It didn’t bring Mian back, or her husband. All it did was take her daughter away too.”

“We’re all going to go through this, one way or an other, being forced to confront every mistake we ever made.”

“Maybe,” Mavens said softly. He smiled and ran his finger along the edge of his desk. “Here’s what the WormCam has done for me. My job isn’t an intellectual exercise any more, Sherlock Holmes puzzles. Now I sit here every day and I get to watch the determination, the savagery, the — the calculation. We’re animals, Bobby. Beasts, under these neat suits of clothing.” He shook his head, still smiling, and he ran his finger along the desk, back and forth, back and forth.

Chapter 19 Time

As the availability and power of the WormCam extended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snowflakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time…

Princeton, New Jersey, USA. April 17, 1955 A.D.

His good humour, in those last hours, struck his visitors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed to regard his approaching end as simply an expected natural phenomenon.

And, of course, even to the end, he issued gruff orders. He was concerned not to become an object of pilgrimage, and he instructed that his office at the Institute should not be preserved as he left it, and that his home should not become a shrine, and so on.

Doctor Dean looked in on him for the last time at eleven P.M., and found him sleeping peacefully.

But a little after midnight his nurse — Mrs. Alberta Roszel — noticed a change in his breathing. She called for help and, with the help of another nurse, cranked up the head of the bed.

He was muttering, and Mrs. Roszel came close to hear.

Even as the finest mind since Newton began, at last, to unravel, final thoughts floated to the surface of his consciousness. Perhaps he regretted the great physics unification project he had left unfinished. Perhaps he wondered if his pacifism had after all been the right course — if he had been correct to encourage Roosevelt to enter the nuclear age. Perhaps, simply, he regretted how he had always put science first, even over those who loved him.

But it was too late for all that. His life, so vivid and complex in youth and middle age, was now reducing, as all lives must, to a single thread of utter simplicity.

Mrs. Roszel bent close to hear his soft voice. But his words were in German, the language of his youth, and she did not understand.

…And she did not see, could not see, the swarm of spacetime flaws which, in these last moments, crowded around the trembling lips of Einstein to hear those final words: “…Lieseri! Oh, Lieseri!”

Extracted from testimony by Prof. Maurice Patefield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chair of the “Wormseed” campaign group, to the Congressional Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, 23 September, 2037:

As soon as it became apparent that the WormCam can reach, not just through walls, but into the past, a global obsession of the human species with its own history opened up. At first we were treated to professionally-made “factual” WormCam movies showing such great events as wars, assassinations, political scandals. Unsinkable, the multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the Titanic disaster, for example, made harrowing, compelling viewing — even though it demolished many sea-story myths propagated by uncritical storytellers, and much of the event took place in pitch North Atlantic darkness. But we soon grew impatient with the interpolation of the professionals. We wanted to see for ourselves. The hasty inspection of many notorious moments of the recent past has revealed both banality and surprise. The depressing truths surrounding Elvis Presley, O. J. Simpson and even the deaths of the Kennedys surely surprised nobody. On the other hand, the revelations about the murders of so many prominent women — from Marilyn Monroe through Mother Teresa to Diana, Princess of Wales — caused a wave of shock, even in a society becoming accustomed to too much truth. The existence of a shadowy, relentless cabal of misogynistic men whose activities against (as they saw it) too powerful women, actions carried across decades, caused much soul-searching among both sexes. But many true-story versions of historic events — the Cuba missile crisis, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the euro — while of interest to aficionados, have turned out to be muddled, confusing and complex. It is dismaying to realize that even those supposedly at the centers of power generally know little and understand less of what is going on around them. With all respect to the great traditions of this House, almost all the key incidents in human history are screw-ups, it seems, just as almost all the great passions are no more than crude and manipulative tumblings. And, worse than that, the truth generally turns out to be boring. The lack of pattern and logic in the overwhelming, almost unrecognisable true history that is now being revealed is proving so difficult and wearying for all but the most ardent scholar that fictionalized accounts are actually making a comeback: stories which provide a narrative structure simple enough to engage the viewer. We need story and meaning, not blunt fact…

Toulouse, France. 14 January, 1636 A.D.:

In the dusty calm of his study, he took down his beloved copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica. With great excitement he turned to Book II, Problem 8, and hunted for a quill.

…On the other hand, it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as a sum of two fourth powers, or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain…

Bernadette Winstanley, a fourteen-year-old student from Harare, Zimbabwe, booked time on her high-school WormCam and devoted herself to tracking back from the moment of Fermat’s brief scribbling in that margin.

…This was where it had started for him, and so it was appropriate that it was here that it should end. It was after all Diophantus’ eighth problem which had so intrigued him, and sent him on his voyage of mathematical discovery: Given a number which is a square, write it as a sum of two other squares. This was the algebraic expression of Pythagoras’ theorem, of course; and every schoolchild knew solutions: 3 squared plus 4 squared, for example, meaning 9 plus 16, summed to 25, which was 5 squared.

Ah, but what of an extension of the notion beyond this geometric triviality? Were there numbers which could be expressed as sums of greater powers? 3 cubed plus 4 cubed made 27 plus 64, summing to 91 — not itself a cube. But did any such triplets exist? And what of the higher powers, the fourth, fifth, sixth…?

It was clear the ancients had known of no such cases — nor had they known a proof of impossibility.

But now he — a lawyer and magistrate, not even a professional mathematician — had managed to prove that no triple of numbers existed for any index higher than two.

Bernadette imaged sheets of notes expressing the essence of the proof Fermat believed he had found, and, with some help from a teacher, deciphered their meaning.

…For now he was pressed by his duties, but when he had time he would assemble a formal expression of his proof from the scribbled notes and sketches he had accumulated. Then he would communicate it to Desargues, Descartes, Pascal, Bernoulli and the others — how they would marvel at its far-reaching elegance!

And then he could explore the numbers further: those pellucid yet stubbornly complex entities, which seemed at times so strange he fancied they must have an existence independent of the human mind which had conceived them…

Pierre de Fermat never wrote out the proof of what would become known as his Last Theorem. But that brief marginalia, discovered after Fermat’s death by his son, would tantalize and fascinate later generations of mathematicians. A proof was found — but not until the 1990s, and it was of such technical intricacy, involving abstract properties of elliptic curves and other unfamiliar mathematical entities, that scholars believed it was impossible Fermat could have found a proof in his day. Perhaps he had been mistaken — or had even perpetrated a huge hoax on later generations.

Then, in the year 2037, to general amazement, armed with no more than high-school math, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Winstanley was able to prove that Fermat had been right

And when at last Fermat’s proof was published, a revolution in mathematics began.

Patefield Testimony: Of course, the kooky fringe immediately found a way to get online to history. As a scientist and a rationalist I regard it as a great fortune that the WormCam has proven the greatest debunker yet discovered. And so it is now indisputable, for example, that there was no crashed UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Not a single alien-abduction incident yet inspected has turned out to be anything more than a misinterpretation of some innocent phenomenon — often complicated by disturbed neurological states. Similarly, not a shred of evidence has emerged for any paranormal or supernatural phenomenon, no matter how notorious. Whole industries of psychics, mediums, astrologers, faith healers, homeopathists and others are being systematically demolished. We must look forward to the day when the WormCam’s delvings reach as far as the building of the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Nazca geoglyphs and other sources of “wisdom” or “mystery.” And then will come Atlantis… It may be a new day is dawning — it may be that in the not too distant future the mass of humanity wilt at last conclude that truth is more interesting than delusion.

Florence, Italy. 12 April, 1506 A.D.

Bernice would readily admit she was no more than a junior researcher in the Louvre’s curatorial office. And so it was a surprise — a welcome one! — when she was asked to perform the first provenance check on one of the museum’s most famous paintings.

Even if the result was less welcome.

At first the search had been simple: in fact, confined to the walls of the Louvre itself. Before a blur of visitors, attended by generations of curators, the fine old lady sat in semi-darkness behind her panes of protective glass, silently watching time unravel.

The years before the transfer to the Louvre were more complex.

Bernice glimpsed a series of fine houses, generations of elegance and power punctuated by intervals of war and social unrest and poverty. Much of this, back as deep as the seventeenth century, confirmed the painting’s documented record.

Then — in the early years of that century, more than a hundred years after the painting’s supposed composition — came the first surprise. Bernice watched, stunned, as a scrawny, hungry-looking young painter stood before two side-by-side copies of the famous image-and, time-reversed, with brushstroke after brushstroke, eliminated the copy that had passed down the centuries to the care of the Louvre.

Briefly she detoured to track forward in time, following the fate of the older “original” from which the Louvre’s copy — just a copy, a replica! — had been made. That “original” was to last little-more than two centuries, she saw, before being lost in a massive house fire in Revolutionary France.

WormCam studies had exposed many of the world’s best-known works of art as forgeries and copies — more than seventy percent of pre-twentieth-century paintings (and a smaller proportion of sculptures, smaller presumably only because of the effort required to make copies). History was a dangerous, destructive corridor through which very little of value survived unscathed.

But still there had been no indication that this painting, of all of them, had been a fake. Although at least a dozen replicas had been known to circulate at various times and places, the Louvre had a continuous record of ownership since the artist had laid down his brush. And there was besides evidence of changes to the composition under the top layer of paint: an indication more of an original, assayed and reworked, than a copy.

But then, Bernice reflected, composition techniques and records could be faked too.

Bewildered, she returned down the decades to that dingy room, the ingenious, forging painter. And she began to follow the “original” he had copied deeper into the past.

More decades flickered by, more transfers of ownership, all of it an uninteresting blur around the changeless painting itself.

At last she approached the start of the sixteenth century, and was nearing his studio, in Florence. Even now copies were being made, by the master’s own students, But all of the copies were of this, the lost “original” she had identified.

Perhaps there would be no more surprises.

She was to be proved wrong.

Oh, it was true that he was involved in the composition, preliminary sketches, and much of the painting’s design. It was to be the ideal portrait, he declared grandly, the features and symbolic overtones of its subject synthesized into a perfect unity, and with a sweeping, flowing style — to astound his contemporaries and fascinate later generations. The conception, indeed, was his, and the triumph.

But not the execution. The master — distracted by many commissions and his wider interests in science and technology — left that to others.

Bernice, awe and dismay swirling in her heart, watched as a young man from the provinces called Raphael Sanzio painstakingly applied the last touches to that gentle, puzzling smile…

Patefield Testimony: It is a matter of regret that many cherished — and harmless — myths, now exposed to the cold light of this future day, are evaporating. Betsy Ross is a notorious recent instance. There really was a Betsy Ross. But she was never visited by George Washington; she was not asked to make a flag for the new nation; she did not work on its design with Washington; she did not make up the flag in her back parlor. As far as can be determined, all this stuff was a concoction of her grandson’s, almost a century later. Davy Crockett’s myth was self-manufactured, his coonskin legend developed fairly cynically to create popularity by the Whig party in Congress. There has been not one WormCam observation of him using the phrase “bar-hunting” on Capitol Hill. Paul Revere, on the other hand, has had his reputation enhanced by the WormCam. For many years Revere served as the principal rider for Boston’s Committee of Safety. His most famous ride — to Lexington to warn revolutionary leaders that the British were on the march — was, ironically, more hazardous, Revere’s achievement still more heroic, even than the legend of Longfellow’s poem. But still, many modern Americans have been dismayed by the heavy French accent Revere had inherited from his father. And so it goes on — not just in America, but around the world. There are even some famous figures — the commentators call them “snowmen” — who prove never to have existed at all! What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts — indeed, sometimes from no facts — in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control. We must wonder where this will lead us. Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples. But, just as each human will now have to learn to construct a personality in the glare of pitiless WormCam inspection, so communities will have to come to terms with the stripped-bare truth of their own past — and find new ways to express their common values and history, if they are to survive the future. And the sooner we get on with it, the better.

Similaun Glacier, Alps. April, 2321 B.C.:

It was an elemental world: black rock, blue sky, hard white ice. This was one of the highest passes in the Alps. The man, alone, moved through this lethal environment with utter confidence.

But Marcus knew the man he watched was already approaching the place where, slumped over a boulder and with his Neolithic tool kit stacked neatly at his side, he would meet his death.

At first — as he had explored the possibilities of the WormCam, here at the Institute of Alpine Studies at the University of Innsbruck-Marcus Pinch had feared that the WormCam would destroy archaeology and replace it with something more resembling butterfly hunting: the crude observation of “the truth,” perhaps by untrained eyes. There would be no more Schliemanns, no more Troys, no more patient unravelling of the past from shards and traces.

But as it turned out there was still a role for the accumulated wisdom of archaeology, as the best intellectual reconstruction available of the true past. There was just too much to see — and the WormCam horizon expanded all the time. For the time being, the role of the WormCam was be to supplement conventional archaeological techniques: to provide key pieces of evidence to resolve disputes, to reinforce or overthrow hypotheses, as a more correct consensual narrative of the past slowly emerged.

And in this case, for Marcus, the truth that would be revealed — here now, by the blue-white-black images relayed through time and space to his SoftScreen — would provide answers to the most compelling questions in his own professional career.

This man, this hunter, had been dug out of the ice fifty-three centuries after he died. The smears of blood, tissue, starch, hair and fragments of feather on his tools and clothing had enabled the scientists, Marcus included, to reconstruct much of his life. Modern researchers had even, whimsically, given him a name: Ötzi, the Ice Man.

His two arrows were of particular interest to Marcus — in fact, they had served as the basis of Marcus’s doctorate. Both the arrows were broken, and Marcus had been able to demonstrate that before he died, the hunter had been trying to dismantle the arrows, intent on making one good arrow out of the two broken ones, by fitting the better arrowhead into the good shaft.

It was such painstaking detective work as this that had drawn Marcus into archaeology. Marcus saw no limit to the reach of such techniques. Perhaps in some sense every event left some mark on the universe, a mark that could one day be decoded by sufficiently ingenious instruments. In a sense the WormCam was the crystallization of the unspoken intuition of every archaeologist: that the past is a country, real, out there somewhere, which can be explored, fingertip by fingertip.

But a new book of truth was opening. For the ’Cam could answer questions left untouched by traditional archaeology, no matter how powerful the techniques — even about this man, Ötzi, who had become the best known human of all those who had lived throughout prehistory.

What had never been answered — what was impossible to answer from the fragments recovered — was why the Ice Man had died. Perhaps he was fleeing warfare, or pursuing a love affair. Perhaps he was a criminal, fleeing the rough justice of his time.

Marcus had intuited that all these explanations were parochial, projections of a modern world on a more austere past. But he longed, along with the rest of the world, to know the truth.

But now the world had forgotten Ötzi, with his skin clothes and tools of flint and copper, the mystery of his lonely death. Now, in a world where any figure from the past could be made to come to vibrant life, Ötzi was no longer a novelty, nor even particularly interesting. Nobody cared to learn how, after all, he had died.

Nobody save Marcus. So Marcus had sat in the chill gloom of this university facility, struggling through that Alpine pass at Ötzi’s shoulder, until the truth had become apparent.

Ötzi was a high-status Alpine hunter. His copper axehead and bearskin hat were marks of hunting prowess and prestige — And his goal, on this fatal expedition, had been the most elusive quarry of all, the only Alpine animal which retires to high rocky areas at night: the ibex.

But Ötzi was old — at forty-six, he had already reached an advanced age for a man of his period. He was plagued by arthritis, and afflicted today by an intestinal infection which had given him chronic diarrhoea. Perhaps he had grown weaker, slower than he knew — or cared to admit.

He had followed his quarry ever deeper into the cold heights of the mountains. He had made his simple camp in this pass, intending to repair the arrowheads he had broken, continue his pursuit the next day. He had taken a final meal, of salted goat flesh and dried plums.

But the night had turned crystal clear, and the wind had howled through the pass, drawing Ötzi’s life heat with it.

It was a sad, lonely death, and Marcus, watching, thought there was a moment when Ötzi tried to rise, as if aware of his terrible mistake, as if he knew he was dying. But he could not rise; and Marcus could not reach through the WormCam to help him.

And so Ötzi would lie alone, entombed in his ice, for five thousand years.

Marcus shut down the WormCam, and once more Ötzi was at peace.

Patefield Testimony: Many nations — not just America — are facing grave internal dialogues about the new truths revealed about the past, truths in many cases barely reported, if at all, in conventional histories. In France, for example, there has been much soul-searching about the unexpectedly wide nature of collaboration with the Nazi regime during the German occupation of the Second World War. Reassuring myths about the significance of the wartime Resistance have been severely damaged — not least by the new revelations about David Moulin, a revered Resistance leader. Barely anyone who knows the legend of Moulin was prepared to learn that he had begun his career as a Nazi mole — although he was later persuaded to his national cause, and was in fact tortured and executed by the SS in 1943. Modern Belgians seem overwhelmed by their confrontation with the brutal reality of the “Congo Free State,” a tightly centralized colony designed to strip the territory of its natural wealth — principally rubber — and maintained by atrocity, murder, starvation, exposure, disease and hunger, resulting in the uprooting of whole communities and the massacre, between 1885 and 1906, of eight million people. In the lands of the old Soviet Union, people are fixated on the era of the Stalinist terror. The Germans are confronting the Holocaust once more. The Japanese, for the first time in generations, are having to come to terms with the truth of their wartime massacres and other brutalities in Szechwan and elsewhere. Israelis are uncomfortably aware of their own crimes against the Palestinians. The fragile Serbian democracy is threatening to collapse under the new exposure of the horrors in Bosnia and elsewhere after the breakup of the old Yugoslavia. And so on. Most of these past horrors were well known before the WormCam, of course, and many honest and conscientious histories were written. But still the endless dismal banality of it all, the human reality of so much cruelty and pain and waste, remains utterly dismaying. And stronger emotions than dismay have been stirred. Ethnic and religious disputes centuries old have been the trigger for many past conflicts. So it has been this time: we have seen interpersonal anger, riots, interethnic struggles, even coups and minor wars. And much of the anger is still directed at OurWorld, the messenger who has delivered so much dismal truth. But it could have been worse. As it turns out — while there has been much anger expressed at ancient wrongs, some never even exposed before — by and large each community has become too aware of its own crimes, against its own people and others, to seek atonement for those of others. No nation is without sin; none seems prepared to cast the first stone, and almost every surviving major institution — be it nation, corporation, church — finds itself forced to apologize for crimes committed in its name in the past. But there is a deeper shock to be confronted. The WormCam, after all, does not deliver its history lessons in the form of verbal summaries or neat animated maps. Nor does it have much to say of glory or honor. Rather, it simply shows us human beings, one at a time — very often starving or suffering or dying at the hands of others. Greatness no longer matters. We see now that each human being who dies is the centre of a universe: a unique spark of hope and despair, hate and love, going alone into the greater darkness. It is as if the WormCam has brought a new democracy to the viewing of history. As Lincoln might have remarked, the history emerging from all this intent WormCam inspection will be a new story of mankind: a story of the people, by the people, for the people. Now, what matters most is my story — or my lover’s, or my parent’s, or my ancestor’s, who died the most mundane, meaningless of deaths in the mud of Stalingrad or Passchendaele or Gettysburg, or simply in some unforgiving field, broken by a life of drudgery. Empowered by the WormCam, assisted by such great genealogical record centers as the Mormons’, we have all discovered our ancestors. There are those who argue that this is dangerous and destabilizing. After all, the spate of divorces and suicides which followed the WormCam’s first gift of openness has now been followed by a fresh wave as we have become able to spy on our partners, not just in the real time of the present, but in the past as far back as we care to look, and every past misdeed, open or hidden, is made available for scrutiny, every old wound reopened. But this is a process of adjustment, which the strongest relationships will survive. And anyhow, such comparatively trivial consequences of the WormCam are surely insignificant compared to the great gift of deeper historical truth which, for the first time, is being made available to us. So I do not endorse the doomsayers. I say, trust the people. Give us the tools and we will finish the job. There is a growing clamour — tragically impossible to satisfy — to find a way, some way, any way, to change the past: to help the suffering long-dead, even to redeem them. But the past is immutable; only the future is there to be shaped. With all the difficulties and dangers, we are privileged to be alive at such a time. There will surely never again be a time when the light of truth and understanding spreads with such overwhelming rapidity into the darkness of the past, never again a time when the mass consciousness of mankind is transformed so dramatically. The new generations, born in the omnipresent shadow of the WormCam, will grow up with a very different view of their species and its past. For better or worse.

Middle East. c. 1250 B.C.:

Miriam was a tutor of accounting expert systems: certainly no professional historian. But, like almost everybody else she knew, she had gotten hold of WormCam time as soon as it had become available, and started to research her own passions. And, in Miriam’s case, that passion focused on a single man: a man whose story had been her lifelong inspiration.

But the closer the WormCam brought Miriam to her subject, the more, maddeningly, he seemed to dissolve. The very act of observing was destroying him, as if he was obeying some unwelcome form of historical uncertainty principle.

Yet she persisted.

At last, having spent long hours searching for him in the harsh, confusing sunlight of those ancient deserts, she began to consult the professional historians who had gone before her into these wastes of time. And, piece by piece, she confirmed for herself what they had deduced.

The career of the man himself — shorn of its supernatural elements — was a fairly crude conflation of the biographies of several leaders of that era, as the nation of Israel had coalesced from groups of Palestinian refugees fleeing the collapse of Canaanite city-states. The rest was invention or theft.

That business, for instance, of being concealed in a wicker basket and floated down the Nile, in order to save him from murder as a firstborn Israelite: that was no more than a conflation of older legends from Mesopotamia and Egypt — about the god Horns, for example — none of which was based on fact either. And he’d never been an Egyptian prince. That fragment seemed to come from the story of a Syrian called Bay who had served as Egypt’s chief treasurer, and had made it to Pharaoh, as Ramosekhayemnetjeru.

But what is truth?

After all, as preserved by the myth, he had been a complex, human, inspiring man. He was marked by imperfection: he had stammered, and often fell out with the very people he led. He even argued with God. But his triumph over those imperfections had been an inspiration, over three thousand years, to many people, including Miriam herself — named for his beloved sister — who had had to overcome the obstacles set in her own life by her cerebral palsy.

He was irresistible, as vividly real as any personage from “true” history, and Miriam knew he would live on into the future. And given that, did it matter that Moses never truly existed?

It was a new obsession, Bobby saw, as millions of figures from history — renowned and otherwise — came briefly to life once more, under the gaze of this first generation of WormCam witnesses.

Absenteeism seemed to be reaching an all-time high, as people abandoned their work, their vocations, even their loved ones to devote themselves to the endless fascination of the WormCam. It was as if the human race had become suddenly old, content to hide away, feeding on its memories.

And perhaps that was how it was, Bobby thought. After all, if the Wormwood couldn’t be turned away, there was no future to speak of. Maybe the WormCam, with its gift of the past, was precisely what the human race required right now; a bolt-hole.

And each of those witnesses was coming to understand that one day she too would be no more than a thing of light and shadow, embedded in time, perhaps scrutinized in her turn from some unknowable future.

But to Bobby, it was not the mass of mankind that concerned him, not the great currents of history and thought that were stirred, but the breaking heart of his brother.

Chapter 20 Crisis of faith

David had turned into a recluse, it seemed to Bobby. He would come to the Wormworks unannounced, perform obscure experiments, and return to his apartment, where — according to OurWorld records — he continued to make extensive use of WormCam technology, pursuing his own obscure, undeclared projects.

After three weeks, Bobby sought him out. David met him at his door, seemed on the point of refusing to let him in. Then he stood aside.

The apartment was cluttered, books and SoftScreens everywhere. A place where a man was living alone, habits unmoderated by consideration of others.

“What the hell happened to you?”

David managed to smile. “The WormCam, Bobby. What else?”

“Heather said you assisted her with the Lincoln project.”

“Yes. That was what gave me the bug, perhaps. But now I have seen too much history… I am a bad host. Would you like a drink, some beer.”

“Come on, David. Talk to me.”

David rubbed his blond scalp. “This is called a crisis of faith, Bobby. I don’t expect you to understand.”

In fact Bobby, irritated, did understand, and he was disappointed with the mundanity of his brother’s condition. Every day, WormCam addicts, hooked on history, beat on OurWorld’s corporate doors, demanding ever more ’Cam access. But then David had isolated himself; perhaps he didn’t know how much a part of the human race he remained, how common his addiction had become.

But how to tell him?

Bobby said carefully, “You’re suffering history shock. It’s a — fashionable — condition right now. It will pass.”

“Fashionable, is it?” David glowered at him.

“We’re all feeling the same.” He cast around for examples. “I watched the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth: the Kamtnertor Theatre, Vienna, 1824. Did you see that?” The symphony performance had been professionally recorded and rebroadcast by one of the media conglomerates. But the ratings had been poor. “It was a mess. The playing was lousy, the choir discordant. The Shakespeare was even worse.”

“Shakespeare?”

“You really have been locked away, haven’t you? It was the premiere of Hamlet, at the Globe in 1601. The playing was amateurish, the costumes ridiculous, the crowd a drunken rabble, the Theatre not much more than a thatched cesspit. And the accents were so foreign the play had to be subtitled. The deeper into the past we look, the stranger it all seems.

“A lot of people are finding the new history hard to accept. OurWorld is a scapegoat for their anger, so I know that’s true. Hiram has been hit by endless suits — libel, incitement to riot, incitement to provoke racial hatred — from national and patriotic groups, religious organizations, families of debunked heroes, even a few national governments. That’s aside from the physical threats. Of course it isn’t helping that he is trying to copyright history.”

David couldn’t help but guffaw. “You’re joking.”

“Nope. He’s arguing that history is out there to be discovered, like the human genome; if you can patent pieces of that, why not history — or at any rate those stretches of it OurWorld ’Cams have been first to reach? The fourteenth century is the current test case. If that fails, he has plans to copyright the snowmen. Like Robin Hood.”

Like many semi-mythical heroes of the past, under the WormCam’s pitiless glare Robin had simply melted away into legend and confabulation, leaving not a trace of historical truth. The legend had stemmed, in fact, from a series of fourteenth-century English ballads born out of a time of baronial rebellions and agrarian discontent, which had culminated in the Peasants’ revolt of 1381.

David smiled. “I like that. Hiram always did like Robin Hood. I think he fancies himself as a modern equivalent — even if he’s deluding himself; in fact he probably has more in common with King John… How ironic if Hiram came to own Robin.”

“Look, David — many people feel just as you do. History is full of horror, of forgotten people, of slaves, of people whose lives were stolen. But we can’t change the past. All we can do is to move on, resolving not to make the same mistakes again.”

“You think so?” David snapped bitterly. He stood, and with brisk movements he opaqued the windows of his cluttered apartment, shutting out the afternoon light. Then he sat beside Bobby and unrolled a SoftScreen. “Watch now, and see if you still believe it is so easy.” With confident keystrokes he initiated a stored WormCam recording.

Side by side, the brothers sat, bathed in the light of other days.

…The small, round, battered sailing ship approached the shore. Two more ships could be seen on the horizon. The sand was pure, the water still and blue, the sky huge.

People came out onto the beaches: men and women naked, dark, handsome. They seemed full of wonder. Some of the natives swam out to meet the approaching vessel.

“Columbus,” Bobby breathed.

“Yes. These are the Arawaks. The natives of the Bahamas. They were friendly. They gave the Europeans gifts, parrots and balls of cotton and spears made of cane. But they also had gold, which they wore as ornaments in their ears.

“Columbus immediately took some of the Arawaks by force, so that he could extract information about the gold. And it developed from there. The Spaniards had armour and muskets and horses. The Arawaks had no iron, no means of defending themselves from the Europeans’ weapons and discipline.

“The Arawaks were taken as slave labor. On Haiti, for example, mountains were stripped from top to bottom, in the search for gold. The Arawaks died by the thousands, roughly a third of the workers every six months. Soon mass suicides began, using cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. And so on. There seem to have been about a quarter of a million Arawaks on Haiti when Columbus arrived. Within a few years, half of them were dead of murder, mutilation or suicide. And by 1650, after decades of ferocious slave labor, none of the original Arawaks or their descendants were left on Haiti.

“It turned out there were no gold fields after all: only bits of dust the Arawaks garnered from streams for their pathetic, deadly jewellry.

“And that, Bobby, was how our invasion of the Americas began.”

“David.”

“Watch.” He tapped the ’Screen and brought up a new scene.

Bobby saw blurred images of a city: small, cluttered, crowded, of white stone that glowed in the flat sunlight.

“Jerusalem,” David said now. “Fifteen July, 1099. Full of Jews and Muslims. The Crusaders, a military mission from Western Christendom, had laid siege to the city for a month. Now their attack is reaching its peak.”

Bobby watched bulky figures clambering over walls, soldiers rushing to meet them. But the defenders fell back, and the knights advanced, wielding their swords. Bobby saw, incredibly, a man beheaded with a single blow.

The Crusaders fought their way to the Temple area. There the defending Turks held out for a day. At last — wading in blood up to their ankles — the Crusaders broke through and quickly slew the surviving defenders.

The knights and their followers swarmed through the city, taking horses and mules, gold and silver. Lamps and candelabras were stripped from the Dome of the Rock. Corpses were butchered, for sometimes the Crusaders found coins in the bellies of the dead.

And, as the long day of pillage and butchery went on, Bobby saw Christians tear strips of flesh from their fallen foe, smoke and eat them.

All this in violent, colour-filled glimpses: the vermilion splash of bloody swords, the frightened cries of horses, the hard eyes of grimy, half-starved knights who sang psalms and hymns, eerily, even as they swung their great swords. But the fighting was oddly quiet: there were no guns here, no cannon, the only weapons wielded by human muscles.

David murmured, “This was an utter disaster for our civilization. It was an act of rape, and it caused a schism between East and West that has never truly healed. And it was all in the name of Christ.

“Bobby, thanks to the WormCam, I’ve been privileged to watch centuries of Christian terrorism, an orgy of cruelty and destruction that stretched from the Crusades to the sixteenth-century plundering of Mexico and beyond: all of it driven by the religion of the Popes — my religion — and the frenzy for money and property, the capitalism of which my own father is such a prominent champion.”

With their mail and bright crosses the Crusaders were like magnificent animals, rampaging in the sunlit dust. The barbarism was astonishing.

But still…

“David, we knew this. The Crusades were well chronicled. The historians have been able to pick out fact from propaganda, long before the WormCam.”

“Perhaps. But we’re human, Bobby. It is the cruel power of the WormCam to retrieve history from the dust of textbooks and make it live again, accessible to our poor human senses. And so we must experience it again, as the blood spilled centuries back flows once more.

“History is a river of blood, Bobby. That is what the WormCam forces us to see. History washes away lives like grains of sand, down to the sea of darkness — and every one of those lives is, was, as precious and vibrant as yours or mine. And none of it, not one drop of blood, can be changed.” He eyed Bobby. “You ready for more?”

“David.”

David, you aren’t the only one. All of us share the horror. You are sinking into self-indulgence, if you suppose that you alone are witnessing these scenes, feeling this way.

But he had no way to say this.

David brought up another image. Bobby longed to leave, to turn his head away. But he knew he must face this, if he was to help his brother.

Once again, life and blood fled across the ’Screen.

In the midst of this, his most difficult time, David kept his promise to Heather, and sought out Mary.

He had never regarded himself as particularly competent in affairs of the human heart. So, in his humility — and consumed by his own inner turmoil — he had spent a long time seeking a way to approach Heather’s difficult, anguished daughter. And the way he found, in the end, was technical: through a piece of software, in fact.

He came to her workstation in the Wormworks. It was late, and most of the other researchers had gone. She sat in a pool of light, coloured by the flickering glow of the workstation SoftScreen, surrounded by the greater, brooding darkness of this dusty place of engineering and electronics. When he arrived, she hastily cleared down the ’Screen. But he glimpsed a sunny day, a garden, children running with an adult, laughing, before the darkness returned. She glowered up at him sulkily; she wore a baggy, grubby T-shirt bearing a brazen message:

David admitted to himself he didn’t understand the significance, but he wasn’t about to ask her about it. She made it clear, by her silence and posture, that he wasn’t welcome here. But he wasn’t about to be put off so easily. He sat beside her.

“I’ve been hearing good things about the tracking software you’ve been developing.”

She looked at him sharply. “Who’s been telling you what I’ve been doing? My mother, I suppose.”

“No. Not your mother.”

“Then who…? I don’t suppose it matters. You think I’m paranoid, don’t you? Too defensive. Too prickly.”

He said evenly, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

She actually smiled at that. “At least that’s a fair answer. Anyway, how did you know about my software?”

“You’re a WormCam user,” he said. “One of the conditions of use of the Wormworks is that any innovation you make to the equipment is the intellectual property of OurWorld. It’s in the agreement I had to sign on behalf of your mother — and you.”

“Typical Hiram Patterson.”

“You mean, good business? It seems reasonable to me. We all know this technology has a long way to go.”

“You’re telling me. The whole user interface sucks, David.”

“- and who better to come up with ways of putting that right than the users themselves, the people who need to make it better now?”

“So you have spies? People watching the pastwatchers?”

“We have a layer of metasoftware which monitors user customization, assessing its functionality and quality. If we see a good idea we may pick up on it and develop it; best of all, of course, is to find something which is a bright idea and well developed.”

She showed a flicker of interest, even pride. “Like mine?”

“It has potential. You’re a smart person, Mary, with a bright future ahead of you. But — how would you put it? — you know diddly-squat about developing quality software.”

“It works, doesn’t it?”

“Most of the time. But I doubt that anybody but you could make an enhancement without rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.” He sighed. “This isn’t the 1990s, Mary. Software development is a craft now.”

“I know, I know. We get all this at school… You think my idea works, though.”

“Why don’t you show me?”

She reached for the SoftScreen; he could see she was about to clear the settings, set up a fresh WormCam run.

Deliberately he put his hand over hers. “No. Show me what you were looking at when I sat down.”

She glared at him. “So that’s it. My mother did send you, didn’t she? And you’re not interested in my tracking software at all.”

“I believe in the truth, Mary.”

“Then start telling it.”

He picked off the points on his fingers. “Your mother’s concerned about you. It was my idea to come to you, not hers. I do think you ought to show me what you’re watching. Yes, it serves as a pretext to talk to you, but I am interested in your software innovation in its own right. Is there anything else?”

“If I refuse to go along with this, will you throw me out of the Wormworks?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Compared to the equipment here, the stuff you can access via the net sucks.”

“I told you, I’m not threatening you with that.”

The moment stretched.

Subtly, she subsided in her seat, and he knew he had won the round.

With a few keystrokes she restored the scene.

It was a small garden — a yard, really, strips of sun-baked grass separated by patches of gravel, a few poorly tended flower beds. The image was bright, the sky blue, the shadows long. There were toys everywhere, splashes of colour, some of them autonomously toiling back and forth on their programmed tasks and routines.

Here came two children: a boy and a girl, aged maybe six and eight respectively. They were laughing, kicking a ball between them, and they were being chased by a man, also laughing. He grabbed the girl and whirled her high in the air, so that she flew through shadows and light. Mary froze the scene.

“A cliché,” she said. “Right? A childhood memory, a summer’s afternoon, long and perfect.”

“This is your father and your brother — and yourself.”

Her face twisted into a sour smile. “The scene is barely eight years old, but two of the protagonists are dead already. What do you think of that?”

“Mary.”

“You wanted to see my software.”

He nodded. “Show me.”

She tapped at the ’Screen; the viewpoint panned from side to side, and stepped forward and back in time, through a few seconds. The girl was raised and lowered and raised again, her hair tumbling this way and that, as if this was a film being wound back and forth.

“Right now I’m using the standard workstation interface. The viewpoint is like a little camera floating in the air. I can control its location in space and move it through time, adjusting the position of the wormhole mouth. Which is fine for some applications. But if I want to scan more extended periods, it’s a drag — as you know.”

She let the scene run on. The father put down child-Mary. Mary focused the viewpoint on her father’s face and, with taps of the SoftScreen, tracked it, jerkily, as the father ran after his daughter across that vanished lawn. “I can follow the subject,” she said clinically, “but it’s difficult and tedious. So I’ve been seeking a way to automate the tracking.” She tapped more virtual buttons. “I used pattern-recognition routines to latch on to faces. Like his.”

The WormCam viewpoint swung down, as if guided by some invisible cameraman, and focused on her father’s face. The face stayed there, central to the image, as he moved his head this way and that, talking, laughing, shouting; the background swung around him disconcertingly.

“All automated,” David said. “Yes. I have subroutines to monitor my preferences, and make the whole thing a little more professional…” More keystrokes, and now the viewpoint pulled back a little. The camera angles were more conventional, stabilized, no longer slaved to that face. The father was still the central protagonist, but his context became more clear.

David nodded. “This is valuable, Mary. This, tied to interpretative software, might even allow us to automate the compilation of historic-figure biographies, at first draft anyhow. You’re to be commended.”

She sighed. “Thanks. But you still think I’m a wacko because I’m watching my father rather than John Lennon. Don’t you?”

He shrugged. He said carefully, “Everybody else is watching John Lennon. His life. for better or worse, is common property. Your life — this golden afternoon — is your own.”

“But I’m an obsessive. Like those nuts you find watching their own parents making love, watching their own conception.”

“I’m no psychoanalyst,” he said gently. “Your life has been hard. Nobody denies that. You lost your brother, your father. But…”

“But what?”

“But you’re surrounded by people who don’t want you to be unhappy. You have to believe that.”

She sighed heavily. “You know, when we were little — Tommy and I — my mother had a habit of using other adults against us. If I was bad, she’d point to something in the adult world — a car sounding its horn a kilometre away, even a jet airplane screaming overhead — and she’d say, ‘That man heard what you said to your mother, and he’s showing you what he thinks about it.’ It was terrifying. I grew up with the impression that I was alone in a huge forest of adults, all of whom watched over me, judging me the whole time.”

He smiled. “Full-time surveillance. Then you won’t find it hard to get used to life with the WormCam.”

“You mean, the damage has been done to me already? I’m not sure that’s a consolation.” And then she eyed him. “So, David — what do you watch when you have the WormCam to yourself?”

He went back to his apartment. He slaved his own workstation to Mary’s back at the Wormworks, and ran through the recordings OurWorld routinely made of every user’s utilization of its WormCams.

He’d done enough, he felt, not to feel guilty over what he had to do next to fulfill his obligation to Heather. Which was to spy on Mary.

It didn’t take him long to get to the heart of it. She did, after all, view the same incident, over and over.

It had been another bright afternoon of sun and play and family, not long after the one he’d watched with her. Here she was at age eight with her father and family, hiking — easily, at a six-year-old’s pace — through the Rainier National Park. Sunlight, rock, trees.

And then he came to it: the crux of Mary’s life. It lasted only seconds.

It wasn’t as if they’d taken any risks; they hadn’t strayed from the marked path, or attempted anything ambitious. It had just been an accident

Tommy had been riding his father’s neck, clinging to handfuls of thick black hair, with his legs draped over his shoulders, firmly grasped by his father’s broad hands. Mary had gone running past, eager to chase what looked like the shadow of a deer. Tommy reached for her, unbalancing a little, and the father’s grasp slipped — just a little, but enough.

The impact itself was unspectacular: a soft crack as that big skull hit a sharp volcanic rock, the strange limp crumpling of the body. Just unfortunate, even in the way he hit the ground so lethally. Nobody’s fault.

That was all. Over in a heartbeat. Unfortunate, commonplace, nobody’s fault — save, he thought with unwelcome anger, the Cosmic Designer who chose to lodge something as precious as the soul of a six-year-old in a container so fragile.

The first time Mary (and now David, like an unwelcome ghost) had watched this incident, she’d used a remarkable WormCam viewpoint: looking out through child-Mary’s own eyes. It was as if the viewpoint was lodged right at the centre of her soul, that mysterious place in her head where “she” resided, surrounded by the soft machinery of her body.

Mary saw the boy falling. She reacted, reached out her arms, took a pace toward him. He seemed to fall slowly, as if in a dream. But she was too far away to reach him, could do nothing to change what unfolded.

…And now, tracking Mary’s usage, David was forced to watch the same incident from the father’s point of view. It was like looking down from a watchtower, with child-Mary a blur below him, the boy a thing of dark shadows around his head. But the same events unfolded with grisly inevitability: the unbalancing, the slip, the boy falling, his legs impeding him so that he fell upside down and descended headfirst toward the stony ground.

But what Mary watched over and over, obsessively, was not the death itself, but the moments before. Little Tommy, falling, was only a meter from Mary, but that was too far, and no more than centimetres from his father’s grasp, a fraction of a second’s reaction time. It might have been a kilometre, hours of delay; it would have made no difference.

And this, David suspected, was the real reason her father had committed his suicide. Not the publicity that suddenly surrounded him and his family — though that couldn’t have helped. If he was anything like Mary, he must have seen immediately the implications of the WormCam for himself — just like millions of others, now exploring the capabilities of the WormCam, and the darkness in their own hearts.

How could that bereaved father not watch this? How could he not relive those terrible moments over and over? How could he turn away from this child, trapped within the machine, as vivid as life and yet unable to grow a second older or to do anything the slightest bit different, ever again?

And how could that father bear to live in a world in which the terrible clarity of the incident was available for him to replay any time he wished, from any angle he chose — and yet knowing he would never be able to change a single detail?

How indulgent he had been — David himself — to sit and watch gruesome episodes from the history of the Church, incidents centuries removed from his own reality. After all, Columbus’ crimes hurt nobody now — save perhaps the man himself, David thought grimly. How much greater had been the courage of Mary, a lonely, flawed child, as, alone, she faced the moment that had shaped her life, for good or ill.

For this, he realized, is the core of the WormCam experience: not timid spying or voyeurism, not the viewing of some impossibly remote period of history, but the chance to review the glowing incidents that make up my life.

But my eyes have not evolved to see such sights. My heart has not evolved to cope with such repeated revelations. Once, time was called the great healer; now the healing balm of distance has been torn away.

We have been granted the eyes of God, he thought, eyes which can see the immutable, bloodstained past as if it were today. But we are not God, and the burning light of that history may destroy us.

Anger coalesced. Immutability. Why should he accept such unfairness? Maybe there was something he could do about that.

But first he would have to figure out what to say to Heather.

The next time he called, when more weeks had gone by, Bobby was shocked by David’s deterioration.

David was wearing a baggy jumpsuit that looked as if it hadn’t been changed for days. His hair was mussed, and he had shaved only carelessly. The apartment was even more of a mess now, the furniture littered with SoftScreens, opened-out books and journals, yellow pads, abandoned pens. On the floor, stacked around an overflowing garbage pail, there were soiled paper plates and pizza boxes and microwave junk-food cartons.

But David seemed defensive, perhaps apologetic. “It’s not what you’re thinking. WormCam addiction, yes? I may be an obsessive, Bobby, but I think I pulled myself back from that.”

“Then what.”

“I have been working.”

A whiteboard had been set up against one wall; it was covered with scarlet scrawl, equations, scraps of phrases in English and French, connected by swirling arrows and loops.

Bobby said carefully, “Heather told me you dropped out of the 12,000 Days project. The Christ TrueBio.”

“Yes, I dropped out. Surely you understand why.”

“Then what have you been doing here, David?”

David sighed. “I tried to touch the past, Bobby. I tried, and I failed.”

“…Whoa,” said Bobby. “Did I understand that right? You tried to use a wormhole to affect the past? Is that what you’re saying? But your theory says that’s impossible. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes. I tried anyway. I ran some tests in the Wormworks. I tried to send a signal back in time, through a small wormhole, to myself. Just across a few milliseconds, but enough to prove the principle.”

“And?”

David smiled wryly. “Signals can travel forward in time through a wormhole. That’s how we view the past. But when I tried to send a signal back in time, there was feedback. Imagine a photon leaving my wormhole mouth a few seconds in the past. It can fly to the future mouth, travel back in time, and emerge from the past mouth at the precise moment it started its trip. It overlies its earlier self.”

“- and doubles the energy.”

“Actually more than that, because of Doppler effects. It’s a positive feedback loop. The bit of radiation can travel through the wormhole over and over, piling up energy extracted from the wormhole itself. Eventually it becomes so strong it destroys the wormhole — a fraction of a second before it operates as a full time machine.”

“And so your test wormhole went bang.”

David said dryly, “With more vigor than I’d anticipated. It looks as if dear old Hawking was right about chronology protection. The laws of physics do not allow backwards-operating time machines. The past is a relativistic block universe, the future is quantum uncertainty, and the two are joined at the present — which, I suppose, is a quantum gravity interface… I am sorry. The technicalities do not matter. The past, you see, is like an advancing ice sheet, encroaching on the fluid future; each event is frozen into its place in the crystal structure, fixed forever.

“What is important is that I know, better than anyone on the planet, that the past is immutable, unchangeable — open to us to observe, through the wormholes, but fixed. Do you understand how this feels?”

Bobby walked through the apartment, stepping over mounds of paper and books. “Fine. You’re suffering. You use abstruse physics as therapy. What about your family? Do you ever spare a thought for us?”

David closed his eyes. “Tell me. Please.”

Bobby took a breath. “Well, Hiram’s gone into deeper hiding. But he’s planning to make even more money from weather forecasting — vastly better predictions, based on precise data centuries deep, thanks to the WormCam. He thinks it may even be possible to develop climate control systems, given the new understanding we have of long-term climate shifts.”

“Hiram is -” David sought the right word. “ — a phenomenon. Is there no limit to his capitalistic imagination? And the news of Kate?”

“The jury’s out.”

“I thought the evidence was circumstantial.”

“It is. But to actually see her at her terminal at the time the crime was committed, to see that she had the opportunity — I think that swayed a lot of the jurors.”

“What will you do if she’s convicted?”

“I haven’t decided.” That was true. The end of the trial was a black hole, waiting to consume Bobby’s future, as unavoidable and as unwelcome as death. So he did his best not to think about it.

“I saw Heather,” he said. “She’s well, in spite of everything. She’s published her Lincoln TrueBio.”

“Good piece of work. And her pieces on the Aral Sea war were remarkable.” David eyed Bobby. “You must be proud of her — of your mother.”

Bobby thought that over. “I suppose I should be. But I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about her. You know, I watched her with Mary. For all their friction, there’s a bond there. It’s like a steel rope that connects them. I don’t feel anything like that. It’s probably my fault.”

“You said you watched them? Past tense?”

Bobby faced him. “I guess you haven’t heard, Mary left home.”

“…Ah. How disappointing.”

“They had one final fight about the way Mary was using the WormCam. Heather is frantic with worry.”

“Why doesn’t she trace Mary?”

“She’s tried.”

David snorted. “Ridiculous. How can any of us hide from the WormCam?”

“Evidently there are ways. Look, David, isn’t it time you rejoined the human race?”

David caged his hands, a big man, deeply distressed. “But it is so unbearable,” he said. “This is surely why Mary fled. I tried, remember. I tried to find a way to fix things — to fix the broken past. And I found that none of us has a choice about history. Not even God. I have experimental proof. Don’t you see? Watching all that blood, that rapine and plunder and murder… If I could deflect one Crusader’s sword, save the life of one Arawak child.”

“And so you’re escaping into arid physics.”

“What would you suggest I do?”

“You can’t fix the past. But you can fix yourself. Sign up for the 12,000 Days.”

“I’ve told you.”

“I’ll help you. I’ll be there. Do it, David. Go find Jesus.” Bobby smiled. “I dare you.”

After a long silence, David returned his smile.

Chapter 21 Behold the man

Extracted from the Introduction by David Curzon to The 12,000 Days: A Preliminary Commentary, eds. S. P. Kozlov and G. Risha, Rome 2040:

The international scholarly project known popularly as the 12,000 Days has reached the conclusion of its first phase. I was one of a team of (actually a little more than) twelve thousand WormCam observers worldwide who were assigned to study the historical life and times of the man known to His contemporaries as Yesho Ben Pantera, and to later generations as Jesus Christ… It is an honor to be asked to pen this introduction… We have always known that when we meet Jesus in the Gospels, we see Him through the eyes of the evangelists. For example Matthew believed that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, as appeared to be predicted by the Old Testament prophet Micah; and so he reports Jesus as being born in Bethlehem (though Jesus, the Galilean, was in fact — naturally enough — born in Galilee). We understand this; we compensate for it. But how many Christians over the centuries have longed to meet Jesus for themselves through the neutral medium of a camera — or better still, face-to-face? And how many would have believed that ours would be the first generation for which such a meeting would be possible? But that is precisely what has happened. Each of we Twelve Thousand was assigned a single Day of the short life of Jesus: a Day which we would observe with WormCam technology — in real time, from midnight to midnight. In this way a first draft “true” biography of Jesus could rapidly be compiled. This visual biography and attached reports are no more than a first draft: a simple observation, a laying-out of the events of Jesus’ tragically brief life. There is much subsidiary research to be done. For example, even the identities of the fourteen Apostles (not twelve!) have yet to be determined, and the fate of His brothers, sisters, wife and child are known only sketchily. Then will come the mapping of the blunt events of the central human story against the various accounts, canonical and apocryphal, which survived to tell us of Jesus and His ministry. And then, of course, the true debate will begin: a debate into the meaning of Jesus and His ministry — a debate which may last as long as the human race itself. This first encounter has not been easy. But already the clear light of Galilee has burned away many falsehoods.

David lay in his couch and tested its systems: the VR apparatus itself, the nursing agents which would manage the intravenous feeds and catheters, turn his abandoned body to reduce the risk of bedsores — even clean him if he desired, as if he were a coma victim.

Bobby sat before him, in this quiet, darkened room, his face shining in complex SoftScreen light.

David felt absurd amid all this gear, like an astronaut preparing for launch. But that Day of long ago, embedded in time like an insect in amber, unchanging and brilliant, was waiting for his inspection; and he submitted.

David lifted the Mind’sEye headset and settled it over his bead. He felt the familiar squirming texture as the headset wrapped itself tightly around his temples.

He fought panic. To think that people subjected themselves to this for mere entertainment.”

…And light burst over him, hard and brilliant.

He was born in Nazareth, a small and prosperous Galilean hill town. The birth was routine — for the time. He was indeed born to a Mary, who had been a virgin — a Temple Virgin. As his contemporaries knew Him, Jesus Christ was the illegitimate son of a Roman legionary, an Illyrian called Pantera. It was a relationship based on love, not coercion — even though Mary had been betrothed at the time to Joseph, a prosperous master builder and widower. But Pantera was transferred from the district when Mary’s pregnancy became known. It is to Joseph’s credit that he took in Mary and raised the boy as his own. Nevertheless Jesus was not ashamed of His origin, and would later style Himself Yesho Ben Pantera: that is, Jesus, son of Pantera. That is the sum of the historical facts of Jesus’ birth. Any deeper mystery lies beyond the reach of any WormCam. There was no census, no trek to Bethlehem, no stable, no manger, no cattle, no wise men, no shepherds, no Star. All of that — devised by the evangelists to show how this boy-child was a fulfilment of prophecy — was no more than an invention. The WormCam is stripping away many of our illusions about ourselves and our past. There are those who argue that the WormCam is a mass therapy tool which is enabling us to become more sane as a species. Perhaps. But it is a hard heart which does not mourn the debunking of the Christmas story!…

He was standing on a beach. He could feel the heat like a heavy moist blanket, and sweat prickled on his forehead.

To his left there were hills, folded in green, and to his right a blue sea lapped softly. On the horizon, mist laden, he could make out fishing boats, brown-blue shadows as still and flat as cardboard cutouts. On the northern shore of the sea, perhaps five kilometres distant, he could make out a town: a clutter of brown-walled, flat-roofed buildings. That must be Capernaum. He knew he could use the Search Engine to be there in an instant. But it seemed more appropriate to walk.

He closed his eyes. He could feel the warmth of the sun on his face, hear the lapping of water, smell grass and the sourness of fish. The light here was so bright that it shone, pink, through his closed eyelids. But in the corner of his eye, within his eyelid, glowed a small gold OurWorld logo.

He set off, the sharp coolness of the Galilee water at his feet.

…He had several brothers and sisters, and also some half-siblings (from Joseph’s previous marriage). One of His brothers, James, bore a remarkable similarity to Him, and would go on to lead the Church (at any rate a strand of it) after Jesus’ death. Jesus was apprenticed to His uncle Joseph of Arimathea — not as a carpenter, but a builder. He spent much of His late youth and early manhood in the city of Sepphoris, five kilometres north of Nazareth. Sepphoris was a major city — the largest in Judaea, in fact, apart from Jerusalem and the capital of Galilee. There was a great deal of work for builders, masons and architects in the city at this time, for Sepphoris had been largely destroyed by a Roman action against a Jewish uprising in the year 4 B.C. His time in Sepphoris was significant for Jesus. For here, Jesus became cosmopolitan. He was exposed to Hellenic culture, for example through Greek Theatre, and — most significantly — to the Pythagorean tradition of number and proportion. Jesus even attached Himself, for a time, to a Jewish Pythagorean group called the Essenes. This was in turn part of a much older tradition that spanned Europe — it had, in fact, reached as far as the Druids of Britain. Jesus became, not a humble carpenter, but a craftsman in a highly sophisticated and ancient tradition. Joseph’s trade would lead the young Jesus to travel extensively throughout the Roman world. Jesus’ life was full. He married. (The Bible story of the marriage of Cana, with water turning into wine, seems to have been embroidered from an incident at Jesus’ own wedding.) His wife died in childbirth; He did not remarry. But the child survived, a daughter. She disappeared in the confusion surrounding the end of her father’s life. (The search for this daughter of Jesus, and any descendants living today, is one of the most active areas of WormCam research.) But Jesus was restless. At a precociously early age He began to formulate His own philosophy. This could be regarded, simplistically, as based on a peculiar synthesis of Mosaic with Pythagorean lore: Christianity would grow out of this collision between Eastern mysticism and Western logic. Jesus saw Himself, metaphorically, as a mean between God and mankind — and the concept of the mean, particularly the Golden Mean, was of course the subject of much contemplation in the Pythagorean tradition. He was, and would always remain, a good Jew. But He did develop strong ideas about how the practice of His religion could be bettered. He began to cultivate friendships among those His family deemed definitely unsuitable for a man of His station: the poor, criminals. He even forged shadowy links with various groups of lestai, would be insurrectionists. He argued with His family, and He left for Capernaum, where He would live with friends. And, during these years, He began to practice miracles.

Two men were walking toward him.

They were shorter than he was, but stockily well muscled, each with thick black hair tied back behind his head. Their clothing was functional, what looked like one-piece cotton shifts with deep, well-used pockets. They were walking at the edge of the sea, careless as small waves broke over their feet. They looked forty, but were probably younger. They were healthy, well fed, prosperous; they were probably merchants, he thought.

They were so immersed in their conversation they hadn’t noticed him yet.

…No, he reminded himself. They could not see David — for he hadn’t been there, on that long-gone day when this sun-drenched conversation had taken place. They were all unaware that a man of their remote future would one day marvel at them, a man with the ability to make this everyday moment come alive and run through, again and again, utterly changeless.

He flinched as the men collided softly with him. The light seemed to dim, and he no longer felt the stones’ sharpness beneath his feet.

But then they were past, walking away from him, their conversation not disturbed by so much as a word by his ghostly encounter. And the vivid “reality” of the landscape was restored, as smoothly as if he had adjusted the controls on some invisible SoftScreen.

He walked on, toward Capernaum.

Jesus was able to “cure” mind-mediated and placebo diseases such as back pains, stuttering, ulcers, stress, hay fever, hysterical paralysis and blindness, even false pregnancies. Some of the “cures” are remarkable, and very moving to witness. But they were restricted to those whose belief in Jesus was stronger than their belief in their illness. And, like every other “healer” before or since, Jesus was unable to cure deeper organic illnesses. (To His credit, He never claimed He could.) His healing miracles naturally attracted a great following. But what distinguished Jesus from the many other hasidim of His day was the message He preached with His healing. Jesus believed that the Messianic Age promised by the prophets would come — not when the Jews were militarily victorious, but when they became pure of heart. He believed that this inner purity was to be achieved not just through a life of outer virtue, but through a submission to the terrible mercy of God. And He believed that this mercy extended to the whole of Israel: to the untouchables, the impure, the outcasts and the sinners. Through His healing and exorcisms He demonstrated the reality of that love. Jesus was the Golden Mean between the divine and the human. No wonder His appeal was electric; He seemed able to make the most wretched sinner feel close to God. But few in this occupied nation were sophisticated enough to understand His message. Jesus grew impatient at the clamouring demands for Him to reveal Himself as the Messiah. And the lestai who were attracted to His charismatic presence began to see in Him a convenient focal point for a rising against the hated Romans. Trouble coalesced.

David wandered through the small, boxy rooms like a ghost, watching the people, women, servants and children, come and go.

The house was more impressive than he had expected. It was built on the pattern of a Roman villa, with a central open atrium and various rooms opening off it, in the manner of a cloister. The setting was very Mediterranean, the light dense and bright, the rooms open to the still air.

Already, so early in Jesus’ ministry, there was a permanent encampment outside the house walls: the sick, the lame, would-be pilgrims, a miniature tent city.

Later, a house church would be built on this site, and then, in the fifth century, a Byzantine church that would survive to David’s own day — together with the legend of those who had once lived here.

Now there was noise outside the house: the sound of running feet, people calling. He walked briskly outside.

Most of the inhabitants of the tent city — some of them showing surprising alacrity — were making their way toward the glimmering sea, which David glimpsed between the houses. He followed the gathering crowd, towering above the people around him, and he tried to ignore the stink of unwashed humanity, much of it extrapolated by the controlling software with unwelcome authenticity; the direct detection of scent through WormCams was still an unreliable business.

The crowd spread out as they reached the rudimentary harbour. David made his way through the crush to the water’s edge, ignoring the temporary dimmings as Galileans brushed past or through him in their eagerness.

There was a single boat on the still water. It was perhaps six metres long, wooden, its construction crude. Four men were patiently rowing toward the shore; beside a stocky helmsman at the stern was a piled-up fishing net.

Another man was standing at the prow, facing the people on the shore.

David heard eager muttering. He had been preaching, from the boat, at other sites along the shore. He had a commanding voice which carried well across the water, this Yesho, this Jesus.

David struggled to see Him more clearly. But the light on the water was dazzling.

…And so we must turn, with reluctance, to the true story of the Passion. Jerusalem — sophisticated, chaotic, built of the radiantly bright white local stone — was crowded this Passover with pilgrims come to eat the Paschal Lamb within the confines of the holy city, as tradition demanded. And the city also contained a heavy presence of Roman soldiers. And, this Passover, it was a place of tension. There were many insurrectionist groups working here: for example the Zealots, fierce opponents of Rome, and iscarii, assassins who would customarily work the large festival crowds. Into this historic crucible walked Jesus and His followers. Jesus’ group ate their Passover feast. (But there was no rehearsal of the Eucharist: no commandment by Jesus to take bread and wine in memory of Him, as if they were fragments of His own body. This rite is evidently an invention of the evangelists. That night, Jesus had much on His mind; but not the invention of a new religion.) We know now that Jesus had links to many of the sects and groups which operated at the fringe of His society. But Jesus’ intent was not insurrection. Jesus made His way to the place called Gethsemane — where olive trees still grow today, some of them (we can verify now) survivors from Jesus’ own day. Jesus had worked to cleanse Judaism of sectarianism. He thought He would meet the authorities and leaders of various rebel groups here, and seek a peaceful unity. As ever, Jesus sought to be the Golden Mean, a bridge between these groups in conflict But the humanity of Jesus’ time was no more rational than that of any other era. He was met by a group of armed soldiers sent by the chief priests. And the events thereafter unfolded with a deadly, familiar logic. The Trial was no grand theological event. All that mattered to the High Priest — a tired, conscientious, worn-down old man — was to maintain public order. He knew he had to protect his people from the Romans’ savage reprisals by accepting the lesser evil of handing over this difficult, anarchistic faith healer. That done, the High Priest returned to his bed, and an uncomfortable sleep. Pilate, the Roman Procurator, had to come out to meet priests who would not enter his Praetorium for fear of being defiled. Pilate was a competent, cruel man, a representative of an occupying power centuries old. Yet he too hesitated, it seems for fear of inciting worse violence by executing a popular leader. We have now witnessed the fears and loathing and dreadful calculations which motivated the men facing each other that dark night — and each of them, no doubt, believed he was doing the right thing. Once his decision was made, Pilate acted with brutal efficiency. Of what followed, we know the dreadful details too well. It was not even a grand spectacle — but then the Passion of Christ is an event which has taken not two days, but two thousand years to unfold. But there is still much we do not know. The moment of His death is oddly obscured; WormCam exploration there is limited. Some scientists have speculated that there is such a density of viewpoints in those key seconds that the fabric of spacetime itself is being damaged by wormhole intrusions. And these viewpoints are presumably sent down by observers from our own future — or perhaps from a multiplicity of possible futures, if what lies ahead of us is undetermined. So we still have not heard His last words to His mother; we still do not know if — beaten, dying, bewildered — He cried out to His God. Even now, despite all our technology, we see Him through a glass darkly.

At the centre of the town there was a market square, already crowded. Suppressing a shudder, David forced himself to push through the people.

At the centre of the crowd a soldier, crudely uniformed, was holding a woman by one arm. She looked wretched, her robe torn, her hair matted and filthy, her plump, once-pretty face streaked by crying. Beside her were two men in fine, clean religious garb. Perhaps they were priests, or Pharisees. They were pointing to the woman, gesticulating angrily, and arguing with a figure before them, who — hidden by the crowd — was squatting in the dust.

David wondered if this incident had left any trace in the Gospels. Perhaps this was the woman who had been condemned for adultery, and the Pharisees were confronting Jesus with another of their trick questions, trying to expose His blasphemy.

The man in the dust had a phalanx of friends. They were sturdy-looking men, perhaps fishermen; gently but firmly they were keeping the crushing crowds away. But still — David could see as he approached, wraith-like — some of the people were coming near, reaching out a tentative hand to touch a robe, even stroke a lock of hair.

I do not think His death — humiliated, broken — need remain the centre of our obsession with Jesus, as it has been for two thousand years. For me the zenith of His life as I have witnessed it is the moment when Pilate produces Him, already tortured and bloody, to be mocked by the soldiers, sacrificed by His own people. With everything He had intended apparently in ruins, perhaps already feeling abandoned by God, Jesus should have been crushed. And yet He stood straight. A man immersed in His time, defeated and yet unbeaten. He is Gandhi, He is Saint Francis, He is Wilberforce, He is Elizabeth Fry, He is Father Damien among the lepers. He is His own people, and the dreadful suffering they would endure in the name of the religion founded in His name. The major religions have all faced crises as their origins and tangled pasts had become open to scrutiny. None of them have emerged unscathed; some have collapsed altogether. But religion is not simply about morality, or the personalities of founders and practitioners. It is about the numinous, a higher dimension of our nature. And there are still those who hunger for the transcendent, the meaning of it all. Already — cleansed, reformed, refounded — the Church is beginning to offer consolation to many people left bewildered by the demolition of privacy and historic certainty. Perhaps we have lost Christ. But we have found Jesus. And His example can still lead us into an unknown future — even if that future holds only the Wormwood, and our religions’ only remaining role is to comfort us. And yet history still holds surprises for us: for one of the most peculiar yet stubborn legends about the life of Jesus has, against all expectation, been born out…

The man in the dust was thin. His hair severely pulled back, prematurely greying at the temples. His robe was stained with dust and trailed in the dirt. His nose was prominent, proud and Roman, His eyes black, fierce, intelligent. He seemed angry, and was drawing in the dust with one finger.

This silent, brooding man had the measure of the Pharisees, without even the need to speak.

David stepped forward. Beneath his feet he could feel the dust of this Capernaum marketplace. He reached forward to the hem of that robe.

…But, of course, his fingers slid through the cloth; and, though the sun dimmed, David felt nothing.

The man in the dust looked up and gazed directly into David’s eyes.

David cried out. The Galilean light dissipated, and the concerned face of Bobby hovered before him.

As a young man, following a well-established trade route with His uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus visited the tin mine area of Cornwall with companions. He travelled further inland, as far as Glastonbury — at the time a significant port — where He studied with the Druids, and helped design and build a small house, on the future site of Glastonbury Abbey. This visit is remembered, after a fashion, in scraps of local folklore. We have lost so much. The harsh glare of the WormCam has revealed so many of our fables to be things of shadows and whispers: Atlantis has evaporated like dew; King Arthur has stepped back into the shadows from which he never truly emerged. And yet it is after all true, as Blake sang, that those feet in ancient time did walk upon England’s mountains green.

Chapter 22 The verdict

In Christmas week, 2037, Kate’s trial concluded. The courtroom was small, panelled in oak, and the Stars and Stripes hung limply at the back of the room. The judge, the attorneys and the court officers sat in grave splendour before rows of benches containing a few scattered spectators: Bobby, officials from OurWorld, reporters tapping notes into SoftScreens.

The jury was an array of random-looking citizenry, though some of them were sporting the highly coloured masks and SmartShroud clothes that had become fashionable in the last few months. If Bobby didn’t look too carefully he could lose sight of a juror until she moved — and then a face or lock of hair or fluttering hand would appear as if from nowhere, and the rest of the juror’s body would become dimly visible, outlined by a patchy, imperfect distortion of the background.

It was a sweet irony, he thought, that SmartShrouds were another bright idea of Hiram’s: one new OurWorld product sold at high profit to counteract the intrusive effects of another.

…And there, sitting alone in the dock, was Kate. She was dressed in simple black, her hair tied back, her mouth set, eyes empty.

Cameras had been banned from the courtroom itself, and there had been little of the usual media scrum at the courthouse entrance. But everybody knew that restraining orders meant nothing now. Bobby imagined the air around him speckled with hovering WormCam viewpoints, no doubt great swarms of them clustered on Kate’s face and his own.

Bobby knew that Kate had conditioned herself never to forget the scrutiny of the WormCam, not for a second; she couldn’t stop the invisible voyeurs gazing at her, she said, but she could deny them the satisfaction of seeing how she hurt. To Bobby, her frail, lone figure represented more strength than the mighty legal process to which she was subject, and the great, rich corporation which had prosecuted her.

But even Kate could not conceal her despair when her sentence was at last handed down.

“Dump her, Bobby,” Hiram said. He was pacing around his big conference desk. Storm rain lashed against the picture window, filling the room with noise. “She’s done you nothing but harm. And now she’s a convicted felon. What more proof do you want? Come on, Bobby. Cut yourself loose. You don’t need her.”

“She believes you framed her.”

“Well, I don’t care about that. What do you believe? That’s what counts for me. Do you really think I’m so devious that I’d frame the lover of my son — no matter what I thought about her?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Bobby said evenly. He felt calm, controlled; Hiram’s bluster, obviously manipulative, was unable to reach him. “I don’t know what I believe any more.”

“Why discuss it? Why don’t you use the WormCam to go check up on me?”

“I don’t intend to spy on you.”

Hiram stared at his son. “If you’re trying to find my conscience, you’re going to have to dig deeper than that. Anyhow it’s only reprogramming. Hell, they should lock her up and wipe the key. Reprogramming is nothing.”

Bobby shook his head. “Not to Kate. She’s fought against the methodology for years. She has a real dread of it, Dad.”

“Oh, bull. You were reprogrammed. And it didn’t hurt you.”

“I don’t know if it did or not.” Bobby stood now, and faced his father. He felt his own anger rising. “I felt different when the implant was turned off. I was angry, terrified, confused. I didn’t even know how I was supposed to feel.”

“You sound like her,” Hiram shouted. “She’s reprogrammed you with her words and her pussy more than I ever could with a bit of silicon. Don’t you see that? Ah, Christ. The one good thing the bloody implant did do to you was make you too dumb to see what’s happening to you…” He fell silent, and averted his eyes.

Bobby said coldly, “You’d better tell me what you meant by that.”

Hiram turned, anger, impatience, even something like guilt appearing to struggle for dominance within him. “Think about it. Your brother is a brilliant physicist. I don’t use the word lightly; he may be nominated for a Nobel Prize. And as for me.” He raised his hands. “I built up all this, from scratch. No dummy could have achieved that. But you…”

“Are you saying that’s because of the implant?”

“I knew there was a risk. Creativity is linked to depression. Great achievement is often linked to an obsessive personality. Blah, blah. But you don’t need bloody brains to become the President of the United States. Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?” And he reached for Bobby’s cheek, as if to pinch it, like a child’s.

Bobby flinched back. “I remember a hundred, a thousand times as a child when you said that to me. I never knew what you meant before.”

“Come on, Bobby.”

“You did it, didn’t you? You set Kate up. You know she’s innocent. And you’re prepared to let them screw around with her brain. Just as you screwed around with mine.”

Hiram stood there for a moment, then dropped his arms. “Bugger it. Go back to her if you want, bury yourself in her quim. In the end you always come running back, you little shit. I’ve got work to do.” And he sat at his desk, tapped the surface to open up his SoftScreens, and soon the glow of scrolling digits lit up his face, as if Bobby had ceased to exist.

After she was released, Bobby took her home.

As soon as they arrived she stalked around the apartment, closing curtains compulsively, shutting out the bright noon sunlight, trailing rooms of darkness.

She pulled off the clothes that she had worn since leaving the courtroom and consigned them to the garbage. He lay in bed listening to her shower, in pitch darkness, for long minutes. Then she slid beneath the duvet. She was cold, shivering in fact, her hair not quite dry. She had been showering in cold water. He didn’t question that; he just held her until his warmth had permeated her.

At last she said, in a whisper, “You need to buy thicker curtains.”

“Darkness can’t hide you from a WormCam.”

“I know that,” she said. “And I know that even now they are listening to every word we say. But we don’t have to make it easy for them. I can’t bear it. Hiram beat me, Bobby. And now he’s going to destroy me.”

Just as, he thought, Hiram destroyed me.

He said, “At least your sentence isn’t custodial; at least we have each other.”

She balled her fist and punched his chest, hard enough to hurt. “That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? You won’t have me. Because by the time they’ve finished, there won’t be a me any more. Whatever I will have become, I’ll be — different.”

He covered her fist with his hand until he felt her fingers uncurl. “It’s just reprogramming.”

“They said I must suffer from Syndrome E. Spasms of over-activity in my orbito-frontal and medial prefrontal lobes. Excessive traffic from the cortex prevents emotions rising to my consciousness. And that’s how I can commit a crime, directed at the father of my lover, without conscience or remorse or self-disgust.”

“Kate.”

“And then I’m to be conditioned against the use of the WormCam. Convicted felons like me, you see, aren’t to be allowed access to the technology. They will lay down false memory traces in my amygdala, the seat of my emotions. I’ll have a phobia, unbeatable, about even considering the use of a WormCam, or viewing its results.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She propped herself up on her elbows. Her shadowed face loomed before him, her eye sockets smooth-rimmed wells of darkness. “How can you defend them? You, of all people.”

“I’m not defending anybody. Anyhow, I don’t believe there’s a them. Everybody involved has just been doing her job: the FBI, the courts.”

“And Hiram?”

He didn’t try to answer. He said, “All I want to do is hold you.”

She sighed, and laid her head down on his chest; it felt heavy, her cheek warm against his flesh.

He hesitated. “Anyhow, I know what the real problem is…”

He could feel her frowning.

“It’s me. Isn’t it? You don’t want a switch in your head, because that’s what I had when you found me. You have a dread of becoming like me, like I was. On some level.” He forced it out. “On some level, you despise me.”

She pulled herself back from him. “All you’re thinking about is yourself. But I’m the one who’s about to have her brains removed by an ice-cream scoop.” She got out of bed, walked out of the room, and shut the door with cold control, leaving him in darkness.

He slept awhile.

When he woke, he went to find her. The living room was still dark, the curtains closed and lights off. But he could tell she was here.

“Lights on.”

Light, garish and bright, flooded the room.

Kate was sitting on a sofa, fully dressed. She was facing a table, on which sat a bottle of some clear fluid, and another bottle, smaller. Barbiturates and alcohol. Both bottles were unopened, their seals intact. The liquor was an expensive absinthe.

She said, “I always did have good taste.”

“Kate.”

Her eyes were watering in the light, her pupils huge, making her seem child-like. “Funny, isn’t it? I must have covered a dozen suicides, more attempted. I know there are quicker ways than this. I could slit my wrists, or even my neck. I could even blow out my brains, before they get screwed up. This will be slower. Probably more painful. But it’s easy. You see? You sip and swallow, sip and swallow.” She laughed, coldly. “You even get drunk in the process.”

“You don’t want to do this.”

“No. You’re right. I don’t want to do it. Which is why I need you to help me.”

For answer he picked up the liquor and hurled it across the room. It smashed against a wall, creating a spectacular, expensive splash stain on the plaster there.

Kate sighed. “That’s not the only bottle in the world. I’ll do it eventually. I’d rather die than let them screw with my brain.”

“There must be another way. I’ll go back to Hiram, and tell him.”

“Tell him what? That if he doesn’t ’fess up I’m going to destroy myself? He’ll laugh at you, Bobby. He wants me destroyed, one way or the other.”

He paced the room, growing desperate. “Then let’s get out of here!”

She sighed. “They can watch us leave this room, follow us anywhere. We could go to the Moon and never be free.”

The voice seemed to come out of thin air. “If you believe that, you may as well give up now.”

Kate gasped; Bobby jumped and whirled. It had been the voice of a woman, or a girl — a familiar voice. But the room seemed empty.

Bobby said slowly, “Mary?”

Bobby saw her face first, floating in the air, as she began to peel back a hood. Then, as she started to move against the background, the perfection of her SmartShroud concealment began to break down, and he could make out her outline; a shadowed limb here, a vague discoloured blur where her torso must be, the whole overlaid by an odd, eye-deceiving fish-eye effect, like the earliest WormCam images. He noted, absently, that she seemed clean, healthy, even well fed.

“How did you get in here?”

She grinned. “If you come with me, Kate, I’ll show you.”

Kate said slowly, “Come with you? Where?”

“And why?” Bobby asked.

“’Why’ is obvious, Bobby,” Mary said, an echo of her adolescent prickle returning. “Because, as Kate keeps saying, if she doesn’t get out of here the man is going to stir her brains with a spoon.”

Bobby said reasonably, “Wherever she goes she can be traced.”

“Right,” Mary said heavily. “The WormCam. But you haven’t been able to trace me since I left home three months ago. You didn’t see me coming. You didn’t know I was in the apartment until I revealed myself. Look, the WormCam is a terrific tool. But it isn’t a magic wand. People are paralysed by it. They’ve stopped thinking. Even if Santa Claus can see you, what is he going to do? By the time he arrives you can be long gone.”

Bobby frowned. “Santa Claus?”

Kate said slowly, “Santa can see you all the time. On Christmas Eve, he can look back over the whole year and see if you’ve been naughty or nice.”

Mary grinned. “Santa must have had the first WormCam of all. Right? Merry Christmas.”

“I always thought that was a sinister myth,” Kate said. “But you can only keep away from Santa if you can see him coming.”

Mary smiled. “That’s easy.” She raised her arm, pulled back her SmartShroud sleeve and revealed what looked like a fat wristwatch. It was compact, scuffed, and had the look of something out of a home workshop. The instrument’s face was a miniature SoftScreen; it showed views of the corridor outside, the street, the elevators, what must be neighbouring apartments. “All empty,” murmured Mary. “Maybe some goon somewhere is listening to everything we say. Who cares? By the time he gets here, we’ll be gone.”

“That’s a WormCam,” Kate said. “On her wrist. Some kind of pirate design.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Bobby. “Compared to the giant accelerators in the Wormworks.”

“And,” said Mary, “Alexander Graham Bell probably never thought a telephone could be made without a cable, and so small it could be implanted in your wrist.”

Kate’s eyes narrowed. “A Casimir injector could never be miniaturized that far. This has to be squeezed vacuum technology. The stuff David was working on, Bobby.”

“If it is,” Bobby said heavily, “how did the technology development leak out of the Wormworks?” He eyed Mary. “Does your mother know where you are?”

“Typical,” Mary snapped. “A couple of minutes ago Kate was about to kill herself, and now you’re accusing me of industrial espionage and worrying about my relationship with my mother.”

“My God.” Kate said. “What kind of world is it going to be where every damn kid wears a WormCam on her wrist?”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Mary said. “We already do. The details are on the Internet. There are home workshops churning them out, all over the planet.” She grinned. “The djinn is out of the bottle. Look, I’m here to help you. There are no guarantees. Santa Claus isn’t all powerful, but he has made it harder to hide. All I’m offering you is a chance.” She stared at Kate. “That’s better than what you’re facing now, isn’t it?”

Kate said, “Why do you want to help me?”

Mary looked embarrassed. “Because you’re family. More or less.”

Bobby said, “Your mother is family too.”

Mary glared at him. “I’ll cut you a deal, if it’ll make you feel better. Let me get you out of here. Let me save Kate’s head from being sliced open. In return I’ll call my mother. Deal?”

Kate and Bobby exchanged a glance. “Deal.”

Mary dug into her tunic and produced a swatch of cloth, which she shook out. “SmartShroud.”

Bobby said, “Is there room for two in there?”

Mary was grinning. “I was hoping you’d say that. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Hiram’s security guards, alerted by a routine WormCam monitor, arrived ten minutes later. The apartment, brightly lit, was empty. The guards began to squabble over who would have to tell Hiram and take the blame — and then fell silent, as they realized he was, or would be, watching anyhow.