Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days

by Light Of Other Days (lit)

  Details seemed to crystallize as she fell: trees and peo- ple and even dapples of light on the water of the river. At last the tallest trees were stretching up around her.

  With a blur of motion she settled easily to the ground- When she looked into the sky she saw a blizzard of people in their snow-white robes, falling easily, without apparent fear.

  There was gold everywhere: underfoot, on the walls of the nearest buildings. She studied the faces nearest her. They seemed excited, happy, anticipating. But the gold filled the air with a yellow light that made the peo- ple look as if they were suffering from some mineral deficiency. And no doubt those happy-clappy expres- sions were virtual fakes painted on bemused faces.

  Bobby walked over to a tree. She noticed that his bare feet disappeared a centimeter or two into the grass sur- face- Bobby said, "The trees have got more than one kind of fruit. Look. Apples, oranges, limes—"

  "On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bear- ing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations..."

  "I'm impressed by the attention to detail."

  "Don't be," She bent down to touch the ground. She could feel no grass blades, no dew, no earth, only a slick plastic smoothness. "Billybob is a showman," she said. "But he's a cheap showman." She straightened up. "This isn't even a true religion. Billybob has marketeers and business analysts working for him, not nuns. He is preaching a gospel of prosperity, (hat it's okay to be greedy and grasping. Talk to your brother about it. This is a commodity fetishism, directly descended from Bil- lybob's banknote-baptism scam."

  "You sound as if you care about religion."

  "Believe me, I don't," she said vehemently. "The hu- man race could get along fine without it. But my beef is with Billybob and his kind. I brought you here to show you how powerful he is, Bobby. We need to stop him."

  "So how am I supposed to help?"

  She stepped a little closer to him. "I know what your father is trying to build. An extension of his DataPipe technology. A remote viewer."

  He said nothing.

  *'I don't expect you to confirm or deny that. And I'm not going to tell you how I know about it. What I want you to think about is what we could achieve with such a technology."

  He frowned. "Instant access to news stories, wherever they break—"

  She waved that away. "Much more than that. Think about it. If you could open up a wormhole to anywhere, then there would be no more barriers. No walls. You could see anybody, at any time. And crooks like Billy- bob would have nowhere to hide."

  His frown deepened. "You're talking about spying?"

  She laughed. "Oh, come on, Bobby—each of us is under surveillance the whole time anyhow. You've been a celebrity since the age of twenty-one; you must know how it feels to be watched."

  "It's not the same."

  She took his arm. "If Billybob has nothing to hide, he's nothing to fear," she said. "Look at it that way."

  "Sometimes you sound like my father," he said neu- trally. ^

  She fell silent, disquieted.

  They walked forward with the throng. Now they were nearing a great throne, with seven dancing globes and twenty-four smaller attendant thrones, a scaled-up ver- sion of the real-world display Billybob had mounted out in the stadium.

  And before the great central throne stood Billybob Meeks.

  But this wasn't the fat, sweating man she had seen out on the sports field. This Billybob was taller, younger, thinner, far better looking, like a young Charlton Heston. Although he must have been at least a kilometer from where she stood, he towered over the congregation. And he seemed to be growing.

  He leaned down, hands on hips, his voice like shaped thunder. "The city does not need the sun or the Moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the

  Lamb is its lamp...." Still Billybob grew, his arms like tree trunks, his face a looming disc that was already above the lower clouds. Kate could see people fleeing from beneath his giant feet, like ants.

  And Billybob pointed a mighty finger directly at her, immense gray eyes glaring, the angry furrows on his brow like Martian channels. "Nothing impure will ever come in to it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life. Is your name in that book? Is it? Are you worthy?"

  Kate screamed, suddenly overwhelmed- And she was picked up by an invisible hand and dragged into the shining air.

  There was a sucking sensation at her eyes and ears. Light, noise, the mundane stink of hot dogs flooded over her.

  Bobby was kneeling before her. She could see the marks the Glasses had made around his eyes. "He got to you, didn't he?"

  "Billybob does have a way of punching his message home," she gasped, still disoriented.

  On row after row of the old sports stadium's battered seats, people were rocking and moaning, tears leaking from the black eye seals of the Glasses. In one area paramedics were working on unconscious people— perhaps victims of faints, epilepsy, even heart attacks, Kate speculated; she had had to sign various release forms when applying for their tickets, and she didn't imagine the safety of his parishioners was a high priority for Billybob Meeks.

  Curiously she studied Bobby, who seemed unpertur- bed. "But what about you?"

  He shrugged. "I've played more interesting adventure games." He looked up at the muddy December sky. "Kate—I know you're just using me as a way to get to my father. But I like you even so. And maybe tweaking Hiram's nose would be good for my soul. What do you think?"

  She held her breath. She said, "I think mat's about the most human thing I've ever heard you say."

  "Then let's do it."

  She forced a smile. She'd got what she wanted.

  But the world around her still seemed unreal, com- pared to the vividness of those final moments inside Bil- lybob's mind.

  She had no doubt that—if the rumors about the ca- pability Hiram was constructing were remotely accurate, and if she could get access to it—she would be able to destroy Billybob Meeks. It would be a great scoop, a personal triumph.

  But she knew mat some part of her, no matter how far down she buried it, would always regret doing so. Some part of her would always long to be allowed to return to that glowing city of gold, with walls that stretched halfway to the Moon, where shining, smiling people were waiting to welcome her.

  Billybob had broken through, his shock tactics had gotten even to her. And that, of course, was the whole point. Why Billybob must be stopped.

  "Yes," she said. "Let's do it."

  THE BILLION-DOLLAR PEARL

  David, with Hiram and Bobby, sat before a giant SoftScreen spread across the Wormworks counting- house wall. The 'Screen image—returned by a fiber- optic camera that had been snaked into the heart of the Wormworks' superconducting-magnet nest—was noth- ing but darkness, marred by an occasional stray pixel, a prickle of color and light.

  A digital counter in a comer display worked its way down toward zero.

  Hiram paced impatiently around the cramped, clut- tered countinghouse; David's assistant technicians cow- ered from him, avoiding his eyes. Hiram snapped, "How do you know the bloody wormhole is even open?"

  David suppressed a smile. "You don't need to whis- per." He pointed to the comer display. Beside the count- down clock was a small numerical caption, a sequence of prime numbers scrolling upward from two to thirty- one, over and over. "That's the test signal, sent through the wormhole by the Brisbane crew at the normal gamma-ray wavelengths. So we know we managed to find and stabilize a wormhole mouth—without a remote anchor—and the Australians have been able to locate it." During his three months' work here, David had quickly discovered a way to use modulations of exotic-matter pulses to battle the wormholes' inherent instability. Turning that into practical and repeatable engineering, of course, had been immensely difficult—but in the end successful. "Our placement of the remote mouth isn't so precise
yet. I'm afraid our Australian colleagues have to chase our wormhole mouths through the dust out there. Chasing fizzers over the gibbers, as they put it... But still, now we can open up a wormhole to anywhere. What we don't know yet is whether we're going to be able to expand the holes up to visible-light dimensions."

  Bobby was leaning easily against a table, legs crossed, looking fit and relaxed, as if he'd just come off a tennis court—as perhaps he had, mused David. "I think we ought to give David a lot of credit. Dad. After all he has solved half the problem already."

  "Yes," Hiram said, "but I don't see anything but gamma rays squirted in by some broken-nosed Aussie. Unless we can find a way to expand these bloody things, we're wasting my money. And I can't stomach all this waiting! Why just one test run a day?"

  "Because," said David evenly, "we have to analyze me results from each test, strip down the Casimir gear, reset the control equipment and detectors. We have to understand each failure before we can go ahead toward success." That is, he added silently ,'before I can extricate myself from mis complex family entanglement and re- turn to the comparative calm of Oxford, funding battles, ferocious academic rivalry and all.

  Bobby asked, "What exactly is it we're looking for? What will a wormhole mouth look like?"

  "I can answer that one," Hiram said, still pacing. "I grew up with enough bad pop-science shows. A worm- hole is a shortcut through a fourth dimension. You have to cut a chunk out of our three-dimensional space and join it onto another such chunk, over in Brisbane."

  Bobby raised an eyebrow at David.

  David said carefully, "It's a tittle more complicated. But he's more right than wrong. A wormhole mouth is a sphere, floating freely in space. A three-dimensional excision. If we succeed with the expansion, for the first time we'll be able to see our wormhole mourn—with a hand lens, anyhow...." The countdown clock was down to a single digit. David said, "Heads up, everybody. Here we go."

  The ripples of conversation in the room died away, and everyone turned to the digital clock.

  The count reached zero.

  And nothing happened.

  There were events, of course. The track counter racked up a respectable score, showing heavy and en- ergetic particles passing through the detector array, the debris of an exploded wormhole. The array's pixel ele- ments, each firing individually as a particle passed through them, could later be used to trace the paths of debris fragments in three dimensions—paths which could then be reconstructed and analyzed.

  Lots of data, lots of good science. But the big wall SoftScreen remained blank. No signal.

  David suppressed a sigh. He opened up the logbook and entered details of the run in his round, neat hand; around him his technicians began equipment diagnostics.

  Hiram looked into David's face, at the empty 'Screen, at the technicians. "Is that it? Did it work?"

  Bobby touched his father's shoulder. "Even I can tell it didn't. Dad." He pointed to the prime-number test se- quence. It had frozen on thirteen. "Unlucky thirteen," murmured Bobby.

  "Is he right? David, did you screw up again?"

  "This wasn't a failure. Just another test. You don't understand science, Father. Now, when we run the anal- ysis and learn from this—"

  "Jesus Christ on a bike! I should have left you rotting in bloody Oxford. Call me when you have something." Hiram, shaking his head, stalked from the room.

  When he left, the feeling of relief in the room was palpable. The technicians—silver-haired particle physi- cists all, many of them older than Hiram, some of them with distinguished careers beyond OurWorld—started to file out.

  When they'd gone, David sat before a SoftScreen to begin his own follow-up work.

  He brought up his favored desktop metaphor. It was like a window into a cluttered study, with books and documents piled in untidy heaps on the floor and shelves and tables, and with complex particle-decay models hanging like mobiles from the ceiling. When he looked around the "room," the point at the focus of his attention expanded, opening out more detail, the rest of the room blurring to a background wash. He could "pick up" doc- uments and models with a fingertip, rummaging until he found what he wanted, exactly where he'd left it last time.

  First he had to check for detector pixel faults. He be- gan passing the vertex detector traces into the analog signal bus, and pulled out a blow-up overview of various detector slabs. There were always random failures of pixels when some especially powerful particle hit a de- tector element. But, though some of the detectors had suffered enough radiation damage to require replace- ment, there was nothing serious for now.

  Humming, immersed in the work, he prepared to move on—

  "Your user interface is a mess."

  David, startled, turned. Bobby was still here: still lean- ing, in fact, against his table.

  "Sorry," David said. "I didn't mean to turn my back." How odd that he hadn't even noticed his brother's con- tinued presence.

  Bobby said now, "Most people use the Search En- gine."

  "Which is irritatingly slow, prone to misunderstanding and which anyhow masks a Victorian-era hierarchical data-storage system. Filing cabinets. Bobby, I'm too dumb for the Search Engine. I'm just an unevolved ape who likes to use his hands and eyes to find things. This may look a mess, but I know exactly where everything is."

  "But still, you could study this particle-track stuff a lot better as a virtual. Let me set up a trial of my latest Mind'sEye prototype for you. We can reach more areas of the brain, switch more quickly—"

  "And all without the need for trepanning."

  Bobby smiled.

  "All right," David said. "I'd appreciate that."

  Bobby's gaze roamed around the room in that absent, disconcerting way of his. "Is it true? What you told Dad—that this isn't a failure, but just another step?"

  "I can understand Hiram's impatience. After all he's paying for all of this."

  "And he's working under commercial pressure," Bobby said. "Already some of his competitors are claim- ing to have DataPipes of comparable quality to Hiram's. It surely won't be long before one of them comes up with the idea of a remote viewer—independently, if no- body's leaked it already."

  "But commercial pressure is irrelevant," David said testily. "A study like this has to proceed at its own pace. Bobby, I don't know how much you know about phys- ics."

  "Assume nothing. Once you have a wormhole, what's so difficult about expanding it?"

  "It's not as if we're building a bigger and better car. We're trying to push spacetime into a form it wouldn't naturally adopt. Look—wormholes are intrinsically un- stable. You know that to keep them open at all we have to thread them with exotic matter."

  "Antigravity."

  "Yes. But the tension in the throat of a wormhole is gigantic. We're constantly balancing one huge pressure against another." David balled his fists and pressed them against each other, hard. "As long as they are balanced, fine. But the smallest perturbation and you lose every- thing." He let one fist slide over the other, breaking the equilibrium he'd established. "And that fundamental in- stability grows worse with size. What we're attempting is to monitor conditions inside the wormhole, and adjust the pumping of exotic matter-energy to compensate for fluctuations." He pressed his fists against each other again; this time, as he jiggled the left back and forth, he compensated with movements of his right, so his knuck- les stayed pressed together.

  "I get it," Bobby said. "As if you're threading the worm- hole with software."

  "Or with a smart worm." David smiled. "Yes. It's very processor-intensive. And so far, the instabilities have been too rapid and catastrophic to deal with.

  "Look at this." He reached to his desktop and, with the touch of a fingertip, he pulled up a fresh view of a particle cascade. It had a strong purple trunk—the color showing heavy ionization—with clusters of red jets, wide and narrow, some straight, others curved. He tapped a key, and the spray rotated in three dimensions; the software suppressed foreground elements
to allow details of the jet's inner structure to become visible. The central spray was surrounded by numbers showing en- ergy, momentum and charge readings. "We're looking at a high-energy, complex event here, Bobby. All this exotic garbage spews out before the wormhole disap- pears completely." He sighed. "It's like trying to figure out how to fix a car by blowing it up and combing through the debris.

  "Bobby, I was honest with Father. Every trial is an exploration of another comer of what we call parameter space, as we try different ways of making our wormhole viewers wide and stable. There are no wasted trials; every time we proceed we learn something. In fact many of my tests are negative—I actually design them to fail. A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true. Eventually we'll get there ... or else we'll prove Hiram's dream is impossible, with present-day technology."