Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days

by Light Of Other Days (lit)

  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 compli- cated 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, in- cluding 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 anymore, 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 anymore. 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 docu- soaps: 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 fol- low 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, commen- tators. 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 every- body 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 son 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 bum 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 / 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 nap- ping 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 reces- sive, 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.

  LIGHT YEARS

  Hiram stalked around David's small room, silhouet- ted by picture-window Seattle nighttime skyline. He picked up a paper at random, a faded photocopy, and read its title. " 'Lorentzian Wormholes from the Gravi- tationally Squeezed Vacuum.' More brain-busting the- ory?"

  David sat on his sofa, irritated and disturbed by his father's unannounced visit. He understood Hiram's need f
or company, to bum off his adrenaline, to escape the intensely scrutinized goldfish bowl his life had become. He just wished it didn't have fo 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 Califomian vineyards are almost accepta- ble." 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 bal- ance of the capacitor's two superconducting plates, a balance between the Casimir forces and electrical repul- sion, 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 tech- nology a lot further."

  "And is there a way?"

  "Well, perhaps. Casinur 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." Hirani 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 Franco- American head stuck up your broad and welcoming backside, and that's where it has remained."

  David bristled. 'Is mat 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 aban- doned cubicle in the Wormworks.

  Mary walked around the desk, touching the blank SoftScreen lying there, the surrounding acoustic parti- tions. 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 parceled 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 Kate- ness about this anonymous desk, t^lis chair, as if in the months she had spent here she had somehow impressed herself on this dull piece of spacedme. 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 Wbrmworks."

  "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 lev- els below.

  David wasn't here today. The supervising tech wel- comed 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 Worm- Cams. It's something called squeezed-vacuum technol- ogy. 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 mag- nets. 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 in- jectors 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 comer 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 im- age, 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 hun- dred 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 dimen- sions, 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...."