Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days

by Light Of Other Days (lit)

  "And now the Wilson case."

  "Yeah." Mavens smiled thinly. "Maybe you can un- derstand 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 exe- cuted 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." Ma- vens 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 facedown on the bed: slim, dressed in T-shirt and Jeans, he was propped up on his elbows over books and a primary-color 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 Wil- son." 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, in- cidentally, 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 oul 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 se- cure 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 indepen- dent. 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. Afterward 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 re- main sensible. He sent her back to college, talking about putting this behind them, it's a one-off. Maybe he really thought dme 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 an- other way back...."

  "Not exactly." Mavens hit the SoftScreen, and the lit- tle 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 giri 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 tittle 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 mo- ment—she had to face a much more dreadful truth."

  Bobby felt uncomfortable, confronted by this horr
or, 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 biood. 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 anymore, Sheriock Holmes puzzles. Now 1 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.

  TIME

  As the availability and power of the WormCam ex- tended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snow- flakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time....

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

  His good humor, in those last hours, struck his visi- tors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed4o 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 pilgrim- age, 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 fina! 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 WbrmCam 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" WonnCam 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 sto- rytellers, and much of the event took place in pitch North Atlantic darkness.

  But we soon grew impatient with the interpola- tion of the professionals. We wanted to see for our- selves.

  The hasty inspection of many notorious moments of the recent past has revealed both banality and surprise. The depressing truths surrounding Elvis Presley, 0. 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 misogynisdc 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— me Cuba missile crisis, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the euro—while of in- terest to aficionados, have turned out to be mud- dled, 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 his- tory are screwups, it seems, just as almost all the great passions are no more than crude and manip- ulative tumblings.

  And, worse than that, the truth generally turns out to be boring.

  The lack of pattern and logic in the over- whelming, almost unrecognizable 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 come- back: 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 be- loved copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. With great ex- citement he turned to Book II, Problem 8, and hunted for a quill.

  ... On the other hand, it is impossible/or 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 marvelous demon- stration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.. .

  Bemadette 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 Format'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 mathe- matical 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 pro- fessional mathematician—had managed to prove that no triple of numbers existed for any index higher than two.

  Bemadette imaged sheets of notes expressing the es- sence of the proof Fermat believed he had found, and, with some help from a teacher, deciphered their mean- ing.

  ... 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 De- sargues, 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 exis- tence independent of the human mind which had con- ceived them....

  Pierre de Fermat never wrote out the proof of what would become known as his Last Theorem. But that brief marginalia, discovered after Format'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 im- possible Fermat could have found a proof in his day. Perhaps he had been mistaken—or had even perpetrated a huge hoax on later generations.