Then, in the year 2037, to general amazement, armed with no more than high-school math, fourteen-year-old Bemadette Winstanley was able to prove that Fermat had been right
And when at last Format's proof was published a rev- olution 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 Mex- ico, in 1947. Not a single alien-abduction incident yet inspected has turned out to be anything more than a misinterpretation of some innocent phenom- enon—often complicated by disturbed neurological states. Similarly, not a shred of evidence has emerged for any paranormal or supernatural phe- nomenon, no matter how notorious.
Whole industries of psychics, mediums, astrolo- gers, faith healers, homeopathists and others are be- ing systematically demolished. We must look forward to the day when the WormCam's delvings reach as far as the building of the Pyramids, Stone- henge, the Nazca geoglyphs and other sources of "wisdom" or "mystery." And then will come Atlan- tis ...
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:.
Bemice 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 semidarknesA behind her panes of protective glass, silently watching time unravel.
The years before the transfer to the Louvre were more complex.
Bemice 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 doc- umented record.
Then—in the early years of that century, more than a hundred years after the painting's supposed composi- tion—came the first surprise. Bemice 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, elim- inated the copy that had passed down the centuries to the care of the Louvre.
Briefly she detoured to track forward in time, follow- ing the fate of the older "original" from which the Lou- vre'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.
WonnCam 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 presum- ably 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 paint- ing, 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 composi- tion under the top layer of paint: an indication more of an original, assayed and reworked, than a copy.
But then, Bemice 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 be- gan to follow the "original" he had copied deeper into the past.
More decades nickered by, more transfers of owner- ship, all of it an uninteresting blur around the changeless painting itself.
At last she approached the start of the sixteenth cen- tury, 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 composi- tion, 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 sub- ject synthesized into a perfect unity, and with a sweep- ing, 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.
Bemice, 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 ex- posed to the cold light of this future day, are evap- orating.
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 "b'ar-hunting" on Capitol Hill.
Paul Revere, on the other hand, has had his rep- utation 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 Longfel- low's poem. But still, many modem Americans have been dismayed by the«4ieavy 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 fig- ures—the commentators call them "snowmen"— who prove never to have existed at all! What is becoming more interesting than the myths them- selves 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 any- body'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 com- mon values and history, if they are to survive the future. And me 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 me 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 unraveling of the past from shards and traces.
But as it turned out there was still a role for the ac- cumulated wisdom of archaeology, as the best intellec- tual reconstruction available of the true past. There was just too much to see—and the WormCam horizon ex- panded all the time. For the time being, the role of the WormCam was be to supplement conventional archae- ological techniques: to provide key pieces of evidence to resolve disputes, to reinforce or overthrow hypothe- ses, 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 re- layed 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. Modem researchers had even, whimsically, given him a name: Otzi, the Ice Man.
His two arrows were of particular interest to Marcus— in fact, they had served as the basis of Marcus's doc- torate. 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 mak- ing 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 in- struments. In a sense the WormCam was the crystalli- zation 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 ar- chaeology, no matter how powerful the techniques— even about this man, Otzi, 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 aus- tere past. But he longed, along with the rest of the world, to know the truth.
But now the world had forgotten Otzi, 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, Otzi was no longer a novelty, nor even particularly interesting. No- body cared to leam 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 Otzi's shoulder, until the truth had be- come apparent.
Otzi was a high-status Alpine hunter. His copper axe- head 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 an- imal which retires to high rocky areas at night: the ibex.
But Otzi 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 diarrhea. 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 Otzi's life heat with it.
It was a sad, lonely death, and Marcus, watching, thought there was a moment when Otzi 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 Otzi would lie alone, entombed in his ice, for five thousand years.
Marcus shut down the WormCam, and once more Otzi was at peace.
Patefield Testimony: Many nations—not just Amer- ica—are facing grave internal dialogues about the new truths revealed about the past, truths in many cases barely reported, if at all, in conventional his- tories.
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. Re- assuring myths about the significance of the war- time 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 leam 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.
Modem 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, star- vation, exposure, disease and hunger, resulting in the uprooting of whole communities and the mas- sacre, between 1885 and 1906, of eight million peo- ple.
In the lands of the old Soviet Union, people are fixated on the era of the Stalinist terror. The Ger- mans 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 war- time massacres and other brutalities in Szechwan and elsewhere. Israelis are uncomfortably aware of their own crimes against the Palestinians. The frag- tO ARTHUR C, CLARKE AND STEPHEN BAXTER ile Serbian democracy is threatening to collapse un- der 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 be- fore the WormCam, of course, and many honest and conscientious histories were written. But still the endless dismal banality of it all, the human re- ality of so much cruelty and pain and waste, re- mains 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 ex- posed 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 pre- pared to cast the first stone, and almost every sur- viving 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 his- tory 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 suf- fering or dying at the hands of others.
Greatness no longer matters. We see now that each human being who dies is the center of a uni- verse: 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 re- marked, the history emerging from all this intent WormCam inspection will be a new story of man- kind: a story of the people, by the people, for th
e 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, as- sisted by such great genealogical record centers as the Mormons', we have all discovered our ances- tors- There are those who argue that this is dangerous and destabilizing. After all, the spate of divorces and suicides which followed the WonnCam's first gift of openness has now been followed by a fresh wave as we have become able to spy on our part- ners, 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 relation- ships will survive. And anyhow, such compara- tively 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.
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 21
