Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days

by Light Of Other Days (lit)

  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 clamor—tragically impossi- ble 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 priv- ileged to be alive at such a time. There will surely never again be a dme when the light of truth and understanding spreads with such overwhelming ra- pidity into the darkness of the past, never again a time when the mass consciousness of mankind is transformed so dramatically. The new generations, bom 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: cer- tainly no professional historian. But, like almost every- body 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 uncer- tainty 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 super- natural 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 ref- ugees 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 Mesopo- tamia 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 im- perfection: 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 inspira- tion, over three thousand years, to many people, includ- ing 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 fas- cination 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 under- stand 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.

  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 apart- ment, where—according to OurWorld records—he con- tinued 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, hab- its 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 proj- ect."

  "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 con- dition. 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 be- come.

  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 ex- amples. "I watched the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth: the Kamtnertor Theater, Vienna, 1824. Did you see that?" The symphony performance had been profession- ally recorded and rebroadcast by one of the media con- glomerates. 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 Theater 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 ha- tred—from national and patriotic groups, religious or- ganizations, 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 bom 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 modem 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. His- tory 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 mink 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 Worm- Cam 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 Ba- hamas. 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 or- naments 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 armor and muskets and horses. The Arawaks had no iron, no means of defending themselves from the Euro- peans' 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 poi- son. 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 fe- rocious 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 jewelery.

  "And that, Bobby, was how our invasion of the Amer- icas 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 me 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 Cru- saders 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, color-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 hu- man 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 privi- leged to watch centuries of Christian terrorism, an orgy of cruelty and destruction that stretched from the Cru- sades 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 chron- icled. The historians have been able to pick out fact from propaganda, long before the WormCam."

  "Perhaps. But we're human, Bobby. It is the cruet 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 sup- pose 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 com- petent 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 diffi- cult, 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, colored by the nickering 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:

  SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN

  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 an- swer. Anyway, how did you know about my software?"

  "You're a WormCam user," he said. "One of the con- ditions 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 be- half 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 themselve
s, the people who need to make it better now?"

  "So you have spies? People watching the past- watchers?"

  "We have a layer of metasoftware which monitors user customization, assessing its functionality and qual- ity. 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 nicker 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."