Hiram laughed, an ugly, strained sound. "Don't tei] me. It doesn't matter. Everyone has a grudge. I always knew one of you bitter arseholes would get through in the end. But I trusted you, Wilson."
"If not for you I would be happy " Her voice was pellucid, calm.
"What are you talking about? . .. But who gives a fuck? Look—you've got me," Hiram said desperately. "Let Bobby go. And the girl. They don't matter."
"Oh, but they do." Wilson seemed on the verge of crying. "Don't you see? He is the point." The hum of the equipment rose to a crescendo, and digits scrolled over the SoftScreen monitor outputs on the wall. "Just a couple of seconds," Wilson said. 'That isn't long to wait, is it? And then it will all be over." She turned to Bobby. "Don't be afraid."
Bobby, barely conscious, struggled to speak. "What?"
"You won't feel a thing."
"What do you care?"
"But I do care." She stroked his cheek. "I spent so long watching you. I knew you were cloned. It doesn't matter. I saw you take your first step. I love you."
Hiram growled. "A bloody WormCam stalker. Is that all you are? How—small. I've been hunted by priests and pimps and politicians, criminals, nationalists, the sane and the insane. Everybody with a grudge about the inventor of the WormCam. I evaded them all. And now it comes down to this." He began to struggle. "No. Not mis way. Not this way—"
And, with a single, snake-like movement, he lunged at Wilson's leg and sank his teeth into her hamstring.
She cried out and staggered back. Hiram clung on with his teeth, like a dog, the woman's blood trickling from his mouth. Wilson rolled on top of him and raised her fist. Hiram released Wilson's leg and yelled at Kate. '^Jet him out of here! Get him out..." But then Wilson drove her fist into his bloodied throat, and Kate heard the crunch of cartilage and bone, and his voice turned to a gurgle.
Kate grabbed Bobby by his good arm and hauled him, by main force, over the threshold of me bunker. He cried out as his head raided on the door's thick metal sill, but she ignored him.
As soou as his dangling feet were clear she slammed the door, masking the rising noise of the wonnhole, and began to dog it shut.
Hiram's security goons were approaching, bewildered. Kate, hauling on me wheel, screamed at them. "Help him up and get out of here!—"
But then the wall bulged out at her, and she glimpsed light, as bright as the sun. Deafened, blinded, she seemed to be falling.
Falling into darkness.
THE AGES OF SISYPHUS
A s two apledons, disembodied WormCam view- points, Bobby and David soared over southern Af- nca.
It was the year 2082. Four decades had elapsed since the death of Hiram Patterson. And Kate, Bobby's wife of thirty-five years, was dead.
A year after he had accepted that brutal truth, it was never far from Bobby's thoughts, no matter what won- derful scenery the WormCam brought him. But he was still alive, and he must live on; he forced himself to look outward, to study Africa.
Today the plains of mis most ancient of continents were covered with a rectangular gridwork of fields. Here and there buildings were clustered, neat plastic huts, and machines toiled, autonomous cultivators looking like overgrown beetles, their solar-cell carapaces glinting. People moved slowly through the fields. They all wore loose white clothes, broad-brimmed hats and gaudy lay- ers of sunblock.
In one farmyard, neatly swept, a group of children played. They looked clean, well dressed and well fed, running noisily, bright pebbles on this immense tabletop landscape. But Bobby had seen few children today, and this rare handful seemed precious, cherished.
And, as he watched more closely, he saw how their movements were complex and tightly coordinated, as if they could tell without delay or ambiguity what the oth- ers were thinking. As, perhaps, they could. For_he was told—there were children being bom now with worm- holes in their heads, linked into the spreading group minds of the Joined even before they left the womb.
It made Bobby shudder. He knew his body was re- sponding to the eerie thought, abandoned in the facility that was still called me Wormworks—though, forty years after the death of Hiram, the facility was now owned by a trust representing a consortium of museums and universities.
So much time had elapsed since mat climactic day, me day of Hiram's death at the Wormworks—and yet it was all vivid in Bobby's mind, as if his menaoiy were itself a WormCam, his mind locked to the past. And it was now a past that contained all mat was left of Kate, dead a year ago of cancer, her every action embedded in unchangeable history, like all the nameless billions who had preceded her to the grave.
Poor Hiram, he thought- All he ever wanted to do was make money. Now, with Hiram long dead, his company was gone, his fortune impounded. And yet, by accident, he changed me world.... *-
David, an invisible presence here with him, had been silent for a long time. Bobby cut in empathy subroutines to glimpse David's viewpoint.
... The glowing fields evaporated, to be replaced by a desolate, arid landscape in which a few stunted trees struggled to survive.
Under the flat, garish sunlight a line of women worked their way slowly across the land. Each bore an immense plastic container on her head, containing a great weight of brackish water. They were stick-thin, dressed in rags, their backs rigid.
One woman led a child by the hand. It seemed obvi- ous that the wretched child—naked, a thing of bones and papery skin—was in me grip of advanced malnutrition. or perhaps even AIDS: what they used to call here, Bobby remembered with grim humor, the slims disease.
He said gently, "Why look into the past, David? Things are better now."
"But this was the world we made," David said bitterly. His voice sounded as if he were just a few meters away from Bobby in some warm, comfortable room, rather than floating in this disregarded emptiness. "No wonder the kids think we old folk arc a bunch of savages. It was an Africa of AIDS and malnutrition and drought and malaria and staph infections and dengue fever and end- less futile wars, an Africa drenched in savagery ... But," he said, "it was an Africa with elephants."
"There are still elephants," Bobby said. And that was true: a handful of animals in the zoos, their seed and eggs flown back and forth in a bid to maintain viable populations. There were even zygotes, of elephants and many other endangered or otherwise lost species, frozen in their liquid nitrogen tanks in the unchanging shadows of a lunar south pole crater—perhaps the last refuge of life from Earth if it proved, after all, impossible to de- flect the Wormwood.
So there were still elephants. But none in Africa: no trace of them save the bones occasionally unearthed by the robot farmers, bones sometimes showing teeth marks left by desperate humans. In Bobby's lifetime, they had all gone to extinction: the elephant, the lion, the bear— even man's closest relatives, the chimps and gorillas and apes. Now, outside the homes and zoos and collections and labs, there was no large mammal on the planet, none save man.
But what was done was done.
With an effort of will Bobby grasped his brother's viewpoint and rose straight upward.
As they ascended in space and time the shining fields were restored. The children dwindled to invisibility and the farmland shrank to a patchwork of detail, obscured by mist and cloud.
And then, as Earth receded, the bulbous shape of Af- rica itself, schoolbook-familiar, swam into Bobby's view.
Farther to die west, over the Atlantic, a solid layer of clouds lay across the ocean's curving skin, corrugated in neat gray-white rows. As the turning planet bore Africa toward the shadow of night, Bobby could see equatorial thunderheads spreading hundreds of kilometers toward the land, probing purple fingers of darkness.
But even from this vantage Bobby could make out the handiwork of man.
There was a depression far out in me ocean, a great cappuccino swirl of white clouds over blue ocean. But this was oo natural system; it had a regularity and sta- bility that belied its scale. The new weather management functions were, slowly, reducing th
e severity of the storm systems that still raged across the planet, espe- cially around me battered Pacific Rim.
To me south of me old continent Bobby could cleariy see the great curtain-ships working their way through the atmosphere, the conducting sheets they bore shimmering like dragonfly wings as they cleansed the air and restored its long-depleted ozone. And off the western coast pale masses followed me line of me shore for hundreds of kilometers: reefs built up rapidly by me new breed of engineered coral, laboring to fix excess carbon—and to provide a new sanctuary for the endangered communities of plants and animals which had once inhabited the world's natural reefs, long destroyed by pollution, over- fishing and storms.
Everywhere, people were working, repairing, building.
The land, too, had changed. The continent was almost cloud free, its broad land gray-brown, me green of life suppressed by mist. The great northern mass which had been the Sahara was broken by a fine tracery of blue- white. Already, along me banks of the new canals, the glow of green was starting to spread. Here and there he could see the glittering jewel-like forms of PowerPipe plants, the realization of Hiram's last dream, drawing heat from the core of Earth itself—the energy bounty, free and clean, which had largely enabled the planet's stabilizing and transformation. It was a remarkable view, its scale and regularity stunning; David said it reminded him of nothing so much as the old dreams of Mars, the dying desert world restored by intelligence.
The human race, it seemed, had gotten smart just in dme to save itself. But it had been a difficult adoles- cence.
Even as the human population had continued to swell, climatic changes had devastated much of the world's food and water supply, with the desertification of the great grain regions of the U.S. and Asia, the drowning of many productive lowland farming areas by rising sea levels, and the pollution of aquifers and the acidification or drying of freshwater lakes. Soon the problem of ex- cess population went into reverse as drought, disease and starvation culled communities across the planet. It was a crash only in relative terms; most of Earth's population had survived. But as usual the most vulnerable—the very old and the very young—had paid the price.
Overnight, the world had become middle-aged.
New generations had emerged into a world that was, re- covering, still crowded with aging survivors. And the young—scattered, cherished, WormCam-linked—regarded their elders with increasing intolerance, indifference and mistrust.
In the schools, the children of the WormCam made academic studies of the era in which their parents and grandparents had grown up: an incomprehensible, taboo- ridden pre-WormCam age only a few decades in the past in which liars and cheats had prospered, and crime was out of control, and people killed each other over lies and myths, and in which the world had been systematically trashed through willful carelessness, greed, and an utter lack of sympathy for others or foresight regarding the future.
And meanwhile, to the old, the young were a bunch of incomprehensible savages with a private language and about as much modesty as a tribe of chimpanzees....
But the generational conflict was not the full story. It seemed to Bobby that a more significant rift was opening up.
The mass minds were still, Bobby supposed, in their infancy, and they were far outnumbered by the Unjoined older generations—but already their insights, folded down into the human world, were having a dramatic effect.
The new superminds were beginning to rise to the greatest of challenges: challenges which demanded at once the best of human intellect and the suppression of humanity's worst divisiveness and selfishness. The mod- ification and control of the world's climate, for example, was, because of the intrinsically chaotic nature of the global weather systems, a problem that had once seemed intractable. But it was a problem that was now being solved.
The new generations of maturing Joined were already shaping the future. It would be a failure in which, many feared, democracy would seem irrelevant, and in which even the consolation of religion would not seem impor- tant; for the Joined believed—with some justification— that they could even banish death.
Perhaps it would not even be a human future at all.
It was wonderful, awe-inspiring, terrifying. Bobby knew that he was privileged to be alive at such a mo- ment, for surely such a great explosion of mind would not come again.
But it was also true that he—and David and the rest of their generation, the last of the Unjoined—had come to feel more and more isolated on the planet that had bome them.
He knew this shining future was not for him. And— a year after Kate's death, the illness that had suddenly taken her from him—the present held no interest. What remained for him, as for David, was the past.
And the past was what he and David had decided to explore, as far and as fast as they could, two old fools who didn't matter to anybody else anyhow.
He felt a pressure—diffuse, almost intangible, yet summoning. It was as if his hand were being squeezed. "David?"
"Are you ready?"
Bobby let a comer of his mind linger in his remote body, just for a second; shadowy limbs formed around him, and be took a deep breath, squeezed his hands into fists, relaxed again. "Let's do it."
Now Bobby's viewpoint began to fall from the Afri- can sky, down toward me southern coast- And as he fell, day and night began to flap across me patient face of the continent, centuries falling away like leaves from an au- tumn tree.
A hundred thousand years deep, they paused. Bobby and David hovered like two fireflies before a face: heavy- browed, fiat-nosed, clear-eyed, female.
Not quite human.
Behind her, a small family group—powerfully built adults, children like baby gorillas—were working at a fire they had built on mis ancient beach. Beyond them was a low cliff, and the sky above was a crisp, deep blue; perhaps this was a winter's day.
The brothers sank deeper.
The details, the family group, the powder-blue sky, winked out of existence. The Neandertal grandmother herself blurred, becoming expressionless, as one gener- ation was laid over another, too fast for the eye to fol- low. The landscape became a grayish outline, centuries of weather and seasonal growth passing with each sec- ond.
The multiple-ancestor face flowed and changed. Half a million years deep her forehead lowered, her eye socket ridges growing more prominent, her chin reced- ing, her teeth and jaws pronounced. Perhaps this face was now apelike, Bobby thought. But those eyes re- mained curious, intelligent.
Now her skin tone changed in great slow washes, dark to tight to dark.
"Homo Erectus" David said. "A toolmaker. Migrated around the planet. We're still falling. A hundred thou- sand years every few seconds, good God. But so little changes!..."
The next transition came suddenly. The brow sank lower, the face grew longer—though the brain of this remote grandmother, much smaller than a modern hu- man's, was nevertheless larger than a chimpanzee's.
"Homo Habilis," said David- "Or perhaps this is Aus- tralopithecus. The evolutionary lines are tangled. We're already two million years deep."
The anthropological labels scarcely mattered. It was profoundly disturbing, Bobby found, to gaze at this flick- ering multigeneration face, the face of a chimpanzee-like creature he might not have looked at twice in some zoo .,. and to know that this was hi? ancestor, the mother of his grandmothers, in an unbroken line of descent. Maybe this was how the Victorians felt when Darwin got back from the Galapagos, he thought.
Now the last vestiges of humanity were being shed, the brain pan shrinking further, those eyes growing cloudy, puzzled.
The background, blurred by the passage of the years, became greener. Perhaps there were forests covering Af- rica, this deep in time. And still the ancestor diminished, her face, fixed in the glare of the WormCam viewpoint, becoming more elemental, those eyes larger, more timid. Now she reminded Bobby more of a tarsier, or a lemur.
But yet those forward-facing eyes, set in a flat face, still held a poignant mem
ory, or promise.
David impulsively slowed their descent, and brought them fleetingly to a halt some forty million years deep.
The shrewlike face of the ancestor peered out at Bobby, eyes wide and nervous. Behind her was a back- ground of leaves, branches. On a plain beyond, dimly glimpsed through green light, there was a herd of what looked like rhinoceros—but with huge, misshapen heads, each fitted with six horns. The herd moved slowly, massive, tails flicking, browsing on low bushes, and reaching up to the dangling branches of trees. Her- bivores, then. A young straggler was being stalked by a group of what looked like horses—but these "horses," with prominent teeth and tense, watchful motions, ap- peared to be predators.
David said, "The first great heyday of the mammals. Forests all over the planet; the grasslands have all but disappeared. And so have the modem fauna: there are no fully-evolved horses, rhinos, pigs, cattle, cats, dogs..."
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 33
