Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days

by Light Of Other Days (lit)

  My God, he thought.

  "Am I dead? Have I been resurrected, Mary?"

  She growled, and ran her hand through loose hair. "David said you'd be like this. Questions, questions." Her intonation was clumsy, her voice dry, as if she wasn't used to speaking aloud.

  "Why have I been brought back? ... Oh. The Worm- wood. Is that it?"

  Mary frowned, and briefly seemed to be listening to remote voices. "The Wormwood? You mean the comet. We pushed that away long ago." She said it casually, as if a moth had been brushed aside.

  Bemused, he asked, "Then what?"

  "I can tell you how you got here," she said gently. "As to why, you'll have to figure that out for your- self. . .."

  Sixty more years had worn away, he learned.

  It was the WormCam, of course. It was possible now to look back into time and read off a complete DNA sequence from any moment in an individual's life. And it was possible to download a copy of that person's mind—making her briefly Joined, across years, even de- cades—and, by putting the two together, regenerated body and downloaded mind, to restore her.

  To bring her back from the dead.

  "You were dying," said Mary. "At the instant we cop- ied you. Though you didn't know it yet."

  "My cloning."

  "Yes. The procedure was still experimental in Hiram's time. There were problems with your telomeres." Ge- netic structures mat controlled the aging of cells. "Your decline was rapid after—"

  "After my last memory, in the Wormworks-"

  "Yes."

  How strange to think mat even as he handed that last cup of coffee to David his life had already been effec- tively over, the remnant, evidently, not worth living.

  She took his hand. When he stood, he felt light, dreamlike, spindly. For the first time he noticed she was naked, but wearing a pattern of implants in the flesh of her arms and belly. Her breasts seemed to move oddly: languidly, as if the gravity wasn't quite right here.

  She said, 'There is so muctr-you must learn. We have room now. The Earth's population is stable. We live on Mars, the moons of the outer planets, and we're heading for the stars. There have even been experiments in down- loading human minds into the quantum foam."

  ". -. Room for what?"

  "For the Anastasis. We intend to restore all human souls, back to the beginning of the species. Every refu- gee, every aborted child. We intend to put right me past, to defeat the awful tragedy of death in a universe that may last tens of billions of years."

  How wonderful, he thought. A hundred billion souls, restored like the leaves of an autumnal tree. What will it be likel

  "But," he said slowly, "arc they the same people? Am I me?"

  "Some philosophers argue that it's possible. Leibniz's

  Identity of the Indiscemibles tells us that you are you. But—"

  "But you don't think so."

  "No. I'm sorry."

  He thought that over.

  "When we're all revived, what will we do next?"

  She seemed puzzled by the question. "Why—any- thing we want, of course." She took his hand. "Come. Kate is waiting for you."

  Hand in hand they walked into the light.

  AFTERWORD

  The concept of a "time viewer," though venerable, has been explored only sparingly in science fiction—perhaps because it is so much less dramatic than time travel. But there have been a number of remarkable works on the theme, ranging from Gardner Hunting's The Vicarion (1926) to Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemp- tion of Christopher Columbus (1996). One of us has briefly sketched its implications in previous works (Childhood's End, 1953, "The Parasite," 1953). Perhaps the best-known—and best—example is Bob Shaw's "slow glass" classic which shares our title (Analog, Au- gust 1966).

  Today me notion has the first glimmers of scientific plausibility, offered by modem physics—and a reso- nance with our own times, surrounded as we are increas- ingly by the apparatus of surveillance.

  The concept of spacetime wormholes is well described in Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (W. W. Norton, 1994). The proposal that wormholes might be generated by "squeezing the vacuum" was set out by David Hochberg and Thomas Kephart (Physics Letters B, vol. 268, pp. 377-383, 1991).

  The very speculative and, we hope, respectful recon- struction of the historical life of Jesus Christ is largely drawn from A. N. Wilson's fine biography Jesus (Sinclair- Stevenson, 1992). For assistance with the passages on Abraham Lincoln me authors are indebted to Warren Alien

  Smith, New York correspondent of Gay and Lesbian Hu- manist (UK).

  The idea that primitive Earth was afflicted by savage glacial episodes has been proposed by Paul Hoffman of Harvard University and his coworkers (see Science, vol. 281, p. 1342, 28 August 1998). And the notion that primitive life might have survived Earth's early bom- bardment by sheltering deep underground is explored, for example, in Paul Davies' The Fifth Miracle (Penguin, 1998).

  Thanks are due to Andy Sawyer of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, Sydney Jones Library, Liverpool University, for his assistance with research, and to Ed- ward James of Reading University and to Eric Brown for reading drafts of the manuscript. Any errors or omissions are, of course, our responsibility.

  This book, of its nature, contains a great deal of speculation on historical figures and events. Some of this is reasonably well founded on current historical sources, some of it is at the remoter fringe of respectable theorizing, and some of it is little more than the authors' own wild imaginings. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to sort out which is which, in the anticipation that we are not likely to be proven wrong until the invention of the WormCam itself.

  The End