The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Kate said, “Why do you want to help me?”

  Mary looked embarrassed. “Because you’re family. More or less.”

  Bobby said, “Your mother is family too.”

  Mary glared at him. “I’ll cut you a deal, if it’ll make you feel better. Let me get you out of here. Let me save Kate’s head from being sliced open. In return I’ll call my mother. Deal?”

  Kate and Bobby exchanged a glance. “Deal.”

  Mary dug into her tunic and produced a swatch of cloth, which she shook out. “SmartShroud.”

  Bobby said, “Is there room for two in there?”

  Mary was grinning. “I was hoping you’d say that. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  •

  Hiram’s security guards, alerted by a routine WormCam monitor, arrived ten minutes later. The apartment, brightly lit, was empty. The guards began to squabble over who would have to tell Hiram and take the blame — and then fell silent, as they realized he was, or would be, watching anyhow.

  Three

  The light of other days

  Often in the stilly nighty

  Ere Slumbers chain has bound me,

  Fond Memory brings the light

  Of other days around me.

  —Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

  Chapter 23

  The floodlit stage

  Rome, A.D. 2041: Holding Heather’s hand, David was walking through the dense, swarming heart of the city; the night sky above, layered with smog, looked as orange as the clouds of Titan.

  Even this late Rome was crowded with sightseers. Many, like Heather, were walking around with Mind’sEye headbands or Glasses-and-Gloves.

  Four years after the first mass-market release of the WormCam, it had become a fashionable and alluring pastime to become a time tourist at many of the world’s ancient sites, wandering through deep layers of past: David had determined he must try the Scuba tour of sunken Venice before he left Italy… Alluring, yes: and David understood why. The past had become a comfortable and familiar place, its exploration a safe, synthetic adventure, the perfect place to avert the eyes from the blank meteoric wall that terminated the future. How ironic, thought David, that a world denied its future was suddenly granted its past.

  And escape was tempting, from a world where even the transformed present was a strange and disturbing place.

  Almost everybody now wore a WormCam of some kind, generally the wristwatch-sized miniaturized version powered by squeezed-vacuum technology. The personal WormCam was a link to the rest of mankind, to the glories and horrors of the past — and, not least, a useful gadget for looking around the next corner.

  And everybody was reshaped by the WormCam’s relentless glare.

  People didn’t even dress the way they used to. Some of the older people, here in Rente’s crowded streets, still wore clothing that would have been recognizable, even fashionable, a few years before. Some tourist types, in fact, walked around defiantly dressed in loud T-shirts and shorts, just as they had for decades. One woman was wearing a shirt with a gaudy, flashing message:

  HEY, UP THERE IN THE FUTURE:

  GET YOUR GRANDMOM OUT OF HERE!

  But many more people had covered up, wearing seamless one-piece coveralls that buttoned high on the neck, and with long sleeves and trouser legs that terminated in sewn-on gloves and boots. There were even some examples of all-over-cover styles imported from the Islamic world; shapeless smocks and tunics that trailed along the ground, headpieces hiding all but the eyes, which were uniformly staring and wary.

  Others had reacted quite differently. Here was a nudist couple, two men hand in hand wearing slack middle-aged bellies over shrunken genitalia with defiant pride.

  But, cautious or defiant, the older folk — among whom David reluctantly counted himself — displayed a continual uncomfortable awareness of the WormCam’s unblinking gaze.

  The young, growing up with the WormCam, were different.

  Many of the young went simply naked, save for practical items like purses and sandals. But they seemed to David to have none of the shyness or self-consciousness of their elders, as if they were making a choice about what to wear based simply on practicality or a desire to display personality, rather than any modesty or taboo.

  One group of youngsters wore masks that showed projections of the broad face of a young man. Girls and boys alike wore the face, and it displayed a range of conditions and emotions — rain-lashed, sun-drenched, bearded and clean-shaven, laughing and crying, even sleeping — that seemed to have nothing to do with the activities of the wearers. It was disconcerting to watch, like seeing a group of clones wandering through the Rome night.

  These were Romulus masks, the latest fashion accessory from OurWorld. Romulus, founder of the city, had become quite a character for the young Romans since the WormCam had proved he really existed — even if his brother and all that stuff about the wolf had proved mythical. Each mask was just a SoftScreen, moulded to the face, with inbuilt WormCam feeds, and it showed the face of Romulus as he had been at the exact age, to the minute, of the wearer. OurWorld was targeting other parts of the world with regional variants of the same idea.

  It was a terrific piece of marketing. But David knew it would take him a lifetime to get used to the sight of the face of a young Iron Age male above a pair of pert bare breasts.

  They passed through a small square, a patch of unhealthy-looking greenery surrounded by tall, antique buildings. On a bench here David noticed a young couple, boy and girl, both naked. They were perhaps sixteen. The girl was on the boy’s lap, and they were kissing ardently. The boy’s hand was urgently squeezing the girl’s small breast. And her hand, dug in between their bodies, was wrapped around his erection.

  David knew that some (older) commentators dismissed all this as hedonism, a mad dancing of the young before the onset of the fire. It was a mindless, youthful reflection of the awful, despairing nihilist philosophies that had grown recently in response to the looming existence of the Wormwood: philosophies in which the universe was seen as little more than a giant fist intent on smashing flat all of life and beauty and thought, over and over. There never had been a way to survive the universe’s slow decline, of course; now the Wormwood had made that cosmic terminus gruesomely real, and there was nothing to do but dance and rut and cry.

  Such notions were dismally seductive. But the explanation for the ways of modern youth was surely simpler than that, David thought. It was surely another WormCam consequence: the relentless, disconcerting shedding of taboos, in a world where all the walls had come down.

  A handful of people had stopped to watch the couple. One man — naked too, perhaps in his twenties — was slowly masturbating.

  Technically that was still illegal. But nobody was trying to enforce such laws any more. After all, that lonely man could go back to his hotel room and use his WormCam to zoom in on anybody he chose, any time of the day or night — which was what people had been using the WormCam for since it was released, and movies and magazines and such for a lot longer than that. At least, in this age of the WormCam, there was no more hypocrisy.

  But such incidents were already becoming rare. New social norms were emerging The world seemed to David to be a little like a crowded restaurant. Yes, you could listen in to what the man on the next table was saying to his wife. But it was impolite; if you indulged, you would be ostracized. And, after all, many people actually relished crowded, public places; the buzz, the excitement, the sense of belonging could override any desire for privacy.

  As David watched, the girl broke away, smiling at her lover, and she slid down his body, smooth as a seal, and took his erection in her mouth. And -

  David turned away, face burning.

  Their lovemaking had been clumsy, amateurish, perhaps overeager; their two bodies, though young, were not specially attractive specimens. But then, this was not art, or even pornography; this was human life, in all its clumsy animal beauty. David tried to imagine how it must be to b
e that boy, here and now, freed of taboos, reveling in the power of his body and his lover’s.

  Heather, however, saw none of his. Wandering beside him, eyes glinting, she was still immersed in the deep past — and perhaps it was time he joined her there. With a sense of relief — and a brief word to the Search Engine, requesting guidance — David donned his own Mind’sEye and slid into another time.

  •

  …He walked into daylight But this crowded street, lined by great, boxy multi-storey apartment blocks, was dark. Hemmed in by the peculiar topography of the site — the famous seven hills — Romans, already a million strong, had built up.

  In many ways, the city had a remarkably modern feel. But this was not the twenty-first century: he was glimpsing this swarming, vibrant capital on a bright Italian summer afternoon just five years after the cruel death of Christ Himself. There were no motor vehicles, of course, and few animal-drawn carts or carriages. The most common form of transport, other than by foot, was by hired litter or sedan chair. Even so, the streets were so crowded that even foot traffic could circulate at little more than a crawl.

  There was a crush of humanity — citizens, soldiers, paupers and slaves — all around them. David and Heather towered over most of these people; and besides, walking on the modern ground surface, they were hovering above the cobbled floor of the ancient city. The poor and the slaves looked stunted, some visibly ravaged by malnourishment and disease, even rat-like, as they crowded around the public water fountains. But many of the citizens — some in brilliant-white gold-stitched togas, benefiting from generations of affluence funded by the expanding Empire — were as tall and well fed as David, and, in suitable clothes, would surely not have looked out of place in the streets of any city of the twenty-first century.

  But David could not get used to the way the swarming crowds simply pushed through him. It was hard to accept that to these Romans, busily engaged with their own concerns, he was no more than an insubstantial ghost. He longed to be here, to play a part.

  They came now to a more open place. This was the Forum Romanum: a finely paved rectangular court surrounded by grand, two-story public buildings, fronted by rows of narrow marble columns. A line of triumphal columns, each capped by gold-leafed statues, strode boldly down the centre of the court, and farther ahead, beyond a clutter of characteristically Roman red-tiled, sloping roofs, he could see the curving bulk of the Colosseum.

  In one corner he noticed a group of citizens, grandly dressed — Senators, perhaps — arguing vehemently, tapping at tablets, oblivious of the beauty and marvel around them. They were proof that this city was no museum, but very obviously the operational capital of a huge, complex and well-run empire — the Washington of its day — and its very mundanity was exhilarating, so different from the seamless, shining, depopulated reconstructions of the old, pre-WormCam museums, movies and books.

  But this Imperial city, already ancient, had just a few centuries more to survive. The great aqueducts would fall, the public fountains fail; and for a thousand years afterwards the Romans would be reduced to drawing their water by hand from the Tiber.

  There was a tap on his shoulder.

  David turned, startled. A man stood there, dressed in a drab, charcoal-grey suit and tie, utterly out of place here. He had short-cropped blond hair, and he was holding up a badge. And, like David and Heather, he was floating a few metres above the ground of Imperial Rome.

  It was FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens.

  “You,” David said. “What do you want with us? Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage to my family, Special Agent?”

  “I never intended any damage, sir.”

  “And now.”

  “And now I need your help.”

  Suppressing a sigh, David lifted his hands to his Mind’sEye headband. He could feel the indefinable tingle that came with the breaking of the equipment’s transceiver link to his cortex.

  Suddenly he was immersed in the hot Roman night.

  And around him the Forum Romanum was reduced. Great chunks of marble rubble littered the floor, their surfaces brown, decaying in the foul air of the city. Of the great buildings, only a handful of columns and crosspieces survived, poking out of the ground like exposed bones, and sickly urban-poisoned grass grew through cracks in the flags.

  Bizarrely, amid the gaudy twenty-first-century tourists, grey-suited Mavens looked even more out of place than in ancient Rome.

  Michael Mavens turned and studied Heather. Her eyes, dilated widely, sparkled with the unmistakable pearly glint of viewpoints, cast by the miniature WormCam generators implanted in her retinas. David took her hand. She squeezed gently.

  Mavens caught David’s eye. He nodded, understanding. But he pressed: “We need to talk, sir. It’s important.”

  “My brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. Will you accompany us back to our hotel? It isn’t far.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  So David walked from the ruined Forum Romanum, gently guiding Heather around the fallen masonry. Heather turned her head like a camera stand, still immersed in the bright glories of a city long dead, and spacetime distortion shone in her eyes.

  •

  They reached the hotel.

  Heather had barely spoken since the Forum Romanum. She allowed David to kiss her on the cheek before she went to her room. There she lay down in the dark, facing the ceiling, her wormhole eyes sparkling.

  David realized, uneasily, that he had absolutely no idea what she was looking at.

  When he returned to his own room, Mavens was waiting. David prepared them drinks from the minibar: a single malt for himself, a bourbon for the agent.

  Mavens made small talk. “You know, Hiram Patterson’s reach is awesome. In your bathroom just now I used a WormCam mirror to pick the spinach out of my teeth. My wife has a wormhole NannyCam at home. My brother and his wife are using a WormCam monitor to keep track of their thirteen-year-old daughter, who’s a little wild, in their opinion… And so on. To think of it: the miracle technology of the age, and we use it in such trivial ways.”

  David said briskly, “As long as he continues to sell it, Hiram doesn’t care what we do with it. Why don’t you tell me why you’ve come so far to see me, Special Agent Mavens?”

  Mavens dug into a pocket of his crumpled jacket, and pulled out a thumbnail-sized data disk; he turned it like a coin, and David saw hologram shimmers in its surface. Mavens placed the disk carefully on the small polished table beside his drink. “I’m looking for Kate Manzoni,” he said. “And Bobby Patterson, and Mary Mays. I drove them into hiding. I want to bring them back. Help them rebuild their lives.”

  “What can I do?” David asked sourly. “After all, you have the resources of the FBI behind you.”

  “Not for this. To tell the truth the Agency has given up on the three of them. I haven’t.”

  “Why? You want to punish them some more?”

  “Not at all,” Mavens said uncomfortably. “Manzoni’s was the first high-profile case which hinged on WormCam evidence. And we got it wrong.” He smiled, looking tired. “I’ve been checking. That’s the wonderful thing about the WormCam, isn’t it? It’s the world’s greatest second-guess machine.

  “You see, it’s now possible to read many types of information through the WormCam: particularly, the contents of computer memories and storage devices. I checked through the equipment Kate Manzoni was using at the time of her alleged crime. And, eventually, I found that what Manzoni claimed had been true all along.”

  “Which is?”

  “That Hiram Patterson was responsible for the crime — though it would be difficult to pin it on him, even using the WormCam. And he framed Manzoni.” He shook his head. “I knew and admired Kate Manzoni’s journalism long before the case came up. The way she exposed the Wormwood cover-up.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” David said levelly. “You were only doing your job.”

  Mavens said hars
hly, “It’s a job I screwed up. Not the first. But those who were harmed — Bobby and Kate — have dropped out of sight. And they aren’t the only ones.”

  “Hiding from the WormCam,” David said.

  “Of course. It’s changing everybody…”

  It was true. In the new openness, businesses boomed. Crime seemed to have dropped to an irreducible minimum, a bump driven by mental disorder. Politicians had, cautiously, found ways to operate in the new glass-walled world, with their every move open to scrutiny by a concerned and online citizenry, now and in the future. Beyond the triviality of time tourism, a new true history, cleansed of myths and lies — and no less wonderful for that — was entering the consciousness of the species; nations and religions and corporations seemed almost to have worked through their round of apologies to each other and to the people. The surviving religions, refounded and cleansed, purged of corruption and greed, were re-emerging into the light, and — it seemed to David — were beginning to address their true mission, which was humanity’s search for the transcendent.

  From the highest to the lowest. Even manners had changed. People seemed to be becoming a little more tolerant of one another, able to accept each other’s differences and faults — because each person knew he or she was under scrutiny too.

  Mavens was saying, “You know, it’s as if we have all been standing in spotlights on a darkened stage. Now the theatre lights are up, and we can see all the way to the wings — like it or not. I guess you’ve heard of MAS? — Mutually Assured Surveillance — a consequence of the fact that everybody carries a WormCam; everybody is watching everybody else. Suddenly our nation is full of courteous, wary, watchful citizens. But it can be harmful. Some people seem to be becoming surveillance obsessives, unwilling to do anything that will mark them out as different from the norm. It’s like living in a village dominated by prying gossips…”