The WonnCam couldn't necessarily deprive him of his liberty or his privacy, but, it seemed, it could wall off his humanity.
Suddenly Kate was tugging at his arm, ramming her fingers into his palm. Found her. Mary, Mary is here. Over here. Come come come.
Startled, Bobby let himself be led forward.
She was sitting alone in a corner of the room.
Bobby explored the setup, lightly, with his fingers.
She was clothed, wearing a jumpsuit- There was a plate of food, cooling and untouched, at her side. She wasn't wearing a heat mask.
Her eyes were closed. She didn't respond to then- touches, but he sensed she wasn't asleep.
Kate poked grumpily at Bobby's palm.... Might as well wear neon sign here I am come get me . ..
Is she okay?
Don't know can't tell.
Bobby picked up his sister's limp hand, massaged it, and handspelled her name, over and over. Mary Mary Mary, Mary Mays, Bobby here, Bobby Patterson, Mary Mary—
Abruptly, she seemed to come awake. "Bobby?"
He could sense the shocked, deepened silence around the room. It was the first word anybody had spoken aloud since they had arrived here- Kate, beside him, reached forward and clamped her hand over Mary's mouth.
Bobby found Mary's hand and let her spell to him.
Sorry sorry. Distracted. She lifted his hand to her mouth, and he felt her lips pull up into a smile. Dis- tracted and happy, then. But that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Happy meant careless.
What happened to you?
Her smile broadened. Not supposed to be happy, big brother?
Know what I mean.
Implant, she replied simply.
Implant what implant?
Cortical.
Oh, he thought, dismayed. Rapidly he relayed the in- formation to Kate.
Shit bad shit, Kate signed. Illegal.
Know that.
... Jamaica, Mary signed to him now.
What?
Cell friend in Jamaica. See through his eyes, hear through his ears. Better than London. Mary's touch in his hand was delicate, an analogue of a whisper.
The new cortical implants, adapted from neural- implant VR apparatus, were the final expression of WormCam technology: a small squeezed-vacuum worm- hole generator, together with neural sensor apparatus, buried deep in the cortex of the recipient. The generator was laced with neurotropic chemicals so that, over sev- eral months, the recipient's neurons would grow path- ways into the generator. And the neural sensor was a highly sensitive neuron activity pattern analyzer, capable of pinpointing individual neuronal synapses.
Such an implant could read and write to a brain, and link it to others. By a conscious effort of will, an implant recipient could establish a WormCam connection from the center of her own mind to any other recipient's.
Armed with the implants, a new linked community was emerging from the Arenas and the truth squads and other swirling maelstroms of thought and discussion that had come to characterize the new, young, worldwide polity- Brains joined to brains, ^linds linked.
They called themselves the Joined.
It was, Bobby supposed, a bright new future. What it amounted to here and now, however, was an eighteen- year-old girl, his sister, with a wormhole in her head.
You scared, signed Mary now. Horror stories. Group mind. Lose soul. Blah blah.
Hell yes.
Fear unknown. Maybe—
But suddenly Mary pulled back from him and got to her feet. Bobby reached out blindly, found her head, but she pulled away, was gone.
All over the room, at exactly the same moment, others had moved. It was like a flock of birds rising as one from a tree.
There were slivers of light as the front door was opened.
Come on, Bobby signed. He grabbed Kate's hand and they made their way with the rest toward the door.
Scared, Kate signed as they walked, hurriedly. You scared. Cold palm. Pulse. Can tell.
He was scared, he conceded. But not of the abrupt detection; they had been through situations like this be- fore, and a group in a safe house like this always had an elaborate system of WonnCam-equipped sentries. No, it wasn't detection or even capture he was scared of.
It was the way Mary and the others had acted as one. A single organism. Joined.
He slid into his 'Shroud.
THE GRANDMOTHERS
In the Wormworks, David sat before a large wall- mounted SoftScreen.
Hiram's face peered out at him: a younger Hiram, a softer face—but indubitably Hiram. The face was framed by a dimly lit urban landscape, decaying housing blocks and immense road systems, a place that seemed to have been designed to exclude human beings. This was the outskirts of Birmingham, a great city at the heart of England, just before the end of the twentieth cen- tury—some years before Hirarn had abandoned this old, decaying country in hope of a better opportunity in America.
David had succeeded in combining Michael Mavens' DNA-trace facility with a WormCam guidance system, and he had extended it to cross the generations. So, just as he had managed to scan back along the line of Bobby's life, now he had traced back to Bobby's father, the originator of Bobby's DNA.
And now, driven by curiosity, he intended to go fur- ther back yet, tracing his own roots—which was, in the end, the only history that mattered.
In the darkness of the cavernous lab, a shadow drifted across the wall, sourceless. He caught it in his peripheral vision, ignored it.
He knew it was Bobby, his brother. David didn't know why Bobby was here. He would join David when he was ready.
David wrapped his fingers around a small joystick control, and pressed it forward.
Hiram's face smoothed out, growing younger. The back- ground became a blur around him, a blizzard of days and nights, dimly visible buildings—suddenly replaced by gray-green plains, the fen country where Hiram grew up. Soon Hiram's face shrank on itself, became innocent, boyish, and shriveled in a moment to an infant.
And it was replaced suddenly by a woman's face.
The woman was smiling at David—or rather, at some- body behind the invisible wormhole viewpoint which hovered before her eyes. He had chosen from this point to follow the line of mitochondrial DNA, passed un- changed from mother to daughter—and so this was, of course, his grandmother. She was young, mid-twenties— of course she was young; the DNA trace would have switched to hei- from Hiram at the instant of his concep- tion. Mercifully, he would not see these grandmothers grow old. She was beautiful, in a quiet way, with a look that he thought of as classically English; high cheek- bones, blue eyes, strawberry blond hair tied up into a tight bun.
Hiram's Asian ancestry had come from his father's line. David wondered what difficulty that love affair had caused this pretty young woman in such a time and place.
And behind him, in the Wormworks, he sensed that shadow drifting closer.
He pressed at the joystick, and the rattle of days and nights resumed. The face grew girlish, its changing hair- style fluttering at the edge of visibility. Then the face seemed to lose its form, becoming blurred—bursts of adolescent puppy fat?—before shrinking into the form- lessness of infancy.
Another abrupt transition. His great-grandmother, then. This young woman was in an office, frowning, concentrating, her hair a ridiculously elaborate sculpture of tightly coiled plaits. In the background David glimpsed more women, mostly young, toiling in rows at clumsy mechanical calculators, laboriously turning keys and levers and handles. This must be the 1930s, decades before the birth of the silicon computer; this was perhaps as complex an information processing center as any- where on the planet. Already this past, so close to his own time, was a foreign country, he thought.
He released the girl from her time trap, and she im- ploded into infancy.
Soon another young woman stared out at him. She was dressed in a long skirt and ill-fitting, badly made blouse. She was waving a British Union Flag, and she was being embraced by a soldi
er in a flat tin helmet. The street behind her was crowded, men in suits and caps and overalls, the women in long coats. It was raining, a dismal autumnal day, but nobody seemed to mind.
"November 1918," David said aloud. "The Armistice. The end of four years of bloody slaughter in Europe. Not a bad night to be conceived." He turned. "Don't you think, Bobby?"
The shadow, motionless against the wall, seemed to hesitate. Then it separated, moved freely, took on the outline of a human form. Hands and face appeared, hov- ering disembodied.
"Hello, David."
"Sit with me," David said.
His brother sat with a rustle of SmartShroud smart cloth. He seemed awkward, as if unused to being so close to anybody in the open. It didn't matter; David demanded nothing of him.
The Armistice Day girl's face smoothed, diminished, shrank to an infant, and there was another transition: a girl with some of the looks of her descendants, the blue eyes and strawberry hair, but thinner, paler, her cheeks hollow. Shedding her years, she moved through a blur of dark urban scenes—factories and terraced houses— and then a flash of childhood, another generation, an- other girl, the same dismal landscape.
"They seem so young," Bobby murmured; his voice was scratchy, as if long unused.
"I think we're going to have to get used to that," Da- vid said grimly. "We're already deep in the nineteenth century. The great medical advances are being lost, and hygiene awareness is rudimentary. People are dying of simple, curable diseases. And of course we're following a line of women who at least lived long enough to reach childbearing age. We aren't glimpsing their sisters who died in infancy, leaving no descendants."
The generations fell away, faces deflating like bal- loons, one after the other, subtly changing from gener- ation to generation, slow genetic drift working.
Here was a girl whose scarred face was marked by tears at the moment she gave birth. Her baby had been taken from her, David saw—or rather, in this time- reversed view; given to her—moments after the birth. Her pregnancy unraveled in misery and shame, until they reached the moment that denned her life: a brutal rape committed, it seemed, by a family member, a brother or uncle. Cleansed of that darkness, the girl grew younger, pretty, smiling, her face filling with hope despite the squalor of her life, as she found beauty in simplicity: a flower's brief bloom, the shape of a cloud. i. The world must be full of such anguished biographies, David thought, unraveling as they sank into the past, effects preceding cause, pain and despair falling away as the blankness of childhood approached.
Suddenly the background changed again. Now, around this new grandmother's face, some ten genera- tions remote, there was countryside: small fields, pigs and cows scratching at the ground, a multitude of grimy children. The woman was careworn, gap-toothed, her face lined, appearing old—but David knew she could be no more than thirty-five or forty.
"Our ancestors were farmers," Bobby said.
"Most everybody was, before the great migrations to the cities. But the Industrial Revolution is unwinding. They probably can't even make steel."
The seasons pulsed, summer and winter, light and dark; and the generations of women, daughter to mother, followed their slower cycle from careworn parent to bright maiden to wide-eyed child. Some of the women erupted onto the 'Screen with faces twisted in pain: they were those unfortunates, increasingly more common, who had died in childbirth.
History withdrew. The centuries were receding, the world emptying of people. Elsewhere the Europeans were drawing back from the Americas, soon to forget those great continents even existed, and me Golden Horde—great armies of Mongols and Tartars, their corpses leaping from the ground—was re-forming and drawing back into central Asia.
None of that touched these toiling English peasants, without education or books, working the same piece of ground for generation on generation: people to whom, David reflected, the local collector of tithes would be a far more formidable figure than Tamerlaine or Kublai Khan. If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.
At last, around the framed face of one girl—hair mat- ted and dark, skin sallow, expression ratlike, wary— there was an abrupt blur of scenery. They glimpsed dis- mal countryside, a ragged family of refugees walking endlessly—and, here and there, heaps of corpses, burning.
"A plague," Bobby said.
"Yes. They are forced to flee. But there is nowhere to go."
Soon the image stabilized on another anonymous scrap of land set in a huge, flat landscape; and once more the generations of toil, so calamitously interrupted, re- sumed.
On the horizon there was a Norman cathedral, an im- mense, brooding, sandstone box. If this was the fens, the great plain to the east of England, then that could be Ely. Already centuries old, the great construction looked like a giant sandstone spaceship which had descended from the sky, and it must utterly have dominated the mental landscapes of these toiling people—which was, of course, its purpose.
But even the great cathedral began to shrink, collaps- ing with startling swiftness into smaller, simpler forms, at last disappearing from view altogether.
And the numbers of people were still falling, the great tide of humanity drawing back all over the planet. The Norman invaders must already have dismantled their great keeps and castles and withdrawn to France. Soon the waves of invaders from Scandinavia and Europe would return home from Britain. Farther afield, as the death and birth of Muhammad approached, the Muslims were withdrawing from northern Africa. By the time Christ was brought down from the Cross, there would be only around a hundred million people left in all the world, less than half the population of the United States of David's day.
As the faces of their ancestors pulsed by, there was another change of scene, a brief migration. Now these remote families scratched at a land of ruins—low walls, exposed cellars, the ground littered with blocks of mar- ble and other building stone.
Then buildings grew like time-lapsed flowers, the scattered stones coalescing.
David paused. He fixed on the face of a woman, his own remote ancestor some eighty generations removed. She was perhaps forty, handsome, her strawberry hair tinged with gray, her eyes blue. Her nose was proudly prominent, Romanesque.
Behind her the dismal fields had vanished, to be re- placed by an orderly townscape: a square surrounded by colonnades and statues and tall buildings, their roofs tiled red. The square was crowded with stalls, vendors frozen in the act of hawking their wares. The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of die desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.
"A Roman settlement," Bobby said.
"Yes." David pointed at me 'Screen. "I think this is the forum- That is probably the basilica, the town hall and law courts. These rows of colonnades lead to shops and offices. And the building over there might be a tem- ple. ..."
"It looks so orderly," Bobby murmured. "Even mod- em. Streets and buildings, offices and shops. You can see it's all set out on a rectangular grid, like Manhattan. I feel as if I could walk into me 'Screen and go look for a bar."
The contrast of this little island of civilization with the centuries-wide sea of ignorance and toil that sur- rounded it was so striking tha^David felt a reluctance to leave it.
"You're taking a risk to come here," he said.
Bobby's face, hovering above the 'Shroud, was like an eerie mask, illuminated by die frozen smile of his distant grandmother. "I know that. And I know you've been helping the FBI. The DNA trace—"
David sighed. "If not me, somebody else would have developed it. At least this way I know what they're up to." He tapped his SoftScreen. A border of smaller im- ages lit up around the image of the grandmother. "Here. WormCam views of all the neighboring rooms and the corridors. This aerial view shows t
he parking lot- I've mixed in infrared recognition. If anybody approaches—"
"Thanks."
"It's been too long, brother. I haven't forgotten the way you helped me through my own crisis, my brush with addiction."
"We all have crises. It was nothing."
"On the contrary ... You haven't told me why you've come here."
Bobby shrugged, the movement inside his 'Shroud a shadowy blur. "I know you've been looking for us. I'm alive and well- And so is Kate."
"And happy?"
Bobby smiled. "If I wanted happy, I could just turn on the chip in my head. There's more to life than hap- piness, David. I want you to take a message to Heather."
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 29