The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “And is there a way?”

  “Well, perhaps. Casimir injectors are a rather clunky, nineteenth-century way of making negative energy. But it turns out that such regions can occur naturally. If space is sufficiently strongly distorted, quantum vacuum and other fluctuations can be amplified until… Well. This is a subtle quantum effect. It’s called a squeezed vacuum. The trouble is, the best theory we have says you need a quantum black note to give you a strong enough gravity field. And so…”

  “And so, you’re looking for a better theory.” Hiram riffled through the papers, stared at David’s handwritten notes, the equations linked by looping arrows. He glared around the room. “And not a SoftScreen in sight. Do you get out much? Ever? Or do you SmartDrive to and from work, your head in some dusty paper or other? From the moment you got here you had your FrancoAmerican head stuck up your broad and welcoming backside, and that’s where it has remained.”

  David bristled. “Is that a problem for you, Hiram?”

  “You know how much I rely on your work. But I can’t help feel that you’re missing the point here.”

  “The point? The point about what?”

  “The WormCam. What’s really significant about the ’Cam is what it’s doing out there.” He gestured at the window.

  “Seattle?”

  Hiram laughed. “Everywhere. And this is before the past-viewing stuff really starts to make an impact.” He seemed to come to a decision. He put his glass down. “Listen. Come take a trip with me tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “The Boeing plant.” He gave David a card; it bore a SmartDrive bar code. “Ten o’clock?”

  “All right. But.”

  Hiram stood up. “I regard myself as responsible for completing your education, son. I’ll show you what a difference the WormCam is making.”

  •

  Bobby brought Mary, his half-sister, to Kate’s abandoned cubicle in the Wormworks.

  Mary walked around the desk, touching the blank SoftScreen lying there, the surrounding acoustic partitions. It was all clinically neat, spotless, blank. “This is it?”

  “Her personal stuff has been cleared away. The cops took some items, work stuff. The rest we parcelled up for her family. And since then the forensics people have been crawling all over.”

  “It’s like a skull the scavengers have licked clean.”

  He grimaced. “Nice image.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes. But…”

  But, he thought, there was still some ineffable Kateness about this anonymous desk, this chair, as if in the months she had spent here she had somehow impressed herself on this dull piece of spacetime. He wondered how long this feeling would take to fade away.

  Mary was staring at him. “This is upsetting you, isn’t it?”

  “You’re perceptive. And frank to a fault.”

  She grinned, showing diamonds — presumably fake — studding her front teeth. “I’m fifteen years old. That’s my job. Is it true WormCams can look into the past?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Well, is it?”

  “…Yes.”

  “Show her to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Kate Manzoni. I never met her. Show her to me. You have WormCams here, don’t you?”

  “Of course. This is the Wormworks.”

  “Everyone knows you can see the past with a WormCam. And you do know how to work them. Or are you scared? Like you were scared of coming here.”

  “Up, if I may say so, yours. Come on.”

  Irritated now, he led her to the cage elevator which would take them to David’s workstation a couple of levels below.

  David wasn’t here today. The supervising tech welcomed Bobby and offered him help. Bobby made sure the rig was online, and declined further assistance. He sat at the swivel chair before David’s desk and began to set up the run, his fingers fumbling with the unfamiliar manual keys glowing in the SoftScreen.

  Mary had pulled up a stool beside him. “That interface is disgusting. This David must be some kind of retro freak.”

  “You ought to be more respectful. He’s my half brother.”

  She snorted. “Why should I be respectful, just because old man Hiram couldn’t keep from emptying his sack? Anyhow, what does David do all day?”

  “David is working on a new generation of WormCams. It’s something called squeezed-vacuum technology. Here.” He picked out a couple of references from David’s desk and showed them to her; she flicked through the close-printed pages of equations. “The dream is that soon we’ll be able to open up wormholes without needing a factory full of superconducting magnets. Much cheaper and smaller.”

  “But they will still be in the hands of the government and the big corporations. Right?”

  The big SoftScreen fixed to the partition in front of them lit up with a fizz of pixels. He could hear the whine of the generators powering the big, clumsy Casimir injectors in the pit below, smell the sharp ozone tang of powerful electric fields; as the machinery gathered its huge energies, he felt, as always, a surge of excitement, anticipation.

  And Mary was, to Bobby’s relief, silenced, at least temporarily.

  The static snowstorm cleared, and an image — a little blocky, but immediately recognizable — filled up the SoftScreen.

  They were looking down over Kate’s cubicle, a couple of floors above them here at the Wormworks. But what they saw now was no cleaned-out husk. Now, the cubicle was lived-in. A SoftScreen was slewed at an angle across the desk, and data scrolled across it, unremarked, while a frame in one corner bore what looked like a news broadcast, a talking head with miniature graphics. There were more signs of work in progress: a cut-off soda can adapted as a pencil holder, pens and pencils scattered over the desk with big yellow legal pads, a couple of hard-copy newspapers folded over and propped up.

  But what was more revealing — and heartbreaking — was the kipple, the personal stuff and litter that defined this as Kate’s space and no other: the steaming coffee in a therm-aware cup, scrunched up food wrappers, a prop-up calendar, an ugly, angular 1990s-style digital clock, a souvenir portrait — Bobby and Kate against the exotic background of RevelationLand — tacked ironically to one partition.

  The chair was pushed back from the desk, and was still rotating, slowly. We missed her by seconds, he thought.

  Mary was staring intently at the image, mouth open, fascinated by this window into the past — as everybody was, the first time. “We were just there. It’s so different. It’s incredible.”

  …And now Kate walked from offstage into the image, as Bobby had known she would. She was wearing a simple, practical smock, and a lick of hair was draped over her forehead, catching her eyes. She was frowning, concentrating, her fingers on the keyboard even before she had sat down. He found it hard to speak. “I know.”

  •

  The Boeing VR facility turned out to be a chamber fitted with row upon row of open steel cages — perhaps a hundred of them, David speculated. Beyond glass walls, white-coated engineers moved among brightly lit banks of computer equipment.

  The cages were gimbaled to move in three dimensions, and each of them contained a skeletal suit of rubber and steel, fitted with sensors and manipulators. David was strapped tightly into one of these, and he had to fight feelings of claustrophobia as his limbs were pinned in place. He waved away the genital attachment — which was absurdly huge, like a vacuum flask. “I don’t think I’ll be needing that on this trip…”

  A female tech held a helmet up before his head. It was a hollowed-out mass of electronics. Before it descended, he looked for Hiram. His father was in a cage at the other end of a row a few ranks ahead of him.

  “You seem a long way away.”

  Hiram raised a gloved hand, flexed his fingers. “It won’t make a difference once we’re immersed.” His voice echoed in the cavernous hall. “What do you think of the facility? Pretty impressive, huh?” He winked.<
br />
  David thought of the Mind’sEye, Bobby’s simple headband apparatus — a few hundred grams of metal which, by interfacing directly to the central nervous system, could replace all this total-touch-enclosure Boeing gadgetry. Once more, it seemed, Hiram had a winner.

  He let the tech drop the helmet over his head, and he was suspended in darkness…

  …which cleared slowly, murkily. He saw Hiram’s face hovering before him. It was illuminated by a soft red light.

  “First impressions,” Hiram snapped. He stepped back, revealing a landscape.

  David glanced around. Water, a sloping gravelly ground, a red sky. When he moved his head too rapidly the image crumbled, winking into pixels, and he could feel the helmet’s heavy movement.

  The horizon curved, quite sharply, as if he were viewing it from some great altitude. And on that horizon there were low, eroded, hills, whose shoulders reflected in the water.

  The air seemed thin, and he felt cold.

  He said, “First impressions? A beach at sunset… But that’s no sun I ever saw.”

  The “sun” was a ball of red light, fading to a yellow orange at its centre. It was sitting on the sharp, mist-free horizon, and was flattened to a lens shape, presumably by refraction. But it was immense: much bigger than the sun of Earth, a red-glowing dome covering perhaps a tenth of the sky. Perhaps it was a giant, he mused, a bloated, ageing star.

  The sky was deeper than a sunset sky, too: intense crimson overhead, scarlet around that hulking sun, black beyond. But even around the sun the stars shone — in fact, he realized, he could make out glimmering stars through the diffuse limb of the sun itself.

  Just to the right of the sun was a compact constellation that was hauntingly familiar: that W shape was surely Cassiopeia, one of the most easily recognizable star figures — but there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag.

  He took a step forward. The gravel crunched convincingly, and he could feel sharp stones beneath his feet — though he wondered if the pressure points on his soles matched what he saw on the ground.

  He walked the few paces to the water’s edge. Ice glinted on the rocks, and there were miniature floes extending out into the water a meter or so. The water was flat, almost still, heaving with a soft, languid slow motion. He bent and inspected a pebble. It was hard, black, heavily worn. Basalt? Underneath there was a glint of a crystalline deposit-salt, perhaps. Some bright star behind him brought out yellow-white highlights on the stone, even casting a shadow.

  He straightened up and hurled the rock out over the water. It flew long but slow — low gravity? — eventually hitting the water with a feeble splash; fat ripples spread in languid circles around the impact point.

  Hiram was standing beside him. He was wearing a simple engineer’s jumpsuit with the Boeing roundel on the back. “Figured out where you are yet?”

  “It’s a scene from a science-fiction novel I once read. An end-of-the-world vision.”

  “No,” Hiram said. “Not science fiction. Not a game. This is real… at least the scenery is.”

  “A WormCam view?”

  “Yeah. With a lot of VR enhancement and interpolation, so that the scene responds convincingly if you try to interact with it — for instance when you picked up that stone.”

  “I take it we’re not in the Solar System any more. Could I breathe the air?”

  “No. It’s mostly carbon dioxide.” Hiram pointed to the rounded hills. “There’s still some volcanism here.”

  “But this is a small planet. I can see the way the horizon bends. And the gravity is low: that stone I threw… So why hasn’t this small planet lost all its internal heat, like the Moon? Ah. The star.” He pointed to the glowing hull on the horizon. “We must be close enough for the tides to keep the core of this little world molten. Like Io, orbiting Jupiter. In fact, that must mean the star isn’t the giant I thought it was. It’s a dwarf. And we’re close to it — close enough for liquid water to persist. If that lake or sea over there is water.”

  “Oh, yes. Though I wouldn’t recommend drinking it. Yes, we’re on a small planet orbiting a red dwarf star. The ‘year’ here is only about nine of our days.”

  “Is there life?”

  “The scientists studying this place have found none, nor any relics from the past. A shame.” Hiram bent and picked up another basalt pebble. It cast two shadows on his palm, one, grey and diffuse, from the fat red star ahead of them, and another, fainter but sharper, from the light source behind them.

  …What light source?

  David turned. There was a double star in the sky: brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth, yet still reduced to pinpricks of light by distance. The points of light hurt his eyes, and he lifted his hand to shield his face. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  He turned again, and looked up at the constellation he had tentatively identified as Cassiopeia, that bright additional star tagged onto its end. “I know where we are. The bright stars behind us are the Alpha Centauri binary pair: the nearest bright stars to our sun, some four light years away.”

  “About four point three, I’m told.”

  “And so this must be a planet of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star of all. Somebody Has run a WormCam as far as Proxima Centauri. Across four light years. It’s incredible.”

  “Well done. I told you, you’re out of touch. This is the cutting edge of WormCam technology. This power. Of course the constellations aren’t changed much; four light years is small change on the interstellar scale. But that bright intruder up in Cassiopeia is Sol. Our sun.”

  David stared at the sun: just a point of pale yellow light, bright, but not exceptionally so — and yet that spark of light was the source of all life on Earth. And the sun, the Earth and all the planets, and every place any human had ever visited, might have been eclipsed by a grain of sand.

  •

  “She’s pretty,” Mary said.

  Bobby didn’t reply.

  “It really is a window into the past.”

  “It’s not so magical,” Bobby said. “Every time you watch a movie you’re looking into the past.”

  “Come on,” she whispered. “All you can see is what some camera operator or editor chooses to show you. And mostly, even on a news show, the people you’re watching know the camera is there. Now, with this, you can look at anybody, any time, anywhere, whether a camera is present or not. You’ve watched this scene before, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve had to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is when she’s supposed to have committed her crime.”

  “Stealing virtual-reality secrets from IBM? She doesn’t look like she’s committing any crime to me.”

  That annoyed him. “What do you expect her to do, put on a black mask?… Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I know this is difficult. Why would she do it? I know she was working for Hiram, but she didn’t exactly love him… Oh. She loved you.”

  He looked away. “The FBI case is that she wanted to get some credit in Hiram’s eyes. Then Hiram might accept her relationship with me. That was her motive, says the FBI. So, this. At some point she was going to tell him what she had done.”

  “And you don’t believe it?”

  “Mary, you don’t know Kate. That just isn’t her agenda.” He smiled. “Believe me, if she wants me she’ll just take me, whatever Hiram feels. But there is evidence against her. The techs have crawled all over the equipment she used. They restored deleted files which showed that data about IBM test runs had been present in the memory she used.”

  Mary gestured at the ’Screen. “But we can look into the past. Who cares about computer traces? Has anybody actually seen her open up a big fat file with an IBM logo?”

  “No. But that doesn’t prove anything. Not in the eyes of the prosecution, anyway. Kate knew about the WormCam. Perhaps she even guessed that it would eventually have past-viewing capabilities, and she could be monitor
ed retrospectively. So she covered herself.”

  Mary snorted again. “She’d have to be a devious genius to pull off something like that.”

  “You haven’t met Kate,” he repeated dryly.

  “And anyhow, all this is circumstantial… Is that the right word?”

  “Yes. If not for the WormCam she’d be out of there by now. But she hasn’t even come to trial yet. The Supreme Court is working on a new legal framework governing admissibility of WormCam evidence, and meanwhile a lot of cases — including Kate’s — have been put on hold.”

  With an impulsive stab he cleared the ’Screen.

  “Doesn’t this trouble you?” Mary asked now. “The way they are using the WormCams?”

  “They?”

  “Big corporations watching each other. The FBI, watching us all. I believe Kate is innocent. But somebody here surely spied on IBM — with a WormCam.” With the certainty of youth, she said, “Either everybody should have WormCams, or nobody should.”

  He said, “Maybe you’re right. But it isn’t going to happen.”

  “But the stuff you showed me, the next generation, the squeezed-vacuum approach.”

  “You’ll have to find somebody else to argue with.”

  They sat in silence for a time.

  Then she said, “If I had a time viewer, I’d use it all the time. But I wouldn’t use it to look at shitty stuff over and over. I’d look at nice stuff. Why don’t you look back a bit further, to some time when you were happy with her?”

  Somehow that hadn’t occurred to him, and he recoiled.

  She said, “Well, why not?”

  “Because it’s gone. In the past. What’s the point of looking back?”

  “If the present is shitty and the future is worse, the past is all you’ve got.”

  He frowned. Her face, so like her mother’s, was pale, composed, her frank blue eyes steady. “You’re missing your father.”

  “Of course I’m missing him,” she said, with a spark of anger. “Maybe it’s different on whatever planet you come from.” Now her look softened. “I would like to see him. Just for a while.”