The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  I shouldn’t have brought her here, he thought.

  “Maybe later,” he said gently. “Come on. The weather’s fine. Let’s go to the Sound. Have you ever been sailing?…”

  It took him long minutes of persuasion to make her come away.

  …And later, after a call from David, he learned that some of the references and handwritten notes on squeezed-vacuum wormholes had gone missing from David’s workstation.

  •

  “Actually it was Disney,” Hiram said, matter-of-fact, standing there in Proxima light. “In partnership with Boeing they’ve installed a giant WormCam facility in the old Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. Once they assembled Moon rockets there. Now, they send spy cameras to the stars. Quite something, isn’t it? Of course they mostly rent out their virtual facility to the scientists; but the Boeing management let the staff play here during their lunch breaks. Already they’re peering at every bloody planet and moon in the Solar System, without leaving the air-conditioned warmth of their labs.

  “And Disney is cashing in. The Moon and Mars seem likely to turn into theme parks for virtual WormCam travellers. I’m told the Apollo and Viking sites are particularly popular, though the old Soviet Lunokhods are a competing attraction.”

  And, David thought, no doubt OurWorld has a piece of the action.

  Hiram smiled. “You’re very quiet, David.” David explored his emotions: wonder, he supposed, but laced with dismay. He picked up a handful of rocks, let them fall; their slow low-G bounce wasn’t quite authentic. “This is real. I must have read a hundred fictional dramas, a thousand speculative studies, about missions to Proxima. And now here we are. It is the dream of a million years to stand here and see this. It’s probably a dream rich enough finally to kill off spaceflight. Pity. But that’s all this is: a dream. We’re still in that chilly hangar on the outskirts of Seattle. By showing us the destination, without requiring of us the enervating journey, the WormCam will turn us into a planet of couch potatoes.”

  “You don’t think you’re being a little excitable?”

  “No, I do not. Hiram, before the WormCam, we deduced the existence of this planet of Proxima from minute displacements of the star’s trajectory. We calculated what its surface conditions must be like; we pored over spectroscopic analyses of its smudged light to see if we could deduce what it was made of; we strove to build new generations of telescopes which would give us some map of its surface. We even dreamed of building ships which might come here. Now we have the WormCam, and we don’t need to deduce any more, to strive, to think.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “No!” David snapped. “It is like a child turning to the answers at the back of an exercise book. The point, you see, is not the answers themselves, but the mental development we enjoy through striving for those answers. The WormCam is going to overwhelm a whole range of sciences — planetology, geology, astronomy. For generations to come our scientists will merely count and classify, like an eighteenth-century butterfly collector. Science will become taxonomy.”

  Hiram said slyly, “You forgot history.”

  “History?”

  “You were the one who found out that a WormCam that can reach across four light-years could just as easily reach four years into the past. Our grasp in time is puny compared to space; but it will surely develop. And then all hell’s going to break loose.

  “Think about it. Right now we can reach back days, weeks, months. We can spy on our wives, watch ourselves on the john, the coppers can track and watch criminals in the act. Facing your own past self is hard enough. But this is nothing, personal trivia. When we can reach back, years, you’re talking about opening up history. And what a can of worms that is going to be.

  “Some people out there are preparing the ground already. You must have heard of the 12,000 Days. A Jesuit project, on the orders of the Vatican: to complete a comprehensive firsthand history of the development of the Church — all the way back to Christ Himself.” Hiram grimaced. “Much of that won’t make pretty viewing. But the Pope is smart. Better the Church should do this first than somebody else. Even so, it’s going to make Christianity fall apart like a sandcastle. And the other religions will follow.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Hell, yes.” Hiram’s eyes gleamed in red light. “Didn’t Bobby expose RevelationLand as a fraud dreamed up by a criminal?”

  Actually, David thought, though Bobby helped, that was Kate Manzoni’s triumph. “Hiram, Christ was no Billybob Meeks.”

  “Are you sure? Do you think you could bear to find out? Could your Church bear it?”

  …Perhaps not, David thought. But we must fervently hope so.

  Hiram had been right to drag him out of his monkish academic ceil, he realized, to see all this. It was wrong of him to hide away, to work on the WormCam with no sense of its wider implications. He made a resolution to immerse himself in the ’Cam’s application as well as its theory.

  Hiram looked up at the hull of the sun. “I think it’s getting colder. Sometimes it snows here. Come on.” He began to work the invisible abort buttons on his helmet.

  David peered up at the splinter of light that was distant Sol, and imagined his soul returning home, flying from this desolate beach up to that primal warmth.

  Chapter 15

  Confabulation

  Bobby found the interview room, in the bowels of this ageing courthouse, deeply depressing. The dingy walls looked as if they hadn’t been painted since the turn of the century, and even then only in government-issue pale green.

  And it was in this room that Kate’s privacy was to be flayed, piece by piece.

  Kate and her attorney — an unsmiling, overweight woman — sat on hard plastic chairs behind a scuffed wooden table, on which sat an array of recording devices. Bobby himself was perched on a hard bench at the back of the room, there at Kate’s request, the only witness to this strange tableau. Clive Manning, the psychologist appointed by the court to Kate’s case, was standing at the front of the room, tapping at a SoftScreen fixed to the wall. WormCam images, dimly lit and suffering a little fisheye distortion, flickered as Manning sought his starting point. At last he found the place he wanted. It was a frozen image of Kate with a man. They were standing in a cluttered living room, evidently in the middle of a heated row, screaming at each other.

  Manning — tall, thin, bald, fiftyish — took off his wire spectacles and tapped the frame against his teeth, a mannerism Bobby was already finding gratingly irritating, the spectacles themselves an antiquated affectation. “What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience — as perhaps he was. “It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a storytelling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain’s neural structure.

  “And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.

  “In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and re-creates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it’s true to say that everything I remember is false.” Bobby thought a note of awe entered Manning’s voice.

  “This frightens you,” Kate said, wondering.

  “I’d be a fool not to be frightened. We’re all complex, flawed creatures, Kate, stumbling around in the dark. Perhaps our minds, little transient bubbles of consciousness adrift in this overwhelmingly hostile universe, need an inflated sense of their own importance, of the logic of the universe, in order to summon up the will to survive. But now the WormCam, with
out pity, will never again let us evade the truth.” He was silent for a moment, then smiled at her. “Perhaps we will all be driven mad by truth. Or perhaps, stripped of illusion at last, we will all become sane, and I will be out of a job. What do you think?”

  Kate, wearing a drab black one-piece, sat with her hands tucked between her thighs, her shoulders hunched. “I think you should get on with your show-and-tell.”

  Manning sighed and replaced his glasses. He tapped the ’Screen’s corner, and the fragment of Kate’s vanished life began to play itself out.

  •

  On-screen Kate hurled something at the guy. He ducked; it splashed against the wall.

  “What was that? A peach?”

  “As I recall,” Kate said, “it was a kumquat. A little overripe.”

  “Good choice,” Manning murmured. “You need to work on your aim, however.”

  …asshole. You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?

  What’s it to do with you?

  It’s got everything to do with me, you piece of shit. Why you think I’m going to put up with this I don’t know…

  The man on the ’Screen was called Kingsley, Bobby had learned. He and Kate had been lovers for several years, and had lived with each other for three — up to this point, the moment at which Kate had finally thrown him out.

  Watching was difficult for Bobby. He felt he was participating in voyeurism of this younger, different woman who hadn’t at the time even known he existed, events of which she’d told him nothing. And, like most WormCam-recorded slices of life, it was hard to follow, the conversation illogical, meandering and repetitive, the words designed to express their users’ emotions rather than to progress the encounter in any rational way.

  A century and more of scripted TV and cinema had been poor training for the reality of the WormCam. But his real-life drama was typical of life: messy, unstructured, confusing, the participants groping like people in a darkened room toward an understanding of what was happening to them, how they were feeling.

  The action shifted from the living room to a catastrophically untidy bedroom. Now Kingsley was cramming clothes into a leather bag, and Kate was grabbing more of his stuff and throwing it out of the room. All the time they maintained a screaming dialogue.

  At last, Kingsley stormed out of the apartment. Kate slammed the door shut behind him. She stood rigid for a moment, staring at the closed door, before burying her face in her hands.

  Manning reached over and tapped the ’Screen. The image froze on a close-up of Kate’s face, hidden by her hands, tears visibly leaking between her fingers, her hair a tangle around her forehead, the whole surrounded by a faint fish-eye-distortion halo.

  Manning said, “I believe this incident is the key to your story, Kate. The story of your life, of who you are.”

  The real Kate, bleak and subdued, stared at her younger self woodenly. “I was framed,” she said evenly. “Over the IBM espionage. It was subtle, beyond the reach even of the WormCam. But it’s nevertheless true. And that’s what we should be focusing on. Not this barroom psychoanalysis.”

  Manning drew back. “That’s as may be. But evidentiary issues are beyond my competence. The judge has asked me to come up with a framework for your state of mind at the time of the crime itself. Motive and intent: a deeper truth than even the WormCam can offer us. And,” he said with a trace of steel, “let’s remind ourselves that you don’t have any choice but to cooperate.”

  “But that doesn’t alter my opinion,” she said.

  “What opinion?”

  “That, like every shrink I’ve ever met, you are one inhuman asshole.” The attorney touched Kate’s arm, but Kate shook her off.

  Manning’s eyes glittered, hard behind his spectacles; Bobby realized Manning was going to enjoy exerting power over this willful woman.

  Manning turned to his SoftScreen and ran through the brief breakup scene again. “Let me recall what you told me about this period in your life. You’d been living with Kingsley Roman for some three years when you decided to try for a baby. You suffered a late miscarriage.”

  “I’m sure you enjoyed watching that,” Kate said bleakly.

  “Please,” Manning said, pained. “You seem to have decided, with Kingsley, that you would try again.”

  “We never decided that. We didn’t discuss it in that way.”

  Manning blinked owlishly at a notepad. “But you did. February 24, 2032, is the clearest example. I can show you if you like.” He looked up at her over his glasses. “Don’t be alarmed if your memory differs from the WormCam record. It’s common. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s normal. Confabulation, remember. Shall I go on?

  “Despite your stated decision, you don’t conceive. In fact you return to the regular use of contraceptives, so that conception is impossible anyhow. Six months after the miscarriage, Kingsley begins his affair with a colleague at his place of work. A woman called Jodie Morris. And a few months after that, he is careless enough to let you find out about it.” He studied her again. “Do you remember what you told me about that?”

  Kate said reluctantly, “I told you the truth. I think Kingsley decided, on some level, that the baby was my fault. And so he started looking around. And besides, after the miscarriage, work was starting to take off for me. The Wormwood… I think Kingsley was jealous.”

  “And so he started to seek the attention he craved from somebody else.”

  “Something like that. When I found out, I threw him out.”

  “He claims he left.”

  “Then he’s a lying asshole.”

  “But we just saw the incident,” Manning said gently. “I didn’t see any evidence of clear decision-making, of unilateral action by either of you.”

  “It doesn’t matter what the WormCam shows. I know what is true.”

  Manning nodded. “I’m not denying that you’re telling us the truth as you see it, Kate.” He smiled at her, owlish, looming. “You aren’t lying. That isn’t the problem at all. Don’t you see?”

  Kate gazed at her caged hands.

  •

  They took a break. Bobby wasn’t allowed to be with her.

  Kate’s treatment was one of many experiments being run as the politicians, legal experts, pressure groups and concerned citizens worked feverishly to find a way to accommodate the WormCam’s eerie historical reach — still not widely known to the public — into something resembling the existing due process of the law, and, even more challenging, into natural justice.

  In essence it had suddenly become radically easier to establish physical truth.

  The conduct of court cases seemed likely to be transformed radically. Trials would surely become much less adversarial, fairer, much less dependent on the demeanor of a suspect in court or the quality of her representatives. When the WormCam was available at federal, state and county levels, some commentators were anticipating savings of billions of dollars annually: there would be shorter trials, more plea bargains, more civil settlements.

  And major trials in future would perhaps focus on what remained beyond the bare facts: motive and intent — hence the assignment of a psychologist like Manning to Kate’s case.

  Meanwhile, as WormCammed law enforcers went to diligent work over unresolved cases, a huge logjam of new cases was heading for the courts. Some Congressmen had proposed that to maximize the clear-up rate a general amnesty should be declared for crimes of lesser severity committed up to the last full calendar year before the WormCam’s invention — an amnesty, that is, in return for waiving of Fifth Amendment protection in the relevant case. In fact, evidence gathering was made so much more powerful, thanks to the WormCam, that Fifth Amendment rights had become moot anyhow. But this was proving highly contentious. Most Americans did not appear to feel comfortable with losing Fifth protection.

  Challenges to privacy were even more contentious — made so by the fact that even now there was no accepted definition of privacy rights, even within America. Privacy was not
mentioned in the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights spoke of a right against intrusion by the state — but it left a great deal of room for manoeuvre by those in authority who wished to investigate citizens, and besides offered citizens virtually no protection against other bodies, such as corporations or the press or even other citizens. From a welter of scattershot laws at state and federal levels, as well as a mass of cases in common law to provide precedent, a certain common acceptance of the meaning of privacy had slowly emerged: for instance a right to be “let alone,” to be free from unreasonable interference from outside forces.

  But all of this was challenged by the WormCam.

  Legal safeguards surrounding WormCam use were being promoted, by law-enforcement and investigation agencies like the FBI and the police, as a compensating balance to the loss of privacy and other rights. For example WormCam records intended for legal purposes would have to be collected in controlled circumstances — probably by trained observers, and notarized formally. That wasn’t likely to prove a problem, as any WormCam observation could always be repeated as many times as required simply by setting up a new wormhole link to the incident in question.

  There were even suggestions that people should be prepared to submit to a form of “documented life.” This would effectively grant the authorities legal access to any incident in an individual’s past without the need for formal procedures in advance — and it would also be a strong shield against false accusation and identity theft.

  But despite protests from campaigners against the erosion of rights, everybody seemed to accept that as far as its use in criminal investigation and prosecution was concerned, the WormCam was here to stay; it was simply too powerful to ignore.

  Some philosophers argued that this was no bad thing. After all, humans had evolved to live in small groups in which everybody knew everybody else, and strangers were rarely encountered; it was only recently, in evolutionary terms, that people had been forced to live in larger communities like cities, crammed together with friends and strangers alike. The WormCam was bringing a return to older ways of living, of thinking about other people and interacting with them.