The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 before, and a group in a safe house like this always had an elaborate system of WormCam-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.

  Chapter 26

  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 century — some years before Hiram 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 further 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 background became a blur around him, a blizzard of days and nights, dimly visible buildings — suddenly replaced by grey-green plains, the fen country where Hiram grew up. Soon Hiram’s face shrank on itself, became innocent, boyish, and shrivelled 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 somebody behind the invisible wormhole viewpoint which hovered before her eyes. He had chosen from this point to follow the line of mitochondrial DNA, passed unchanged 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 her from Hiram at the instant of his conception. 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 cheekbones, 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 hairstyle 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 formlessness 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 anywhere 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 imploded 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 soldier 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, hovering 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, another 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,” David 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 balloons, one after the other, subtly changing from generation 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 unravelled in misery and shame, until they reached the moment that defined 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. The world must be full of such anguished biographies, David thought, unravelling 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 generations 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 the 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 matted and dark, skin sallow, expression rat-like, wary — there was an abrupt blur of scenery. They glimpsed dismal 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, resumed.

  On the horizon there was a Norman cathedral, an immense, 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, collapsing 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 marble 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 grey, her eyes blue. Her nose was proudly prominent, Romanesque.

  Behind her the dismal fields had vanished, to be replaced 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 the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.

  “A Roman settlement,” Bobby said.

  “Yes.” David pointed at the ’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 temple…”

  “It looks so orderly,” Bobby murmured. “Even modern. 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 the ’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 surrounded it was so striking that 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 the 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 images lit up around the image of the grandmother. “Here. WormCam views of all the neighbouring rooms and the corridors. This aerial view shows the 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 happiness, David. I want you to take a message to Heather.”

  David frowned. “Is it about Mary? Is she hurt?”

  “No. No, not exactly.” Bobby rubbed his face, hot in his SmartShroud. “She’s become one of the Joined. We’re going to try to get her to come home. I want you to help me set it up.”

  It was disturbing news. “Of course. You can trust me.”

  Bobby grinned. “I know it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come.”

  And I, David thought uneasily, have, since we last met, discovered something momentous about you.

  He looked into Bobby’s open, curious face, lit up by a day two millennia gone. Was this the time to hit Bobby with another revelation about Hiram’s endless tinkering with his life — perhaps, indeed, the greatest crime Hiram had committed against his son?

  Later, he thought. Later. There will be a moment.

  And besides, the WormCam image still glowed on the ’Screen, enticing, alien, utterly irresistible. The WormCam in all its manifestations had changed the world. But none of that mattered, he thought, compared to this: the power of the technology to reveal what had been thought lost forever.

  There would be time enough for life, for their complex affairs, to deal with the unshaped future. For now, history beckoned. He took the joystick, pushing it forward; and the Roman buildings evaporated like snowflakes in the sun.

  •

  Another brief blur of migrations, and now here was a new breed of ancestor: still with the characteristic strawberry hair and blue eyes, but with no trace of the Romanesque nose.

  Around the flickering faces David glimpsed fields, small and rectangular, worked by ploughs drawn by oxen, or even, in poorer times, by humans. There were timber granaries, sheep and pigs, cattle and goats. Beyond the grouped fields he saw earthwork banks, making the area into a fort — but abruptly, as they sank. deeper into the past, the earthworks were replaced by a cruder wooden palisade.

  Bobby said, “The world’s getting simpler.”

  “Yes. How did Francis Bacon put it?… ‘The good effects wrought by founders of cities, law-givers, fathers of the people, extirpers of tyrants, and heroes of that class, extend but for short times: whereas the work of the Inventor, though a thing of less pomp and show, is felt everywhere and lasts forever.’ Right about now the Trojan War is being fought with bronze weapons. But bronze breaks easily, which is why that war lasted twenty years with comparatively few casualties. We forgot how to make iron, so we can’t kill each other as efficiently as we used to…”

  The earnest toil in the fields continued, largely unchanging from generation to generation. The sheep and cattle, though domesticated, looked like much wilder breeds.

  A hundred and fifty generations deep, and the bronze tools gave way, at last, to stone. But the stone-worked fields were little changed. As the pace of historical change slowed, David let them fall fast
er. Two hundred, three hundred generations passed, the fleeing faces blurring one into the other, slowly moulded by time and toil and the mixing of genes.

  But soon it will mean nothing, David thought bleakly — nothing, after Wormwood Day. On that dark morning all of this patient struggle, the toil of billions of small lives, will be obliterated; all we have learned and built will be lost, and there may not even be minds to remember, to mourn. And time’s wall was close, much closer even than the Roman spring they had glimpsed; so little history might be left to play itself out.

  Suddenly it was an unbearable thought, as if he had imaginatively absorbed the reality of the Wormwood for the first time. We must find a way to push it aside, he thought. For the sake of these others, the old ones who stare out at us through the WormCam. We must not lose the meaning of their vanished lives.

  And then, suddenly, the background was a blur once more.

  Bobby said, “We’ve become nomads. Where are we?”

  David tapped a reference panel. “Northern Europe. We forgot how to do agriculture. The towns and settlements have dispersed. No more empires, no cities. Humans are pretty rare beasts, and we live in nomadic groups and clans, settlements that last a season or two at best.”

  Twelve thousand years deep, he paused the scan.

  She might have been fifteen years old, and there was a round sigil of some kind crudely tattooed onto her left cheek. She looked in rude health. She carried a baby, swaddled in animal hide — my remote great-uncle, David thought absently — and she was stroking its round cheek. She wore shoes, leggings, a heavy cloak of plaited grasses. Her other garments seemed to have been stitched together from strips of skin. There was grass stuffed into her shoes and under her hat, presumably for insulation.

  Cradling her baby, she was walking after a group of others: men, women with infants, children. They were making their way up a shallow, sloping ridge of rock. They were walking casually, easily, a pace that seemed destined to carry them many kilometres. But some of the adults had flint-tipped spears at the ready: presumably as a guard against animal attack rather than any human threat.