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 anymore. 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, gray 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 monitored 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."
I shouldn't have brought her here, he thought.
"Maybe later," he said gently. "Come on. The weather's fine. Le
t'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 travelers. 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 anymore, 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 aging 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, without 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.