The Light of Other Days

  But David knew that no matter how far back he looked, whatever he witnessed, however the images were analyzed and discussed, the fifteen minutes of the War Between the States he had just endured would stay with him forever.

  Heather touched his arm. "You don't have a very strong stomach, do you? We've only scratched the surface of this war—barely begun to study the past."

  "But it is a vast, banal butchery."

  "Of course. Isn't it always? In fact the Civil War was one of the first truly modern wars. More than six hundred thousand dead, nearly half a million wounded, in a country whose population was only thirty million. It's as if, today, we lost five million. It was a peculiarly American triumph for such a young country to stage such a vast conflict."

  "But it was just..." Heather was working on the Civil War period as part of her research for the first WormCam-compiled TrueBio of Abraham Lincoln, funded by an historical association. "Will that be your conclusion? After all the war led to the eradication of slavery in the United States."

  "But that wasn't what the war was about. We're about to lose our romantic illusions about it—to confront the truth that the braver historians have faced all along. The war was a clash of economic interests. North against South. The slaves were an economic asset worth billions of dollars. And it was a bloody affair, erupting out of a class-ridden, unequal society. Troops from Gettysburg were sent to New York to put down antidraft riots. Lincoln jailed around thirty thousand political prisoners, without trial."

  David whistled. "You think Lincoln's reputation can survive our seeing all that?" He began to set up a new run.

  She shrugged. "Lincoln remains an impressive figure. Even though he wasn't gay."

  That jolted David. "What? Are you sure?"

  She smiled. "Not even bi."

  From the neighboring cubicle he could hear a faint sound of high-pitched screaming.

  Heather smiled at him tiredly. "Mary. She's watching the Beatles again."

  "The Beatles?"

  Heather listened for a moment. "The Top Ten Club in Hamburg. April 1961, probably. Legendary performances, where the Beatles are thought to have played better than they ever did again. Never filmed, and so of course never seen again until now. Mary is working her way through the performances, night after night of them."

  "Umm. How are things between you?"

  She glanced at the partition, spoke in a subdued whisper. "I'm worried that our relationship is heading for a full-scale breakdown. David, I don't know what she does half the time, where she goes, who she meets... All I get is her anger. It was only the bribe of using an OurWorld WormCam that brought her here today. Aside from the Beatles, I don't even know what she's using it for."

  He hesitated. "I'm somewhat dubious about the ethics of what I'm offering. But—would you like me to find out?"

  She frowned, and pushed greying hair out of her eyes. "Can you do that?"

  "I'll talk to her."

  The SoftScreen image stabilized.

  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here...

  Lincoln's audience—in their stiff top hats and black coats, almost all of them male—looked unutterably alien, David thought. And Lincoln himself towered above them, so tall and spare he seemed almost grotesque, his voice an irritatingly high, nasal whine. And yet—

  "And yet," he said, "his words still have the power to move."

  "Yes," Heather said. "I think Lincoln will survive the TrueBio process. He was complex, ambiguous, never straightforward. He told audiences what they wanted to hear—sometimes pro-Abolition, sometimes not. He certainly wasn't the Abe of the legend. Old Abe, honest Abe, father Abe... But he was living in difficult times. He came through a hellish war by turning it into a crusade. If not for Abe, who knows if the nation could have survived?"

  "And he wasn't gay."

  "Nope."

  "What about the Joshua Speed diary?"

  "A clever forgery, put together after Lincoln's death by the ring of Confederate sympathizers who were behind his assassination. All designed to blacken his character, even after they'd taken his life..."

  Abraham Lincoln's sexuality had come under scrutiny following the discovery of a diary supposedly written by Joshua Speed, a merchant in Springfield, Illinois, with whom Lincoln, as a young, impoverished lawyer, had lodged for some years. Although both Speed and Lincoln had later married—and in fact both had reputations as womanizers—rumors had developed that they had lived as gay lovers.

  In the difficult opening years of the twenty-first century, Lincoln had been reborn as a figure of toleration and broad appeal. "Pink Lincoln," a divided hero for a divided age. At Easter 2015, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, this had climaxed in an open-air celebration around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.; for a single night, the great stone figure had been bathed in gaudy pink spotlights.

  "...I have notarized WormCam records to prove it," Heather said now. "I've had expert systems fast-forward through Lincoln's every sexual encounter. There's not a single trace of gay or bi behavior in there."

  "But Speed."

  "He and Lincoln shared a bed, those years in Illinois. But that wasn't uncommon back then—Lincoln couldn't afford a bed of his own!"

  David scratched his head. "This," he said, "is going to annoy everybody."

  She said, "You know, we're going to have to get used to this. No more heroes, no more fairy tales. Successful leaders are pragmatic. Almost every choice they make is between bad options; the wisest of them, like Lincoln, pick out the least worst, consistently. And that's about all you can ask of them."

  David nodded. "Perhaps. But you Americans are lucky that you are already running out of history. We Europeans have thousands more years left to witness."

  They fell silent, and gazed at the stiff images of Lincoln and his audience, the tinny voices, the rustle of applause from men long dead.

  Chapter 18—HINDSIGHT

  After six months, Kate's case was still held up. Bobby put in calls every few days to see FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens. Mavens steadfastly refused to see him.

  Then, abruptly, to Bobby's surprise, Mavens invited Bobby to come out to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Bobby hastily arranged a flight.

  He found Mavens in his office, a small anonymous box, windowless and stuffy. Mavens was sitting behind his littered desk—feet propped up on a pile of file boxes, jacket off, tie loose—watching a news show on a small SoftScreen. He waved Bobby silent.

  The piece was about the extension of the scope of citizens' truth squad activities to the murkier corners of the past, now that—in response to a powerful and immediate clamor—past-viewing WormCam facilities had at last been made available for private use.

  In the midst of poring over each other's grubby past, in between staring at their own younger selves in awe or amazement or shame, people had been turning the WormCam's unforgiving gaze on the rich and powerful. There had been a whole new spate of resignations from public office and prominent organizations and corporations, as various past crimes were disinterred. A whole series of old outrages were being turned over. The coals of the old scandal of the tobacco companies' knowledge of, indeed manipulation of, the addictive and toxic effects of their products, were being raked once more. The involvement and profit-making of the world's larger companies in Nazi Germany—many of them still operating, some of them American—had been even more extensive than imagined; the justification that de-Nazification had been left incomplete in order to assist economic recovery after the war looked, at this remove, dubious. Most computer manufacturers had indeed made inadequate provisions to shield their customers when microwave-frequency microchips had come on the market in the first decade of the century, leading to a rash of cancers.

  Bobby said, "So much for the scare predictions of how we ordinary folk wouldn't be mature enough to handle a technology as powerful as the past viewer. All this seems pretty responsible to me
."

  Mavens grunted. "Maybe. Although we're all using WormCams for the sleazy stuff too. At least these crusading citizen types aren't just beating up on the government. I always thought the big corporations were a bigger threat to freedom than anything we were likely to do. In fact we in government were the ones holding them in check."

  Bobby smiled. "We—OurWorld—were caught by the microwave row. The compensation claims are still being assessed."

  "Everybody's apologizing to everybody else. What a world... Bobby, I got to tell you I still don't think we can achieve much progress on Ms. Manzoni's case. But we can talk about it, if you like." Mavens looked exhausted, his eyes black-rimmed, as if he hadn't been sleeping.

  "If there's no progress, why am I here?"

  Mavens looked unhappy, uncomfortable, somehow out of place. He had lost the brave youthful certainty Bobby remembered about him. "Because I have time on my hands, all of a sudden. I'm not suspended, in case you're thinking that. Call it a sabbatical. One of my old cases has been under review." He eyed Bobby. "And."

  "What?"

  "I want you to see what your WormCam is really doing to us. Just one time, one example. You remember the Wilson murder?"

  "Wilson?"

  "New York City, a couple of years ago. A young teenager from Bangladesh—he'd been orphaned by the floods in '33."

  "I remember."

  "The UN placement agency found this particular relocate, called Mian Sharif, an adoptive home in New York. A middle-aged, childless couple who'd taken one adopted kid before—a girl, Barbara—and brought her up successfully. Apparently.

  "The story looked simple. Mian is killed at home. Mutilated, before and after death, apparently raped. The father was the prime suspect." He grimaced. "Family members always are.

  "I worked on the case. The forensics were ambiguous, and Wilson's mind maps showed no particular propensity to violence, sexual or otherwise. But we had enough to convict the man. Philip George Wilson was executed by lethal injection on November 27, 2034."

  "But now..."

  "Because of the demand on WormCam time for new and unresolved cases, the review of closed cases like Wilson has been a low priority. But now the public have gotten online to the WormCams, they are looking for themselves, and they are starting to agitate for some old cases to be reopened: friends, family, even the convicted themselves."

  "And now the Wilson case."

  "Yeah." Mavens smiled thinly. "Maybe you can understand how I'm feeling. You see, before the WormCam, I could never be sure what the truth is in any given case. No witness is a hundred percent reliable. The perps know how to lie through forensics. I couldn't know what happened, unless I was there.

  "Wilson was the first convicted criminal to be executed because of my work. I knew I'd done the best I could to establish the truth. But now, years after the event, I've been able to see Wilson's alleged crime for the first time. And I found out the truth about the man I sent to the needle."

  "Are you sure you ought to show me."

  "It will be in the public domain soon enough." Mavens twisted the SoftScreen around so Bobby could see, and began to dial up a recording.

  The 'Screen cleared to show a bedroom. There was a wide bed, a wardrobe and cupboards, animated posters of rock and sports stars and movie icons on the wall. A boy lay facedown on the bed: slim, dressed in T-shirt and Jeans, he was propped up on his elbows over books and a primary-color SoftScreen, sucking a pencil. He was dark, his hair a rich black mass.

  Bobby said, "That's Mian?"

  "Yeah. Bright kid, lived quietly, worked hard. He's doing his homework. Shakespeare, as it happens. Aged thirteen, though I guess he looks a little younger. Well, he won't get any older... Tell me if you want to stop this."

  Bobby nodded, curtly, resolved to see this through. This was a test, he thought. A test of his new humanity.

  The door opened outward, admitting a burly middle-aged man. "Here comes the father. Philip George Wilson." Wilson was carrying a soda bottle; he opened it and set it down on a bedside table. The boy looked around and said a few words.

  Mavens said, "We know what they said. What are you working on, what time does Mom get home, blah blah. Nothing consequential; just an ordinary exchange."

  Wilson ruffled the boy's hair and left the room. Mian smoothed back his hair and went back to work.

  Mavens froze the image; the boy turned to a statue, his image flickering slightly.

  "Let me tell you what we thought happened next—as we reconstructed it back in '34.

  "Wilson comes back into the room. He makes some kind of pass at the boy. The boy rebuffs him. So Wilson attacks him. Maybe the boy fights back; if so, he didn't do Wilson any damage. Wilson has a knife—which, incidentally, we don't find. He cuts and rips at the kid's clothes. He mutilates him. After he kills the boy, by cutting his throat, he may have performed sex on the body, or he may have masturbated; we find flecks of Wilson's semen on the body.

  "And then, cradling the body, covered in blood, he yells 911 at the Search Engine."

  "You're kidding."

  Mavens shrugged. "People act in strange ways. The facts are that there was no way in or out of the apartment save for locked windows and doors, none of which were forced. The hallway security cams showed nothing.

  "We had no suspects save for Wilson, and a lot of evidence against him. He never denied what he did. I think maybe he believed himself that he really had done it, even though he had no memory of it.

  "Our experts were split. We have psychoanalysts who say Wilson's knowledge of his appalling act was too much for his ego to bear. So he repressed it, came out of the episode, returned to something like normal. Then we have cynics who say he's lying, that he knew exactly what he was doing; when he realized he couldn't get away with the crime, he feigned mental problems to secure a softer sentence. And we have neurologists who say he probably suffers from a form of epilepsy."

  Bobby prompted, "But now we have the truth."

  "Yes. Now, the truth." Mavens tapped the SoftScreen, and the recording resumed.

  There was an air-conditioning grille in the corner of the bedroom. It popped open. The boy, Mian, got to his feet quickly, looking startled, and backed into a corner.

  "He didn't call out at this point," Mavens said softly. "If he had..."

  Now a figure crawled out through the open grille. It was a girl, dressed in a tight-fitting spandex ski suit. She looked sixteen, might have been older. She was holding a knife.

  Mavens froze the image again Bobby frowned. "Who the hell is that?"

  "The Wilsons' first adopted daughter. She's called Barbara—you remember I mentioned her. Here she was eighteen years old, and she'd been living away from home a couple of years."

  "But she still had the security code to get into the building."

  "Yeah. She came in disguise. Then she got into the air ducts, big fat ones in a building that age. And that's how she got into the apartment.

  "We used the 'Cam to track her back a couple of years deeper into the past. Turns out her relationship with her father was a little more complex than anyone had known.

  "They got on fine when she lived at home. After she left for college, she had a couple of bad experiences. She wanted to come home. The parents talked it over, but encouraged her to stay away, to become independent. Maybe they were wrong to do that, maybe they were right. But they meant well.

  "She came home anyway, one night when the mother was away. She crawled in bed with her sleeping father, and performed oral sex on him. She was the initiator. But he didn't stop her. Afterward he was full of guilt. The boy, Mian, was asleep in the next room."

  "So they had a row."

  "No. Wilson was distressed, ashamed, but tried to remain sensible. He sent her back to college, talking about putting this behind them, it's a one-off. Maybe he really thought time would heal the wounds. Well, he was wrong.

  "What he didn't understand was Barbara's jealousy. She'd become convinced that Mian ha
d displaced her in her parents' affections, and that was the reason she was shut out, kept away from home."

  "Right. So she tries to seduce the father, to find another way back..."

  "Not exactly." Mavens hit the SoftScreen, and the little drama began to unfold once more.

  Mian, recognizing his adoptive sister, got over his shock and stepped forward.

  But with startling speed Barbara closed on him. She elbowed him in the throat, leaving him clutching his neck, gasping.

  "Smart," said Mavens professionally. "Now he can't call out."

  Barbara pushed the boy onto his back and straddled him. She grabbed his hands, held them over his head and began to slash at his clothes.

  "She doesn't look strong enough to do that," Bobby said.

  "It isn't strength that counts. It's determination. Mian couldn't believe, even now, this girl, a girl he thought of as his sister, was going to do him real harm. Would you?"

  Now the boy's chest was bare. Barbara reached down with the knife—

  Bobby snapped, "Enough."

  Mavens hit a button, and the SoftScreen cleared, to Bobby's profound relief.

  Mavens said, "The rest is detail. When Mian was dead she propped him against the door, and called for her father. Wilson came running. When he opened the door his son's warm body fell into his arms. And he called the Search Engine."

  "But Wilson's semen."

  "She stored it, after that night she blew him, in a cute little cryo-flask she liberated from a medical lab. She'd been planning this, even as far back as that." He shrugged. "It all worked out. Revenge, the destruction of the father who had spurned her, as she saw it. It all worked, at least until the WormCam came along. And so."

  "And so the wrong man was convicted."

  "Executed."

  Mavens tapped the 'Screen and brought up a fresh image. It was of a woman—fortyish, blond. She was sitting in some dingy office. Her face was crumpled with grief.