The Light of Other Days
"This is Mae Wilson," Mavens said. "Philip's wife, mother to the two adopted children. She'd had to come to terms with the death of the boy, what she thought of as her husband's dreadful crime. She'd even reconciled with Barbara, found comfort with her. Now—at this moment—she had to face a much more dreadful truth."
Bobby felt uncomfortable, confronted by this horror, this naked grief. But Mavens froze the image.
"Right here," he murmured. "That's where we tore her heart in two. And it's my responsibility."
"You did your best."
"No. I could have done better. The girl, Barbara, had an alibi. But with hindsight it's an alibi I could have taken apart. There were other small things: discrepancies in the timing, the distribution of the blood. But I didn't see any of that." He looked at Bobby, his eyes bright. "I didn't see the truth. That's what your WormCam is. It's a truth machine."
Bobby shook his head. "No. It's a hindsight machine."
"It has to be right to bring the truth to light," Mavens said. "I still believe that. Of course I do. But sometimes the truth hurts, beyond belief. Like poor Mae Wilson, here. And you know what? The truth didn't help her. It didn't bring Mian back, or her husband. All it did was take her daughter away too."
"We're all going to go through this, one way or an other, being forced to confront every mistake we ever made."
"Maybe," Mavens said softly. He smiled and ran his finger along the edge of his desk. "Here's what the WormCam has done for me. My job isn't an intellectual exercise anymore, Sherlock Holmes puzzles. Now I sit here every day and I get to watch the determination, the savagery, the—the calculation. We're animals, Bobby. Beasts, under these neat suits of clothing." He shook his head, still smiling, and he ran his finger along the desk, back and forth, back and forth.
Chapter 19—TIME
As the availability and power of the WormCam extended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snowflakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time...
Princeton, New Jersey, USA. April 17, 1955 A.D.
His good humor, in those last hours, struck his visitors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed to regard his approaching end as simply an expected natural phenomenon.
And, of course, even to the end, he issued gruff orders. He was concerned not to become an object of pilgrimage, and he instructed that his office at the Institute should not be preserved as he left it, and that his home should not become a shrine, and so on.
Doctor Dean looked in on him for the last time at eleven P.M., and found him sleeping peacefully.
But a little after midnight his nurse—Mrs. Alberta Roszel—noticed a change in his breathing. She called for help and, with the help of another nurse, cranked up the head of the bed.
He was muttering, and Mrs. Roszel came close to hear.
Even as the finest mind since Newton began, at last, to unravel, final thoughts floated to the surface of his consciousness. Perhaps he regretted the great physics unification project he had left unfinished. Perhaps he wondered if his pacifism had after all been the right course—if he had been correct to encourage Roosevelt to enter the nuclear age. Perhaps, simply, he regretted how he had always put science first, even over those who loved him.
But it was too late for all that. His life, so vivid and complex in youth and middle age, was now reducing, as all lives must, to a single thread of utter simplicity.
Mrs. Roszel bent close to hear his soft voice. But his words were in German, the language of his youth, and she did not understand.
...And she did not see, could not see, the swarm of spacetime flaws which, in these last moments, crowded around the trembling lips of Einstein to hear those final words; "...Lieseri! Oh, Lieseri!"
Extracted from testimony by Prof. Maurice Patefield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chair of the "Wormseed" campaign group, to the Congressional Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, 23 September, 2037:
As soon as it became apparent that the WormCam can reach, not just through walls, but into the past, a global obsession of the human species with its own history opened up.
At first we were treated to professionally-made "factual" WormCam movies showing such great events as wars, assassinations, political scandals. Unsinkable, the multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the Titanic disaster, for example, made harrowing, compelling viewing—even though it demolished many sea-story myths propagated by uncritical storytellers, and much of the event took place in pitch North Atlantic darkness.
But we soon grew impatient with the interpolation of the professionals. We wanted to see for ourselves.
The hasty inspection of many notorious moments of the recent past has revealed both banality and surprise. The depressing truths surrounding Elvis Presley, O. J. Simpson and even the deaths of the Kennedys surely surprised nobody. On the other hand, the revelations about the murders of so many prominent women—from Marilyn Monroe through Mother Teresa to Diana, Princess of Wales—caused a wave of shock, even in a society becoming accustomed to too much truth. The existence of a shadowy, relentless cabal of misogynistic men whose activities against (as they saw it) too powerful women, actions carried across decades, caused much soul-searching among both sexes.
But many true-story versions of historic events—the Cuba missile crisis, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the euro—while of interest to aficionados, have turned out to be muddled, confusing and complex. It is dismaying to realize that even those supposedly at the centers of power generally know little and understand less of what is going on around them.
With all respect to the great traditions of this House, almost all the key incidents in human history are screwups, it seems, just as almost all the great passions are no more than crude and manipulative tumblings.
And, worse than that, the truth generally turns out to be boring.
The lack of pattern and logic in the overwhelming, almost unrecognizable true history that is now being revealed is proving so difficult and wearying for all but the most ardent scholar that fictionalized accounts are actually making a comeback: stories which provide a narrative structure simple enough to engage the viewer. We need story and meaning, not blunt fact...
Toulouse, France. 14 January, 1636 A.D.:
In the dusty calm of his study, he took down his beloved copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. With great excitement he turned to Book II, Problem 8, and hunted for a quill.
...On the other hand, it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as a sum of two fourth powers, or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain...
Bernadette Winstanley, a fourteen-year-old student from Harare, Zimbabwe, booked time on her high-school WormCam and devoted herself to tracking back from the moment of Fermat's brief scribbling in that margin.
...This was where it had started for him, and so it was appropriate that it was here that it should end. It was after all Diophantus' eighth problem which had so intrigued him, and sent him on his voyage of mathematical discovery; Given a number which is a square, write it as a sum of two other squares. This was the algebraic expression of Pythagoras' theorem, of course; and every schoolchild knew solutions: 3 squared plus 4 squared, for example, meaning 9 plus 16, summed to 25, which was 5 squared.
Ah, but what of an extension of the notion beyond this geometric triviality? Were there numbers which could be expressed as sums of greater powers? 3 cubed plus 4 cubed made 27 plus 64, summing to 91—not itself a cube. But did any such triplets exist? And what of the higher powers, the fourth, fifth, sixth...?
It was clear the ancients had known of no such cases—nor had they known a proof of impossibility.
But now he—a lawyer and magistrate, not even a professional mathematician—had managed to prove that no triple o
f numbers existed for any index higher than two.
Bernadette imaged sheets of notes expressing the essence of the proof Fermat believed he had found, and, with some help from a teacher, deciphered their meaning.
...For now he was pressed by his duties, but when he had time he would assemble a formal expression of his proof from the scribbled notes and sketches he had accumulated. Then he would communicate it to Desargues, Descartes, Pascal, Bernoulli and the others—how they would marvel at its far-reaching elegance!
And then he could explore the numbers further: those pellucid yet stubbornly complex entities, which seemed at times so strange he fancied they must have an existence independent of the human mind which had conceived them...
Pierre de Fermat never wrote out the proof of what would become known as his Last Theorem. But that brief marginalia, discovered after Fermat's death by his son, would tantalize and fascinate later generations of mathematicians. A proof was found—but not until the 1990s, and it was of such technical intricacy, involving abstract properties of elliptic curves and other unfamiliar mathematical entities, that scholars believed it was impossible Fermat could have found a proof in his day. Perhaps he had been mistaken—or had even perpetrated a huge hoax on later generations.
Then, in the year 2037, to general amazement, armed with no more than high-school math, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Winstanley was able to prove that Fermat had been right
And when at last Fermat's proof was published, a revolution in mathematics began.
Patefield Testimony: Of course, the kooky fringe immediately found a way to get online to history. As a scientist and a rationalist I regard it as a great fortune that the WormCam has proven the greatest debunker yet discovered.
And so it is now indisputable, for example, that there was no crashed UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Not a single alien-abduction incident yet inspected has turned out to be anything more than a misinterpretation of some innocent phenomenon—often complicated by disturbed neurological states. Similarly, not a shred of evidence has emerged for any paranormal or supernatural phenomenon, no matter how notorious.
Whole industries of psychics, mediums, astrologers, faith healers, homeopathists and others are being systematically demolished. We must look forward to the day when the WormCam's delvings reach as far as the building of the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Nazca geoglyphs and other sources of "wisdom" or "mystery." And then will come Atlantis...
It may be a new day is dawning—it may be that in the not too distant future the mass of humanity wilt at last conclude that truth is more interesting than delusion.
Florence, Italy. 12 April, 1506 A.D.
Bernice would readily admit she was no more than a junior researcher in the Louvre's curatorial office. And so it was a surprise—a welcome one!—when she was asked to perform the first provenance check on one of the museum's most famous paintings.
Even if the result was less welcome.
At first the search had been simple: in fact, confined to the walls of the Louvre itself. Before a blur of visitors, attended by generations of curators, the fine old lady sat in semidarkness behind her panes of protective glass, silently watching time unravel.
The years before the transfer to the Louvre were more complex.
Bernice glimpsed a series of fine houses, generations of elegance and power punctuated by intervals of war and social unrest and poverty. Much of this, back as deep as the seventeenth century, confirmed the painting's documented record.
Then—in the early years of that century, more than a hundred years after the painting's supposed composition—came the first surprise. Bernice watched, stunned, as a scrawny, hungry-looking young painter stood before two side-by-side copies of the famous image—and, time-reversed, with brushstroke after brushstroke, eliminated the copy that had passed down the centuries to the care of the Louvre.
Briefly she detoured to track forward in time, following the fate of the older "original" from which the Louvre's copy—just a copy, a replica!—had been made. That "original" was to last little-more than two centuries, she saw, before being lost in a massive house fire in Revolutionary France.
WormCam studies had exposed many of the world's best-known works of art as forgeries and copies—more than seventy percent of pre-twentieth-century paintings (and a smaller proportion of sculptures, smaller presumably only because of the effort required to make copies). History was a dangerous, destructive corridor through which very little of value survived unscathed.
But still there had been no indication that this painting, of all of them, had been a fake. Although at least a dozen replicas had been known to circulate at various times and places, the Louvre had a continuous record of ownership since the artist had laid down his brush. And there was besides evidence of changes to the composition under the top layer of paint: an indication more of an original, assayed and reworked, than a copy.
But then, Bernice reflected, composition techniques and records could be faked too.
Bewildered, she returned down the decades to that dingy room, the ingenious, forging painter. And she began to follow the "original" he had copied deeper into the past.
More decades flickered by, more transfers of ownership, all of it an uninteresting blur around the changeless painting itself.
At last she approached the start of the sixteenth century, and was nearing his studio, in Florence. Even now copies were being made, by the master's own students, But all of the copies were of this, the lost "original" she had identified.
Perhaps there would be no more surprises.
She was to be proved wrong.
Oh, it was true that he was involved in the composition, preliminary sketches, and much of the painting's design. It was to be the ideal portrait, he declared grandly, the features and symbolic overtones of its subject synthesized into a perfect unity, and with a sweeping, flowing style—to astound his contemporaries and fascinate later generations. The conception, indeed, was his, and the triumph.
But not the execution. The master—distracted by many commissions and his wider interests in science and technology—left that to others.
Bernice, awe and dismay swirling in her heart, watched as a young man from the provinces called Raphael Sanzio painstakingly applied the last touches to that gentle, puzzling smile...
Patefield Testimony: It is a matter of regret that many cherished—and harmless—myths, now exposed to the cold light of this future day, are evaporating.
Betsy Ross is a notorious recent instance. There really was a Betsy Ross. But she was never visited by George Washington; she was not asked to make a flag for the new nation; she did not work on its design with Washington; she did not make up the flag in her back parlor. As far as can be determined, all this stuff was a concoction of her grandson's, almost a century later.
Davy Crockett's myth was self-manufactured, his coonskin legend developed fairly cynically to create popularity by the Whig party in Congress. There has been not one WormCam observation of him using the phrase "bar-hunting" on Capitol Hill.
Paul Revere, on the other hand, has had his reputation enhanced by the WormCam.
For many years Revere served as the principal rider for Boston's Committee of Safety. His most famous ride—to Lexington to warn revolutionary leaders that the British were on the march—was, ironically, more hazardous, Revere's achievement still more heroic, even than the legend of Longfellow's poem. But still, many modern Americans have been dismayed by the heavy French accent Revere had inherited from his father.
And so it goes on—not just in America, but around the world. There are even some famous figures—the commentators call them "snowmen"—who prove never to have existed at all! What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.
We must wonder where this will lead
us. Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.
But, just as each human will now have to learn to construct a personality in the glare of pitiless WormCam inspection, so communities will have to come to terms with the stripped-bare truth of their own past—and find new ways to express their common values and history, if they are to survive the future. And the sooner we get on with it, the better.
Similaun Glacier, Alps. April, 2321 B.C.:
It was an elemental world: black rock, blue sky, hard white ice. This was one of the highest passes in the Alps. The man, alone, moved through this lethal environment with utter confidence.
But Marcus knew the man he watched was already approaching the place where, slumped over a boulder and with his Neolithic tool kit stacked neatly at his side, he would meet his death.
At first—as he had explored the possibilities of the WormCam, here at the Institute of Alpine Studies at the University of Innsbruck—Marcus Pinch had feared that the WormCam would destroy archaeology and replace it with something more resembling butterfly hunting: the crude observation of "the truth," perhaps by untrained eyes. There would be no more Schliemanns, no more Troys, no more patient unraveling of the past from shards and traces.
But as it turned out there was still a role for the accumulated wisdom of archaeology, as the best intellectual reconstruction available of the true past. There was just too much to see—and the WormCam horizon expanded all the time. For the time being, the role of the WormCam was be to supplement conventional archaeological techniques: to provide key pieces of evidence to resolve disputes, to reinforce or overthrow hypotheses, as a more correct consensual narrative of the past slowly emerged.
And in this case, for Marcus, the truth that would be revealed—here now, by the blue-white-black images relayed through time and space to his SoftScreen—would provide answers to the most compelling questions in his own professional career.