“That’s Saturn,” Mavens said, wondering. “The planet Saturn.”
“Yes. We’re looking at the rings.” David grinned. “I established a WormCam viewpoint all of a billion and a half kilometres away. Quite a thing, isn’t it? If you look closely you can even see a couple of the moons, here in the plane of the rings.”
Hiram laughed out loud and hugged David’s bulk. “My God, that’s bloody terrific.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. But that’s not important. Not any more.”
“
Feverishly David began to tap at his SoftScreen; the image of Saturn’s rings dissolved. “I can reconfigure it from here. It’s as easy as that. It was Bobby who gave me the clue. I just hadn’t thought out of the box as he did. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of metres, then the rest of the wormhole span becomes timelike…”
Bobby leaned forward to see. The ’Screen now showed an equally grainy image of a much more mundane scene. Bobby recognized it immediately: it was David’s work cubicle in the Wormworks. David was sitting there, his back to the viewpoint, and Bobby was standing at his side, looking over his shoulder.
“As easily as that,” David said again, his voice small, awed. “Of course we’ll have to run repeatable trials, properly timed.”
Hiram said, “That’s just the Wormworks. So what?”
“You don’t understand. This new wormhole has the same, umm,
“The one that reached to Saturn.”
“Yes. But instead of spanning eighty light-minutes -”
Mavens finished it for him. “I get it. This wormhole spans eighty minutes.”
“Yes,” David said. “
Hiram’s mouth had dropped open.
Bobby felt as if the world was swimming around him, changing, configuring into some strange, unknowable pattern, as if another chip in his head had been switched off. He looked at Kate, who seemed diminished, terrified, lost in shock.
But Hiram, his troubles dismissed, grasped the implications immediately. He glared into the air. “I wonder how many of them are watching us right now?”
Mavens said, “Who?”
“In the future. Don’t you see? If he’s right this is a turning point in history, this moment, right here and right now, the invention of this, this past viewer. Probably the air around us is fizzing with WormCam viewpoints, sent back by future historians. Biographers. Hagiographers.” He lifted up his head and bared his teeth. “Are you watching me? Are you? Do you remember my name? I’m Hiram Patterson! Hah! See what I did, you arseholes!”
And in the corridors of the future, innumerable watchers met his challenging gaze.
Two
The eyes Of God
History… is indeed little more than a chronicle of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Chapter 13
Walls of glass
Kate was in remand, waiting for her trial. It was taking a while to come to court, as it was a complex case, and Hiram’s lawyers had argued, in confidence through the FBI, that her trial should be delayed anyhow while the new past-viewing capabilities of WormCam technology stabilized.
In fact, such had been the wide publicity surrounding Kate’s case that the ruling was being taken as a precedent. Even before its past-viewing possibilities were widely understood, the WormCam was expected to have an immediate impact on almost all contested criminal cases. Many major trials had been delayed or paused awaiting new evidence, and in general only minor and uncontested cases were being processed through the courts.
For a long time to come, whatever the outcome of the case, Kate wouldn’t be going anywhere. So Bobby decided to go find his mother.
Heather Mays lived in a place called Thomas City, close to the Utah-Arizona state line. Bobby flew into Cedar City and drove from there. At Thomas, he stopped the car a few blocks short of Heather’s home and walked.
A police car silently cruised by, and a beefy male cop peered out at Bobby. The cop’s face was a broad, hostile moon, scarred by the pits of multiple basal-cell carcinomas. But his glare softened with recognition. Bobby could read his lips:
As the car moved on, Bobby felt a shiver of self consciousness. The WormCam had made Hiram the most famous person on the planet, and in the all-seeing public eye, Bobby stood right at his side.
He knew, in fact, that as he approached his mother’s home a hundred WormCam viewpoints must hover at his shoulder even now, gazing into his face at this difficult moment, invisible emotional vampires.
He tried not to think about it: the only possible defence against the WormCam. He walked on through the heart of the little town.
Out-of-season April snow was falling on the roofs and gardens of clapboard houses that might have been preserved for a hundred years. He passed a small pond where children were skating, round and round in tight circles, laughing loudly. Even under the pale wintry sun, the children wore sunglasses and silvery, reflective smears of sunblock.
Thomas was a settled, peaceful, anonymous place, one of hundreds like it, he supposed, here in the huge empty heart of America. It was a place that, three months ago, he would have regarded as deadly dull; if he’d ever found himself here he probably would have hightailed it for Vegas as soon as possible. And yet now he found himself wondering how it would have been to grow up here.
As he watched the cop car pass slowly along the street, he noticed a strange flurry of petty law-breaking following in its wake. A man emerging from a sushi-burger store crumpled the paper his food had been wrapped in and dropped it to the floor, right under the cops’ noses. At a crossing, an elderly woman jaywalked, glaring challengingly through the cops’ windscreen. And so on. The cops watched tolerantly. And as soon as the car had passed, the people, done with thumbing their noses at the authorities, resumed their apparently lawful lives.
This was a widespread phenomenon. There had been a surprisingly wide-ranging, if muted, rebellion against the new regime of invisible WormCam overseers. The idea of the authorities having such immense powers of oversight did not, it seemed, sit well with the instincts of many Americans, and there had been rises in petty-crime rates all over the country. Otherwise law-abiding people seemed suddenly struck by a desire to perform small illegal acts — littering, jaywalking — as if to prove they were still free, despite the authorities’ assumed scrutiny. And local cops were learning to be tolerant of this.
It was just a token, of liberties defended. But Bobby supposed it was healthy.
He reached the main street. Animated images on tabloid vending machines urged him to download their latest news, for just ten dollars a shot. He eyed the seductive headlines. There was some serious news, local, national and international — it seemed that the town was getting over an outbreak of cholera, related to stress on the water supply, and was having some trouble assimilating its quota of sea-level-rise relocates from Galveston Island — but the serious stuff was mostly swamped by tabloid trivia.
A local member of Congress had been forced out of office by a WormCam exposure of sexual peccadilloes. She had been caught pressuring a high-school football hero, sent to Washington as a reward for his sporting achievements, into another form of athletics… But the boy had been over the age of consent; as far as Bobby was concerned the Representative’s main crime, in this dawning age of the WormCam, was stupidity.
Well, she wasn’t the only one. It was said that twenty percent of members of Congress, and almost a third of the Senate, had announced they would not be seeking re-election, or would retire early, or had just resigned outright. Some commentators estimated that fully half of all America’s elected officials might be forced out of office before the WormCam became embedded in the national, and individual, consciousness.
Some said this was a good thing. that people were being frightened into decency. Others pointed out that most humans had moments they would prefer not to share with the rest of mankind. Perhaps in a couple of electoral cycles the only survivors among those in office, or prepared to run for office, would be the pathologically dull with no personal lives to speak of at all.
No doubt the truth, as usual, would be somewhere between the extremes.
There was still some coverage of last week’s big story: the attempt by unscrupulous White House aides to discredit a potential opponent of President Juarez at the next election campaign. They had WormCammed him sitting on the john with his trousers down his ankles, picking his nose and extracting fluff from his navel.
But this had rebounded on the voyeurs, and had done no damage to Governor Beauchamp at all. After all, everybody had to use the john; and probably nobody, no matter how obscure, did so now without wondering if there was a WormCam viewpoint looking down (or, worse, up) at her.
Even Bobby had taken to using the lavatory in the dark. It wasn’t easy, even with the new easy-use touch-textured plumbing that was rapidly becoming commonplace. And he sometimes wondered if there was anybody in the developed world who still had sex with the lights on…
He doubted that even the supermarket-tabloid vendors would persist with such paparazzi exposure as the shock value wore off. It was telling that these images, which would have been shockingly revealing just a few months ago, now blared multi-coloured in the middle of the afternoon from stands in the main street of this Mormon community, unregarded by almost everyone, young and old, children and churchgoers alike.
It seemed to Bobby that the WormCam was forcing the human race to shed a few taboos, to grow up a little.
He walked on.
The Mayses’ home was easy to find. Before this otherwise nondescript house, in a nondescript residential street, here in the middle of classic small-town America, he found the decades-old symbol of fame or notoriety: a dozen or so news crews, gathered before the white painted picket fence that bordered the garden. Instant access WormCam technology or not, it was going to take a long time before the news-watching public was weaned off the interpretative presence of a reporter interposing herself before some breaking news story.
