The Light of Other Days

She smiled. “How about ‘Heather’ ? This is complicated enough already.”

And, without warning, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his chest.

He had tried to rehearse for this moment, tried to imagine how he would handle the storm of emotion he had expected. But now the moment was here, what he felt was…

Empty.

And all the while he was aware, achingly aware, of a million eyes on him, on every gesture and expression he made.

She pulled away from him. “I haven’t seen you since you were five years old, and it has to be like this. Well, I think we’ve put on enough of a show.”

She led him into the room he had tentatively identified as a study. On a worktable there was a giant SoftScreen of the finely grained type employed by artists and graphic designers. The walls were covered with lists, images of people, places, scraps of yellow paper covered with spidery, incomprehensible writing. There were scripts and reference books open on every surface, including the floor. Heather, brusquely, picked a mass of papers up off a swivel chair and dumped it on the floor. He accepted the implicit invitation by sitting down.

She smiled at him, “When you were a little boy you liked tea.”

“I did?”

“You’d drink nothing else. Not even soda. So, you’d like some?”

He made to refuse. But she had probably bought some specially. And this is your mother, asshole. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

She went to the kitchen, returned with a steaming mug of what proved to be jasmine tea. She leaned close to give it to him. “You can’t fool me,” she whispered. “But thanks for indulging me.”

Awkward silence; he sipped his tea.

He indicated the big SoftScreen, the nest of paper. “You’re a filmmaker. Right?”

She sighed. “I used to be. Documentaries. I regard myself as an investigative journalist.” She smiled. “I won awards. You should be proud. Not that anybody cares about that side of my life any more, compared to the fact that I once slept with the great Hiram Patterson.”

He said, “You’re still working? Even though.”

“Even though my life has turned to shit? I’m trying to. What else should I do? I don’t want to be defined by Hiram. Not that it’s easy. Everything has changed so fast.”

“The WormCam?”

“What else?… Nobody wants thought-through pieces any more. And drama has been completely wiped out. We’re all fascinated by this new power we have to watch each other. So there’s no work in anything but docusoaps: following real people going through their real lives — with their consent and approval, of course. Ironic considering my own position, don’t you think? Look.” She brought up an image on the SoftScreen, a smiling young woman in uniform. “Anna Petersen. Fresh out of the Navy college at Annapolis.”

He smiled. “Anna from Annapolis?”

“You can see why she was chosen. We have rotating teams to track Anna twenty-four hours a day. We’ll follow her career through her first postings, her triumphs and disasters, her loves and losses. The word is she’s to be sent with the task force to the Aral Sea water-war flashpoints, so we’re expecting some good material. Of course the Navy knows we’re tracking Anna.” She looked up into the empty air. “Don’t you, guys? So maybe it isn’t a surprise she got an assignment like that, and no doubt we’ll be getting plenty of mom-friendly, feel-good wartime footage.”

“You’re cynical.”

“Well, I hope not. But it isn’t easy. The WormCam is making a mess of my career. Oh, for now there is a demand for interpretation-analysts, editors, commentators. But even that is going to disappear when the great unwashed masses out there can point their own WormCams at whoever they want.”

“You think that’s going to happen?”

She snorted. “Oh, of course it is. We’ve been here before, with personal computers. It’s just a question of how fast. Driven by competitive pressure and social forces, the WormCams are going to get cheaper and more powerful and more widely available, until everybody has one.”

And perhaps — Bobby thought uneasily, thinking of David’s time-viewing experiments — more powerful than you know.

“…Tell me about you and Hiram.”

She smiled, looking tired. “Are you sure you want that? Here, on planet Candid Camera?”

“Please.”

“What did Hiram say to you about me?”

Slowly, stumbling occasionally, he repeated Hiram’s account.

She nodded. “Then that’s what happened.” And she held his gaze, for long seconds. “Listen to me. I’m more than an appendage of Hiram, some sort of annex to your life. And so is Mary. We’re people, Bobby. Did you know I lost a child, Mary, a little brother?”

“…No. Hiram didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. Because it had nothing to do with him. Thank God nobody can watch that.”

Not yet, Bobby thought darkly.

“…I want you to understand this, Bobby.” She looked into the air. “I want everyone to understand. My life is being destroyed, piece by piece, by being watched. When I lost my boy, I hid. I locked the doors, closed the curtains, even hid under the bed. At least there were moments when I could be private. Not now. Now, it’s as if every wall of my house has been turned into a one-way mirror. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“I think so,” he said gently.

“In a few days the attention focus is going to move on, to burn somebody else. But I’ll never know when some obsessive, somewhere in the world, will be peering into my bedroom, still curious even years from now. And even if the WormCam disappeared tomorrow, it could never bring Desmond back.

“Look, it’s been bad enough for me. But at least I know this is all because of something I did, long ago. My husband and daughter had nothing to do with it. And yet they’ve been subject to the same pitiless stare. And Desmond.”

“I’m sorry.”

She dropped her gaze. Her tea cup was trembling, with a delicate china rattle, in its saucer. “I’m sorry too. I didn’t agree to see you to make you feel bad.”

“Don’t worry. I felt bad already. And I brought the audience. I’ve been selfish.”

She smiled, with an effort. “They were here anyway.” She waved her hand through the air around her head. “I sometimes imagine I can disperse the watchers, like flapping away insects. But I don’t suppose it does any good. I’m glad you came, whatever the circumstances… Would you like some more tea?”

•

…She had brown eyes.

It was only as he endured the long drive back to Cedar City that that simple point struck him.

He called, “Search Engine. Basic genetics. Dominant and recessive genes. For example, blue eyes are recessive, brown dominant. So if a father has blue eyes and a mother brown, the children should have…”

“Brown eyes? It’s not quite as simple as that, Bobby. If the mother’s chromosomes carry a blue-eyes gene, then some of the children will have blue eyes too.”

“Blue-blue from the father; blue-brown from the mother. Four combinations.”

“Yes. So one in four of the children will be blue-eyed.”

“…Umm.” I have blue eyes, he thought. Heather has brown.

The Search Engine was smart enough to interpolate his real question. “I don’t have information on Heather’s genetic ancestry, Bobby. If you like I can find out.”

“Never mind. Thank you.”

He settled back in his seat. No doubt it was a stupid question. Heather must have blue eyes in her family background.

No doubt.

The car sped through the huge, gathering night.

Chapter 14 Light years

Hiram stalked around David’s small room, silhouetted by picture-window Seattle night-time skyline. He picked up a paper at random, a faded photocopy, and read its title. “’Lorentzian Wormholes from the Gravitationally Squeezed Vacuum.’ More brain-busting theory?”

David sat on his sofa, irritated and disturbed by his father’s unannounced visit. He understood Hiram’s need for company, to burn off his adrenaline, to escape the intensely scrutinized goldfish bowl his life had become. He just wished it didn’t have to be in his space. “Hiram, do you want a drink? A coffee, or…”

“A glass of wine would be fine. Not French.” David went to the refrigerator. “I keep a Chardonnay. A few of the Californian vineyards are almost acceptable.” He brought the glasses back to the sofa.

“So,” Hiram said. “Lorentzian wormholes?” David leaned back in the sofa and scratched his head. “To tell the truth, we’re nearing a dead end. Casimir technology seems to have inherent limitations. The balance of the capacitor’s two superconducting plates, a balance between the Casimir forces and electrical repulsion, is unstable and easily lost. And the electric charges we have to carry are so large there are frequent violent discharges to the surroundings. Three people have been killed in WormCam operations already, Hiram. As you know from the insurance suits. The next generation of WormCam is going to require something more robust. And if we had that we could build much smaller, cheaper WormCam facilities, and propagate the technology a lot further.”

“And is there a way?”

“Well, perhaps. Casimir injectors are a rather clunky, nineteenth-century way of making negative energy. But it turns out that such regions can occur naturally. If space is sufficiently strongly distorted, quantum vacuum and other fluctuations can be amplified until… Well. This is a subtle quantum effect. It’s called a squeezed vacuum. The trouble is, the best theory we have says you need a quantum black note to give you a strong enough gravity field. And so…”

“And so, you’re looking for a better theory.” Hiram riffled through the papers, stared at David’s handwritten notes, the equations linked by looping arrows. He glared around the room. “And not a SoftScreen in sight. Do you get out much? Ever? Or do you SmartDrive to and from work, your head in some dusty paper or other? From the moment you got here you had your FrancoAmerican head stuck up your broad and welcoming backside, and that’s where it has remained.”