The Light of Other Days

“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 any more. 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, grey 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. Let’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 travellers. 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 any more, 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,