The Light of Other Days

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 unravelling 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.

This man, this hunter, had been dug out of the ice fifty-three centuries after he died. The smears of blood, tissue, starch, hair and fragments of feather on his tools and clothing had enabled the scientists, Marcus included, to reconstruct much of his life. Modern researchers had even, whimsically, given him a name: Otzi, the Ice Man.

His two arrows were of particular interest to Marcus — in fact, they had served as the basis of Marcus’s doctorate. Both the arrows were broken, and Marcus had been able to demonstrate that before he died, the hunter had been trying to dismantle the arrows, intent on making one good arrow out of the two broken ones, by fitting the better arrowhead into the good shaft.

It was such painstaking detective work as this that had drawn Marcus into archaeology. Marcus saw no limit to the reach of such techniques. Perhaps in some sense every event left some mark on the universe, a mark that could one day be decoded by sufficiently ingenious instruments. In a sense the WormCam was the crystallization of the unspoken intuition of every archaeologist: that the past is a country, real, out there somewhere, which can be explored, fingertip by fingertip.

But a new book of truth was opening. For the ’Cam could answer questions left untouched by traditional archaeology, no matter how powerful the techniques — even about this man, Otzi, who had become the best known human of all those who had lived throughout prehistory.

What had never been answered — what was impossible to answer from the fragments recovered — was why the Ice Man had died. Perhaps he was fleeing warfare, or pursuing a love affair. Perhaps he was a criminal, fleeing the rough justice of his time.

Marcus had intuited that all these explanations were parochial, projections of a modern world on a more austere past. But he longed, along with the rest of the world, to know the truth.

But now the world had forgotten Otzi, with his skin clothes and tools of flint and copper, the mystery of his lonely death. Now, in a world where any figure from the past could be made to come to vibrant life, Otzi was no longer a novelty, nor even particularly interesting. Nobody cared to learn how, after all, he had died.

Nobody save Marcus. So Marcus had sat in the chill gloom of this university facility, struggling through that Alpine pass at Otzi’s shoulder, until the truth had become apparent.

Otzi was a high-status Alpine hunter. His copper axehead and bearskin hat were marks of hunting prowess and prestige — And his goal, on this fatal expedition, had been the most elusive quarry of all, the only Alpine animal which retires to high rocky areas at night: the ibex.

But Otzi was old — at forty-six, he had already reached an advanced age for a man of his period. He was plagued by arthritis, and afflicted today by an intestinal infection which had given him chronic diarrhoea. Perhaps he had grown weaker, slower than he knew — or cared to admit.

He had followed his quarry ever deeper into the cold heights of the mountains. He had made his simple camp in this pass, intending to repair the arrowheads he had broken, continue his pursuit the next day. He had taken a final meal, of salted goat flesh and dried plums.

But the night had turned crystal clear, and the wind had howled through the pass, drawing Otzi’s life heat with it.

It was a sad, lonely death, and Marcus, watching, thought there was a moment when Otzi tried to rise, as if aware of his terrible mistake, as if he knew he was dying. But he could not rise; and Marcus could not reach through the WormCam to help him.

And so Otzi would lie alone, entombed in his ice, for five thousand years.

Marcus shut down the WormCam, and once more Otzi was at peace.

•

Patefield Testimony: Many nations — not just America — are facing grave internal dialogues about the new truths revealed about the past, truths in many cases barely reported, if at all, in conventional histories. In France, for example, there has been much soul-searching about the unexpectedly wide nature of collaboration with the Nazi regime during the German occupation of the Second World War. Reassuring myths about the significance of the wartime Resistance have been severely damaged — not least by the new revelations about David Moulin, a revered Resistance leader. Barely anyone who knows the legend of Moulin was prepared to learn that he had begun his career as a Nazi mole — although he was later persuaded to his national cause, and was in fact tortured and executed by the SS in 1943. Modern Belgians seem overwhelmed by their confrontation with the brutal reality of the “Congo Free State,” a tightly centralized colony designed to strip the territory of its natural wealth — principally rubber — and maintained by atrocity, murder, starvation, exposure, disease and hunger, resulting in the uprooting of whole communities and the massacre, between 1885 and 1906, of eight million people. In the lands of the old Soviet Union, people are fixated on the era of the Stalinist terror. The Germans are confronting the Holocaust once more. The Japanese, for the first time in generations, are having to come to terms with the truth of their wartime massacres and other brutalities in Szechwan and elsewhere. Israelis are uncomfortably aware of their own crimes against the Palestinians. The fragile Serbian democracy is threatening to collapse under the new exposure of the horrors in Bosnia and elsewhere after the breakup of the old Yugoslavia. And so on. Most of these past horrors were well known before the WormCam, of course, and many honest and conscientious histories were written. But still the endless dismal banality of it all, the human reality of so much cruelty and pain and waste, remains utterly dismaying. And stronger emotions than dismay have been stirred. Ethnic and religious disputes centuries old have been the trigger for many past conflicts. So it has been this time: we have seen interpersonal anger, riots, interethnic struggles, even coups and minor wars. And much of the anger is still directed at OurWorld, the messenger who has delivered so much dismal truth. But it could have been worse. As it turns out — while there has been much anger expressed at ancient wrongs, some never even exposed before — by and large each community has become too aware of its own crimes, against its own people and others, to seek atonement for those of others. No nation is without sin; none seems prepared to cast the first stone, and almost every surviving major institution — be it nation, corporation, church — finds itself forced to apologize for crimes committed in its name in the past. But there is a deeper shock to be confronted. The WormCam, after all, does not deliver its history lessons in the form of verbal summaries or neat animated maps. Nor does it have much to say of glory or honor. Rather, it simply shows us human beings, one at a time — very often starving or suffering or dying at the hands of others. Greatness no longer matters. We see now that each human being who dies is the centre of a universe: a unique spark of hope and despair, hate and love, going alone into the greater darkness. It is as if the WormCam has brought a new democracy to the viewing of history. As Lincoln might have remarked, the history emerging from all this intent WormCam inspection will be a new story of mankind: a story of the people, by the people, for the people. Now, what matters most is my story — or my lover’s, or my parent’s, or my ancestor’s, who died the most mundane, meaningless of deaths in the mud of Stalingrad or Passchendaele or Gettysburg, or simply in some unforgiving field, broken by a life of drudgery. Empowered by the WormCam, assisted by such great genealogical record centers as the Mormons’, we have all discovered our ancestors. There are those who argue that this is dangerous and destabilizing. After all, the spate of divorces and suicides which followed the WormCam’s first gift of openness has now been followed by a fresh wave as we have become able to spy on our partners, not just in the real time of the present, but in the past as far back as we care to look, and every past misdeed, open or hidden, is made available for scrutiny, every old wound reopened. But this is a process of adjustment, which the strongest relationships will survive. And anyhow, such comparatively trivial consequences of the WormCam are surely insignificant compared to the great gift of deeper historical truth which, for the first time, is being made available to us. So I do not endorse the doomsayers. I say, trust the people. Give us the tools and we will finish the job. There is a growing clamour — tragically impossible to satisfy — to find a way, some way, any way, to change the past: to help the suffering long-dead, even to redeem them. But the past is immutable; only the future is there to be shaped. With all the difficulties and dangers, we are privileged to be alive at such a time. There will surely never again be a time when the light of truth and understanding spreads with such overwhelming rapidity into the darkness of the past, never again a time when the mass consciousness of mankind is transformed so dramatically. The new generations, born in the omnipresent shadow of the WormCam, will grow up with a very different view of their species and its past. For better or worse.

•

Middle East. c. 1250 B.C.:

Miriam was a tutor of accounting expert systems: certainly no professional historian. But, like almost everybody else she knew, she had gotten hold of WormCam time as soon as it had become available, and started to research her own passions. And, in Miriam’s case, that passion focused on a single man: a man whose story had been her lifelong inspiration.

But the closer the WormCam brought Miriam to her subject, the more, maddeningly, he seemed to dissolve. The very act of observing was destroying him, as if he was obeying some unwelcome form of historical uncertainty principle.

Yet she persisted.

At last, having spent long hours searching for him in the harsh, confusing sunlight of those ancient deserts, she began to consult the professional historians who had gone before her into these wastes of time. And, piece by piece, she confirmed for herself what they had deduced.

The career of the man himself — shorn of its supernatural elements — was a fairly crude conflation of the biographies of several leaders of that era, as the nation of Israel had coalesced from groups of Palestinian refugees fleeing the collapse of Canaanite city-states. The rest was invention or theft.

That business, for instance, of being concealed in a wicker basket and floated down the Nile, in order to save him from murder as a firstborn Israelite: that was no more than a conflation of older legends from Mesopotamia and Egypt — about the god Horns, for example — none of which was based on fact either. And he’d never been an Egyptian prince. That fragment seemed to come from the story of a Syrian called Bay who had served as Egypt’s chief treasurer, and had made it to Pharaoh, as Ramosekhayemnetjeru.

But what is truth?

After all, as preserved by the myth, he had been a complex, human, inspiring man. He was marked by imperfection: he had stammered, and often fell out with the very people he led. He even argued with God. But his triumph over those imperfections had been an inspiration, over three thousand years, to many people, including Miriam herself — named for his beloved sister — who had had to overcome the obstacles set in her own life by her cerebral palsy.

He was irresistible, as vividly real as any personage from “true” history, and Miriam knew he would live on into the future. And given that, did it matter that Moses never truly existed?

•

It was a new obsession, Bobby saw, as millions of figures from history — renowned and otherwise — came briefly to life once more, under the gaze of this first generation of WormCam witnesses.