Absenteeism seemed to be reaching an all-time high, as people abandoned their work, their vocations, even their loved ones to devote themselves to the endless fascination of the WormCam. It was as if the human race had become suddenly old, content to hide away, feeding on its memories.
And perhaps that was how it was, Bobby thought. After all, if the Wormwood couldn’t be turned away, there was no future to speak of. Maybe the WormCam, with its gift of the past, was precisely what the human race required right now; a bolt-hole.
And each of those witnesses was coming to understand that one day she too would be no more than a thing of light and shadow, embedded in time, perhaps scrutinized in her turn from some unknowable future.
But to Bobby, it was not the mass of mankind that concerned him, not the great currents of history and thought that were stirred, but the breaking heart of his brother.
Chapter 20
Crisis of faith
David had turned into a recluse, it seemed to Bobby. He would come to the Wormworks unannounced, perform obscure experiments, and return to his apartment, where — according to OurWorld records — he continued to make extensive use of WormCam technology, pursuing his own obscure, undeclared projects.
After three weeks, Bobby sought him out. David met him at his door, seemed on the point of refusing to let him in. Then he stood aside.
The apartment was cluttered, books and SoftScreens everywhere. A place where a man was living alone, habits unmoderated by consideration of others.
“What the hell happened to you?”
David managed to smile. “The WormCam, Bobby. What else?”
“Heather said you assisted her with the Lincoln project.”
“Yes. That was what gave me the bug, perhaps. But now I have seen too much history… I am a bad host. Would you like a drink, some beer.”
“Come on, David. Talk to me.”
David rubbed his blond scalp. “This is called a crisis of faith, Bobby. I don’t expect you to understand.”
In fact Bobby, irritated, did understand, and he was disappointed with the mundanity of his brother’s condition. Every day, WormCam addicts, hooked on history, beat on OurWorld’s corporate doors, demanding ever more ’Cam access. But then David had isolated himself; perhaps he didn’t know how much a part of the human race he remained, how common his addiction had become.
But how to tell him?
Bobby said carefully, “You’re suffering history shock. It’s a — fashionable — condition right now. It will pass.”
“Fashionable, is it?” David glowered at him.
“We’re all feeling the same.” He cast around for examples. “I watched the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth: the Kamtnertor Theatre, Vienna, 1824. Did you see that?” The symphony performance had been professionally recorded and rebroadcast by one of the media conglomerates. But the ratings had been poor. “It was a mess. The playing was lousy, the choir discordant. The Shakespeare was even worse.”
“Shakespeare?”
“You really have been locked away, haven’t you? It was the premiere of
“A lot of people are finding the new history hard to accept. OurWorld is a scapegoat for their anger, so I know that’s true. Hiram has been hit by endless suits — libel, incitement to riot, incitement to provoke racial hatred — from national and patriotic groups, religious organizations, families of debunked heroes, even a few national governments. That’s aside from the physical threats. Of course it isn’t helping that he is trying to copyright history.”
David couldn’t help but guffaw. “You’re joking.”
“Nope. He’s arguing that history is out there to be discovered, like the human genome; if you can patent pieces of
Like many semi-mythical heroes of the past, under the WormCam’s pitiless glare Robin had simply melted away into legend and confabulation, leaving not a trace of historical truth. The legend had stemmed, in fact, from a series of fourteenth-century English ballads born out of a time of baronial rebellions and agrarian discontent, which had culminated in the Peasants’ revolt of 1381.
David smiled. “I like that. Hiram always did like Robin Hood. I think he fancies himself as a modern equivalent — even if he’s deluding himself; in fact he probably has more in common with King John… How ironic if Hiram came to
“Look, David — many people feel just as you do. History is full of horror, of forgotten people, of slaves, of people whose lives were stolen. But we can’t change the past. All we can do is to move on, resolving not to make the same mistakes again.”
“You think so?” David snapped bitterly. He stood, and with brisk movements he opaqued the windows of his cluttered apartment, shutting out the afternoon light. Then he sat beside Bobby and unrolled a SoftScreen. “Watch now, and see if you still believe it is so easy.” With confident keystrokes he initiated a stored WormCam recording.
Side by side, the brothers sat, bathed in the light of other days.
…The small, round, battered sailing ship approached the shore. Two more ships could be seen on the horizon. The sand was pure, the water still and blue, the sky huge.
People came out onto the beaches: men and women naked, dark, handsome. They seemed full of wonder. Some of the natives swam out to meet the approaching vessel.
“Columbus,” Bobby breathed.
“Yes. These are the Arawaks. The natives of the Bahamas. They were friendly. They gave the Europeans gifts, parrots and balls of cotton and spears made of cane. But they also had gold, which they wore as ornaments in their ears.
“Columbus immediately took some of the Arawaks by force, so that he could extract information about the gold. And it developed from there. The Spaniards had armour and muskets and horses. The Arawaks had no iron, no means of defending themselves from the Europeans’ weapons and discipline.
“The Arawaks were taken as slave labor. On Haiti, for example, mountains were stripped from top to bottom, in the search for gold. The Arawaks died by the thousands, roughly a third of the workers every six months. Soon mass suicides began, using cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. And so on. There seem to have been about a quarter of a million Arawaks on Haiti when Columbus arrived. Within a few years, half of them were dead of murder, mutilation or suicide. And by 1650, after decades of ferocious slave labor, none of the original Arawaks or their descendants were left on Haiti.
“It turned out there were no gold fields after all: only bits of dust the Arawaks garnered from streams for their pathetic, deadly jewellry.
“And that, Bobby, was how our invasion of the Americas began.”
“David.”
“Watch.” He tapped the ’Screen and brought up a new scene.
Bobby saw blurred images of a city: small, cluttered, crowded, of white stone that glowed in the flat sunlight.
“Jerusalem,” David said now. “Fifteen July, 1099. Full of Jews and Muslims. The Crusaders, a military mission from Western Christendom, had laid siege to the city for a month. Now their attack is reaching its peak.”
Bobby watched bulky figures clambering over walls, soldiers rushing to meet them. But the defenders fell back, and the knights advanced, wielding their swords. Bobby saw, incredibly, a man beheaded with a single blow.
The Crusaders fought their way to the Temple area. There the defending Turks held out for a day. At last — wading in blood up to their ankles — the Crusaders broke through and quickly slew the surviving defenders.
The knights and their followers swarmed through the city, taking horses and mules, gold and silver. Lamps and candelabras were stripped from the Dome of the Rock. Corpses were butchered, for sometimes the Crusaders found coins in the bellies of the dead.
And, as the long day of pillage and butchery went on, Bobby saw Christians tear strips of flesh from their fallen foe, smoke and eat them.
All this in violent, colour-filled glimpses: the vermilion splash of bloody swords, the frightened cries of horses, the hard eyes of grimy, half-starved knights who sang psalms and hymns, eerily, even as they swung their great swords. But the fighting was oddly quiet: there were no guns here, no cannon, the only weapons wielded by human muscles.
David murmured, “This was an utter disaster for our civilization. It was an act of rape, and it caused a schism between East and West that has never truly healed. And it was all in the name of Christ.
“Bobby, thanks to the WormCam, I’ve been privileged to watch centuries of Christian terrorism, an orgy of cruelty and destruction that stretched from the Crusades to the sixteenth-century plundering of Mexico and beyond: all of it driven by the religion of the Popes —
With their mail and bright crosses the Crusaders were like magnificent animals, rampaging in the sunlit dust. The barbarism was astonishing.
But still…
“David, we knew this. The Crusades were well chronicled. The historians have been able to pick out fact from propaganda, long before the WormCam.”
“Perhaps. But we’re human, Bobby. It is the cruel power of the WormCam to retrieve history from the dust of textbooks and make it live again, accessible to our poor human senses. And so we must experience it again, as the blood spilled centuries back flows once more.
“History is a river of blood, Bobby. That is what the WormCam forces us to see. History washes away lives like grains of sand, down to the sea of darkness — and every one of those lives is, was, as precious and vibrant as yours or mine. And none of it, not one drop of blood, can be changed.” He eyed Bobby. “You ready for more?”
“David.”
David, you aren’t the only one. All of us share the horror. You are sinking into self-indulgence, if you suppose that you alone are witnessing these scenes, feeling this way.
But he had no way to say this.
David brought up another image. Bobby longed to leave, to turn his head away. But he knew he must face this, if he was to help his brother.
Once again, life and blood fled across the ’Screen.
