In the midst of this, his most difficult time, David kept his promise to Heather, and sought out Mary.

He had never regarded himself as particularly competent in affairs of the human heart. So, in his humility — and consumed by his own inner turmoil — he had spent a long time seeking a way to approach Heather’s difficult, anguished daughter. And the way he found, in the end, was technical: through a piece of software, in fact.

He came to her workstation in the Wormworks. It was late, and most of the other researchers had gone. She sat in a pool of light, coloured by the flickering glow of the workstation SoftScreen, surrounded by the greater, brooding darkness of this dusty place of engineering and electronics. When he arrived, she hastily cleared down the ’Screen. But he glimpsed a sunny day, a garden, children running with an adult, laughing, before the darkness returned. She glowered up at him sulkily; she wore a baggy, grubby T-shirt bearing a brazen message:

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN

David admitted to himself he didn’t understand the significance, but he wasn’t about to ask her about it. She made it clear, by her silence and posture, that he wasn’t welcome here. But he wasn’t about to be put off so easily. He sat beside her.

“I’ve been hearing good things about the tracking software you’ve been developing.”

She looked at him sharply. “Who’s been telling you what I’ve been doing? My mother, I suppose.”

“No. Not your mother.”

“Then who…? I don’t suppose it matters. You think I’m paranoid, don’t you? Too defensive. Too prickly.”

He said evenly, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

She actually smiled at that. “At least that’s a fair answer. Anyway, how did you know about my software?”

“You’re a WormCam user,” he said. “One of the conditions of use of the Wormworks is that any innovation you make to the equipment is the intellectual property of OurWorld. It’s in the agreement I had to sign on behalf of your mother — and you.”

“Typical Hiram Patterson.”

“You mean, good business? It seems reasonable to me. We all know this technology has a long way to go.”

“You’re telling me. The whole user interface sucks, David.”

“- and who better to come up with ways of putting that right than the users themselves, the people who need to make it better now?”

“So you have spies? People watching the pastwatchers?”

“We have a layer of metasoftware which monitors user customization, assessing its functionality and quality. If we see a good idea we may pick up on it and develop it; best of all, of course, is to find something which is a bright idea and well developed.”

She showed a flicker of interest, even pride. “Like mine?”

“It has potential. You’re a smart person, Mary, with a bright future ahead of you. But — how would you put it? — you know diddly-squat about developing quality software.”

“It works, doesn’t it?”

“Most of the time. But I doubt that anybody but you could make an enhancement without rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.” He sighed. “This isn’t the 1990s, Mary. Software development is a craft now.”

“I know, I know. We get all this at school… You think my idea works, though.”

“Why don’t you show me?”

She reached for the SoftScreen; he could see she was about to clear the settings, set up a fresh WormCam run.

Deliberately he put his hand over hers. “No. Show me what you were looking at when I sat down.”

She glared at him. “So that’s it. My mother did send you, didn’t she? And you’re not interested in my tracking software at all.”

“I believe in the truth, Mary.”

“Then start telling it.”

He picked off the points on his fingers. “Your mother’s concerned about you. It was my idea to come to you, not hers. I do think you ought to show me what you’re watching. Yes, it serves as a pretext to talk to you, but I am interested in your software innovation in its own right. Is there anything else?”

“If I refuse to go along with this, will you throw me out of the Wormworks?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Compared to the equipment here, the stuff you can access via the net sucks.”

“I told you, I’m not threatening you with that.”

The moment stretched.

Subtly, she subsided in her seat, and he knew he had won the round.

With a few keystrokes she restored the scene.

It was a small garden — a yard, really, strips of sun-baked grass separated by patches of gravel, a few poorly tended flower beds. The image was bright, the sky blue, the shadows long. There were toys everywhere, splashes of colour, some of them autonomously toiling back and forth on their programmed tasks and routines.

Here came two children: a boy and a girl, aged maybe six and eight respectively. They were laughing, kicking a ball between them, and they were being chased by a man, also laughing. He grabbed the girl and whirled her high in the air, so that she flew through shadows and light. Mary froze the scene.

“A cliche,” she said. “Right? A childhood memory, a summer’s afternoon, long and perfect.”

“This is your father and your brother — and yourself.”

Her face twisted into a sour smile. “The scene is barely eight years old, but two of the protagonists are dead already. What do you think of that?”

“Mary.”

“You wanted to see my software.”

He nodded. “Show me.”

She tapped at the ’Screen; the viewpoint panned from side to side, and stepped forward and back in time, through a few seconds. The girl was raised and lowered and raised again, her hair tumbling this way and that, as if this was a film being wound back and forth.

“Right now I’m using the standard workstation interface. The viewpoint is like a little camera floating in the air. I can control its location in space and move it through time, adjusting the position of the wormhole mouth. Which is fine for some applications. But if I want to scan more extended periods, it’s a drag — as you know.”

She let the scene run on. The father put down child-Mary. Mary focused the viewpoint on her father’s face and, with taps of the SoftScreen, tracked it, jerkily, as the father ran after his daughter across that vanished lawn. “I can follow the subject,” she said clinically, “but it’s difficult and tedious. So I’ve been seeking a way to automate the tracking.” She tapped more virtual buttons. “I used pattern-recognition routines to latch on to faces. Like his.”

The WormCam viewpoint swung down, as if guided by some invisible cameraman, and focused on her father’s face. The face stayed there, central to the image, as he moved his head this way and that, talking, laughing, shouting; the background swung around him disconcertingly.

“All automated,” David said. “Yes. I have subroutines to monitor my preferences, and make the whole thing a little more professional…” More keystrokes, and now the viewpoint pulled back a little. The camera angles were more conventional, stabilized, no longer slaved to that face. The father was still the central protagonist, but his context became more clear.

David nodded. “This is valuable, Mary. This, tied to interpretative software, might even allow us to automate the compilation of historic-figure biographies, at first draft anyhow. You’re to be commended.”

She sighed. “Thanks. But you still think I’m a wacko because I’m watching my father rather than John Lennon. Don’t you?”

He shrugged. He said carefully, “Everybody else is watching John Lennon. His life. for better or worse, is common property. Your life — this golden afternoon — is your own.”

“But I’m an obsessive. Like those nuts you find watching their own parents making love, watching their own conception.”

“I’m no psychoanalyst,” he said gently. “Your life has been hard. Nobody denies that. You lost your brother, your father. But…”

“But what?”

“But you’re surrounded by people who don’t want you to be unhappy. You have to believe that.”

She sighed heavily. “You know, when we were little — Tommy and I — my mother had a habit of using other adults against us. If I was bad, she’d point to something in the adult world — a car sounding its horn a kilometre away, even a jet airplane screaming overhead — and she’d say, ‘That man heard what you said to your mother, and he’s showing you what he thinks about it.’ It was terrifying. I grew up with the impression that I was alone in a huge forest of adults, all of whom watched over me, judging me the whole time.”

He smiled. “Full-time surveillance. Then you won’t find it hard to get used to life with the WormCam.”

“You mean, the damage has been done to me already? I’m not sure that’s a consolation.” And then she eyed him. “So, David — what do you watch when you have the WormCam to yourself?”

He went back to his apartment. He slaved his own workstation to Mary’s back at the Wormworks, and ran through the recordings OurWorld routinely made of every user’s utilization of its WormCams.

He’d done enough, he felt, not to feel guilty over what he had to do next to fulfill his obligation to Heather. Which was to spy on Mary.

It didn’t take him long to get to the heart of it. She did, after all, view the same incident, over and over.

It had been another bright afternoon of sun and play and family, not long after the one he’d watched with her. Here she was at age eight with her father and family, hiking — easily, at a six- year-old’s pace — through the Rainier National Park. Sunlight, rock, trees.

And then he came to it: the crux of Mary’s life. It lasted only seconds.

It wasn’t as if they’d taken any risks; they hadn’t strayed from the marked path, or attempted anything ambitious. It had just been an accident

Tommy had been riding his father’s neck, clinging to handfuls of thick black hair, with his legs draped over his shoulders, firmly grasped by his father’s broad hands. Mary had gone running past, eager to chase what looked like the shadow of a deer. Tommy reached for her, unbalancing a little, and the father’s grasp slipped — just a little, but enough.

The impact itself was unspectacular: a soft crack as that big skull hit a sharp volcanic rock, the strange limp crumpling of the body. Just unfortunate, even in the way he hit the ground so lethally. Nobody’s fault.

That was all. Over in a heartbeat. Unfortunate, commonplace, nobody’s fault — save, he thought with unwelcome anger, the Cosmic Designer who chose to lodge something as precious as the soul of a six-year-old in a container so fragile.

The first time Mary (and now David, like an unwelcome ghost) had watched this incident, she’d used a remarkable WormCam viewpoint: looking out through child-Mary’s own eyes. It was as if

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