of a home workshop. The instrument’s face was a miniature SoftScreen; it showed views of the corridor outside, the street, the elevators, what must be neighbouring apartments. “All empty,” murmured Mary. “Maybe some goon somewhere is listening to everything we say. Who cares? By the time he gets here, we’ll be gone.”
“That’s a WormCam,” Kate said. “On her wrist. Some kind of pirate design.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Bobby. “Compared to the giant accelerators in the Wormworks.”
“And,” said Mary, “Alexander Graham Bell probably never thought a telephone could be made without a cable, and so small it could be implanted in your wrist.”
Kate’s eyes narrowed. “A Casimir injector could never be miniaturized that far. This has to be squeezed vacuum technology. The stuff David was working on, Bobby.”
“If it is,” Bobby said heavily, “how did the technology development leak out of the Wormworks?” He eyed Mary. “Does your mother know where you are?”
“Typical,” Mary snapped. “A couple of minutes ago Kate was about to kill herself, and now you’re accusing me of industrial espionage and worrying about my relationship with my mother.”
“My God.” Kate said. “What kind of world is it going to be where every damn kid wears a WormCam on her wrist?”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Mary said. “We already do. The details are on the Internet. There are home workshops churning them out, all over the planet.” She grinned. “The djinn is out of the bottle. Look, I’m here to help you. There are no guarantees. Santa Claus isn’t all powerful, but he has made it harder to hide. All I’m offering you is a chance.” She stared at Kate. “That’s better than what you’re facing now, isn’t it?”
Kate said, “Why do you want to help me?”
Mary looked embarrassed. “Because you’re family. More or less.”
Bobby said, “Your mother is family too.”
Mary glared at him. “I’ll cut you a deal, if it’ll make you feel better. Let me get you out of here. Let me save Kate’s head from being sliced open. In return I’ll call my mother. Deal?”
Kate and Bobby exchanged a glance. “Deal.”
Mary dug into her tunic and produced a swatch of cloth, which she shook out. “SmartShroud.”
Bobby said, “Is there room for two in there?”
Mary was grinning. “I was hoping you’d say that. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Hiram’s security guards, alerted by a routine WormCam monitor, arrived ten minutes later. The apartment, brightly lit, was empty. The guards began to squabble over who would have to tell Hiram and take the blame — and then fell silent, as they realized he was, or would be, watching anyhow.
Three
The light of other days
Chapter 23
The floodlit stage
Rome, A.D. 2041: Holding Heather’s hand, David was walking through the dense, swarming heart of the city; the night sky above, layered with smog, looked as orange as the clouds of Titan.
Even this late Rome was crowded with sightseers. Many, like Heather, were walking around with Mind’sEye headbands or Glasses-and-Gloves.
Four years after the first mass-market release of the WormCam, it had become a fashionable and alluring pastime to become a time tourist at many of the world’s ancient sites, wandering through deep layers of past: David had determined he must try the Scuba tour of sunken Venice before he left Italy… Alluring, yes: and David understood why. The past had become a comfortable and familiar place, its exploration a safe, synthetic adventure, the perfect place to avert the eyes from the blank meteoric wall that terminated the future. How ironic, thought David, that a world denied its future was suddenly granted its past.
And escape was tempting, from a world where even the transformed present was a strange and disturbing place.
Almost everybody now wore a WormCam of some kind, generally the wristwatch-sized miniaturized version powered by squeezed-vacuum technology. The personal WormCam was a link to the rest of mankind, to the glories and horrors of the past — and, not least, a useful gadget for looking around the next corner.
And everybody was reshaped by the WormCam’s relentless glare.
People didn’t even dress the way they used to. Some of the older people, here in Rente’s crowded streets, still wore clothing that would have been recognizable, even fashionable, a few years before. Some tourist types, in fact, walked around defiantly dressed in loud T-shirts and shorts, just as they had for decades. One woman was wearing a shirt with a gaudy, flashing message:
But many more people had covered up, wearing seamless one-piece coveralls that buttoned high on the neck, and with long sleeves and trouser legs that terminated in sewn-on gloves and boots. There were even some examples of all-over-cover styles imported from the Islamic world; shapeless smocks and tunics that trailed along the ground, headpieces hiding all but the eyes, which were uniformly staring and wary.
Others had reacted quite differently. Here was a nudist couple, two men hand in hand wearing slack middle-aged bellies over shrunken genitalia with defiant pride.
But, cautious or defiant, the older folk — among whom David reluctantly counted himself — displayed a continual uncomfortable awareness of the WormCam’s unblinking gaze.
The young, growing up with the WormCam, were different.
Many of the young went simply naked, save for practical items like purses and sandals. But they seemed to David to have none of the shyness or self-consciousness of their elders, as if they were making a choice about what to wear based simply on practicality or a desire to display personality, rather than any modesty or taboo.
One group of youngsters wore masks that showed projections of the broad face of a young man. Girls and boys alike wore the face, and it displayed a range of conditions and emotions — rain- lashed, sun-drenched, bearded and clean-shaven, laughing and crying, even sleeping — that seemed to have nothing to do with the activities of the wearers. It was disconcerting to watch, like seeing a group of clones wandering through the Rome night.
These were Romulus masks, the latest fashion accessory from OurWorld. Romulus, founder of the city, had become quite a character for the young Romans since the WormCam had proved he really existed — even if his brother and all that stuff about the wolf had proved mythical. Each mask was just a SoftScreen, moulded to the face, with inbuilt WormCam feeds, and it showed the face of Romulus as he had been at the exact age, to the minute, of the wearer. OurWorld was targeting other parts of the world with regional variants of the same idea.
It was a terrific piece of marketing. But David knew it would take him a lifetime to get used to the sight of the face of a young Iron Age male above a pair of pert bare breasts.
They passed through a small square, a patch of unhealthy-looking greenery surrounded by tall, antique buildings. On a bench here David noticed a young couple, boy and girl, both naked. They were perhaps sixteen. The girl was on the boy’s lap, and they were kissing ardently. The boy’s hand was urgently squeezing the girl’s small breast. And her hand, dug in between their bodies, was wrapped around his erection.
David knew that some (older) commentators dismissed all this as hedonism, a mad dancing of the young before the onset of the fire. It was a mindless, youthful reflection of the awful, despairing nihilist philosophies that had grown recently in response to the looming existence of the Wormwood: philosophies in which the universe was seen as little more than a giant fist intent on smashing flat all of life and beauty and thought, over and over. There never had been a way to survive the universe’s slow decline, of course; now the Wormwood had made that cosmic terminus gruesomely real, and there was nothing to do but dance and rut and cry.
Such notions were dismally seductive. But the explanation for the ways of modern youth was surely simpler than that, David thought. It was surely another WormCam consequence: the relentless, disconcerting shedding of taboos, in a world where all the walls had come down.
A handful of people had stopped to watch the couple. One man — naked too, perhaps in his twenties — was slowly masturbating.
Technically
But such incidents were already becoming rare. New social norms were emerging The world seemed to David to be a little like a crowded restaurant. Yes, you could listen in to what the man on the next table was saying to his wife. But it was impolite; if you indulged, you would be ostracized. And, after all, many people actually relished crowded, public places; the buzz, the excitement, the sense of belonging could override any desire for privacy.
As David watched, the girl broke away, smiling at her lover, and she slid down his body, smooth as a seal, and took his erection in her mouth. And -
David turned away, face burning.
Their lovemaking had been clumsy, amateurish, perhaps overeager; their two bodies, though young, were not specially attractive specimens. But then, this was not art, or even pornography; this was human life, in all its clumsy animal beauty. David tried to imagine how it must be to be that boy, here and now, freed of taboos, reveling in the power of his body and his lover’s.
Heather, however, saw none of his. Wandering beside him, eyes glinting, she was still immersed in the deep past — and perhaps it was time he joined her there. With a sense of relief — and a
