Hiram said heavily, ‘What case?’
Mavens picked up what looked like a charge sheet from his briefcase. ‘The bottom line is that a charge of trade-secret misappropriation, under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, has been brought against OurWorld: by IBM, specifically by the director of their Thomas J. Watson research laboratory. Mr. Patterson, we believe the WormCam has been used to gain illegal access to IBM proprietary research results. Something called a synaesthesia-suppression software suite, associated with virtual-reality technology.’ He looked up. ‘Does that make sense?’
Hiram looked at Bobby.
Bobby sat transfixed, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, with no real idea how he should react, what he should say.
Kate said, ‘You have a suspect, don’t you. Special Agent?’
The FBI man eyed her steadily, sadly. ‘I think you already know the answer to that question, Ms. Manzoni.’
Kate appeared confused.
Bobby snapped, ‘You mean Kate? That’s ridiculous.’
Hiram thumped a fist into a palm. ‘I knew it. I knew she was trouble. But I didn’t think she’d go this far.’
Mavens sighed. ‘I’m afraid there’s a very clear evidentiary trail leading to you, Ms. Manzoni.’
Kate flared. ‘If it’s there, it was planted.’
Mavens said, ‘You’ll be placed under arrest. I hope there won’t be any trouble. If you’ll sit quietly, the Search Engine will read you your rights.’
Kate looked startled as a voice – inaudible to the rest of them- began to sound in her ears.
Hiram was at Bobby’s side. ‘Take it easy, son. We’ll get through his shit together. What were you trying to do, Manzoni? Find another way to get to Bobby? Is that what it was all about?’ Hiram’s face was a grim mask, empty of emotion: there was no trace of anger, pity, relief-or triumph.
And the door was flung open. David stood there, grinning, his bearlike bulk filling the frame; he held a rolled-up SoftScreen in one hand. ‘I did it,’ he said. ‘By God, I did it … What’s happening here?’
Mavens said, ‘Doctor Curzon, it may be better if – ‘
‘It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t matter. Not compared to this.’ He spread his SoftScreen on the tabletop. ‘As soon as I got it I came straight here. Look at this.’
The SoftScreen showed what looked superficially like a rainbow, reduced to black and white and gray, uneven bands of light that arced, distorted, across a black background.
‘Of course it’s somewhat grainy,’ David said. ‘But still, this picture is equivalent to the quality of images returned by NASA’s first flyby probes back in the 1970s.’
‘That’s Saturn,’ Mavens said, wondering. ‘The planet Saturn.’
‘Yes. We’re looking at the rings.’ David grinned. ‘I established a WormCam viewpoint all of a billion and a half kilometers away. Quite a thing, isn’t it? If you look closely you can even see a couple of the moons, here in the plane of the rings.’
Hiram laughed out loud and hugged David’s bulk. ‘My God, that’s bloody terrific.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. But that’s not important. Not anymore.’
‘Not important? Are you kidding?’
Feverishly David began to tap at his SoftScreen; the image of Saturn’s rings dissolved. ‘I can reconfigure it from here. It’s as easy as that. It was Bobby who gave me the clue. I Just hadn’t thought out of the box as he did. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of meters, then the rest of the wormhole span becomes timelike … ‘
Bobby leaned forward to see. The ‘Screen now showed an equally grainy image of a much more mundane scene. Bobby recognized it immediately: it was David’s work cubicle in the Wormworks. David was sitting mere, his back to the viewpoint, and Bobby was standing at his side, looking over his shoulder.
‘As easily as that,’ David said again, his voice small, awed. ‘Of course we’ll have to run repeatable trials, properly timed.’
Hiram said, ‘That’s just the Wormworks. So what?’
‘You don’t understand. This new wormhole has the same, umm, length as the other.’
‘The one that reached to Saturn.’
‘Yes. But instead of spanning eighty light-minutes – ‘
Mavens finished it for him. ‘I get it. This wormhole spans eighty minutes.’
‘Yes,’ David said. ‘Eighty minutes into the past. Look, Father. You’re seeing me and Bobby, just before you summoned him away.’
Hiram’s mouth had dropped open.
Bobby felt as if the world was swimming around him, changing, configuring into some strange, unknowable pattern, as if another chip in his head had been switched off. He looked at Kate, who seemed diminished, terrified, lost in shock.
But Hiram, his troubles dismissed, grasped the implications immediately. He glared into the air. ‘I wonder how many of them are watching us right now?’
Mavens said, ‘Who?’
‘In the future. Don’t you see? If he’s right this is a turning point in history, this moment, right here and right now, the invention of this, this past viewer. Probably the air around us is fizzing with WormCam viewpoints, sent back by future historians. Biographers. Hagiographers.’ He lifted up his head and bared his teeth. ‘Are you watching me? Are you? Do you remember my name? I’m Hiram Patterson! Hah! See what I did, you arseholes”
And in the corridors of the future, innumerable watchers met his challenging gaze.
TWO
THE EYES OF GOD
History … is indeed little more than a chronicle of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
-Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
Chapter 13 – WALLS OF GLASS
Kate was in remand, waiting for her trial. It was taking a while to come to court, as it was a complex case, and Hiram’s lawyers had argued, in confidence through the FBI, that her trial should be delayed anyhow while the new past-viewing capabilities of WormCam technology stabilized.
In fact, such had been the wide publicity surrounding Kate’s case that the ruling was being taken as a precedent. Even before its past-viewing possibilities were widely understood, the WormCam was expected to have an immediate impact on almost all contested criminal cases. Many major trials had been delayed or paused awaiting new evidence, and in general only minor and uncontested cases were being processed through the courts.
For a long time to come, whatever the outcome of the case, Kate wouldn’t be going anywhere. So Bobby decided to go find his mother.
Heather Mays lived in a place called Thomas City, close to the Utah-Arizona state line. Bobby flew into Cedar City and drove from there. At Thomas, he stopped the car a few blocks short of Heather’s home and walked.
A police car silently cruised by, and a beefy male cop peered out at Bobby. The cop’s face was a broad, hostile moon, scarred by the pits of multiple basal-cell carcinomas. But his glare softened with recognition. Bobby could read his lips: Good day, Mr. Patterson.
As the car moved on, Bobby felt a shiver of self consciousness. The WormCam had made Hiram the most famous person on the planet, and in the all-seeing public eye, Bobby stood right at his side.
He knew, in fact, that as he approached his mother’s home a hundred WormCam viewpoints must hover at his shoulder even now, gazing into his face at this difficult moment, invisible emotional vampires.
He tried not to think about it: the only possible defense against the WormCam. He walked on through the heart of the little town.
Out-of-season April snow was falling on the roofs and gardens of clapboard houses that might have been preserved for a hundred years. He passed a small pond where children were skating, round and round in tight circles, laughing loudly. Even under the pale wintry sun, the children wore sunglasses and silvery, reflective smears of sunblock.
Thomas was a settled, peaceful, anonymous place, one of hundreds like it, he supposed, here in the huge empty heart of America. It was a place that, three months ago, he would have regarded as deadly dull; if he’d ever found himself here he probably would have hightailed it for Vegas as soon as possible. And yet now he found himself wondering how it would have been to grow up here.
As he watched the cop car pass slowly along the street, he noticed a strange flurry of petty law-breaking following in its wake. A man emerging from a sushiburger store crumpled the paper his food had been wrapped in and dropped it to the floor, right under the cops’ noses. At a crossing, an elderly woman jaywalked, glaring challengingly through the cops’ windscreen. And so on. The cops watched tolerantly. And as soon as the car had passed, the people, done with thumbing their noses at the authorities, resumed their apparently lawful lives.
This was a widespread phenomenon. There had been a surprisingly wide-ranging, if muted, rebellion against the new regime of invisible WormCam overseers. The idea of the authorities having such immense powers of oversight did not, it seemed, sit well with the instincts of many Americans, and there had been rises in pettycrime rates all over the country. Otherwise law-abiding people seemed suddenly struck by a desire to perform small illegal acts – littering, jaywalking – as if to prove they were still free, despite the authorities’ assumed scrutiny. And local cops were learning to be tolerant of this.