Ere Slumbers chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
-THOMAS MWRE (1779-1852)
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 comer.
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:
HEY, UP THERE IN THE FUTURE;
GET YOUR GRANDMOM OUT OF HERE!
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 dial 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, molded 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 die 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 modem 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 that was still illegal. But nobody was trying to enforce such laws anymore. After all, that lonely man could go back to his hotel room and use his WormCam to zoom in on anybody he chose, any time of the day or night-which was what people had been using the WormCam for since it was released, and movies and magazines and such for a lot longer than that. At least, in this age of the WormCam, there was no more hypocrisy.
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.
Then- 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 brief word to the Search Engine, requesting guidance-David donned his own Mind’sEye and slid into another time.
… He walked into daylight But this crowded street, lined by great, boxy multistory apartment blocks, was dark. Hemmed in by the peculiar topography of the site-the famous seven hills-Romans, already a million strong, had built up.
In many ways, the city had a remarkably modern feel. But this was not the twenty-first century: he was glimpsing this swarming, vibrant capital on a bright Italian summer afternoon just five years-after the cruel death of Christ Himself. There were no motor vehicles, of course, and few animal-drawn carts or carriages. The most common form of transport, other man by foot, was by hired litter or sedan chair. Even so, the streets were so crowded that even foot traffic could circulate at little more than a crawl.
There was a crush of humanity-citizens, soldiers, paupers and slaves-all around them. David and Heather towered over most of these people; and besides, walking on the modern ground surface, they were hovering above the cobbled floor of the ancient city. The poor and the slaves looked stunted, some visibly ravaged by malnourishment and disease, even ratlike. as they crowded around the public water fountains. But many of the citizens-some in brilliant-white gold-stitched togas, benefiting from generations of affluence funded by the expanding Empire-were as tall and well fed as David, and, in suitable clothes, would surely not have looked out of place in the streets of any city of the twenty-first century.