Hiram’s face peered out at him: a younger Hiram, a softer face-but indubitably Hiram. The face was framed by a dimly lit urban landscape, decaying housing blocks and immense road systems, a place that seemed to have been designed to exclude human beings. This was the outskirts of Birmingham, a great city at the heart of England, just before the end of the twentieth century-some years before Hiram had abandoned this old, decaying country in hope of a better opportunity in America.
David had succeeded in combining Michael Mavens’ DNA-trace facility with a WormCam guidance system, and he had extended it to cross the generations. So, just as he had managed to scan back along the line of Bobby’s life, now he had traced back to Bobby’s father, the originator of Bobby’s DNA.
And now, driven by curiosity, he intended to go further back yet, tracing his own roots-which was, in the end, the only history that mattered.
In the darkness of the cavernous lab, a shadow drifted across the wall, sourceless. He caught it in his peripheral vision, ignored it.
He knew it was Bobby, his brother. David didn’t know why Bobby was here. He would join David when he was ready.
David wrapped his fingers around a small joystick control, and pressed it forward.
Hiram’s face smoothed out, growing younger. The background became a blur around him, a blizzard of days and nights, dimly visible buildings-suddenly replaced by gray-green plains, the fen country where Hiram grew up. Soon Hiram’s face shrank on itself, became innocent, boyish, and shriveled in a moment to an infant.
And it was replaced suddenly by a woman’s face.
The woman was smiling at David-or rather, at somebody behind the invisible wormhole viewpoint which hovered before her eyes. He had chosen from this point to follow the line of mitochondrial DNA, passed unchanged from mother to daughter-and so this was, of course, his grandmother. She was young, mid-twenties- of course she was young; the DNA trace would have switched to her from Hiram at the instant of his conception. Mercifully, he would not see these grandmothers grow old. She was beautiful, in a quiet way, with a look that he thought of as classically English; high cheekbones, blue eyes, strawberry blond hair tied up into a tight bun.
Hiram’s Asian ancestry had come from his father’s line. David wondered what difficulty that love affair had caused this pretty young woman in such a time and place.
And behind him, in the Wormworks, he sensed that shadow drifting closer.
He pressed at the joystick, and the rattle of days and nights resumed. The face grew girlish, its changing hairstyle fluttering at the edge of visibility. Then the face seemed to lose its form, becoming blurred-bursts of adolescent puppy fat?-before shrinking into the formlessness of infancy.
Another abrupt transition. His great-grandmother, then. This young woman was in an office, frowning, concentrating, her hair a ridiculously elaborate sculpture of tightly coiled plaits. In the background David glimpsed more women, mostly young, toiling in rows at clumsy mechanical calculators, laboriously turning keys and levers and handles. This must be the 1930s, decades before the birth of the silicon computer; this was perhaps as complex an information processing center as anywhere on the planet. Already this past, so close to his own time, was a foreign country, he thought.
He released the girl from her time trap, and she imploded into infancy.
Soon another young woman stared out at him. She was dressed in a long skirt and ill-fitting, badly made blouse. She was waving a British Union Flag, and she was being embraced by a soldier in a flat tin helmet. The street behind her was crowded, men in suits and caps and overalls, the women in long coats. It was raining, a dismal autumnal day, but nobody seemed to mind.
‘November 1918,’ David said aloud. ‘The Armistice. The end of four years of bloody slaughter in Europe. Not a bad night to be conceived.’ He turned. ‘Don’t you think, Bobby?’
The shadow, motionless against the wall, seemed to hesitate. Then it separated, moved freely, took on the outline of a human form. Hands and face appeared, hovering disembodied.
‘Hello, David.’
‘Sit with me,’ David said.
His brother sat with a rustle of SmartShroud smart cloth. He seemed awkward, as if unused to being so close to anybody in the open. It didn’t matter; David demanded nothing of him.
The Armistice Day girl’s face smoothed, diminished, shrank to an infant, and there was another transition: a girl with some of the looks of her descendants, the blue eyes and strawberry hair, but thinner, paler, her cheeks hollow. Shedding her years, she moved through a blur of dark urban scenes-factories and terraced houses- and then a flash of childhood, another generation, another girl, the same dismal landscape.
‘They seem so young,’ Bobby murmured; his voice was scratchy, as if long unused.
‘I think we’re going to have to get used to that,’ David said grimly. ‘We’re already deep in the nineteenth century. The great medical advances are being lost, and hygiene awareness is rudimentary. People are dying of simple, curable diseases. And of course we’re following a line of women who at least lived long enough to reach childbearing age. We aren’t glimpsing their sisters who died in infancy, leaving no descendants.’
The generations fell away, faces deflating like balloons, one after the other, subtly changing from generation to generation, slow genetic drift working.
Here was a girl whose scarred face was marked by tears at the moment she gave birth. Her baby had been taken from her, David saw-or rather, in this timereversed view; given to her-moments after the birth. Her pregnancy unraveled in misery and shame, until they reached the moment that denned her life: a brutal rape committed, it seemed, by a family member, a brother or uncle. Cleansed of that darkness, the girl grew younger, pretty, smiling, her face filling with hope despite the squalor of her life, as she found beauty in simplicity: a flower’s brief bloom, the shape of a cloud. The world must be full of such anguished biographies, David thought, unraveling as they sank into the past, effects preceding cause, pain and despair falling away as the blankness of childhood approached.
Suddenly the background changed again. Now, around this new grandmother’s face, some ten generations remote, there was countryside: small fields, pigs and cows scratching at the ground, a multitude of grimy children. The woman was careworn, gap-toothed, her face lined, appearing old-but David knew she could be no more than thirty-five or forty.
‘Our ancestors were farmers,’ Bobby said.
‘Most everybody was, before the great migrations to the cities. But the Industrial Revolution is unwinding. They probably can’t even make steel.’
The seasons pulsed, summer and winter, light and dark; and the generations of women, daughter to mother, followed their slower cycle from careworn parent to bright maiden to wide-eyed child. Some of the women erupted onto the ‘Screen with faces twisted in pain: they were those unfortunates, increasingly more common, who had died in childbirth.
History withdrew. The centuries were receding, the world emptying of people. Elsewhere the Europeans were drawing back from the Americas, soon to forget those great continents even existed, and the Golden Horde-great armies of Mongols and Tartars, their corpses leaping from the ground-was re-forming and drawing back into central Asia.
None of that touched these toiling English peasants, without education or books, working the same piece of ground for generation on generation: people to whom, David reflected, the local collector of tithes would be a far more formidable figure than Tamerlaine or Kublai Khan. If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.
At last, around the framed face of one girl-hair matted and dark, skin sallow, expression ratlike, wary- there was an abrupt blur of scenery. They glimpsed dismal countryside, a ragged family of refugees walking endlessly-and, here and there, heaps of corpses, burning.
‘A plague,’ Bobby said.
‘Yes. They are forced to flee. But there is nowhere to go.’
Soon the image stabilized on another anonymous scrap of land set in a huge, flat landscape; and once more the generations of toil, so calamitously interrupted, resumed.
On the horizon there was a Norman cathedral, an immense, brooding, sandstone box. If this was the fens, the great plain to the east of England, then that could be Ely. Already centuries old, the great construction looked like a giant sandstone spaceship which had descended from the sky, and it must utterly have dominated the mental landscapes of these toiling people-which was, of course, its purpose.
But even the great cathedral began to shrink, collapsing with startling swiftness into smaller, simpler forms, at last disappearing from view altogether.
And the numbers of people were still falling, the great tide of humanity drawing back all over the planet. The Norman invaders must already have dismantled their great keeps and castles and withdrawn to France. Soon the waves of invaders from Scandinavia and Europe would return home from Britain. Farther afield, as the death and birth of Muhammad approached, the Muslims were withdrawing from northern Africa. By the time Christ was brought down from the Cross, there would be only around a hundred million people left in all the world, less than half the population of the United States of David’s day.