The Light of Other Days

part 2: THE EYES OF GOD Chapter 17 - THE DEBUNK MACHINE
David and Heather sat before a flickering SoftScreen, their faces illuminated by the harsh sunlight of a day long gone.

...He was a private, a soldier of the first Maryland Infantry. He was one of a line which stretched into the distance, muskets raised. A drumbeat was audible, steady and ominous They hadn't yet learned his name.

His face was begrimed, smeared by sweat, his uniform filthy, rain-stained and heavily patched. He was becoming visibly more nervous as he approached the front.

Smoke covered the lines in the distance. But already David and Heather could hear the crackle of small arms, the booming of cannon.

Their soldier passed a field hospital now, tents set up at the center of a muddy field. There were rows of unmoving bodies, uncovered, lying outside the nearest tent, and-somehow more horrific-a pile of severed arms and legs, some still bearing scraps of cloth. Two men were feeding the limbs into a brazier. The cries of the wounded within the tents were scratchy, remote, agonizing.

The soldier dug into his jacket and produced a pack of playing cards, battered and bound up with string, and a photograph.

David, working the WormCam controls, froze the image, and zoomed in on the little photograph, much thumbed, its image a crude black-and-white graininess. "It's a woman," he said slowly. "And that looks like a donkey. And... Oh."

Heather was smiling. "He's afraid. He thinks he might not live through the day. He doesn't want that stuff sent home with his personal effects."

David resumed the sequence. The soldier dropped his possessions into the mud and ground them in with his heel.

Heather said, "Listen. What's he singing?"

David adjusted the volume and frequency filters. The private's accent was remarkably broad, but the words were recognizable:... Into the ward of the clean whitewashed halls / Where the dead slept and the dying lay / Wounded by bayonets, sabers and balls / Somebody's darling was borne one day...

A mounted officer came by behind the line, his black, sweating horse visibly nervous. Close up. Dress, there... Close up. His accent was stiff, alien to David's ear-

There was an explosion, flying earth. The bodies of soldiers seemed simply to burst, into large, bloody fragments.

David recoiled. It had been a shell. Suddenly, startlingly quickly, war was here.

The noise level rose abruptly: there was cheering, swearing, a rattle of rifle-muskets and pistols- The private raised his musket, fired rapidly, and dug another cartridge from his belt. He bit into it, exposing the powder and ball, and particles of black powder clung to his lips.

Heather murmured, "They say the powder tasted like pepper."

Another shell landed near the wheel of an artillery piece. A horse close to the gun seemed to explode, bloody scraps flying. A man walking alongside fell, and he looked down in apparent surprise at the stump which now terminated his leg.

All around the private now there was horror: smoke, fire, mutilated bodies, many men littered on the ground, writhing. But he seemed to be growing more calm. He continued to advance.

David said, "I don't understand. He's in the middle of a mass slaughter. Wouldn't it be rational to retreat, to hide?"

Heather said, "He may not even understand what the war is about. Soldiers often don't. Right now, he's responsible for himself; his destiny is in his own hands. Perhaps he feels relief that the moment has come. And he has his reputation, esteem from his buddies."

"It's a form of madness," David said.

"Of course it is..."

They didn't hear the musket ball coming.

It passed through one eye socket and out the back of the private's head, taking a palm-sized chunk of skull with it. David could see matter within, red and gray.

The private stood there a few seconds more, still bearing his weapon, but his body was shaking, his legs convulsing. Then he fell in a heap.

Another soldier dropped his musket and got to his knees beside him. He lifted the private's head, gently, and seemed to be trying to tuck his brain back into his shattered skull-

David tapped his control. The SoftScreen went blank. He ripped his headphones from his ears.

For a moment he sat still, letting the images and sounds of the gruesome Civil War battlefield fade from his head, to be replaced by the composed scientific calm of the Wormworks, the subdued murmur of the researchers. In rows of similar cubicles all around them, people toiled at dim WormCam images: tapping at SoftScreens, listening to the mutter of ancient voices in headphones, making notes on yellow legal pads. Most had gained admittance by submitting research proposals which were screened by a committee David had established, and then selected by lottery. Others had been brought in as guests of Hiram's, like Heather and her daughter. They were journalists, researchers, academics seeking to resolve historical disputes and special-interest types-including a few conspiracy theorists-with points to prove.

Somewhere, somebody was softly whistling a nursery rhyme. The melody made an odd counterpoint to the horrors still rattling around David's head-but he knew the significance immediately. One of the more enthusiastic researchers here had been determined to uncover the simple tune said to have formed the basis of Edward Elgar's 1899 Enigma Variations. Many candidates had been proposed, from Negro spirituals and forgotten music-hall hits to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Now, though, it sounded as if the researcher had uncovered the truth, and David let his mind supply the words to the gentle melody: Mary Had a Little Lamb...

The researchers had been drawn here because OurWorld was still far ahead of the competition in the power of its WormCam technology. The depth of the past accessible to modern scrutiny was increasing all the time; some researchers had already reached as. far back as three centuries. But for now-for better or worse-the use of the powerful past-viewer WormCams remained tightly controlled, offered only in facilities like this, where its users were screened and prioritized and monitored, their results edited carefully and given interpretative glosses before public release.

But David knew that no matter how far back he looked, whatever he witnessed, however the images were analyzed and discussed, the fifteen minutes of the War Between the States he had just endured would stay with him forever.

Heather touched his arm. "You don't have a very strong stomach, do you? We've only scratched the surface of this war-barely begun to study the past."

"But it is a vast, banal butchery."

"Of course. Isn't it always? In fact the Civil War was one of the first truly modem wars. More than six hundred thousand dead, nearly half a million wounded, in a country whose population was only thirty million. It's as if, today, we lost five million. It was a peculiarly American triumph for such a young country to stage such a vast conflict."

"But it was just..." Heather was working on the Civil War period as part of her research for the first WormCam-compiled TrueBio of Abraham Lincoln, funded by an historical association. "Will that be your conclusion? After all the war led to the eradication of slavery in the United States."

"But that wasn't what the war was about. We're about to lose our romantic illusions about it-to confront the truth that the braver historians have faced all along. The war was a clash of economic interests. North against South. The slaves were an economic asset worth billions of dollars. And it was a bloody affair, erupting out of a class-ridden, unequal society. Troops from Gettysburg were sent to New York to put down antidraft riots. Lincoln jailed around thirty thousand political prisoners, without trial."

David whistled. "You think Lincoln's reputation can survive our seeing all that?" He began to set up a new run.

She shrugged. "Lincoln remains an impressive figure. Even though he wasn't gay."

That jolted David. "What? Are you sure?"

She smiled. "Not even bi."

From the neighboring cubicle he could hear a faint sound of high-pitched screaming.

Heather smiled at him tiredly. "Mary. She's watching the Beatles again."

"The Beatles?"

Heather listened for a moment. "The Top Ten Club in Hamburg. April 1961, probably. Legendary performances, where the Beatles are thought to have played better than they ever did again. Never filmed, and so of course never seen again until now. Mary is working her way through the performances, night after night of them."

"Umm. How are things between you?"

She glanced at the partition, spoke in a subdued whisper. "I'm worried that our relationship is heading for a full-scale breakdown. David, I don't know what she does half the time, where she goes, who she meets... All I get is her anger. It was only the bribe of using an OurWorld WormCam that brought her here today. Aside from the Beatles, I don't even know what she's using it for."

He hesitated. "I'm somewhat dubious about the ethics of what I'm offering. But-would you like me to find out?"

She frowned, and pushed greying hair out of her eyes. "Can you do that?"

"I'll talk to her."

The SoftScreen image stabilized.

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here...

Lincoln's audience-in their stiff top hats and black coats, almost all of them male-looked unutterably alien, David thought. And Lincoln himself towered above them, so tall and spare he seemed almost grotesque, his voice an irritatingly high, nasal whine. And yet-

"And yet," he said, "his words still have the power to move."

"Yes," Heather said. "I think Lincoln will survive the TrueBio process. He was complex, ambiguous, never straightforward. He told audiences what they wanted to hear-sometimes pro-Abolition, sometimes not. He certainly wasn't the Abe of the legend. Old Abe, honest Abe, father Abe... But he was living in difficult times. He came through a hellish war by turning it into a crusade. If not for Abe, who knows if the nation could have survived?"

"And he wasn't gay."

"Nope."

"What about the Joshua Speed diary?"

"A clever forgery, put together after Lincoln's death by the ring of Confederate sympathizers who were behind his assassination. Alt designed to blacken his character, even after they'd taken his life..."

Abraham Lincoln's sexuality had come under scrutiny following the discovery of a diary supposedly written by Joshua Speed, a merchant in Springfield, Illinois, with whom Lincoln, as a young, impoverished lawyer, had lodged for some years. Although both Speed and Lincoln had later married-and in fact both had reputations as womanizers-rumors had developed that they had lived as gay lovers.

In the difficult opening years of the twenty-first century, Lincoln had been reborn as a figure of toleration and broad appeal. "Pink Lincoln," a divided hero for a divided age. At Easter 2015, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, this had climaxed in an open-air celebration around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.; for a single night, the great stone figure had been bathed in gaudy pink spotlights.

"...I have notarized WormCam records to prove it," Heather said now. "I've had expert systems fast-forward through Lincoln's every sexual encounter. There's not a single trace of gay or bi behavior in there."

"But Speed."

"He and Lincoln shared a bed, those years in Illinois. But that wasn't uncommon back then-Lincoln couldn't afford a bed of his own!"

David scratched his head. "This," he said, "is going to annoy everybody."

She said, "You know, we're going to have to get used to this. No more heroes, no more fairy tales. Successful leaders are pragmatic. Almost every choice they make is between bad options; the wisest of them, like Lincoln, pick out the least worst, consistently. And that's about all you can ask of them."

David nodded. "Perhaps. But you Americans are lucky that you are already running out of history. We Europeans have thousands more years left to witness."

They fell silent, and gazed at the stiff images of Lincoln and his audience, the tinny voices, the rustle of applause from men long dead.