The Light of Other Days

part 2: THE EYES OF GOD Chapter 19 - TIME
As the availability and power of the WormCam extended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snowflakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time...

Princeton, New Jersey, USA. April 17, 1955 A.D;

His good humor, in those last hours, struck his visitors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed to regard his approaching end as simply an expected natural phenomenon.

And, of course, even to the end, he issued gruff orders. He was concerned not to become an object of pilgrimage, and he instructed that his office at the Institute should not be preserved as he left it, and that his home should not become a shrine, and so on.

Doctor Dean looked in on him for the last time at eleven P.M., and found him sleeping peacefully.

But a little after midnight his nurse - Mrs. Alberta Roszel - noticed a change in his breathing. She called for help and, with the help of another nurse, cranked up the head of the bed.

He was muttering, and Mrs. Roszel came close to hear.

Even as the finest mind since Newton began, at last, to unravel, final thoughts floated to the surface of his consciousness. Perhaps he regretted the great physics unification project he had left unfinished. Perhaps he wondered if his pacifism had after all been the right course-if he had been correct to encourage Roosevelt to enter the nuclear age. Perhaps, simply, he regretted how he had always put science first, even over those who loved him.

But it was too late for all that. His life, so vivid and complex in youth and middle age, was now reducing, as all lives must, to a single thread of utter simplicity.

Mrs. Roszel bent close to hear his soft voice. But his words were in German, the language of his youth, and she did not understand.

...And she did not see, could not see, the swarm of spacetime flaws which, in these last moments, crowded around the trembling lips of Einstein to hear those final words; "...Lieseri! Oh, Lieseri!"

Extracted from testimony by Prof. Maurice Patefield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chair of the "Wormseed" campaign group, to the Congressional Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, 23 September, 2037:

As soon as it became apparent that the WormCam can reach, not just through walls, but into the past, a global obsession of the human species with its own history opened up.

At first we were treated to professionally-made "factual" WormCam movies showing such great events as wars, assassinations, political scandals. Unsinkable, the multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the Titanic disaster, for example, made harrowing, compelling viewing-even though it demolished many sea-story myths propagated by uncritical storytellers, and much of the event took place in pitch North Atlantic darkness.

But we soon grew impatient with the interpolation of the professionals. We wanted to see for ourselves.

The hasty inspection of many notorious moments of the recent past has revealed both banality and surprise. The depressing truths surrounding Elvis Presley, O. J. Simpson and even the deaths of the Kennedys surely surprised nobody. On the other hand, the revelations about the murders of so many prominent women-from Marilyn Monroe through Mother Teresa to Diana, Princess of Wales- caused a wave of shock, even in a society becoming accustomed to too much truth. The existence of a shadowy, relentless cabal of misogynistic men whose activities against (as they saw it) too powerful women, actions carried across decades, caused much soul-searching among both sexes.

But many true-story versions of historic events- the Cuba missile crisis, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the euro-while of interest to aficionados, have turned out to be muddled, confusing and complex. It is dismaying to realize that even those supposedly at the centers of power generally know little and understand less of what is going on around them.

With all respect to the great traditions of this House, almost all the key incidents in human history are screwups, it seems, just as almost all the great passions are no more than crude and manipulative tumblings.

And, worse than that, the truth generally turns out to be boring.

The lack of pattern and logic in the overwhelming, almost unrecognizable true history that is now being revealed is proving so difficult and wearying for all but the most ardent scholar that fictionalized accounts are actually making a comeback: stories which provide a narrative structure simple enough to engage the viewer. We need story and meaning, not blunt fact...

Toulouse, France. 14 January, 1636 A.D.:

In the dusty calm of his study, he took down his beloved copy of Diophantus" Arithmetica. With great excitement he turned to Book II, Problem 8, and hunted for a quill.

...On the other hand, it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as a sum of two fourth powers, or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain...

Bernadette Winstanley, a fourteen-year-old student from Harare, Zimbabwe, booked time on her high-school WormCam and devoted herself to tracking back from the moment of Format's brief scribbling in that margin.

...This was where it had started for him, and so it was appropriate that it was here that it should end. It was after all Diophantus" eighth problem which had so intrigued him, and sent him on his voyage of mathematical discovery; Given a number which is a square, write it as a sum of two other squares. This was the algebraic expression of Pythagoras" theorem, of course; and every schoolchild knew solutions: 3 squared plus 4 squared, for example, meaning 9 plus 16, summed to 25, which was 5 squared.

Ah, but what of an extension of the notion beyond this geometric triviality? Were there numbers which could be expressed as sums of greater powers? 3 cubed plus 4 cubed made 27 plus 64, summing to 91-not itself a cube. But did any such triplets exist? And what of the higher powers, the fourth, fifth, sixth... ?

It was clear the ancients had known of no such cases-nor had they known a proof of impossibility.

But now he-a lawyer and magistrate, not even a professional mathematician-had managed to prove that no triple of numbers existed for any index higher than two.

Bernadette imaged sheets of notes expressing the essence of the proof Fermat believed he had found, and, with some help from a teacher, deciphered their meaning.

...For now he was pressed by his duties, but when he had time he would assemble a formal expression of his proof from the scribbled notes and sketches he had accumulated. Then he would communicate it to Desargues, Descartes, Pascal, Bernoulli and the others- how they would marvel at its far-reaching elegance!

And then he could explore the numbers further: those pellucid yet stubbornly complex entities, which seemed at times so strange he fancied they must have an existence independent of the human mind which had conceived them...

Pierre de Fermat never wrote out the proof of what would become known as his Last Theorem. But that brief marginalia, discovered after Format's death by his son, would tantalize and fascinate later generations of mathematicians. A proof was found-but not until the 1990s, and it was of such technical intricacy, involving abstract properties of elliptic curves and other unfamiliar mathematical entities, that scholars believed it was impossible Fermat could have found a proof in his day. Perhaps he had been mistaken-or had even perpetrated a huge hoax on later generations.

Then, in the year 2037, to general amazement, armed with no more than high-school math, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Winstanley was able to prove that Fermat had been right

And when at last Format's proof was published a revolution in mathematics began.

Patefield Testimony: Of course, the kooky fringe immediately found a way to get online to history. As a scientist and a rationalist I regard it as a great fortune that the WormCam has proven the greatest debunker yet discovered.

And so it is now indisputable, for example, that there was no crashed UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Not a single alien-abduction incident yet inspected has turned out to be anything more than a misinterpretation of some innocent phenomenon-often complicated by disturbed neurological states. Similarly, not a shred of evidence has emerged for any paranormal or supernatural phenomenon, no matter how notorious.

Whole industries of psychics, mediums, astrologers, faith healers, homeopathists and others are being systematically demolished. We must look forward to the day when the WormCam's delvings reach as far as the building of the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Nazca geoglyphs and other sources of "wisdom" or "mystery." And then will come Atlantis...

It may be a new day is dawning-it may be that in the not too distant future the mass of humanity wilt at last conclude that truth is more interesting than delusion.

Florence, Italy. 12 April, 1506 A D:.

Bernice would readily admit she was no more than a junior researcher in the Louvre's curatorial office. And so it was a surprise-a welcome one!-when she was asked to perform the first provenance check on one of the museum's most famous paintings.

Even if the result was less welcome.

At first the search had been simple: in fact, confined to the walls of the Louvre itself. Before a blur of visitors, attended by generations of curators, the fine old lady sat in semidarkness behind her panes of protective glass, silently watching time unravel.

The years before the transfer to the Louvre were more complex.

Bernice glimpsed a series of fine houses, generations of elegance and power punctuated by intervals of war and social unrest and poverty. Much of this, back as deep as the seventeenth century, confirmed the painting's documented record.

Then-in the early years of that century, more than a hundred years after the painting's supposed composition-came the first surprise. Bernice watched, stunned, as a scrawny, hungry-looking young painter stood before two side-by-side copies of the famous image-and, time-reversed, with brushstroke after brushstroke, eliminated the copy that had passed down the centuries to the care of the Louvre.

Briefly she detoured to track forward in time, following the fate of the older "original" from which the Louvre's copy-just a copy, a replica!-had been made. That "original" was to last little-more than two centuries, she saw, before being lost in a massive house fire in Revolutionary France.

WormCam studies had exposed many of the world's best-known works of art as forgeries and copies-more than seventy percent of pre-twentieth-century paintings (and a smaller proportion of sculptures, smaller presumably only because of the effort required to make copies). History was a dangerous, destructive corridor through which very little of value survived unscathed.

But still there had been no indication that this painting, of all of them, had been a fake. Although at least a dozen replicas had been known to circulate at various times and places, the Louvre had a continuous record of ownership since the artist had laid down his brush. And there was besides evidence of changes to the composition under the top layer of paint: an indication more of an original, assayed and reworked, than a copy.

But then, Bernice reflected, composition techniques and records could be faked too.

Bewildered, she returned down the decades to that dingy room, the ingenious, forging painter. And she began to follow the "original" he had copied deeper into the past.

More decades nickered by, more transfers of ownership, all of it an uninteresting blur around the changeless painting itself.

At last she approached the start of the sixteenth century, and was nearing his studio, in Florence. Even now copies were being made, by the master's own students, But all of the copies were of this, the lost "original" she had identified.

Perhaps there would be no more surprises.

She was to be proved wrong.

Oh, it was true that he was involved in the composition, preliminary sketches, and much of the painting's design. It was to be the ideal portrait, he declared grandly, the features and symbolic overtones of its subject synthesized into a perfect unity, and with a sweeping, flowing style -to astound his contemporaries and fascinate later generations. The conception, indeed, was his, and the triumph.

But not the execution. The master-distracted by many commissions and his wider interests in science and technology-left that to others.

Bernice, awe and dismay swirling in her heart, watched as a young man from the provinces called Raphael Sanzio painstakingly applied the last touches to that gentle, puzzling smile...

Patefield Testimony: It is a matter of regret that many cherished-and harmless-myths, now exposed to the cold light of this future day, are evaporating.

Betsy Ross is a notorious recent instance. There really was a Betsy Ross. But she was never visited by George Washington; she was not asked to make a flag for the new nation; she did not work on its design with Washington; she did not make up the flag in her back parlor. As far as can be determined, all this stuff was a concoction of her grandson's, almost a century later.

Davy Crockett's myth was self-manufactured, his coonskin legend developed fairly cynically to create popularity by the Whig party in Congress. There has been not one WormCam observation of him using the phrase "bar-hunting" on Capitol Hill.

Paul Revere, on the other hand, has had his reputation enhanced by the WormCam.

For many years Revere served as the principal rider for Boston's Committee of Safety. His most famous ride-to Lexington to warn revolutionary leaders that the British were on the march-was, ironically, more hazardous, Revere's achievement still more heroic, even than the legend of Longfellow's poem. But still, many modem Americans have been dismayed by the heavy French accent Revere had inherited from his father.

And so it goes on-not just in America, but around the world. There are even some famous figures-the commentators call them "snowmen'- who prove never to have existed at all! What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts- indeed, sometimes from no facts-in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.

We must wonder where this will lead us. Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.

But, just as each human will now have to learn to construct a personality in the glare of pitiless WormCam inspection, so communities will have to come to terms with the stripped-bare truth of their own past-and find new ways to express their common values and history, if they are to survive the future. And the sooner we get on with it, the better.

Similaun Glacier, Alps. April, 2321 B.C.:

It was an elemental world: black rock, blue sky, hard white ice. This was one of the highest passes in the Alps. The man, alone, moved through this lethal environment with utter confidence.

But Marcus knew the man he watched was already approaching the place where, slumped over a boulder and with his Neolithic tool kit stacked neatly at his side, he would meet his death.

At first-as he had explored the possibilities of the WormCam, here at the Institute of Alpine Studies at the University of Innsbruck-Marcus Pinch had feared that the WormCam would destroy archaeology and replace it with something more resembling butterfly hunting: the crude observation of "the truth," perhaps by untrained eyes. There would be no more Schliemanns, no more Troys, no more patient unraveling of the past from shards and traces.

But as it turned out there was still a role for the accumulated wisdom of archaeology, as the best intellectual reconstruction available of the true past. There was just too much to see-and the WormCam horizon expanded all the time. For the time being, the role of the WormCam was be to supplement conventional archaeological techniques: to provide key pieces of evidence to resolve disputes, to reinforce or overthrow hypotheses, as a more correct consensual narrative of the past slowly emerged.

And in this case, for Marcus, the truth that would be revealed-here now, by the blue-white-black images relayed through time and space to his SoftScreen-would provide answers to the most compelling questions in his own professional career.

This man, this hunter, had been dug out of the ice fifty-three centuries after he died. The smears of blood, tissue, starch, hair and fragments of feather on his tools and clothing had enabled the scientists, Marcus included, to reconstruct much of his life. Modem researchers had even, whimsically, given him a name: Otzi, the Ice Man.

His two arrows were of particular interest to Marcus- in fact, they had served as the basis of Marcus's doctorate. Both the arrows were broken, and Marcus had been able to demonstrate that before he died, the hunter had been trying to dismantle the arrows, intent on making one good arrow out of the two broken ones, by fitting the better arrowhead into the good shaft.

It was such painstaking detective work as this that had drawn Marcus into archaeology. Marcus saw no limit to the reach of such techniques. Perhaps in some sense every event left some mark on the universe, a mark that could one day be decoded by sufficiently ingenious instruments. In a sense the WormCam was the crystallization of the unspoken intuition of every archaeologist: that the past is a country, real, out there somewhere, which can be explored, fingertip by fingertip.

But a new book of truth was opening. For the "Cam could answer questions left untouched by traditional archaeology, no matter how powerful the techniques- even about this man, Otzi, who had become the best known human of all those who had lived throughout prehistory.

What had never been answered-what was impossible to answer from the fragments recovered-was why the Ice Man had died. Perhaps he was fleeing warfare, or pursuing a love affair. Perhaps he was a criminal, fleeing the rough justice of his time.

Marcus had intuited that all these explanations were parochial, projections of a modern world on a more austere past. But he longed, along with the rest of the world, to know the truth.

But now the world had forgotten Otzi, with his skin clothes and tools of flint and copper, the mystery of his lonely death. Now, in a world where any figure from the past could be made to come to vibrant life, Otzi was no longer a novelty, nor even particularly interesting. Nobody cared to learn how, after all, he had died.

Nobody save Marcus. So Marcus had sat in the chill gloom of this university facility, struggling through that Alpine pass at Otzi's shoulder, until the truth had become apparent.

Otzi was a high-status Alpine hunter. His copper axehead and bearskin hat were marks of hunting prowess and prestige- And his goal, on this fatal expedition, had been the most elusive quarry of all, the only Alpine animal which retires to high rocky areas at night: the ibex.

But Otzi was old-at forty-six, he had already reached an advanced age for a man of his period. He was plagued by arthritis, and afflicted today by an intestinal infection which had given him chronic diarrhea. Perhaps he had grown weaker, slower than he knew-or cared to admit.

He had followed his quarry ever deeper into the cold heights of the mountains. He had made his simple camp in this pass, intending to repair the arrowheads he had broken, continue his pursuit the next day. He had taken a final meal, of salted goat flesh and dried plums.

But the night had turned crystal clear, and the wind had howled through the pass, drawing Otzi's life heat with it.

It was a sad, lonely death, and Marcus, watching, thought there was a moment when Otzi tried to rise, as if aware of his terrible mistake, as if he knew he was dying. But he could not rise; and Marcus could not reach through the WormCam to help him.

And so Otzi would lie alone, entombed in his ice, for five thousand years.

Marcus shut down the WormCam, and once more Otzi was at peace.

Patefield Testimony: Many nations-not just America-are facing grave internal dialogues about the new truths revealed about the past, truths in many cases barely reported, if at all, in conventional histories.

In France, for example, there has been much soul-searching about the unexpectedly wide nature of collaboration with the Nazi regime during the German occupation of the Second World War. Reassuring myths about the significance of the wartime Resistance have been severely damaged-not least by the new revelations about David Moulin, a revered Resistance leader. Barely anyone who knows the legend of Moulin was prepared to learn that he had begun his career as a Nazi mole- although he was later persuaded to his national cause, and was in fact tortured and executed by the SS in 1943.

Modem Belgians seem overwhelmed by their confrontation with the brutal reality of the "Congo Free State," a tightly centralized colony designed to strip the territory of its natural wealth-principally rubber-and maintained by atrocity, murder, starvation, exposure, disease and hunger, resulting in the uprooting of whole communities and the massacre, between 1885 and 1906, of eight million people.

In the lands of the old Soviet Union, people are fixated on the era of the Stalinist terror. The Germans are confronting the Holocaust once more- The Japanese, for the first time in generations, are having to come to terms with the truth of their wartime massacres and other brutalities in Szechwan and elsewhere. Israelis are uncomfortably aware of their own crimes against the Palestinians. The fragile Serbian democracy is threatening to collapse under the new exposure of the horrors in Bosnia and elsewhere after the breakup of the old Yugoslavia.

And so on.

Most of these past horrors were well known before the WormCam, of course, and many honest and conscientious histories were written. But still the endless dismal banality of it all, the human reality of so much cruelty and pain and waste, remains utterly dismaying.

And stronger emotions than dismay have been stirred Ethnic and religious disputes centuries old have been the trigger for many past conflicts. So it has been this time: we have seen interpersonal anger, riots, interethnic struggles, even coups and minor wars. And much of the anger is still directed at OurWorld,. the messenger who has delivered so much dismal truth.

But it could have been worse.

As it turns out-while there has been much anger expressed at ancient wrongs, some never even exposed before-by and large each community has become too aware of its own crimes, against its own people and others, to seek atonement for those of others. No nation is without sin; none seems prepared to cast the first stone, and almost every surviving major institution-be it nation, corporation, church-finds itself forced to apologize for crimes committed in its name in the past.

But there is a deeper shock to be confronted.

The WormCam, after all, does not deliver its history lessons in the form of verbal summaries or neat animated maps. Nor does it have much to say of glory or honor. Rather, it simply shows us human beings, one at a time-very often starving or suffering or dying at the hands of others.

Greatness no longer matters. We see now that each human being who dies is the center of a universe: a unique spark of hope and despair, hate and love, going alone into the greater darkness. It is as if the WormCam has brought a new democracy to the viewing of history. As Lincoln might have remarked, the history emerging from all this intent WormCam inspection will be a new story of mankind: a story of the people, by the people, for the people.

Now, what matters most is my story-or my lover's, or my parent's, or my ancestor's, who died the most mundane, meaningless of deaths in the mud of Stalingrad or Passchendaele or Gettysburg, or simply in some unforgiving field, broken by a life of drudgery. Empowered by the WormCam, assisted by such great genealogical record centers as the Mormons', we have all discovered our ancestors. There are those who argue that this is dangerous and destabilizing. After all, the spate of divorces and suicides which followed the WormCam's first gift of openness has now been followed by a fresh wave as we have become able to spy on our partners, not just in the real time of the present, but in the past as far back as we care to look, and every past misdeed, open or hidden, is made available for scrutiny, every old wound reopened. But this is a process of adjustment, which the strongest relationships will survive. And anyhow, such comparatively trivial consequences of the WormCam are surely insignificant compared to the great gift of deeper historical truth which, for the first time, is being made available to us.

So I do not endorse the doomsayers. I say, trust the people. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

There is a growing clamor-tragically impossible to satisfy-to find a way, some way, any way, to change the past: to help the suffering long-dead, even to redeem them. But the past is immutable; only the future is there to be shaped.

With all the difficulties and dangers, we are privileged to be alive at such a time. There will surely never again be a time when the light of truth and understanding spreads with such overwhelming rapidity into the darkness of the past, never again a time when the mass consciousness of mankind is transformed so dramatically. The new generations, born in the omnipresent shadow of the WormCam, will grow up with a very different view of their species and its past.

For better or worse.

Middle East. c. 1250 B.C.:

Miriam was a tutor of accounting expert systems: certainly no professional historian. But, like almost everybody else she knew, she had gotten hold of WormCam time as soon as it had become available, and started to research her own passions. And, in Miriam's case, that passion focused on a single man: a man whose story had been her lifelong inspiration.

But the closer the WormCam brought Miriam to her subject, the more, maddeningly, he seemed to dissolve. The very act of observing was destroying him, as if he was obeying some unwelcome form of historical uncertainty principle.

Yet she persisted.

At last, having spent long hours searching for him in the harsh, confusing sunlight of those ancient deserts, she began to consult the professional historians who had gone before her into these wastes of time. And, piece by piece, she confirmed for herself what they had deduced.

The career of the man himself-shorn of its supernatural elements-was a fairly crude conflation of the biographies of several leaders of that era, as the nation of Israel had coalesced from groups of Palestinian refugees fleeing the collapse of Canaanite city-states. The rest was invention or theft.

That business, for instance, of being concealed in a wicker basket and floated down the Nile, in order to save him from murder as a firstborn Israelite: that was no more than a conflation of older legends from Mesopotamia and Egypt-about the god Horns, for example- none of which was based on fact either. And he'd never been an Egyptian prince. That fragment seemed to come from the story of a Syrian called Bay who had served as Egypt's chief treasurer, and had made it to Pharaoh, as Ramosekhayemnetjeru.

But what is truth?

After all, as preserved by the myth, he had been a complex, human, inspiring man. He was marked by imperfection: he had stammered, and often fell out with the very people he led. He even argued with God. But his triumph over those imperfections had been an inspiration, over three thousand years, to many people, including Miriam herself-named for his beloved sister-who had had to overcome the obstacles set in her own life by her cerebral palsy.

He was irresistible, as vividly real as any personage from "true" history, and Miriam knew he would live on into the future. And given that, did it matter that Moses never truly existed?

It was a new obsession, Bobby saw, as millions of figures from history-renowned and otherwise-came briefly to life once more, under the gaze of this first generation of WormCam witnesses.

Absenteeism seemed to be reaching an all-time high, as people abandoned their work, their vocations, even their loved ones to devote themselves to the endless fascination of the WormCam. It was as if the human race had become suddenly old, content to hide away, feeding on its memories.

And perhaps that was how it was, Bobby thought. After all, if the Wormwood couldn't be turned away, there was no future to speak of. Maybe the WormCam, with its gift of the past, was precisely what the human race required right now; a bolt-hole.

And each of those witnesses was coming to understand that one day she too would be no more than a thing of light and shadow, embedded in time, perhaps scrutinized in her turn from some unknowable future.

But to Bobby, it was not the mass of mankind that concerned him, not the great currents of history and thought that were stirred, but the breaking heart of his brother.