The Light of Other Days

part 3: THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS Chapter 26 - THE GRANDMOTHERS
In the Wormworks, David sat before a large wallmounted SoftScreen.

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.

As the faces of their ancestors pulsed by, there was another change of scene, a brief migration. Now these remote families scratched at a land of ruins-low walls, exposed cellars, the ground littered with blocks of marble and other building stone.

Then buildings grew like time-lapsed flowers, the scattered stones coalescing.

David paused. He fixed on the face of a woman, his own remote ancestor some eighty generations removed. She was perhaps forty, handsome, her strawberry hair tinged with gray, her eyes blue. Her nose was proudly prominent, Romanesque.

Behind her the dismal fields had vanished, to be replaced by an orderly townscape: a square surrounded by colonnades and statues and tall buildings, their roofs tiled red. The square was crowded with stalls, vendors frozen in the act of hawking their wares. The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of die desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.

"A Roman settlement," Bobby said.

"Yes." David pointed at the "Screen. "I think this is the forum- That is probably the basilica, the town hall and law courts. These rows of colonnades lead to shops and offices. And the building over there might be a temple..."

"It looks so orderly," Bobby murmured. "Even modem. Streets and buildings, offices and shops. You can see it's all set out on a rectangular grid, like Manhattan. I feel as if I could walk into the "Screen and go look for a bar."

The contrast of this little island of civilization with the centuries-wide sea of ignorance and toil that surrounded it was so striking that David felt a reluctance to leave it.

"You're taking a risk to come here," he said.

Bobby's face, hovering above the "Shroud, was like an eerie mask, illuminated by die frozen smile of his distant grandmother. "I know that. And I know you've been helping the FBI. The DNA trace."

David sighed. "If not me, somebody else would have developed it. At least this way I know what they're up to." He tapped his SoftScreen. A border of smaller images lit up around the image of the grandmother. "Here. WormCam views of all the neighboring rooms and the corridors. This aerial view shows the parking lot- I've mixed in infrared recognition. If anybody approaches."

"Thanks."

"It's been too long, brother. I haven't forgotten the way you helped me through my own crisis, my brush with addiction."

"We all have crises. It was nothing."

"On the contrary... You haven't told me why you've come here."

Bobby shrugged, the movement inside his "Shroud a shadowy blur. "I know you've been looking for us. I'm alive and well- And so is Kate."

"And happy?"

Bobby smiled. "If I wanted happy, I could just turn on the chip in my head. There's more to life than happiness, David. I want you to take a message to Heather."

David frowned. "Is it about Mary? Is she hurt?"

"No. No, not exactly." Bobby rubbed his face, hot in his SmartShroud. "She's become one of the Joined. We're going to try to get her to come home. I want you to help me set it up."

It was disturbing news. "Of course. You can trust me."

Bobby grinned. "I know it. Otherwise I wouldn't have come."

And I, David thought uneasily, have, since we last met, discovered something momentous about you.

He looked into Bobby's open, curious face, lit up by a day two millennia gone. Was this the time to hit Bobby with another revelation about Hiram's endless tinkering with his life-perhaps, indeed, the greatest crime Hiram had committed against his son?

Later, he thought. Later. There will be a moment.

And besides, the WormCam image still glowed on the "Screen, enticing, alien, utterly irresistible. The WormCam in all its manifestations had changed the world. But none of that mattered, he thought, compared to this: the power of the technology to reveal what had been thought lost forever.

There would be time enough for life, for their complex affairs, to deal with the unshaped future- For now, history beckoned. He took the joystick, pushing it forward; and the Roman buildings evaporated like snowflakes in the sun.

Another brief blur of migrations, and now here was a new breed of ancestor: still with the characteristic strawberry hair and blue eyes, but with no trace of the Romanesque nose.

Around the flickering faces David glimpsed fields, small and rectangular, worked by ploughs drawn by oxen, or even, in poorer times, by humans. There were timber granaries, sheep and pigs, cattle and goats. Beyond the grouped fields he saw earthwork banks, making the area into a fort-but abruptly, as they sank. deeper into the past, the earthworks were replaced by a cruder wooden palisade.

Bobby said, "The world's getting simpler."

"Yes. How did Francis Bacon put it?... "The good effects wrought by founders of cities, law-givers, fathers of the people, extirpers of tyrants, and heroes of that class, extend but for short times: whereas the work of the Inventor, though a thing of less pomp and show, is felt everywhere and lasts forever." Right about now the Trojan War is being fought with bronze weapons. But bronze breaks easily, which is why that war lasted twenty years with comparatively few casualties. We forgot how to make iron, so we can't kill each other as efficiently as we used to..."

The earnest toil in the fields continued, largely unchanging from generation to generation. The sheep and cattle, though domesticated, looked like much wilder breeds.

A hundred and fifty generations deep, and the bronze tools gave way, at last, to stone. But the stone-worked fields were little changed. As the pace of historical change slowed, David let them fall faster. Two hundred, , three hundred generations passed, the fleeing faces blurring one into the other, slowly molded by time and toil and the mixing of genes.

But soon it will mean nothing, David thought bleakly-nothing, after Wormwood Day. On that dark morning at! of this patient struggle, the toil of billions of small lives, will be obliterated; all we have learned and built will be lost, and there may not even be minds to remember, to mourn. And time's wall was close, much closer even than the Roman spring they had glimpsed; so little history might be left to play itself out.

Suddenly it was an unbearable thought, as if he had imaginatively absorbed the reality of the Wormwood for the first time. We must find a way to push it aside, he s. thought. For the sake of these others, the old ones who  stare out at us through the WormCam. We must not lose the meaning of their vanished lives.

And then, suddenly, the background was a blur once more.

Bobby said, "We've become nomads. Where are we?"

David tapped a reference panel. "Northern Europe. We forgot how to do agriculture. The towns and settlements have dispersed. No more empires, no cities. Humans are pretty rare beasts, and we live in nomadic groups and clans, settlements that last a season or two at best."

Twelve thousand years deep, he paused the scan.

She might have been fifteen years old, and there was a round sigil of some kind crudely tattooed onto her left cheek. She looked in rude health. She carried a baby, swaddled in animal hide-my remote great-uncle, David thought absently-and she was stroking its round cheek. She wore shoes, leggings, a heavy cloak of plaited grasses. Her other garments seemed to have been stitched together from strips of skin. There was grass stuffed into her shoes and under her hat, presumably for insulation.

Cradling her baby, she was walking after a group of others: men, women with infants, children. They were making their way up a shallow, sloping ridge of rock. They were walking casually, easily, a pace that seemed destined to carry them many kilometers. But some of the adults had flint-tipped spears at the ready: presumably as a guard against animal attack rather than any human threat.

She topped the ridge. David and Bobby, riding at their grandmother's shoulder, looked with her over the land beyond.

"Oh, my," David said. "Oh, my."

They were looking down over a broad, sweeping plain. In the far distance, perhaps the north, there were mountains, dark and brooding, striped with the glaring white of glaciers. The sky was crystal blue, the sun high.

There was no smoke, no tracery of fields, no fencing. All the marks made by humans had been erased from his chill world.

But the valley was not empty.

...It was like a carpet, thought David: a moving carpet of boulder-like bodies, each coated in long redbrown fur that dangled to the ground, like the fur of a musk ox. They moved slowly, feeding all the while, the greater herd made up of scattered groups. At the near fringe of the herd, one of the young broke away from its parent, incautiously, and began to paw at the ground. A wolf, gaunt, white-furred, crept forward. The calf's mother broke from the pack, curved tusks flashing. The wolf fled.

"Mammoth," David said.

"There must be tens of thousands of them. And what are they, some kind of deer? Are those camels? And- oh, my God-I think it's a saber-toothed cat."

"Lions and tigers and bears,"

"David said. "Do you want to go on?"

"Yes. Yes, let's go on."

The Ice Age valley disappeared, as if into mist, and only the human faces remained, falling away like the leaves of a calendar.

Still David felt he could recognize the faces of his ancestors: round, almost always devastatingly young when giving birth, and still retaining that signature of blue eyes and strawberry-blond hair.

But the world had changed dramatically.

Great storms battered the sky, some lasting years- The ancestors struggled across landscapes of ice or drought, even desert, starving, thirsty, never healthy.

"We've been lucky," David said- "We've had millennia of comparative climate stability. Time enough to figure out agriculture and build our cities and conquer the world. Before that, this."

"So very fragile," Bobby said, wondering.

More than a thousand generations deep, the faces began to grow darker.

"We're migrating south," Bobby said. "Losing our adaptation to the colder climates. Are we going back to Africa?"

"Yes." David smiled. "We're going home."

And in a dozen more generations, as this first great migration was undone, the images began to stabilize.

This was the southern tip of Africa, east of the Cape of Good Hope. The ancestral group had reached a cave, close to a beach from which thick, tan sedimentary rocks protruded.

It seemed a generous place. Grassland and forest, dominated by bushes and trees with huge, colorful, thistly flowers, lapped right down to the sea's edge. The ocean was calm, and seabirds wheeled overhead. The intertidal shoreline was rich with kelp, jellyfish and stranded cuttlefish,

There was game in the forest. At first they glimpsed familiar creatures like eland, springbok, elephant and wild pig, but deeper in time there were more unfamiliar species; long-homed buffalo, giant hartebeest, a kind of giant horse, striped like a zebra.

And here, in these unremarkable caves, the ancestors stayed, generation on generation.

The pace of change was now terribly slow. At first the ancestors wore clothes, but-as hundreds of generations withered away-the clothing was of decreasing quality, reducing at last to simple skin bags tied around naked waists, and at length not even that. They would hunt with stone-tipped spears and hand axes, no longer with arrows. But the stone tools too were of increasing coarseness, the hunting less ambitious, often no more than a patchy attempt to finish off a wounded eland.

In the caves-whose floors gradually sank deeper over the millennia, as successive layers of human detritus were removed-at first there was something like the sophistication of a human society. There was even art, images of animals and people, laboriously layered on the walls with dye-stained fingers.

But at last, more than twelve hundred generations deep, the walls became blank, the last crude images scraped away.

David shivered. He had reached a world without art: mere were no pictures, no novels, no sculptures, perhaps not even songs or poetry. The world was draining of mind.

Deeper and deeper they fell, through three, four thousand generations: an immense desert of time, crossed by a chain of ancestors who bred and squabbled in this unadorned cave. The succession of grandmothers showed little meaningful change-but David thought he detected an increasing vagueness, a bewilderment, even a state of habitual, uncomprehending fear in those dark faces.

At last there was a sudden, jarring discontinuity. And this time it was not the landscape that changed but the ancestral face itself.

David slowed the fall, and the brothers stared at this most remote grandmother, peering from the mouth of the African cave her descendants would inhabit for thousands of generations.

Her face was outsized, with her eyes too far apart, nose flattened, and features spread too wide, as if the whole face had been pulled wide. Her jaw was thick, but her chin was shallow and sliced back. And bulging out of her forehead was an immense brow, a bony swelling like a tumor, pushing down the face beneath it and making the eyes sunken in their huge hard-boned sockets. A swelling at the back of her head offset the weight of that huge brow, but it tilted her head downward, so that her chin almost rested on her chest, her massive neck snaking forward.

But her eyes were clear and knowing.

She was more human than any ape, and yet she was not human. And it was that degree of closeness yet difference which disturbed him.

She was, unmistakably, Neanderthal.

"She's beautiful," Bobby said.

"Yes," David breathed. "This is going to send the paleontologists back to the drawing board." He smiled, relishing the idea.

And, he wondered suddenly, how many watchers from his own far future would be studying him and his brother, even now, as they became the first humans to confront their own deep ancestors? He supposed he could never begin to imagine their forms, the tools they used, their thoughts.-even as this Neanderthal grandmother could surely never have envisaged this lab, his half-invisible brother, the gleaming gadgets here.

And beyond those watchers, still further into the future, mere must be others watching them in turn- and on, off into the still more unimaginable future, as long as humanity-or those who followed humans- persisted. It was a chilling, crushing thought.

All of it supposing the Wormwood spared anybody at all.

"...Oh," Bobby whispered. He sounded disappointed.

"What is it?"

"It's not your fault I knew the risk." There was a rustle of cloth, a blurred shadow.

David turned. Bobby had gone.

But here was Hiram, storming into the lab, clattering doors and yelling. "I got them. Bugger me, I got them." He slapped David on the back. "That DNA trace worked like a charm. Manzoni and Mary, the pair of them." He raised his head. "You hear me, Bobby? I know you're here. I got them. And if you want to see either of them again, you have to come to me. You got that?"

David stared into the deep eyes of his lost ancestor-a member of a different species, five thousand generations removed from himself-and cleared down the SoftScreen.
Part 3: THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS Chapter 27 - FAMILY HISTORY
When she was forcibly restored to open human society, Kate was relieved to find she'd been cleared of the criminal conviction brought against her. But she was stunned to find she was taken away from Mary, her friends, and immediately incarcerated-by Hiram Patterson.

The door to the suite opened, as it did twice a day.

There stood her guard; a woman, tall, willowy, dressed in a sober businesslike trouser suit. She was even beautiful-but with a deadness of expression and in her dark eyes that Kate found chilling.

Her name, Kate had learned, was Mac Wilson.

Wilson pushed a small trolley through the door, hauled out yesterday's, cast a fast, professional glance around the room, then shut the door. And that was that, over without a word.

Kate had been sitting on the room's sole piece of furniture, a bed. Now she got up and crossed to the trolley, pulled back its white paper cover. There was cold meat, salad, bread, fruit, and drinks, a flask of coffee, bottled water, orange juice. On a lower deck there was laundry, fresh underwear, jumpsuits, sheets for Kate's bed. The usual stuff.

Kate had long exhausted the possibilities of the twicedaily trolley. The paper plates and plastic cutlery were useless for anything but their primary purpose, and a nearly useless for that. Even the wheels of the trolley were of soft plastic. She went back to her bed and sat desultorily munching on a peach.

The rest of the room was just as unpromising. The walls were seamless, coated with a clear plastic she couldn't dig her nails through. There wasn't even a light fitting; the gray glow that flooded the room-twenty-four hours a day-came from fluorescents behind ceiling panels, sealed off behind plastic, and anyhow out of her reach. The bed was a plastic box seamlessly attached to the floor. She'd tried ripping the sheets, but the fabric was too tough. (And anyhow she wasn't yet ready to visualize herself garrotting anybody, even Wilson.)

The plumbing, a John and a shower fixture, was likewise of no value to her greater purpose. The toilet was chemical, and it seemed to lead to a sealed tank, so she couldn't even smuggle out a message in her bodily waste-even supposing she could figure out how.

...But despite all that, she had come close to escape, once. It was enjoyable to replay her near-triumph in her mind.

She'd concocted the scheme in her head, where even the WormCam couldn't yet peer. She'd worked on her preparations for over a week. Every twelve hours she had left the food trolley in a slightly different place- just that fraction further inside the room. She choreographed each setup in her head: three paces from bed to door, cut the second pace by that fraction more...

And each time she'd come to the door to collect the trolley, Wilson had been forced to reach a little further.

Until at last there came a time when Wilson, to reach the trolley, had to take a single pace into the room. Just a pace, that was all-but Kate hoped it would be enough.

Two running steps took her to the doorway. A shoulder charge knocked Wilson forward into the room, and Kate made it as far as two paces out the door.

Her room turned out to be just a box, standing alone in a giant, hangar-sized chamber, the walls high and remote and dimly lit. There were other guards ail around her, men and women, getting up from desks, drawing weapons. Kate looked around frantically, seeking a place to run-

The hand that had closed on hers was like a vise. Her little finger was twisted back, and her arm bent sideways. Kate fell to her knees, unable to keep from screaming, and she felt bones in her finger break in an explosion of grinding pain.

It was, of course, Wilson.

When she'd come to, she was on the floor of her prison, bound there with what felt like duct tape, while a medic treated her hand. Wilson was being held back by another of the guards, with a murderous look on that steely face.

When it was done, Kate had a finger that throbbed for weeks. And Wilson, when she next came to the door on her twice-daily routine, fixed Kate with a glare full of hate. I wounded her pride, Kate realized. Next time, she will kill me without hesitation.

But it was clear to Kate that, even after her attempted escape, all that hate wasn't directed at her. She wondered who was Wilson's real target-and if Hiram knew.

In the same way, she knew, she had never been Hiram's real target. She was just bait, bait in a trap.

She was just in the way of these crazy people with their unguessable agendas.

It did no good to brood on such things. She lay back on her bed. Later, in the routine she'd used to structure her empty days, she'd take some exercise. For now, suspended in light that was never quenched, she tried to blank her mind.

A hand touched hers.

Amid the chaos and recrimination and anger that followed the retrieval of Mary and Kate, David asked to see Mary in the cool calm of the Wormworks.

He was immediately jotted by the familiarity of Mary's blue eyes, so like the eyes he had followed deep into time, all the way back to Africa.

He shivered with a sense of the evanescence of human life. Was Mary really no more than the transient manifestation of genes which had been passed to her through thousands of generations, even from the long-gone Neanderthal days, genes which she in turn would pass on into an unknown future? But the WormCam had destroyed that dismal perspective. Mary's life was transient, but no less meaningful for that; and now that the past was opened up, she would surely be remembered, cherished by those who would follow.

And her life, shaped in a fast-changing world, might yet take her to places he couldn't even imagine.

She said, "You look worried!"

"That's because I'm not sure who I'm speaking to."

She snorted, and for an instant he saw the old, rebellious, discontented Mary.

"Forgive my ignorance," David said. "I'm just trying to understand. We all are. This is something new to us."

She nodded. "And therefore something to fear?... Yes," she said eventually. "Yes, then. We're here. The wormhole in my head never shuts down, David. Everything I do, everything I see and hear and feel, everything I think, is."

"Shared?"

"Yes." She studied him. "But I know what you imply by that. Diluted. Right? But it isn't like that- I'm no less me. But I am enhanced. It's just another layer of mind. Or of information processing, if you like: layered over my central nervous system, the way the CNS is layered over older networks, like the biochemical. My memories are still mine. Does it matter if they are stored in some- body else's head?"

"But this isn't just some kind of neat mobile phone network, is it? You Joined make higher claims than that. Is there a new person in all this, a new, combined you, A group mind, linked by wormholes, emergent from the network?"

"You think that would be a monstrosity, don't you?"

"I don't know what to think about it."

He studied her, trying to grasp Mary within the shell of Joinedness.

It didn't help that the Joined had quickly become renowned as consummate actors-or liars, to be more blunt. Thanks to their detached layers of consciousness, each of them had a mastery over their body language, the muscles of their faces-a power over communication channels that had evolved to transmit information reliably and honestly-that could beat out the most expert thespian. He had no reason to suppose Mary was lying to him, today; it was just that he couldn't see how he could tell if she was or not.

She said now, "Why don't you ask me what you really want to know?"

Disturbed, he said, "Very well. Mary-how does it feel?"

She said slowly; "The same. Just ... more. It's like coming fully awake-a feeling of clarity, of full consciousness. You must know. I've never been a scientist. But I've solved puzzles. I play chess, for instance. Science is something like that, isn't it? You figure something out-suddenly see how the game fits together- it's as if the clouds clear, just for a moment, and you can see far, much farther than before."

"Yes," he said. "I've had a few moments like that in my life. I've been fortunate."

She squeezed his hand. "But for me, that's how it feels all the time. Isn't that wonderful?"

"Do you understand why people fear you?"

"They do more than fear us," she said calmly. "They hunt us down. They attack us. But they can't damage us. We can see them coming, David."

That chilled him.

"And even if one of us is killed-even if I am killed-then we, the greater being, will go on."

"What does that mean?"

"The information network that defines the Joined is large, and growing all the time. It's probably indestructible, like an Internet of minds."

He frowned, obscurely irritated. "Have you heard of attachment theory? It describes our need, psychologically, to form close relationships, to reach out to intimates. We need such relationships to conceal the awful truth, which we confront as we grow up, that each of us is alone. The greatest battle of human existence is to come to terms with that fact- And that is why to be Joined is so appealing.

"But the chip in your head will not help you," he said brutally. "Not in the end. For you must die alone, just as I must."

She smiled, coldly forgiving, and he felt ashamed.

"But that may not be true," she said. "Perhaps I will be able to live on, survive the death of my body-of Mary's body. But I, my consciousness and memories, will not be resident in one member's body or another, but-distributed. Shared amongst them all. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"

He whispered, "And would it be you? Could you truly avoid death that way? Or would this distributed self be a copy?"

She sighed. "I don't know. And besides the technology is some way away from realizing that. Until it does, we will still suffer illness, accident, death. And we will always grieve."

"The wiser you are, the more it hurts."

"Yes. The human condition is tragic, David. The greater the Joined becomes, the more clearly I can see that. And the more I feel it." Her face, still young, seemed overlaid by a ghostly mask of much greater age. "Come with me," he said. "There's something I want to show you."

Kate couldn't help but jump, snatch her hand away.

She finessed her involuntary gasp into a cough, extended the motion of her hand to cover her mouth. Then, delicately, she returned her hand to where it had been, resting on the top sheet of her bed.

And that gentle touch came again, the fingers warm, strong, unmistakable despite the SmartShroud glove which must cover them. She felt the fingers squirm into her palm, and she tried to stay still, eating the peach.

Sorry shocked you. No way warn.

She leaned back a little, seeking to conceal her own handspelling behind her back. Bobby ?

Who else??? Nice prison.

In Wormworks right?

Yes. DNA trace. David helped. Refugee methods. Mary helped. All family together.

Shouldn't have come, she signed quickly. What Hiram wants. Get you. Bait in trap.

Not abandon you. Need you. Be ready.

Tried once. Guards smart, sharp...

She risked a glimpse to her side. She could see no sign of his presence, not so much as a false shadow, an indentation in the bedcover, a hint of distortion. Evidently SmartShroud technology was improving as rapidly as the WormCam itself.

I might not get another chance, she thought. I must tell him.

Bobby. I saw David. Had news. About you.

His signing now was slower, hesitant. Me what me ?

Your family... I can't do it, she thought. Ask Hiram, she signed back, feeling bitter.

Asking you.

Birth. Your birth.

Asking you. Asking you.

Kate took a deep breath.

Not what you believe. Think it through. Hiram wanted dynasty. David big disappointment, out of control. Mother a big inconvenience. So, have boy without mother.

Don't understand. I have mother. Heather mother.

She hesitated. No she isn't. Bobby, you're a clone.

David settled back and fixed the cold metal Mind'sEye hoop over his head. As he sank into virtual reality the world turned dark and silent, and for a brief moment he had no sense of his own body, couldn't even feel Mary's soft, warm hand wrapped around his own.

Then, all around them, the stars came out. Mary gasped and grabbed at his arm.

He was suspended in a three-dimensional diorama of stars, stars spread over a velvet black sky, stars more crowded than the darkest desert night-and yet there was structure, he saw slowly. A great river of light- stars crammed so close they merged into glowing, pale clouds-ran around the equator of the sky. It was the Milky Way, of course: the great disc of stars in which he was still embedded.

He glanced down. Here was his body, familiar and comfortable, clearly visible in the complex, multiply sourced light that fell on him. But he was floating in the starlight without enclosure or support.

Mary drifted beside him, still holding on to his arm. Her touch was comforting. Odd, he thought. We can cast our minds more than two thousand light years from Earth, and yet we must still grasp at each other, our primate heritage never far from the doors of our souls.

This alien sky was populated.

There was a sun, planet and moon here, suspended around him, like the trinity of bodies that had always dominated the human environment. But it was a strange enough sun-in fact, not a single star like Earth's sun, but a binary.

The principal was an orange giant, dim and cool. Centered on a glowing yellow core, it was a mass of orange gas, growing steadily more tenuous. There was much detail in that sullen disc: a tracery of yellow-white light that danced at the poles, the ugly scars of gray-black spots around the equator.

But the giant star was visibly flattened. It had a companion star, small and bluish, little more than a point of light, orbiting so close to its parent it was almost within the giant's scattered outer atmosphere. In fact, David saw, a thin streamer of gas, torn from the parent and still glowing, had wrapped itself around the companion and was falling to its surface, a thin, hellish rain of fusing hydrogen.

David looked down to the planet that hovered beneath his feet. It was a sphere the apparent size of a beachball, half-illuminated by the complex red and white light of its parent stars. But it. was obviously airless, its surface a complex mesh of impact craters and mountain chains. Perhaps it had once had an atmosphere, even oceans; or it might have been the rocky or metallic core of a gas giant, an erstwhile Neptune or Uranus. It was even possible, he supposed, that it had harbored life. If so, that life was now destroyed or fled, every trace of its passing scorched from the surface by the dying sun.

But this dead, blasted world still had a moon. Though much smaller than its parent, the moon glowed more brightly, reflecting more of the complex mixed light of the twin stars. And its surface appeared, at first glance, utterly smooth, so that the little worldlet looked like a cue ball, machined in some great lathe. When David looked more closely, however, he could see there was a network of fine cracks and ridges, some of them evidently hundreds of kilometers long, all across the surface. The moon looked rather like a hard-boiled egg, he thought, whose shell had been assiduously if gently cracked with a spoon.

This moon was a ball of water ice. Its smoothed surface was a sign of recent global melting, presumably caused by the grotesque expansion of the parent star, and the ridges were seams between plates of ice. And perhaps, like Jupiter's moon Europa, there was still a layer of liquid water somewhere beneath this deep-frozen surface, an ancient ocean that might serve as a harbor, even now, for retreating life...

He sighed. Nobody knew. And right now, nobody had the time or resources to find out. There was simply too much to do, too many places to go.

But it wasn't the rocky world, or its ice moon-not even the strange double star itself-but something much grander, beyond this little stellar system, which had drawn him here.

He turned now, and looked beyond the stars.

The nebula spanned half the sky.

It was a wash of colors, ranging from bright blue-white at its center, through green and orange, to somber purples and reds at its periphery. It was like a giant watercolor painting, he thought, the colors smoothly flowing, one into another. He could see layers in the cloud - the texture, the strata of shadows made it look surprisingly three-dimensional - with finer structure deeper in its heart.

The most striking aspect of the larger structure was a pattern of dark clouds, rich with dust, set out in a startlingly clear V-shape before the glowing mass, like an immense bird raising black wings before a flame. And before the bird shape, like a sprinkling of sparks from that bonfire behind, there was a thin veil of stars, separating him from the cloud. The great river of light that was the Galaxy flowed around the nebula, passing behind it as if encircling it.

Even as he turned his head from side to side, it was impossible to grasp the full scale of the structure- At times it seemed close enough to touch, like a giant dynamic wall-sculpture he might reach into and explore. And then it would recede, apparently to infinity. He knew his imagination, evolved to the thousand-kilometer scale of Earth, was inadequate to the task of grasping the immense distances involved here.

For if the sun was moved to the center of the nebula, humans could build an interstellar empire without reaching the edge of the cloud.

Wonder surged in him, sudden, unexpected. I am privileged, he thought anew, to live in such a time. One day, he supposed, some WormCam explorer would sail beneath the icy crust of the moon and seek out whatever lay at its core; and perhaps teams of investigators would scour the surface of the planet below, seeking out relics of the past.

He envied those future explorers the depth of their knowledge. And yet, he knew, they would surely envy his generation most of all. For, as he sailed outward with the expanding front of WormCam exploration, David was here first, and nobody else in all of history would be able to say that.

Long story. Japanese lab. The place he used to clone tigers for witch doctors. Heather just a surrogate. David WormCammed it all. Then all that mind control. Hiram didn't want more mistakes...

Heather. I felt no bond. Know why now. How sad. She thought she could feel his pulse in the invisible touch at her palm. Yes sad sad.

And then, without warning, the door crashed open. Mae Wilson walked in holding a pistol. Without hesitation she fired once, twice, to either side of Kate. The gun was silenced, the shots mere pops.

There was a cry, a patch of blood hovering in the air, another like a small explosion where the bullet exited Bobby's body.

Kate tried to stand. But the nozzle of Wilson's rifle was at the back of her head. "Don't even think about it."

Bobby's "Shroud was failing, is great concentric circles of distortion and shadow that spread around his wounds. Kate could see he was trying to get to the door.

But there were more of Hiram's goons there; he would have no way through. Now Hiram himself arrived at the door. His face twisted with unrecognizable emotion as he looked al

Kate, at Bobby's body. "I knew you couldn't resist it. Gotcha, you little shit"

Kate hadn't been out of her boxy cell for-how long? Thirty, forty days? Now, out in the cavernous dimly lit spaces of the Wormworks, she felt exposed, ill at ease.

The shot turned out to have passed straight through Bobby's upper shoulder, ripping muscle and shattering bone, but-through pure chance-his life was not in danger. Hiram's medics had wanted to give Bobby a general anaesthetic as they treated him, but, staring at Hiram, he refused, and suffered the pain of the treatment in full awareness Hiram led the way across a floor empty of people past quiescent, hulking machinery. Wilson and the other goons circled Bobby and Kate, some of them walking backward so they could watch their captives making it obvious there was no way to escape.

Hiram, immersed in whatever project he was progressing now, looked hunted, ratlike. His mannerisms were strange, repetitive, obsessive: he was a man who had spent too much time alone. He's the subject of an experiment himself, Kate thought sourly: a human being deprived of companionship, afraid of the darkness subject to constant, more or less hostile glares from the rest of the planet's population, their invisible eyes surrounding him. He was being steadily destroyed by a machine he had never imagined, never intended, whose implications he probably didn't understand even now. With a pang of pity, she realized there was no human in history who had more right to feel paranoid.

But she could never forgive him for what he had done to her-and to Bobby. And, she realized, she had absolutely no idea what Hiram intended for them, now that he had trapped his son.

Bobby held Kate's hand tight, making sure her body was never out of contact with his, that they were inseparable. And even as he protected her he was able subtly to lean on her without allowing the others to see, drawing strength she was glad to give him.

They reached a part of the Wormworks Kate had not seen before. A kind of bunker had been constructed, a massive cube half-set into the floor. Its interior was brightly lit. A door was set in its side, operated by a heavy wheel as if this was a submarine bulkhead.

Bobby stepped forward cautiously, still clutching Kate. "What is this, Hiram? Why have you brought us here?"

"Quite a place, isn't it?" Hiram grinned, and slapped the wall confidently. "We borrowed some engineering from the old NORAD base they dug into the Colorado mountains. This whole damn bunker is mounted on huge shock-absorbent springs."

"Is that what this is for? To ride out a nuclear attack?"

"No- These walls aren't to keep out an explosion. They're supposed to contain one."

Bobby frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"The future. The future of OurWorld, Our future, son."

Bobby said, "There are others who knew I was coming here. David, Mary. Special Agent Mavens of the FBI. They will be here soon. And then I'll be walking out of here. With her."

Kate watched Hiram's eyes, glancing from one to the other of them, scheming. He said, "You're right, of course. I can't keep you here. Although I could have fun trying. Just give me five minutes. Let me make my case, Bobby." He forced a smile.

Bobby struggled to speak. "That's all you want? To convince me of something? That's what this is all about?"

"Let me show you." And he nodded his head to the goons, indicating that Bobby and Kate should be brought into the bunker.

The walls were of thick steel. The bunker was cramped, with room only for Hiram, Kate, Bobby and Wilson.

Kate looked around, tense, alert, overloaded. This was obviously a live experimental lab: there were whiteboards, pin boards, SoftScreens, flip charts, fold-up chairs and desks fixed to the walls. At the center of the room was the equipment which, presumably, was the focus of interest here: what looked like a heat exchanger and a small turbine, and other pieces of equipment, white, anonymous boxes. On one of the desks there was a coffee, half-drunk and still steaming.

Hiram walked to the middle of the bunker. "We lost the monopoly on the WormCam quicker than I wanted. But we made a pile of money. And we're making more; the Wormworks is still far ahead of any similar facility around the world. But we're heading for a plateau, Bobby. In another few years the WormCams are going to be able to reach across the universe. And already, now that every punk kid has her own private WormCam, the market for generators is becoming saturated. We'll be in the business of replacement and upgrade, where the profit margins are low and the competition ferocious."

"But you," said Kate, "have a better idea. Right?"

Hiram glared- "Not that it will concern you." He walked to the machinery and stroked it. "We've gotten bloody good at plucking wormholes out of the quantum foam and expanding them. Up to now we've been using them to transmit information. Right? But your smart brother David will tell you that it takes a finite piece of energy to record even a single bit of information. So if we're transmitting data we must be transmitting energy as well. Right now it's just a trickle-not enough to make a light-bulb glow."

Bobby nodded, stiffly, obviously in pain. "But you're going to change all that." Hiram pointed to the pieces of equipment. "That's a wormhole generator. It's squeezed-vacuum technology, but far in advance of anything you'll find on the market. I want to make wormholes bigger and more stable- much more, more than anything anybody's achieved so far. Wide enough to act as conduits for significant amounts of energy.

"And the energy we mine will be passed through this equipment, the heat exchanger and the turbine, to extract usable electrical energy. Simple, nineteenth-century technology-but that's all I need as long as I have the energy flow. This is just a test rig, but enough to prove the point of principle, and to solve the problems- mainly the stability of the wormholes."

"And where," Bobby said slowly, "will you mine the energy from?"

Hiram grinned and pointed to his feet. "From down there. The core of the Earth, son. A ball of solid nickel-iron the size of the Moon, glowing as hot as the surface of the sun. All that energy trapped in there since the Earth formed, the engine that powers the volcanoes and earthquakes and the circulation of the crust plates... That's what I'm planning to tap "You see the beauty of it? The energy we humans burn up, here on the surface, is a candle compared to that furnace. As soon as the technical guys solve the wormhole stability problem, every extant powergenerating business will be obsolete overnight. Nuclear fusion, my hairy arse" And it won't stop there. Maybe some day we'll learn how to tap the stars themselves. Don't you see, Bobby? Even the WormCam was nothing compared to this. We'll change the world. We'll become rich."

"Beyond the dreams of avarice," Bobby murmured.

"Here's the dream, boy. This is what I want us to work on together. You and me. Building a future, building OurWorld."

"Dad." Bobby spread his free hand. "I admire you. I admire what you're building. I'm not going to stop you. But I don't want this. None of this is real-your money and your power-all that's real is me. Kate and me. I have your genes, Hiram. But I'm not you. And I never will be, no matter how you try to make it so..."

And as Bobby said that, links began to form in Kate's mind, as they used to as she neared the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of the most complex story.

I'm not you, Bobby had said.

But, she saw now, that was the whole point.

As she drifted in space, Mary's mouth was open wide. Smiling, David reached out, touched her chin and closed her jaw. "I can't believe it," she said.

"It's a nebula," he said. "It's called the Trifid Nebula, in fact."

"It's visible from Earth?"

"Oh, yes. But we are so far from home that the light that set off from the nebula around the time of Alexander the Great is only now washing over Earth." He pointed. "Can you see those dark spots?" They were small, fine globules, like drops of ink in colored water. "They are called Bok globules. Even the smallest of those spots could enclose the whole of our Solar System. We think they are the birthplaces of stars; clouds of dust and gas which will condense to form new suns. It takes a long time to form a star, of course. But the final stages- when fusion kicks in, and the star blows away its surrounding shell of dust and begins to shine-can happen quite suddenly." He glanced at her. "Think about it. If you lived here-maybe on that ice ball below us-you would be able to see, during your lifetime, the birth of dozens, perhaps hundreds of stars."

"I wonder what religion we would have invented," she said.

It was a good question. "Perhaps something softer. A religion dominated more by images of birth than death."

"Why did you bring me here?"

He sighed. "Everybody should see this before they die."

"And now we have," Mary said, a little formally. "Thank you."

He shook his head, irritated. "Not them. Not the Joined. You, Mary. I hope you'll forgive me for that."

"What is it you want to say to me, David?"

He hesitated. He pointed at the nebula. "Somewhere over there, beyond the nebula, is the center of the Galaxy. There is a great black hole there, a million times the mass of the sun. And it's still growing. Clouds of dust and gas and smashed-up stars flow into the hole from all directions."

"I've seen pictures of it," Mary said.

"Yes. There's a whole cluster of stapledons out there already. They are having some difficulty approaching the hole itself; the massive gravitational distortion plays hell with wormhole stability."

"Stapledons?"

"WormCam viewpoints. Disembodied observers, wandering through space and time." He smiled, and indicated his floating body. "When you get used to this virtual-reality WormCam exploration, you'll find you don't need to carry along as much baggage as this.

"My point is, Mary, that we're sending human minds like a thistledown cloud out through a block of spacetime two hundred thousand light years wide and a hundred millennia deep: across a hundred billion star systems, all the way back to the birth of humanity. Already there's more man we can study even if we had a thousand times as many trained observers-and the boundaries are being pushed back all the time.

"Some of our theories are being confirmed; others are unsentimentally debunked. And that's good; that's how science is supposed to be. But I think there's a deeper, more profound lesson we're already learning."

"And that is."

"That mind-that life itself-is precious," he said slowly. "Unimaginably so. We've only just begun our search. But already we know that there is no significant biosphere within a thousand light years, nor as deep in the past as we can see. Oh, perhaps there are microorganisms clinging to life in some warm, slime-filled pond, or deep in the crevices of some volcanic cleft somewhere. But there is no other Earth.

"Mary, the WormCam has pushed my perception out from my own concerns, inexorably, step by step. I've seen the evil and the good in my neighbor's heart, the lies in my own past, the banal horror of my people's history.

"But we've reached beyond that now, beyond the clamor of our brief human centuries, the noisy island to which we cling. Now we've seen the emptiness of the wider universe, the mindless churning of the past. We are done with blaming ourselves for our family history, and we are beginning to see the greater truth: that we are surrounded by abysses, by great silences, by the blind working-out of huge mindless forces. The WormCam is, ultimately, a perspective machine. And we are appalled by that perspective."

"Why are you telling me this?"

He faced her. "If I must speak to you-to all of you- then I want you to know what a responsibility you may hold.

"There was a Jesuit called Teilhard de Chardin. He believed that just as life had covered the Earth to form the biosphere, so mankind-thinking life-would eventually encompass life to form a higher layer, a cogitative layer he called the noosphere. He argued that the rough organization of the noosphere would grow, until it cohered into a single supersapient being he called the Omega Point"

"Yes," she said, and she closed her eyes."

"The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality."

"You've read de Chardin?"

"We have."

"It's the Wormwood, you see," he said hoarsely. "That's my problem. I can take no comfort from the new nihilist thinkers. The notion that this tiny scrap of life and mind should be smashed-at this moment of transcendent understanding-by a random piece of rock is simply unacceptable."

She touched his face with her small young hands. "I understand. Trust me. We're working on it."

And, looking into her young-old eyes, he believed it.

The light was changing now, subtly, growing significantly darker.

The blue-white companion star was passing behind the denser bulk of the parent. David could see the companion's light streaming through the complex layers of gas at the periphery of the giant-and, as the companion touched the giant's blurred horizon, he actually saw shadows cast by thicker knots of gas in those outer layers against the more diffuse atmosphere, immense lines that streamed toward him, millions of kilometers long and utterly straight. It was a sunset on a star, he realized with awe, an exercise in celestial geometry and perspective.

And yet the spectacle reminded him of nothing so much as the ocean sunsets he used to enjoy as a boy, as he played with his mother on the long Atlantic beaches of France, moments when shafts of light cast by the thick ocean clouds had made him wonder if he was seeing the light of God Himself.

Were the Joined truly the embryo of a new order of humanity-of mind? Was he making a sort of first contact here, with a being whose intellect and understanding might surpass his own as much as he might surpass his Neanderthal great-grandmother?

But perhaps it was necessary for a new form of mind to grow, new mental powers, to apprehend the wider perspective offered by the WormCam.

He thought. You are feared and despised, and now you are weak. I fear you; I despise you. But so was Christ feared and despised. And the future belonged to Him. As perhaps it does to you.

And so you may be the sole repository of my hopes, as I have tried to express to you.

But whatever the future, I can't help but miss the feisty girt who used to live behind those ancient blue eyes.

And it disturbs me that not once have you mentioned your mother, who dreams away what is left of her life in darkened rooms. Do we who" preceded you mean so little?

Mary pulled herself closer to him, wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him. Despite his troubled thoughts, her simple human warmth was a great comfort.

"Let's go home," she said. "I think your brother needs you."

Kate knew she had to tell him. "Bobby."

"Shut up, Manzoni," Hiram snarled. He was raging now, throwing his arms in the air, stalking around the room. "What about me? I made you, you little shit. I made you so I wouldn't have to die knowing."

"Knowing that you'd lose it all," Kate said.

"Manzoni."

Wilson took a step forward, standing between Hiram and Bobby, watching them all.

Kate ignored her. "You want a dynasty. You want your offspring to rule the f*cking planet. It didn't work with David, so you tried again, without even the inconvenience of sharing him with a mother. Yes, you made Bobby, and you tried to control him. But even so he doesn't want to play your games."

Hiram faced her, fists bunching. "What he wants doesn't matter. I won't be blocked."

"No," Kate said, wondering. "No, you won't, will you? My God, Hiram."

Bobby said urgently, "Kate, I think you'd better tell me what you're talking about."

"Oh, I don't say this was his plan from the beginning. But it was always a fallback, in case you didn't- cooperate. And of course he had to wait until the technology was ready. But it's there now. Isn't it, Hiram?..." And another piece of the puzzle fell into place. "You're funding the Joined. Aren't you? Covertly, of course. But it's your resources that are behind the brain-link technology. You had your own purpose for it,"

She could see in Bobby's eyes-black-ringed, marked by pain-that he understood at last.

"Bobby, you're his clone. Your body and nervous structures are as close to Hiram's as is humanly possible to manufacture. Hiram wants OurWorld to live on after his death. He doesn't want to see it dispersed-or, worse, fall into the hands of somebody from outside the family. You're his one hope. But if you won't cooperate..."

Bobby turned to his clone-parent. "If I won't be your heir, then you'll kill me. You'll take my body and you'll upload your own foul mind into me."

"But it won't be like that," Hiram said rapidly. "Don't you see? We'll be together, Bobby. I'll have beaten death, by God. And when you grow old, we can do it again. And again, and again."

Bobby shook off Kate's arm, and strode toward Hiram.

Wilson stepped between Hiram and Bobby, pushing Hiram behind her, and raised her pistol.

Kate tried to move forward, to intervene, but it felt as if she were embedded in treacle.

Wilson was hesitating. She seemed to be coming to a decision of her own. The gun muzzle wavered.

Then, in a single lightning-fast movement, she turned and slapped Hiram over the ear, hard enough to send him sprawling, and she grabbed Bobby. He tried to land a blow on her, but she took his injured arm and pressed a determined thumb into his wounded shoulder. He cried out, eyes rolling, and he fell to his knees.

Kate felt overwhelmed, baffled. What now? How much more complicated can this get? Who was this Wilson? What did she want?

With brisk movements Wilson laid Bobby and his clone-parent side by side, and began to throw switches on the equipment console at the center of the room. There was a hum of fans, a crackle of ozone; Kate sensed great forces gathering in the room.

Hiram tried to sit up, but Wilson knocked him back with a kick in the chest.

Hiram croaked, "What the hell are you doing?"

"Initiating a wormhole," Wilson murmured, concentrating. "A bridge to the center of the Earth."

Kate said, "But you can't. The wormholes are still unstable."

"I know that," Wilson snapped. "That's the point. Don't you understand yet?"

"My God," Hiram said. "You've intended this all along."

"To kill you. Quite right. I waited for the opportunity. And I took it."

"Why, for Christ's sake?"

"For Barbara Wilson. My daughter."

"Who?..."

"You destroyed her. You and your WormCam. Without you."

Hiram laughed, an ugly, strained sound. "Don't tell me. It doesn't matter. Everyone has a grudge. I always knew one of you bitter arseholes would get through in the end. But I trusted you, Wilson."

"If not for you I would be happy" Her voice was pellucid, calm.

"What are you talking about?... But who gives a f*ck? Look-you've got me," Hiram said desperately. "Let Bobby go. And the girl. They don't matter."

"Oh, but they do." Wilson seemed on the verge of crying. "Don't you see? He is the point." The hum of the equipment rose to a crescendo, and digits scrolled over the SoftScreen monitor outputs on the wall. "Just a couple of seconds," Wilson said. "That isn't long to wait, is it? And then it will all be over." She turned to Bobby. "Don't be afraid."

Bobby, barely conscious, struggled to speak. "What?"

"You won't feel a thing."

"What do you care?"

"But I do care." She stroked his cheek. "I spent so long watching you. I knew you were cloned. It doesn't matter. I saw you take your first step. I love you."

Hiram growled. "A bloody WormCam stalker. Is that all you are? How-small. I've been hunted by priests and pimps and politicians, criminals, nationalists, the sane and the insane. Everybody with a grudge about the inventor of the WormCam. I evaded them all. And now it comes down to this." He began to struggle. "No. Not his way. Not this way."

And, with a single, snake-like movement, he lunged at Wilson's leg and sank his teeth into her hamstring.

She cried out and staggered back. Hiram clung on with his teeth, like a dog, the woman's blood trickling from his mouth. Wilson rolled on top of him and raised her fist. Hiram released Wilson's leg and yelled at Kate. "Get him out of here! Get him out..." But then Wilson drove her fist into his bloodied throat, and Kate heard the crunch of cartilage and bone, and his voice turned to a gurgle.

Kate grabbed Bobby by his good arm and hauled him, by main force, over the threshold of the bunker. He cried out as his head raided on the door's thick metal sill, but she ignored him.

As soon as his dangling feet were clear she slammed the door, masking the rising noise of the wormhole, and began to dog it shut.

Hiram's security goons were approaching, bewildered. Kate, hauling on the wheel, screamed at them. "Help him up and get out of here!"

But then the wall bulged out at her, and she glimpsed light, as bright as the sun. Deafened, blinded, she seemed to be falling.

Falling into darkness.