The Light of Other Days

Chapter 23 The floodlit stage

Rome, A.D. 2041: Holding Heather’s hand, David was walking through the dense, swarming heart of the city; the night sky above, layered with smog, looked as orange as the clouds of Titan.

Even this late Rome was crowded with sightseers. Many, like Heather, were walking around with Mind’sEye headbands or Glasses-and-Gloves.

Four years after the first mass-market release of the WormCam, it had become a fashionable and alluring pastime to become a time tourist at many of the world’s ancient sites, wandering through deep layers of past: David had determined he must try the Scuba tour of sunken Venice before he left Italy… Alluring, yes: and David understood why. The past had become a comfortable and familiar place, its exploration a safe, synthetic adventure, the perfect place to avert the eyes from the blank meteoric wall that terminated the future. How ironic, thought David, that a world denied its future was suddenly granted its past.

And escape was tempting, from a world where even the transformed present was a strange and disturbing place.

Almost everybody now wore a WormCam of some kind, generally the wristwatch-sized miniaturized version powered by squeezed-vacuum technology. The personal WormCam was a link to the rest of mankind, to the glories and horrors of the past — and, not least, a useful gadget for looking around the next corner.

And everybody was reshaped by the WormCam’s relentless glare.

People didn’t even dress the way they used to. Some of the older people, here in Rente’s crowded streets, still wore clothing that would have been recognizable, even fashionable, a few years before. Some tourist types, in fact, walked around defiantly dressed in loud T-shirts and shorts, just as they had for decades. One woman was wearing a shirt with a gaudy, flashing message:

But many more people had covered up, wearing seamless one-piece coveralls that buttoned high on the neck, and with long sleeves and trouser legs that terminated in sewn-on gloves and boots. There were even some examples of all-over-cover styles imported from the Islamic world; shapeless smocks and tunics that trailed along the ground, headpieces hiding all but the eyes, which were uniformly staring and wary.

Others had reacted quite differently. Here was a nudist couple, two men hand in hand wearing slack middle-aged bellies over shrunken genitalia with defiant pride.

But, cautious or defiant, the older folk — among whom David reluctantly counted himself — displayed a continual uncomfortable awareness of the WormCam’s unblinking gaze.

The young, growing up with the WormCam, were different.

Many of the young went simply naked, save for practical items like purses and sandals. But they seemed to David to have none of the shyness or self-consciousness of their elders, as if they were making a choice about what to wear based simply on practicality or a desire to display personality, rather than any modesty or taboo.

One group of youngsters wore masks that showed projections of the broad face of a young man. Girls and boys alike wore the face, and it displayed a range of conditions and emotions — rain-lashed, sun-drenched, bearded and clean-shaven, laughing and crying, even sleeping — that seemed to have nothing to do with the activities of the wearers. It was disconcerting to watch, like seeing a group of clones wandering through the Rome night.

These were Romulus masks, the latest fashion accessory from OurWorld. Romulus, founder of the city, had become quite a character for the young Romans since the WormCam had proved he really existed — even if his brother and all that stuff about the wolf had proved mythical. Each mask was just a SoftScreen, moulded to the face, with inbuilt WormCam feeds, and it showed the face of Romulus as he had been at the exact age, to the minute, of the wearer. OurWorld was targeting other parts of the world with regional variants of the same idea.

It was a terrific piece of marketing. But David knew it would take him a lifetime to get used to the sight of the face of a young Iron Age male above a pair of pert bare breasts.

They passed through a small square, a patch of unhealthy-looking greenery surrounded by tall, antique buildings. On a bench here David noticed a young couple, boy and girl, both naked. They were perhaps sixteen. The girl was on the boy’s lap, and they were kissing ardently. The boy’s hand was urgently squeezing the girl’s small breast. And her hand, dug in between their bodies, was wrapped around his erection.

David knew that some (older) commentators dismissed all this as hedonism, a mad dancing of the young before the onset of the fire. It was a mindless, youthful reflection of the awful, despairing nihilist philosophies that had grown recently in response to the looming existence of the Wormwood: philosophies in which the universe was seen as little more than a giant fist intent on smashing flat all of life and beauty and thought, over and over. There never had been a way to survive the universe’s slow decline, of course; now the Wormwood had made that cosmic terminus gruesomely real, and there was nothing to do but dance and rut and cry.

Such notions were dismally seductive. But the explanation for the ways of modern youth was surely simpler than that, David thought. It was surely another WormCam consequence: the relentless, disconcerting shedding of taboos, in a world where all the walls had come down.

A handful of people had stopped to watch the couple. One man — naked too, perhaps in his twenties — was slowly masturbating.

Technically that was still illegal. But nobody was trying to enforce such laws any more. After all, that lonely man could go back to his hotel room and use his WormCam to zoom in on anybody he chose, any time of the day or night — which was what people had been using the WormCam for since it was released, and movies and magazines and such for a lot longer than that. At least, in this age of the WormCam, there was no more hypocrisy.

But such incidents were already becoming rare. New social norms were emerging The world seemed to David to be a little like a crowded restaurant. Yes, you could listen in to what the man on the next table was saying to his wife. But it was impolite; if you indulged, you would be ostracized. And, after all, many people actually relished crowded, public places; the buzz, the excitement, the sense of belonging could override any desire for privacy.

As David watched, the girl broke away, smiling at her lover, and she slid down his body, smooth as a seal, and took his erection in her mouth. And -

David turned away, face burning.

Their lovemaking had been clumsy, amateurish, perhaps overeager; their two bodies, though young, were not specially attractive specimens. But then, this was not art, or even pornography; this was human life, in all its clumsy animal beauty. David tried to imagine how it must be to be that boy, here and now, freed of taboos, reveling in the power of his body and his lover’s.

Heather, however, saw none of his. Wandering beside him, eyes glinting, she was still immersed in the deep past — and perhaps it was time he joined her there. With a sense of relief — and a brief word to the Search Engine, requesting guidance — David donned his own Mind’sEye and slid into another time.

…He walked into daylight But this crowded street, lined by great, boxy multi-storey apartment blocks, was dark. Hemmed in by the peculiar topography of the site — the famous seven hills — Romans, already a million strong, had built up.

In many ways, the city had a remarkably modern feel. But this was not the twenty-first century: he was glimpsing this swarming, vibrant capital on a bright Italian summer afternoon just five years after the cruel death of Christ Himself. There were no motor vehicles, of course, and few animal-drawn carts or carriages. The most common form of transport, other than by foot, was by hired litter or sedan chair. Even so, the streets were so crowded that even foot traffic could circulate at little more than a crawl.

There was a crush of humanity — citizens, soldiers, paupers and slaves — all around them. David and Heather towered over most of these people; and besides, walking on the modern ground surface, they were hovering above the cobbled floor of the ancient city. The poor and the slaves looked stunted, some visibly ravaged by malnourishment and disease, even rat-like, as they crowded around the public water fountains. But many of the citizens — some in brilliant-white gold-stitched togas, benefiting from generations of affluence funded by the expanding Empire — were as tall and well fed as David, and, in suitable clothes, would surely not have looked out of place in the streets of any city of the twenty-first century.

But David could not get used to the way the swarming crowds simply pushed through him. It was hard to accept that to these Romans, busily engaged with their own concerns, he was no more than an insubstantial ghost. He longed to be here, to play a part.

They came now to a more open place. This was the Forum Romanum: a finely paved rectangular court surrounded by grand, two-story public buildings, fronted by rows of narrow marble columns. A line of triumphal columns, each capped by gold-leafed statues, strode boldly down the centre of the court, and farther ahead, beyond a clutter of characteristically Roman red-tiled, sloping roofs, he could see the curving bulk of the Colosseum.

In one corner he noticed a group of citizens, grandly dressed — Senators, perhaps — arguing vehemently, tapping at tablets, oblivious of the beauty and marvel around them. They were proof that this city was no museum, but very obviously the operational capital of a huge, complex and well-run empire — the Washington of its day — and its very mundanity was exhilarating, so different from the seamless, shining, depopulated reconstructions of the old, pre-WormCam museums, movies and books.

But this Imperial city, already ancient, had just a few centuries more to survive. The great aqueducts would fall, the public fountains fail; and for a thousand years afterwards the Romans would be reduced to drawing their water by hand from the Tiber.

There was a tap on his shoulder.

David turned, startled. A man stood there, dressed in a drab, charcoal-grey suit and tie, utterly out of place here. He had short-cropped blond hair, and he was holding up a badge. And, like David and Heather, he was floating a few metres above the ground of Imperial Rome.

It was FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens.

“You,” David said. “What do you want with us? Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage to my family, Special Agent?”

“I never intended any damage, sir.”

“And now.”

“And now I need your help.”

Suppressing a sigh, David lifted his hands to his Mind’sEye headband. He could feel the indefinable tingle that came with the breaking of the equipment’s transceiver link to his cortex.

Suddenly he was immersed in the hot Roman night.

And around him the Forum Romanum was reduced. Great chunks of marble rubble littered the floor, their surfaces brown, decaying in the foul air of the city. Of the great buildings, only a handful of columns and crosspieces survived, poking out of the ground like exposed bones, and sickly urban-poisoned grass grew through cracks in the flags.

Bizarrely, amid the gaudy twenty-first-century tourists, grey-suited Mavens looked even more out of place than in ancient Rome.

Michael Mavens turned and studied Heather. Her eyes, dilated widely, sparkled with the unmistakable pearly glint of viewpoints, cast by the miniature WormCam generators implanted in her retinas. David took her hand. She squeezed gently.

Mavens caught David’s eye. He nodded, understanding. But he pressed: “We need to talk, sir. It’s important.”

“My brother?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Will you accompany us back to our hotel? It isn’t far.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

So David walked from the ruined Forum Romanum, gently guiding Heather around the fallen masonry. Heather turned her head like a camera stand, still immersed in the bright glories of a city long dead, and spacetime distortion shone in her eyes.

They reached the hotel.

Heather had barely spoken since the Forum Romanum. She allowed David to kiss her on the cheek before she went to her room. There she lay down in the dark, facing the ceiling, her wormhole eyes sparkling.

David realized, uneasily, that he had absolutely no idea what she was looking at.

When he returned to his own room, Mavens was waiting. David prepared them drinks from the minibar: a single malt for himself, a bourbon for the agent.

Mavens made small talk. “You know, Hiram Patterson’s reach is awesome. In your bathroom just now I used a WormCam mirror to pick the spinach out of my teeth. My wife has a wormhole NannyCam at home. My brother and his wife are using a WormCam monitor to keep track of their thirteen-year-old daughter, who’s a little wild, in their opinion… And so on. To think of it: the miracle technology of the age, and we use it in such trivial ways.”

David said briskly, “As long as he continues to sell it, Hiram doesn’t care what we do with it. Why don’t you tell me why you’ve come so far to see me, Special Agent Mavens?”

Mavens dug into a pocket of his crumpled jacket, and pulled out a thumbnail-sized data disk; he turned it like a coin, and David saw hologram shimmers in its surface. Mavens placed the disk carefully on the small polished table beside his drink. “I’m looking for Kate Manzoni,” he said. “And Bobby Patterson, and Mary Mays. I drove them into hiding. I want to bring them back. Help them rebuild their lives.”

“What can I do?” David asked sourly. “After all, you have the resources of the FBI behind you.”

“Not for this. To tell the truth the Agency has given up on the three of them. I haven’t.”

“Why? You want to punish them some more?”

“Not at all,” Mavens said uncomfortably. “Manzoni’s was the first high-profile case which hinged on WormCam evidence. And we got it wrong.” He smiled, looking tired. “I’ve been checking. That’s the wonderful thing about the WormCam, isn’t it? It’s the world’s greatest second-guess machine.

“You see, it’s now possible to read many types of information through the WormCam: particularly, the contents of computer memories and storage devices. I checked through the equipment Kate Manzoni was using at the time of her alleged crime. And, eventually, I found that what Manzoni claimed had been true all along.”

“Which is?”

“That Hiram Patterson was responsible for the crime — though it would be difficult to pin it on him, even using the WormCam. And he framed Manzoni.” He shook his head. “I knew and admired Kate Manzoni’s journalism long before the case came up. The way she exposed the Wormwood cover-up.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” David said levelly. “You were only doing your job.”

Mavens said harshly, “It’s a job I screwed up. Not the first. But those who were harmed — Bobby and Kate — have dropped out of sight. And they aren’t the only ones.”

“Hiding from the WormCam,” David said.

“Of course. It’s changing everybody…”

It was true. In the new openness, businesses boomed. Crime seemed to have dropped to an irreducible minimum, a bump driven by mental disorder. Politicians had, cautiously, found ways to operate in the new glass-walled world, with their every move open to scrutiny by a concerned and online citizenry, now and in the future. Beyond the triviality of time tourism, a new true history, cleansed of myths and lies — and no less wonderful for that — was entering the consciousness of the species; nations and religions and corporations seemed almost to have worked through their round of apologies to each other and to the people. The surviving religions, refounded and cleansed, purged of corruption and greed, were re-emerging into the light, and — it seemed to David — were beginning to address their true mission, which was humanity’s search for the transcendent.

From the highest to the lowest. Even manners had changed. People seemed to be becoming a little more tolerant of one another, able to accept each other’s differences and faults — because each person knew he or she was under scrutiny too.

Mavens was saying, “You know, it’s as if we have all been standing in spotlights on a darkened stage. Now the theatre lights are up, and we can see all the way to the wings — like it or not. I guess you’ve heard of MAS? — Mutually Assured Surveillance — a consequence of the fact that everybody carries a WormCam; everybody is watching everybody else. Suddenly our nation is full of courteous, wary, watchful citizens. But it can be harmful. Some people seem to be becoming surveillance obsessives, unwilling to do anything that will mark them out as different from the norm. It’s like living in a village dominated by prying gossips…”

“But surely the WormCam has been, on balance, a force for good. Open Skies, for instance.”

Open Skies had been President Eisenhower’s old dream of international transparency. Even before the WormCam there had been an implementation of something like that vision, with aerial reconnaissance, surveillance satellites, weapons inspectors. But it was always limited: inspectors could be thrown out, missile silos camouflaged by tarpaulins.

“But now,” said Mavens, “in this wonderful WormCam world, we’re watching them, and we know they are watching us. And nothing can be hidden. Arms reduction treaties can be verified; a number of armed conflicts have been frozen into impasse, both sides knowing what the other is about to do. Not only that, the citizens are watching as well. All over the planet…”

Dictatorial and repressive regimes, exposed to the light, were crumbling. Though some totalitarian governments had sought to use the new technology as an instrument of oppression, the (deliberate) flooding of those countries by the democracies with WormCams had resulted in openness and accountability. This was an extension of past work done by groups like the Witness Program, who for decades had supplied video equipment to human-rights groups: Let truth do the fighting.

“Believe me,” Mavens said, “the U.S. is getting off lightly. The worst scandal we suffered recently was the exposure of the Wormwood bunkers.” A pathetic, half-hearted exercise, a handful of hollowed-out mountains and converted mines, meant as a refuge for the rich and powerful — or at least their children — on Wormwood Day. The existence of such facilities had long been suspected; when they were exposed, their futility as refuges was quickly demonstrated by the scientists, and their builders mocked into harmlessness. Mavens said, “If you think about it, there was usually a lot more scandal than that to be exposed, at any moment in the past. We’re all getting cleaner. There are some who argue that we may be on the brink of a true consensual world government at last — even a Utopia.”

“Do you believe it?”

Mavens grinned sourly. “Not for a second. I have the feeling that wherever we’re going, wherever the WormCam is taking us, it’s somewhere much stranger.”

“Perhaps,” David said. “I suppose we’ve lived through one of those perspective-changing moments: the last generation was the first to see the Earth whole from space; ours has been the first to see all of true history — and the truth about ourselves. You know, I should be able to deal with all this.” David forced a smile. “Take it from a Catholic, Special Agent Mavens. I grew up encouraged to believe I was already under the scrutiny of a kind of WormCam… but that ’Cam was the all-seeing eye of God. We must learn to live without subterfuge and shame. Yes, it’s hard for us — hard for me. But thanks to the WormCam, it seems to me everyone is becoming a little more sane.”

And it was remarkable that all of this had flowed from the introduction of a gadget which Hiram, its driving force, had thought was no more than a smarter TV camera. But now Hiram, in deep hiding, was, in the manner of such entrepreneurs all the way back to Frankenstein, in danger of being destroyed by his machine.

“Maybe in a generation or two this will leave us cleansed,” Mavens said. “But not everybody can stand being exposed. The suicide rate remains high — you’d be surprised if you knew how high. And there are many people, like Bobby, disappearing off the registers — poll returns, censuses. Some even dig traceable implants out of their arms. We can see them, of course, but we can’t give them a name.” He eyed David. “This is the kind of group we believe Bobby and the others have joined. They call themselves Refugees. And those are the kind of people we have to trace if we want to pick up Bobby.”

David frowned. “He has made his choice. He may be happy.”

“He’s on the run. He has no choices right now.”

“If you find him, you’ll find Kate too. And she will face her sentence.”

Mavens shook his head. “I can guarantee that won’t happen. I told you, I’ve evidence she’s innocent. I’m already preparing material for a fresh appeal.”

He picked up the data disk and tapped it on the table. “So,” he said. “You want to give your brother a lifeline?”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“We can track people with the WormCam simply by following them,” Mavens said. “It isn’t easy, and it’s labor-intensive, but it’s possible. But eyeball-tracking can be fooled. Nor can a WormCam trace reliably be keyed to any external indicator, even an implant. Implants can be dug out, transferred, reprogrammed, destroyed. So an FBI research lab has been working on a better method.”

“Based on?”

“DNA. We believe it will be possible to begin from any analysable organic fragment — a flake of skin or a nail clipping, enough to record the DNA fingerprint — and then track back the fragment until it, umm, rejoins the individual in question. And then, using the DNA key, we can track the subject back and forward in time as far as we like.

“This disk contains trace software. What we need from you is to tie it to an operational WormCam. You guys at OurWorld — you specifically. Dr. Curzon — are still ahead of the game with this stuff.

“We think it might be possible ultimately to establish a global DNA-sequence database — children would be sequenced and registered as they are born — and use it as the basis of a general search procedure, without relying on holding a physical fragment…”

“And then,” David said slowly, “you will be able to sit in FBI Headquarters, and your wormhole spies will scour the planet until they find anyone you seek — even in complete darkness. It will be the final death of privacy. Correct?”

“Oh, come on, Dr. Curzon,” Mavens pressed. “What is privacy? Look around you. Already the kids are screwing in the street. In another ten years you’ll have to explain what privacy used to mean. These kids are different. The sociologists say it. You can see it. They are growing up used to openness, in the light, and they talk to each other the whole time. Have you heard of the Arenas? — gigantic, ongoing discussions transmitted via WormCam links, unmoderated, international, sometimes involving thousands. And hardly anybody involved over the age of twenty-five. They’re starting to figure things out for themselves, with hardly any reference to the world we built. By comparison, we’re screwed up, right?”

David, reluctantly, found he agreed. And it wouldn’t stop here. Perhaps it was going to be necessary for the damaged elder generations, including himself, to clear their way off the stage, taking with them their hangups and taboos, before the young could inherit this new world, which only they truly understood.

“Maybe,” Mavens growled when David voiced that thought. “But I ain’t ready to quit just yet. And in the meantime.”

“In the meantime, I might find my brother.”

Mavens studied his glass. “Look, it’s nothing to do with me. But — Heather is a wormhead, isn’t she?”

A wormhead was the ultimate result of WormCam addiction. Since taking her retinal implants. Heather had spent her life in a virtual dream. Of course she was able to tune her WormCam eyes to view the present — or at least the very recent past — as if her eyes were still the organic original. But, David knew, she barely ever chose to.

Habitually she wandered through a world illuminated by the lost glow of the deep past. Sometimes she would walk with her own younger self, even looking out through her own eyes, reliving past events over and over. David was sure she was with Mary almost all the time — the infant in her arms, the little girl running to her — unable, and anyhow unwilling, to change a single detail.

If Heather’s condition was nothing to do with Mavens, it was little enough to do with David. Perhaps his impulse for protecting her had been his own brush with the seduction of the past.

“There are some commentators,” David said slowly, “who say this is the future for all of us. Wormholes in our eyes, our ears. We will learn a new perception, in which the layers of the past are as visible to us as the present. It will be a new way of thinking, of living in the universe. But for now.”

“For now,” Mavens said gently, “Heather needs help.”

“Yes. She took the loss of her daughter pretty hard.”

“Then do something about it. Help me. Look — this DNA trace isn’t just a bugging device.” Mavens leaned forward. “Think what else you could do with it. Disease eradication, for instance. You could track a spreading plague back through time along its vectors, airborne or waterborne or whatever, replacing what can be months of painstaking and dangerous detective work with a moment’s glance… The Centers for Disease Control are already looking at that. And what about history? You could track an individual right back to the womb. It wouldn’t take much of an extension to the software to transfer the trace to the DNA of either parent. And to their parents before them. You could follow family trees back into time. And you could work the other way, start with any historical character and trace all their living descendants… You’re a scientist, David. The WormCam has already turned science and history on their heads — right? Think where you could go with this.”

He held the disk out before him, before David’s face, holding it between thumb and forefinger, like, David thought, a Communion host.

Chapter 24 Watching Bobby

Her name was Mac Wilson. Her intent was clear, like a piece of crystal.

That was true from the moment her adopted daughter, Barbara, was convicted of the murder of her adopted son, Mian, and sentenced to follow her father — Mae’s husband, Phil — to a room where she would be delivered a lethal injection.

The fact of it was that she’d gotten used to the idea that her husband had been a monster who had abused and killed the boy in their care. Over the years she’d learned to blame Phil, even learned to hate his shade — and, clinging to that, found a little peace.

And she still had Barbara, out there somewhere, a fragment left over from the wreck of her life, proof that some good had come of it all.

But now, because of the WormCam, that wasn’t an option any more. It hadn’t been Phil after all — but Barbara. It just wasn’t acceptable. The monster hadn’t been the one who had lied to her all these years, but one she had nurtured, grown, made.

And she, Mae, wasn’t a victim of deception, but, somehow, an agent of the whole disaster.

Of course to expose Barbara had been just. Of course it was true. Of course it was a great wrong that had been done to Phil, to all of them, in his wrongful conviction, a wrong now put right, at least partially, thanks to the WormCam.

But it wasn’t justice or truth or tightness that Mae wanted. Nobody did. Why couldn’t these people who so loved the WormCam see that? All Mae wanted was consolation.

Her intent was clear from the start, then. It was to find somebody new to hate.

She could never hate Barbara, of course, despite what she’d done. She was still Barbara, bound to Mae as if by a steel cable.

So Mae’s focus shifted, as she deepened and developed her thinking.

At first she had fixed her attention on FBI Agent Mavens, the man who might have found the truth in the first place, in the old pre-WormCam days. But that wasn’t appropriate, of course; he had been, literally, an agent, dumbly pursuing his job with whatever technology had been available to him.

The technology itself, then — the ubiquitous WormCam? But to hate a mere piece of machinery was shallow, unsatisfying.

She couldn’t hate things. She had to hate people.

Hiram Patterson, of course.

He had blighted the human race with his monstrous truth machine, for no purpose she could detect other than profit.

As if incidentally, the machine had even destroyed the religion that had once brought her comfort.

Hiram Patterson.

It took David three days’ intensive work at the Wormworks to link the federal lab’s trace software to an operational wormhole.

Then he went to Bobby’s apartment. He searched it until he found, clinging to a cushion, a single hair from Bobby’s head. He had its DNA sequenced at another of Hiram’s facilities.

The first image, bright and clear in his SoftScreen, was of the hair itself, lying unremarked on its cushion.

David began to track back in time. He had devised a way to make the viewpoint effectively fast-rewind into the past-in reality a succession of fresh wormholes was being established, back along the world-line of DNA molecules from the hair.

He accelerated, days and nights passing in a blur of grey. Still the hair and the cushion sat unchanging at the centre of the image.

There was a flurry of motion.

He backed up, re-established the image, and allowed it to run forward at normal pace.

The date was more than three years in the past. He saw Bobby, Kate, Mary. They were standing, talking earnestly. Mary was half-concealed by a SmartShroud. They were preparing their disappearance, he realized swiftly; already, by this point, they had all three left the lives of David and Heather.

The test was over. The trace worked. He could track forward, approaching the present, until he located Bobby and the others… But perhaps that was best left to Special Agent Mavens.

His test concluded, he prepared to shut down the WormCam — then, on a whim, David arranged the WormCam image so that it centred on Bobby’s face, as if an invisible camera had hovered there, just before his eyes, through the entirety of his young life.

And David began to scan back.

He kept the speed high as the crucial moments of Bobby’s recent life unravelled: at the court with Kate, in the Wormworks with David himself, arguing with his father, crying in Kate’s arms, braving the virtual citadel of Billybob Meeks.

David increased the pace of the rewind further, still fixing on the face of his brother. He saw Bobby eat, laugh, sleep, play, make love. The background, the flickering light of night and day, became a blur, an irrelevant frame to that face; and expressions passed so rapidly across the face that they too became smoothed out, so that Bobby’s face looked permanently in repose, his eyes half-closed, as if he was sleeping. Summer light came and went like tides, and every so often, with a suddenness that startled David, Bobby’s hairstyle would change: from short to long, natural dark to blond, even, at one point, to a shaven-head crewcut.

And, as the years unwound, Bobby’s skin lost the lines he had acquired around his mouth and eyes, and a youthful smoothness lapped over his bones. Imperceptibly at first and then more rapidly, his de-ageing face softened and shrank, as if simplifying, those flickering half-open eyes growing rounder and more innocent, the shadows beyond — of adults and huge, unidentifiable places — more formidable.

David froze the image a few days after Bobby’s birth. The round, formless face of a baby stared out at him, blue eyes wide and empty as windows.

But behind him David did not see the maternity hospital scene he had expected. Bobby was in a place of harsh fluorescents, gleaming walls, elaborate equipment, expensive testing gear and green-coated technicians.

It looked like a laboratory of some kind.

Tentatively, David ran the image forward.

Somebody was holding the infant Bobby in the air, gloved hands under the child’s armpits. With practised ease David swivelled the viewpoint, expecting to see a younger Heather, or even Hiram.

He saw neither. The smiling face before him, looming like the Moon, was of a middle-aged man, greying, skin wrinkled and brown, distinctively Japanese.

It was a face David knew. And suddenly he understood the circumstances of Bobby’s birth, and many other things beside.

He stared at the image a long while, considering what to do.

Mae knew, better maybe than anybody alive, that it wasn’t necessary to injure somebody physically to hurt him.

She hadn’t been directly involved in the horrific crime which had destroyed her family; she hadn’t even been in the city at the time, hadn’t seen so much as a bloodstain. But now everybody else was dead and she was the one who must carry all the hurt, on her own, for the rest of her life.

So to get to Hiram, to make him suffer as she did, she had to hurt the one Hiram loved the most.

It didn’t take much study of Hiram, the most public man on the planet, to figure out who that was. Bobby Patterson, his golden son.

And of course it must be done in such a way that Hiram would know he was responsible, ultimately — just as Mae had been. That was the way to make the hurt deepest of all.

Slowly, in the dark hollows of her mind, she drew up her plans.

She was careful. She had no intention of following her husband and daughter to the cell with the needle. She knew that as soon as the crime was committed the authorities would use the WormCam to scan back through her life, looking for evidence that she’d planned the crime, and for intent.

She must never forget that fact. It was as if she was on an open stage, her every action being monitored and recorded and analysed by expert observers from the future, taking notes all around her, just out of the light.

She couldn’t conceal her actions. So she had to make it look like a crime of passion.

She knew she even had to pretend she was unaware of the future scrutiny itself. If it looked like an act, it wouldn’t convince anybody. So she kept doing all the private natural things everybody did, farting and picking her nose and masturbating, trying to show no more awareness of scrutiny than anybody else in this glass-walled age.

She had to gather information, of course. But it was possible to conceal even that in the open too. Hiram and Bobby were, after all, two of the most famous people on the planet. She could appear, not an obsessive stalker, but a lonely widow, comforted by TV shows about famous people’s lives.

After a time she thought she found a way to reach them.

It meant a new career. But again, it was nothing unusual. This was an age of paranoia, of watchfulness; personal security had become common, a booming industry, an attractive career for valid reasons for many people. She began to exercise, to strengthen her body, to train her mind. She took jobs elsewhere, guarding people and their property, unconnected with Hiram and his empire.

She wrote nothing down, said nothing aloud. As she slowly changed the trajectory of her life, she tried to make each incremental step seem natural, driven by a logic of its own. As if she was almost by accident drifting toward Hiram and Bobby.

And meanwhile she watched Bobby over and over, through his gilded boyhood, to his growth into a man. He was Hiram’s monster, but he was a beautiful creature, and she came to feel she knew him.

She was going to destroy him. But as she spent her waking hours with Bobby, against her will, he was lodging in her heart, in the hollow places there.

Chapter 25 Refugees

Bobby and Kate, seeking Mary, made their cautious way along Oxford Street.

Three years ago, soon after delivering the pair of them to a Refugee cell, Mary had disappeared out of their lives. That wasn’t so unusual. The loose network of Refugees, spread worldwide, worked on the cell-organization basis of the old terrorist groups.

But recently, concerned he’d had no news of his half sister for many months, Bobby had tracked her down to London. And today, he had been assured, he would meet her.

The London sky overhead was a grey, smoggy lid, threatening rain. It was a summer’s day, but neither hot nor cold, an irritating urban nothingness. Bobby felt annoyingly hot inside his SmartShroud — which, of course, had to be kept sealed up at all times.

Bobby and Kate slid with smooth, unremarkable steps from group to group. With practised skill they would join a transient crowd, worm their way to the centre; then, as it broke up, they would set off again, always in a different direction from the way they had come. If there was no other choice they would even go backward, retracing their steps. Their progress was slow. But it was all but impossible for any WormCam observer to trace them for more than a few paces — a strategy so effective, in fact, that Bobby wondered how many other Refugees there were here today, moving through the crowds like ghosts.

It was obvious that, despite climate collapse and general poverty, London still attracted tourists. People still came here, presumably to visit the art galleries and see the ancient sites and palaces, now vacated by England’s Royals, decanted to a sunnier throne in monarchist Australia.

But it was also sadly clear that this was a city that had seen better days. Most of the shops were unfrosted bargain bazaars, and there were several empty lots, gaps like teeth missing from an old man’s smile. Still, the sidewalks of this thoroughfare, an east-west artery that had long been one of the city’s main shopping areas, were crowded with dense, sluggish rivers of humanity. And that made them a good place to hide.

But Bobby did not enjoy the press of flesh around him. Four years after Kate had turned off his implant he knew he was still too easily startled — and too easily repulsed by unwelcome brushes with his fellow humans. He was particularly offended by unwitting contact with the bellies and flabby buttocks of the many middle-aged Japanese here, a nation who seemed to have responded to the WormCam with a mass conversion to nudity.

Now, above the hubbub of conversation around them, he made out a shout: “Oi! Move it!” Ahead of them people parted, scattering as if some angry animal were forcing its way through. Bobby pulled Kate into a shop doorway.

Through the corridor of annoyed humanity came a rickshaw. It was hauled by a fat Londoner, stripped to the waist, with big slicks of sweat under his pillowy breasts. The woman in the rickshaw, talking into a wrist implant, might have been American.

When the rickshaw had passed Bobby and Kate joined me flow which was forming anew. Bobby shifted his hand so that his fingers were brushing Kate’s palm, and began to handspell. Charming guy.

Not his fault, Kate replied. Look around. Probably rickshaw guy once Chancellor of Exchequer…

They pressed on further, making their way east toward Oxford Street’s junction with Tottenham Court Road. The crowds thinned a little as they left Oxford Circus behind, and Kate and Bobby moved more cautiously and quickly, aware of their exposure; Bobby made sure he was aware of escape routes, several avenues available at any moment.

Kate wore her ’Shroud hood a little open, but beneath it her heat mask was smooth and anonymous. When she stood still, the ’Shroud’s hologram projectors, throwing images of the background around her, would stabilize and make her reasonably invisible from any angle around her — a good illusion, at least, until she began to move again, and processing lag caused her fake image to fragment and blur. But, despite its limitations, a SmartShroud might throw off a careless or distracted WormCam operator, and so it was worth wearing.

In the same spirit, Bobby and Kate were today both wearing their heat masks, moulded to seamless anonymity. The masks gave off false infrared signatures, and were profoundly uncomfortable, with their built-in heating elements warm against Bobby’s skin. It was possible to wear all-over body masks working on the same principle — some of which were capable of masking a man’s characteristic IR signature as a woman’s, and vice versa. But Bobby, having tried the requisite jockstrap laced with heating wires, had drawn back before reaching that particular plateau of discomfort.

They passed one smart-looking town house, presumably converted from a shop, which had had its walls replaced by clear glass panes. Looking into the brightly lit rooms, Bobby could see that even the floors and ceilings were transparent, as was much of the furniture — even the bathroom suite. People moved through the rooms, naked, apparently oblivious of the stares of people outside. This minimal home was yet another response to WormCam scrutiny, an in-your-face statement that the occupants really didn’t care who was looking at them — as well as a constant reminder to the occupants themselves that any apparent privacy was now and forever illusory.

At the junction with Tottenham Court Road, they approached the Center Point ruin; a tower block, never fully occupied, then wrecked during the worst of the Scottish-separatist terrorism problem.

And it was here that Bobby and Kate were met, as they had been promised.

A shimmering outline blocked Bobby’s path. He glimpsed a heat mask within an open ’Shroud hood, and a hand stretched out toward his. It took him a few seconds to tune into the other’s fast, confident handspelling.

…25. 4712425. I am 4712425. I am -

Bobby flipped his hand over and replied. Got you. 4712425. 5650982 one, 8736540 other.

Good we’re good at last, the reply came, brisk and sure. Come now.

The stranger led them off the main street and into a maze of alleys. Bobby and Kate, still holding hands, kept to the sides of the street, sticking to the shadows wherever they could. But they avoided the doorways, most of which — before doors heavily bolted — were occupied by pan handlers.

Bobby slipped his hand into the stranger’s. Think I know you.

The other’s hand, with an iconic form, registered alarm. So much for ’Shrouds and numbers bloody useless. She meant the anonymous ID number each member of the worldwide informal network of Refugee tribes was encouraged to adopt each day. The numbers were provided on demand from a central source, accessible by WormCam, rumoured to be a random number generator buried in a disused mine in Montana, based on uncrackable quantum-mechanical principles.

Not that, he signed back.

What then. Shape of big fat arse can’t conceal even with ’Shroud.

Bobby suppressed a laugh. That was confirmation enough that “4712425” was who he thought: a woman, southern English, somewhere in her sixties, barrel-shaped, good-humoured, confident.

Recognize style. Handspell style.

She made an acknowledegment sign. Yes yes yes. Heard that before. Must change.

Can’t change everything.

No but can try.

The handspelling alphabets, with the fingertips brushing the palms and fingers of the recipient’s hands, had originally been developed for people afflicted with both deafness and blindness. They had been adopted and adapted eagerly by WormCam Refugees; handspelling communication, taking place inside cupped hands, was almost impossible to decipher by an observer.

…Almost, but not quite. Nothing was foolproof. And Bobby was always aware that WormCam observers had the luxury of looking back into the past and rerunning anything they missed, as often as they liked, from whatever angle and in as tight a close-up as they chose.

But there was no need for the Refugees to make the lives of the snoops any easier than they had to.

Bobby knew, from scraps of gossip and acquaintance, that “4712425” was a grandmother. She had retired from her profession a few years earlier, and had no criminal record, or experience of unwelcome surveillance activity, or any other obvious reason to go underground — like, in fact, many of the Refugees he had met during his years on the run. She just didn’t want people looking at her.

At last “4712425” brought them to a door. With a silent gesture their guide had Bobby and Kate stop here and adjust their ’Shrouds and heat masks to ensure nothing of themselves was showing.

The door opened, revealing only darkness.

…And then, in a final misdirection, “4712425” touched them both lightly and led them farther down the street. Bobby looked back, and saw the door closing silently.

A hundred metres further on, they came to a second door, which opened to admit them into a well of darkness.

Take it easy. Step step step, two more… In pitch darkness, “4712425” was guiding Bobby and Kate down a short staircase.

He could sense the room before him, from echoes and scent: it was large, the walls hard-plaster, painted over perhaps with a sound-deadening carpet on the floor. There was a scent of food and hot drinks. And there were people here: he could smell their mixed scent, hear the soft rustle of their bodies as they moved around.

I’m getting better at this, he thought. Another couple of years I won’t need to use my eyes at all.

They reached the base of the stairs. Single room maybe fifteen metres square, “4712425” handspelled now. Two doors off at the back. Toilets. People here, eleven twelve thirteen fourteen, all adults. Windows opaqueable. That was a common ruse; rooms which were kept dark continually were liable to become renowned as nests of Refugees.

Think okay, Kate spelled out now. Food here and beds. Come on. She began to tug at her ’Shroud, and then at the jumpsuit she was wearing beneath.

With a sigh, Bobby began to follow suit. He handed his clothes one by one to “4712425,” who added them to a rack he couldn’t see. Then, naked save for their heat masks, they joined hands once more and entered the group, all of them anonymous in their nudity. Bobby expected that he would even exchange his heat mask before the meeting was over, the further to confuse those who might choose to watch them.

They were greeted. Hands — male and female, noticeably different in texture — fluttered at Bobby’s face. At last somebody picked him out — he had the holistic impression of a woman, fiftyish, shorter than he was — and her hands, small and clumsy, stroked his face, hands and wrists.

Thus, touching in the darkness, the Refugees tentatively explored each other. Recognition — sought with difficulty, confirmed with caution, even reluctance — was based not on names, or faces, or visual or audible labels, but on more intangible, subtler signs: the shape of a person in the dark before him, her scent — ineradicable and characteristic despite layers of dirt or the most vigorous washing — her firmness or weakness of touch, her modes of communication, her warmth or coolness, her style.

At his first such encounter Bobby had cowered, shrinking in the dark from every touch. But it was a far from unpleasant way to greet people. Presumably — Kate had diagnosed for him — all this non-verbal stuff, the touching and stroking, appealed to some deep animal level of the human personality.

He began to relax, to feel safe.

Of course the anonymity of the Refugee communities was sought out by cranks and criminals — and the communities were relatively easy to infiltrate by those seeking others who hid, for good or ill. But in Bobby’s experience the Refugees were remarkably effective at self-policing. Though there was no central coordination, it was in everyone’s interest to maintain the integrity of the local group and of the movement as a whole. So bad guys were quickly identified and thrown out, as were federal agents and other outsiders.

Bobby wondered if this might be a model for how human communities might organize themselves in the wired-up, WormCammed, interconnected future: as loose, self-governing networks, chaotic and even inefficient perhaps, but resilient and flexible. As such, he supposed, the Refugees were no more than an extension of groupings like the MAS networks and Bombwatch and the truth squads, and even earlier groupings like the amateur sky watchers who had turned up the Wormwood.

And, with their taboos and privacy being stripped away by the WormCam, perhaps humans were reverting to an earlier form of behaviour. The Refugees spoke by grooming, like chimpanzees. Suffused by the warmth and scent and touch and even the taste of other people, these gatherings were extremely sensual, and even at times erotic — Bobby had known more than one such gathering descend to a frank orgy, though he and Kate had made their (non-verbal) apologies before getting too involved.

Being a Refugee, then, wasn’t such a bad thing. And it was certainly better than the alternatives on offer for Kate.

But it was a shadow life.

It was impossible to stay in one place for very long, impossible to own significant possessions, impossible even to grow too close to anyone else, for fear of betrayal. Bobby knew the names of only a handful of the Refugees he’d met in his three years underground. Many had become comrades, offering invaluable help and advice, especially at the beginning, to the two helpless neophytes Mary had rescued. Comrades, yes, but without a minimum of human contact, it seemed, they could never be true friends.

The WormCam couldn’t necessarily deprive him of his liberty or his privacy, but, it seemed, it could wall off his humanity.

Suddenly Kate was tugging at his arm, ramming her fingers into his palm. Found her. Mary, Mary is here. Over here. Come come come.

Startled, Bobby let himself be led forward.

She was sitting alone in a corner of the room.

Bobby explored the setup, lightly, with his fingers.

She was clothed, wearing a jumpsuit. There was a plate of food, cooling and untouched, at her side. She wasn’t wearing a heat mask.

Her eyes were closed. She didn’t respond to the touches, but he sensed she wasn’t asleep.

Kate poked grumpily at Bobby’s palm… Might as well wear neon sign here I am come get me…

Is she okay?

Don’t know can’t tell.

Bobby picked up his sister’s limp hand, massaged it, and handspelled her name, over and over. Mary Mary Mary, Mary Mays, Bobby here, Bobby Patterson, Mary Mary -

Abruptly, she seemed to come awake. “Bobby?”

He could sense the shocked, deepened silence around the room. It was the first word anybody had spoken aloud since they had arrived here. Kate, beside him, reached forward and clamped her hand over Mary’s mouth.

Bobby found Mary’s hand and let her spell to him.

Sorry sorry. Distracted. She lifted his hand to her mouth, and he felt her lips pull up into a smile. Distracted and happy, then. But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Happy meant careless.

What happened to you?

Her smile broadened. Not supposed to be happy, big brother?

Know what I mean.

Implant, she replied simply.

Implant what implant?

Cortical.

Oh, he thought, dismayed. Rapidly he relayed the information to Kate.

Shit bad shit, Kate signed. Illegal.

Know that.

…Jamaica, Mary signed to him now.

What?

Cell friend in Jamaica. See through his eyes, hear through his ears. Better than London. Mary’s touch in his hand was delicate, an analogue of a whisper.

The new cortical implants, adapted from neural implant VR apparatus, were the final expression of WormCam technology: a small squeezed-vacuum wormhole generator, together with neural sensor apparatus, buried deep in the cortex of the recipient. The generator was laced with neurotropic chemicals so that, over several months, the recipient’s neurons would grow pathways into the generator. And the neural sensor was a highly sensitive neuron activity pattern analyser, capable of pinpointing individual neuronal synapses.

Such an implant could read and write to a brain, and link it to others. By a conscious effort of will, an implant recipient could establish a WormCam connection from the centre of her own mind to any other recipient’s.

Armed with the implants, a new linked community was emerging from the Arenas and the truth squads and other swirling maelstroms of thought and discussion that had come to characterize the new, young, worldwide polity. Brains joined to brains, minds linked.

They called themselves the Joined.

It was, Bobby supposed, a bright new future. What it amounted to here and now, however, was an eighteen-year-old girl, his sister, with a wormhole in her head.

You scared, signed Mary now. Horror stories. Group mind. Lose soul. Blah blah.

Hell yes.

Fear unknown. Maybe -

But suddenly Mary pulled back from him and got to her feet. Bobby reached out blindly, found her head, but she pulled away, was gone.

All over the room, at exactly the same moment, others had moved. It was like a flock of birds rising as one from a tree.

There were slivers of light as the front door was opened.

Come on, Bobby signed. He grabbed Kate’s hand and they made their way with the rest toward the door.

Scared, Kate signed as they walked, hurriedly. You scared. Cold palm. Pulse. Can tell.

He was scared, he conceded. But not of the abrupt detection; they had been through situations like this before, and a group in a safe house like this always had an elaborate system of WormCam-equipped sentries. No, it wasn’t detection or even capture he was scared of.

It was the way Mary and the others had acted as one. A single organism. Joined.

He slid into his ’Shroud.

Chapter 26 The grandmothers

In the Wormworks, David sat before a large wall-mounted 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 grey-green plains, the fen country where Hiram grew up. Soon Hiram’s face shrank on itself, became innocent, boyish, and shrivelled 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 time-reversed view; given to her — moments after the birth. Her pregnancy unravelled in misery and shame, until they reached the moment that defined 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, unravelling 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 rat-like, 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 grey, 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 the 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 modern. 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 the 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 neighbouring 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 moulded 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 all 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 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 kilometres. 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 red-brown 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 sabre-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, colourful, thistly flowers, lapped right down to the sea’s edge. The ocean was calm, and seabirds wheeled overhead. The inter-tidal 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-horned 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: there 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 tumour, 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 palaeontologists 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, there 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.

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 business-like 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 Mae 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 twice-daily 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 grey 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 all 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 vice. 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 somebody 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. Centred 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 grey-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 harboured 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 kilometres 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 harbour, 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 colours, ranging from bright blue-white at its centre, through green and orange, to sombre purples and reds at its periphery. It was like a giant watercolour painting, he thought, the colours 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-kilometre scale of Earth, was inadequate to the task of grasping the immense distances involved here.

For if the sun was moved to the centre 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 unrecognisable 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, rat-like. 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 centre 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 power-generating 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 coloured 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 centre 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 than 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 neighbour’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 clamour 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 kilometres 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 girl 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 fucking 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 centre 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 centre 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 fuck? 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 this 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 hit 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.

Chapter 28 The ages of Sisyphus

As two stapledons, disembodied WormCam viewpoints, Bobby and David soared over southern Africa.

It was the year 2082. Four decades had elapsed since the death of Hiram Patterson. And Kate, Bobby’s wife of thirty-five years, was dead.

A year after he had accepted that brutal truth, it was never far from Bobby’s thoughts, no matter what wonderful scenery the WormCam brought him. But he was still alive, and he must live on; he forced himself to look outward, to study Africa.

Today the plains of his most ancient of continents were covered with a rectangular gridwork of fields. Here and there buildings were clustered, neat plastic huts, and machines toiled, autonomous cultivators looking like overgrown beetles, their solar-cell carapaces glinting. People moved slowly through the fields. They all wore loose white clothes, broad-brimmed hats and gaudy layers of sunblock.

In one farmyard, neatly swept, a group of children played. They looked clean, well dressed and well fed, running noisily, bright pebbles on this immense tabletop landscape. But Bobby had seen few children today, and this rare handful seemed precious, cherished.

And, as he watched more closely, he saw how their movements were complex and tightly coordinated, as if they could tell without delay or ambiguity what the others were thinking. As, perhaps, they could. For he was told — there were children being born now with wormholes in their heads, linked into the spreading group minds of the Joined even before they left the womb.

It made Bobby shudder. He knew his body was responding to the eerie thought, abandoned in the facility that was still called the Wormworks — though, forty years after the death of Hiram, the facility was now owned by a trust representing a consortium of museums and universities.

So much time had elapsed since that climactic day, the day of Hiram’s death at the Wormworks — and yet it was all vivid in Bobby’s mind, as if his memory were itself a WormCam, his mind locked to the past. And it was now a past that contained all that was left of Kate, dead a year ago of cancer, her every action embedded in unchangeable history, like all the nameless billions who had preceded her to the grave.

Poor Hiram, he thought. All he ever wanted to do was make money. Now, with Hiram long dead, his company was gone, his fortune impounded. And yet, by accident, he changed the world… David, an invisible presence here with him, had been silent for a long time. Bobby cut in empathy subroutines to glimpse David’s viewpoint.

…The glowing fields evaporated, to be replaced by a desolate, arid landscape in which a few stunted trees struggled to survive.

Under the flat, garish sunlight a line of women worked their way slowly across the land. Each bore an immense plastic container on her head, containing a great weight of brackish water. They were stick-thin, dressed in rags, their backs rigid.

One woman led a child by the hand. It seemed obvious that the wretched child — naked, a thing of bones and papery skin — was in the grip of advanced malnutrition or perhaps even AIDS: what they used to call here, Bobby remembered with grim humour, the slims disease.

He said gently, “Why look into the past, David? Things are better now…”

“But this was the world we made,” David said bitterly. His voice sounded as if he were just a few metres away from Bobby in some warm, comfortable room, rather than floating in this disregarded emptiness. “No wonder the kids think we old folk are a bunch of savages. It was an Africa of AIDS and malnutrition and drought and malaria and staph infections and dengue fever and endless futile wars, an Africa drenched in savagery… But,” he said, “it was an Africa with elephants.”

“There are still elephants,” Bobby said. And that was true: a handful of animals in the zoos, their seed and eggs flown back and forth in a bid to maintain viable populations. There were even zygotes, of elephants and many other endangered or otherwise lost species, frozen in their liquid nitrogen tanks in the unchanging shadows of a lunar south pole crater — perhaps the last refuge of life from Earth if it proved, after all, impossible to deflect the Wormwood.

So there were still elephants. But none in Africa: no trace of them save the bones occasionally unearthed by the robot farmers, bones sometimes showing teeth marks left by desperate humans. In Bobby’s lifetime, they had all gone to extinction: the elephant, the lion, the bear — even man’s closest relatives, the chimps and gorillas and apes. Now, outside the homes and zoos and collections and labs, there was no large mammal on the planet, none save man.

But what was done was done.

With an effort of will Bobby grasped his brother’s viewpoint and rose straight upward.

As they ascended in space and time the shining fields were restored. The children dwindled to invisibility and the farmland shrank to a patchwork of detail, obscured by mist and cloud.

And then, as Earth receded, the bulbous shape of Africa itself, schoolbook-familiar, swam into Bobby’s view.

Farther to the west, over the Atlantic, a solid layer of clouds lay across the ocean’s curving skin, corrugated in neat grey-white rows. As the turning planet bore Africa toward the shadow of night, Bobby could see equatorial thunderheads spreading hundreds of kilometres toward the land, probing purple fingers of darkness.

But even from this vantage Bobby could make out the handiwork of man.

There was a depression far out in the ocean, a great cappuccino swirl of white clouds over blue ocean. But this was no natural system; it had a regularity and stability that belied its scale. The new weather management functions were, slowly, reducing the severity of the storm systems that still raged across the planet, especially around the battered Pacific Rim.

To the south of the old continent Bobby could clearly see the great curtain-ships working their way through the atmosphere, the conducting sheets they bore shimmering like dragonfly wings as they cleansed the air and restored its long-depleted ozone. And off the western coast pale masses followed the line of the shore for hundreds of kilometres: reefs built up rapidly by the new breed of engineered coral, labouring to fix excess carbon — and to provide a new sanctuary for the endangered communities of plants and animals which had once inhabited the world’s natural reefs, long destroyed by pollution, over-fishing and storms.

Everywhere, people were working, repairing, building.

The land, too, had changed. The continent was almost cloud free, its broad land grey-brown, the green of life suppressed by mist. The great northern mass which had been the Sahara was broken by a fine tracery of blue white. Already, along the banks of the new canals, the glow of green was starting to spread. Here and there he could see the glittering jewel-like forms of PowerPipe plants, the realization of Hiram’s last dream, drawing heat from the core of Earth itself — the energy bounty, free and clean, which had largely enabled the planet’s stabilizing and transformation. It was a remarkable view, its scale and regularity stunning; David said it reminded him of nothing so much as the old dreams of Mars, the dying desert world restored by intelligence.

The human race, it seemed, had gotten smart just in time to save itself. But it had been a difficult adolescence.

Even as the human population had continued to swell, climatic changes had devastated much of the world’s food and water supply, with the desertification of the great grain regions of the U.S. and Asia, the drowning of many productive lowland farming areas by rising sea levels, and the pollution of aquifers and the acidification or drying of freshwater lakes. Soon the problem of excess population went into reverse as drought, disease and starvation culled communities across the planet. It was a crash only in relative terms; most of Earth’s population had survived. But as usual the most vulnerable — the very old and the very young — had paid the price.

Overnight, the world had become middle-aged.

New generations had emerged into a world that was, recovering, still crowded with ageing survivors. And the young — scattered, cherished, WormCam-linked — regarded their elders with increasing intolerance, indifference and mistrust.

In the schools, the children of the WormCam made academic studies of the era in which their parents and grandparents had grown up: an incomprehensible, taboo-ridden pre-WormCam age only a few decades in the past in which liars and cheats had prospered, and crime was out of control, and people killed each other over lies and myths, and in which the world had been systematically trashed through willful carelessness, greed, and an utter lack of sympathy for others or foresight regarding the future.

And meanwhile, to the old, the young were a bunch of incomprehensible savages with a private language and about as much modesty as a tribe of chimpanzees…

But the generational conflict was not the full story. It seemed to Bobby that a more significant rift was opening up.

The mass minds were still, Bobby supposed, in their infancy, and they were far outnumbered by the Unjoined older generations — but already their insights, folded down into the human world, were having a dramatic effect.

The new superminds were beginning to rise to the greatest of challenges: challenges which demanded at once the best of human intellect and the suppression of humanity’s worst divisiveness and selfishness. The modification and control of the world’s climate, for example, was, because of the intrinsically chaotic nature of the global weather systems, a problem that had once seemed intractable. But it was a problem that was now being solved.

The new generations of maturing Joined were already shaping the future. It would be a future in which, many feared, democracy would seem irrelevant, and in which even the consolation of religion would not seem important; for the Joined believed — with some justification — that they could even banish death.

Perhaps it would not even be a human future at all.

It was wonderful, awe-inspiring, terrifying. Bobby knew that he was privileged to be alive at such a moment, for surely such a great explosion of mind would not come again.

But it was also true that he — and David and the rest of their generation, the last of the Unjoined — had come to feel more and more isolated on the planet that had borne them.

He knew this shining future was not for him. And — a year after Kate’s death, the illness that had suddenly taken her from him — the present held no interest. What remained for him, as for David, was the past.

And the past was what he and David had decided to explore, as far and as fast as they could, two old fools who didn’t matter to anybody else anyhow.

He felt a pressure — diffuse, almost intangible, yet summoning. It was as if his hand were being squeezed. “David?”

“Are you ready?”

Bobby let a corner of his mind linger in his remote body, just for a second; shadowy limbs formed around him, and be took a deep breath, squeezed his hands into fists, relaxed again. “Let’s do it.”

Now Bobby’s viewpoint began to fall from the African sky, down toward the southern coast. And as he fell, day and night began to flap across the patient face of the continent, centuries falling away like leaves from an autumn tree.

A hundred thousand years deep, they paused. Bobby and David hovered like two fireflies before a face: heavy-browed, flat-nosed, clear-eyed, female.

Not quite human.

Behind her, a small family group — powerfully built adults, children like baby gorillas — were working at a fire they had built on his ancient beach. Beyond them was a low cliff, and the sky above was a crisp, deep blue; perhaps this was a winter’s day.

The brothers sank deeper.

The details, the family group, the powder-blue sky, winked out of existence. The Neanderthal grandmother herself blurred, becoming expressionless, as one generation was laid over another, too fast for the eye to follow. The landscape became a greyish outline, centuries of weather and seasonal growth passing with each second.

The multiple-ancestor face flowed and changed. Half a million years deep her forehead lowered, her eye socket ridges growing more prominent, her chin receding, her teeth and jaws pronounced. Perhaps this face was now ape-like, Bobby thought. But those eyes remained curious, intelligent.

Now her skin tone changed in great slow washes, dark to light to dark.

“Homo Erectus.” David said. “A toolmaker. Migrated around the planet. We’re still falling. A hundred thousand years every few seconds, good God. But so little changes!…”

The next transition came suddenly. The brow sank lower, the face grew longer — though the brain of this remote grandmother, much smaller than a modern human’s, was nevertheless larger than a chimpanzee’s.

“Homo Habilis,” said David. “Or perhaps this is Australopithecus. The evolutionary lines are tangled. We’re already two million years deep.”

The anthropological labels scarcely mattered. It was profoundly disturbing, Bobby found, to gaze at this flickering multi-generation face, the face of a chimpanzee-like creature he might not have looked at twice in some zoo… and to know that this was his ancestor, the mother of his grandmothers, in an unbroken line of descent. Maybe this was how the Victorians felt when Darwin got back from the Galapagos, he thought.

Now the last vestiges of humanity were being shed, the brain pan shrinking further, those eyes growing cloudy, puzzled.

The background, blurred by the passage of the years, became greener. Perhaps there were forests covering Africa, this deep in time. And still the ancestor diminished, her face, fixed in the glare of the WormCam viewpoint, becoming more elemental, those eyes larger, more timid. Now she reminded Bobby more of a tarsier, or a lemur.

But yet those forward-facing eyes, set in a flat face, still held a poignant memory, or promise.

David impulsively slowed their descent, and brought them fleetingly to a halt some forty million years deep.

The shrew-like face of the ancestor peered out at Bobby, eyes wide and nervous. Behind her was a background of leaves, branches. On a plain beyond, dimly glimpsed through green light, there was a herd of what looked like rhinoceros — but with huge, misshapen heads, each fitted with six horns. The herd moved slowly, massive, tails flicking, browsing on low bushes, and reaching up to the dangling branches of trees. Herbivores, then. A young straggler was being stalked by a group of what looked like horses — but these “horses,” with prominent teeth and tense, watchful motions, appeared to be predators.

David said, “The first great heyday of the mammals. Forests all over the planet; the grasslands have all but disappeared. And so have the modern fauna: there are no fully-evolved horses, rhinos, pigs, cattle, cats, dogs…”

The grandmother’s head flicked from side to side, nervously, every few seconds, even as she chewed on fruit and leaves. Bobby wondered what predators might loom out of this strange sky to target an unwary primate.

With Bobby’s unspoken consent, David released the moment, and they fell away once more. The background blurred into a blue-green wash, and the ancestor’s face flowed, growing smaller, her eyes wider and habitually black. Perhaps she had become nocturnal.

Bobby glimpsed vegetation, thick and green, much of it unfamiliar. And yet now the land seemed strangely empty: no giant herbivores, no pursuing carnivores crossed the empty stage beyond his ancestor’s thin-cheeked, shadowed, huge-eyed face. The world was like a city deserted by humans, he thought, with the tiny creatures, the rats and mice and voles burrowing among the huge ruins.

But now the forests began to shrink back, melting away like summer mist. Soon the land became skeletal, a plain marked by broken stumps of trees that must once have risen tall.

Ice gathered suddenly, to lie in thick swaths across the land. Bobby sensed life drawing out of this world like a slow tide.

And then clouds came, immersing the world in darkness. Rain, dimly glimpsed, began to leap from the darkened ground. Great heaps of bones assembled from the mud, and flesh gathered over them in grey lumps.

“Acid rain,” murmured David.

Light flared, dazzling, overwhelming.

It was not the light of day, but of a fire that seemed to span the landscape. The fire’s violence was huge, startling, terrifying.

But it drew back.

Under a leaden sky, the fires began to collapse into isolated blazes that dwindled further, each licking flame restoring the greenery of another leafy branch. The fire drew at last into tight, glowing pellets that leapt into the sky, and the fleeing sparks merged into a cloud of shooting stars under a black sky.

Now the thick black clouds drew back like a curtain. A great wind passed, restoring smashed branches to the trees, gently ushering flocks of flying creatures to the branches. And on the horizon a fan of light was gathering, growing pink and white, at last turning into a beacon beam of brilliance pointing directly up into the sky.

It was a column of molten rock.

The column collapsed into an orange glow. And, like a second dawn, a glowing, diffuse mass rose above the horizon, a long, glowing tail spreading across half the sky in a great flamboyant curve. Masked by the daylight, brilliant in the night, the comet receded, day by day, drawing its cargo of destruction back into the depths of the Solar System.

The brothers paused in a suddenly restored world, a world of richness and peace.

The ancestor was a wide-eyed, frightened creature that lingered above ground, perhaps incautiously trapped there.

Beyond her, Bobby glimpsed what appeared to be the shore of an inland sea. Lush jungles lapped the swampy lowlands along the coast, and a broad river decanted from distant blue mountains. The broad ridged backs of what must be crocodiles sliced through the river’s sluggish, muddy waters. This was a land thick with life — unfamiliar in detail, and yet not so unlike the forests of his own youth.

But the sky was not a true blue — more a subtle violet, he thought; even the shapes of the clouds, scattered overhead, seemed wrong. Perhaps the very air was different here, so deep in time.

A herd of horned creatures moved along the swampy coast, looking something like rhinos. But their movements were strange, almost bird-like, as, lumbering, they mingled, browsed, nested, fought, preened. And there was a herd of what looked at first glance like ostriches — walking upright, with bobbing heads, nervous movements and startled, suspicious glances.

In the trees Bobby glimpsed a huge shadow, moving slowly, as if tracking the giant plant-eaters. Perhaps this was a carnivore — even, he thought with a thrill, a raptor.

All around the dinosaur herds, clouds of insects hovered.

“We’re privileged,” David said. “We’ve a relatively good view of the wildlife. The dinosaur age has been a disappointment for the time tourists. Like Africa, it turns out to be huge and baffling and dusty and mostly empty. It stretches, after all, over hundreds of millions of years.”

“But,” Bobby said dryly, “it was kind of disappointing to discover that T. rex was after all just a scavenger… All this beauty, David, and no mind to appreciate it. Was it waiting for us all this time?”

“Ah, yes, the unseen beauty. ‘Were the beautiful volute and cone shells of the Eocene epoch and the gracefully sculpted ammonites of the Secondary period created that man might ages afterward admire them in his cabinet?’ Darwin, in the Origin of Species.”

“So he didn’t know either.”

“I suppose not. This is an ancient place, Bobby. You can see it: an antique community that has evolved together, across hundreds of millions of years. And yet…”

“And yet it would all disappear, when the Cretaceous Wormwood did its damage.”

“The Earth is nothing but a vast graveyard, Bobby. And, as we dive deeper into the past, those bones are rising again to confront us…”

“Not quite. We have the birds.”

“The birds, yes. Rather a beautiful end to this particular evolutionary subplot, don’t you think? Let’s hope we turn out so well. Let’s go on.”

“Yes.”

So they plunged once more, dropping safely through the dinosaurs’ Mesozoic summer, two hundred million years deep.

Ancient jungles swept in a meaningless green wash across Bobby’s view, framing the timid, mindless eyes of millions of generations of ancestors, breeding, hoping, dying.

The greenery abruptly cleared, revealing a flat dusty plain, an empty sky.

The denuded land was a desert, baked hard and flat beneath a high, harsh sun, the sands uniformly reddish in colour. Even the hills had shifted and flowed, so deep was time.

The ancestor here was a small reptile-like creature who nibbled busily on what looked like the remains of a baby rat. She was on the fringe of a scrubby forest, of stunted ferns and conifers, that bordered a straggling river.

Something like an iguana scampered nearby, flashing rows of sharp teeth. Perhaps that was the mother of all the dinosaurs, Bobby mused. And, beyond the trees, Bobby made out what looked like warthogs, grubbing in the mud close to the sluggish water.

David grunted. “Lystrosaurs.” he said. “Luckiest creatures who ever lived. The only large animal to survive the extinction event.”

Bobby was confused. “You mean the dinosaur-killer comet?”

“No,” David said grimly. “I mean another, the one we must soon pass through, two hundred and fifty million years deep. The worst of them all…”

So that was why the great lush jungle panorama of the dinosaurs had drawn back. Once again, the Earth was emptying itself of life. Bobby felt a profound sense of dread.

They descended once more.

At last the final, stunted trees shuddered back into their buried seeds, and the last greenery — struggling weeds and shrubs — shrivelled and died. A scorched land began to reconstitute itself, a place of burned-out stumps and fallen branches and, here and there, heaped-up bones. The rocks, increasingly exposed by the receding tide of life, became powerfully red.

“It’s like Mars.”

“And for the same reason,” David said grimly. “Mars has no life to speak of; and, in life’s absence, its sediments have rusted: slowly burning, subject to erosion and wind, killing heat and cold. And so Earth, as we approach this greatest of the deaths, was the same: all but lifeless, the rocks eroding away.”

And all through this, a chain of tiny ancestors clung to life, subsisting in muddy hollows at the fringes of inland seas that had almost — but not quite — dried to bowls of lethal Martian dust.

Earth in this era was very different, David said. Tectonic drift had brought all of the continents into a single giant assemblage, the largest landmass in the history of the planet. The tropical areas were dominated by immense deserts, white the high latitudes were scoured by glaciation. In the continental interior the climate swung wildly between killing heat and dry freezing.

And this already fragile world was hit by a further calamity; a great excess of carbon dioxide, which choked animals and added greenhouse heating to an already near-lethal climate.

“Animal life in particular suffered: almost knocked back to the level of pond life. But for us it’s nearly over, Bobby; the excess cee-oh-two, is drawing back into where it came from: deep sea traps and a great outpouring of flood basalts in Siberia, gases brought up from Earth’s interior to poison its surface. And soon that monstrous world continent will break up.

“Just remember this: life survived. In fact, our ancestors survived. Fix on that. If not, we wouldn’t be here.” As Bobby studied the flickering mix of reptile and rodent features that centred in his vision, he found that idea cold comfort. They moved beyond the extinction pulse into the deeper past.

The recovering Earth seemed a very different place. There was no sign of mountains, and the ancestors clung to life at the margins of enormous, shallow inland seas that washed back and forth with the ages. And, slowly, after millions of years, as the choking gases drew back into the ground, green returned to planet Earth.

The ancestor had become a low-slung, waddling creature, covered with short dun fur. But as the generations fluttered past, her jaw lengthened, her skull morphing back, and at last she seemed to lose her teeth, leaving a mouth covered with a hard, beak-like material. Now the fur shrank away and the snout lengthened further, and the ancestor became a creature indistinguishable, to Bobby’s untrained eye, from a lizard.

He realized, in fact, that he was approaching so great a depth in time that the great families of land animals — the turtles, the mammals and the lizards, crocodiles and birds — were merging back into the mother group, the reptiles.

Then, more than three hundred and fifty million years deep, the ancestor morphed again. Her head became blunter, her limbs shorter and stubbier, her body more streamlined. Perhaps she was amphibian now. At last those stubby limbs became mere lobed fins that melted into her body.

“Life is retreating from the land,” David said. “The last of the invertebrates, probably a scorpion, is crawling back into the sea. On land, the plants will soon lose their leaves, and will no longer be upright. And after that the only form of life left on land will be simple encrusting forms…”

Suddenly Bobby was immersed, carried by his retreating grandmother into a shallow sea.

The water was crowded. There was a coral reef below, stretching into the milky blue distance. It was littered with what looked like giant long-stemmed flowers, through which a bewildering variety of shelled creatures cruised, looking for food. He recognized nautiloids, what looked like a giant ammonite.

The ancestor was a small, knife-like, unremarkable fish, one of a school which darted to and fro, their movements as complex and nervous as those of any modern species.

In the distance a shark cruised, its silhouette unmistakable, even over this length of time. The fish school, wary of the shark, darted away, and Bobby felt a pulse of empathy for his ancestors.

They accelerated once more: four hundred million years deep, four hundred and fifty.

There was a flurry of evolutionary experimentation, as varieties of bony armour fluttered over the ancestors’ sleek bodies, some of them appearing to last little more than a few generations, as if these primitive fish had lost the knack of a successful body plan. It was clear to Bobby that life was a gathering of information and complexity, information stored in the very structures of living things — information won painfully, over millions of generations, at the cost of pain and death, and now, in this reversed view, being shed almost carelessly.

…And then, in an instant, the ugly primeval fish disappeared. David slowed the descent again.

There were no fish in this antique sea. The ancestor was no more than a pale worm-like animal, cowering in a seabed of rippled sand.

David said, “From now on it gets simpler. There are only a few seaweeds — and at last, a billion years deep, only single-celled life, all the way back to the beginning.”

“How much further?”

He said gently. “Bobby, we’ve barely begun. We must travel three times as deep as to this point.”

The descent resumed.

The ancestor was a crude worm whose form shifted and flickered — and now, suddenly, she shrivelled to a mere speck of protoplasm, embedded in a mat of algae.

And when they fell a little further, there was only the algae.

Abruptly they were plunged into darkness.

“Shit,” Bobby said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

David let them fall deeper, one million years, two. Still the universal darkness persisted.

At last David broke the link with the ancestor of this period — a microbe or a simple seaweed — and brought the viewpoint out of the ocean, to hover a thousand kilometres above the belly of the Earth.

The ocean was white: covered in ice from pole to equator, great sheets of it scarred by folds and creases hundreds of kilometres long. Beyond the icy limb of the planet a crescent Moon was rising, that battered face unchanged from Bobby’s time, its features already unimaginably ancient even at this deep epoch. But the cradled new Moon shone almost as brightly, in Earth’s reflected light, as the crescent in direct sunlight.

Earth had become dazzling bright, perhaps brighter than Venus — if there had been eyes to see.

“Look at that,” David breathed. Somewhere close to Earth’s equator there was a circular ice structure, the walls much softened, a low eroded mound at its heart. “That’s an impact crater. An old one. That ice covering has been there a long time.”

They resumed their descent. The shifting details of the ice sheets — the cracks and crumpled ridges and lines of dune-like mounds of snow — were blurred to a pearly smoothness. But still the global freeze persisted.

Abruptly, after a fall of a further fifty million years, the ice cleared, like frost evaporating from a heated window. But, just as Bobby felt a surge of relief, the ice clamped down again, covering the planet from pole to pole.

There were three more breaks in the glaciation, before at last it cleared permanently.

The ice revealed a world that was Earth-like, and yet not. There were blue oceans and continents. But the continents were uniformly barren, dominated by harsh ice-tipped mountains or by rust-red deserts, and their shapes were utterly unfamiliar to Bobby.

He watched the slow waltz of the continents as they assembled themselves, under the blind prompting of tectonics, into a single giant landmass.

“There’s the answer,” David said grimly. “The supercontinent, alternately coalescing and breaking up, is the cause of the glaciation. When that big mother breaks up, it creates a lot more shoreline. That stimulates the production of a lot more life — which right now is restricted to microbes and algae, living in inland seas and shallow coastal waters — and the life draws down an excess of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect collapses, and the sun is a little dimmer than in our times.”

“And so, glaciation.”

“Yes. On and off, for two hundred million years. There can have been virtually no photosynthesis down there for millions of years at a time. It’s astonishing life survived at all.”

The two of them descended once more into the belly of the ocean, and allowed the DNA trace to focus their attention on an undistinguished mat of green algae. Somewhere here was embedded the unremarkable cell which was the ancestor of all the humans who ever lived.

And above, a small shoal of creatures like simple jellyfish sailed through the cold blue water. Farther away, Bobby could make out more complex creatures: fronds, bulbs, quilted mats attached to the seafloor or free-floating.

Bobby said, “They don’t look like seaweed to me.”

“My God,” David said, startled. “They look like ediacarans. Multi-celled life-forms. But the ediacarans aren’t scheduled to evolve for a couple of hundred million years. Something’s wrong.”

They resumed their descent. The hints of multi-celled life were soon lost, as life shed what it had painfully learned.

A billion years deep and again darkness fell, like a hammer blow.

“More ice?” Bobby asked.

“I think I understand,” David said grimly. “It was a pulse of evolution — an early event, something we haven’t recognized from the fossils — an attempt by life to grow past the single-celled stage. But it’s doomed to be wiped out by the snowball glaciation, and two hundred million years of progress will be lost… Damn, damn.”

When the ice cleared, a further hundred million years deep, again there were hints of more complex, multi-celled life forms grazing among the algae mats: another false start, to be eliminated by the savage glaciation, and again the brothers were forced to watch as life was crushed back to its most primitive forms.

As they fell through the long, featureless aeons, five more times the dead hand of global glaciation fell on the planet, killing the oceans, squeezing out of existence all but the most primitive life-forms in the most marginal environments. It was a savage feedback cycle initiated every time life gained a significant foothold in the shallow waters at the fringe of the continents.

David said, “It is the tragedy of Sisyphus. In the myth, Sisyphus had to roll the rock to the top of the mountain, only to watch it roll back again and again. Thus, life struggles to achieve complexity and significance, and is again and again crushed down to its most primitive level. It is a series of icy Wormwoods, over and over. Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death…”

Bobby said grimly, “Tsiolkovski once called Earth the cradle of mankind. And so it is, in fact the cradle of life. But -”

“But,” said David, “it’s one hell of a cradle which crushes its occupants. At least this couldn’t happen now. Not quite this way, anyhow. Life has developed complex feedback cycles, controlling the flow of mass and energy through Earth’s systems. We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.”

At last they reached a time deeper than any of the hammer-blow glaciations.

This young Earth had little in common with the world it would become. The air was visibly thick — unbreathable, crushing. There were no hills or shores, cliffs or forests. Much of the planet appeared to be covered by a shallow ocean, unbroken by continents. The seabed was a thin crust, cracked and broken by rivers of lava that scalded the seas. Frequently, thick gases clouded the planet for years at a time — until volcanoes thrust above the surface and sucked the gases back into the interior.

When it could be seen through the thick rolling smog, the sun was a fierce, blazing ball. The Moon was huge, the size of a dinner plate, though many of its familiar features were already etched into place.

But both Moon and sun seemed to race across the sky. This young Earth spun rapidly on its axis, frequently plunging its surface and its fragile cargo of life into night, and towering tides swept around the bruised planet.

The ancestors, in this hostile place, were unambitious: generation after generation of unremarkable cells living in huge communities close to the surface of shallow seas. Each community began as a sponge-like mass of matter, which would shrivel back layer on layer until a single patch of green remained, floating on the surface, drifting across the ocean to merge with some older community.

The sky was busy, alive with the flashes of giant meteors returning to deep space. Frequently — terribly frequently — walls of water, kilometres high, would race around the globe and converge on a burning impact scar, from which a great shining body, an asteroid or comet, would leap into space, briefly illuminating the bruised sky before dwindling into the dark.

And the savagery and frequency of these backward impacts seemed to increase.

Now, abruptly, the green life of the algal mats began to migrate across the surface of the young, turbulent oceans, dragging the ancestor chain — and Bobby’s viewpoint — with it. The algal colonies merged, shrank again, merged, as if shrivelling back toward a common core.

At last they found themselves in an isolated pond, cupped in the basin of a wide, deep impact crater, as if on a flooded Moon: Bobby saw jagged raw mountains, a stubby central peak. The pond was a livid, virulent green, and, somewhere within, the ancestor chains continued their blind toil back toward inanimacy.

But now, suddenly, the green stain shrivelled, reducing to isolated specks, and the surface of the crater lake was covered by a new kind of scum, a thick brownish mat.

“…Oh,” David breathed, as if shocked. “We just lost chlorophyll. The ability to manufacture energy from sunlight. Do you see what’s happened? This community of organisms was isolated from the rest by some impact or geological accident — the event that formed this crater, perhaps. It ran out of food here. The organisms were forced to mutate or die.”

“And mutate they did,” Bobby said. “If not.”

“If not, then not us.”

Now there was a burst of violence, a blur of motion, overwhelming and unresolved — perhaps this was the violent, isolating event David had hypothesized.

When it was over, Bobby found himself beneath the sea once more, gazing at a mat of thick brown scum that clung to a smoking vent, dimly lit by Earth’s own internal glow.

“Then it has come to this,” said David. “Our deepest ancestors were rock-eaters: thermophiles, or perhaps even hyperthermophiles. That is, they relished high temperature. They consumed the minerals injected into the water by the vents: iron, sulphur, hydrogen… Crude, inefficient, but robust. They did not require light or oxygen, or even organic material.”

Now Bobby sank into darkness. He passed through tunnels and cracks, diminished, squeezed, in utter darkness broken only by occasional dull red flashes.

“David? Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“What’s happening to us?”

“We’re passing beneath the seabed. We’re migrating through the porous basalt rock there. All the life on the planet is coalescing, Bobby, shrinking back along the ocean ridges and seafloor basalt beds, merging to a single point.”

“Where? Where are we migrating to?”

“To the deep rock, Bobby. A point a kilometre down. It will be the last retreat of life. All life on Earth has come from this cache, deep in the rock, this shelter.”

“And what,” Bobby asked with foreboding, “did life have to shelter from?”

“We are about to find out, I fear.”

David lifted them up, and they hovered in the foul air of this lifeless Earth.

There was light here, but it was dim and orange, like twilight in a smoggy city. The sun must be above the horizon, but Bobby could not locate it precisely, or the giant Moon. The atmosphere was palpably thick and crushing. The ocean churned below, black, in some places boiling, and the fractured seabed was laced with fire.

The graveyard is truly empty now, Bobby thought. Save for that one small deep-buried cache — containing my most remote ancestors — these young rocks have given up all their layered dead.

And now a blanket of black cloud gathered, as if hurled across the sky by some impetuous god. An inverted rain began, rods of water that leapt from the dappled ocean surface to the swelling clouds.

A century wore by, and still the rain roared upward out of the ocean, its ferocity undiminished — indeed, so voluminous was the rain that soon ocean levels were dropping perceptibly. The clouds thickened further and the oceans dwindled, forming isolated brine pools in the lowest hollows of Earth’s battered, cracked surface.

It took two thousand years. The rain did not stop until the oceans had returned to the clouds, and the land was dry.

And the land began to fragment further.

Soon bright glowing cracks in the exposed land were widening, brightening, lava pulsing and flowing. At last there were only isolated islands left, shards of rock which shrivelled and melted, and a new ocean blanketed the Earth: an ocean of molten rock, hundreds of metres deep.

Now a new reversed rain began: a hideous storm of bright molten rock, leaping up from the land. The rock droplets joined the water clouds, so that the atmosphere became a hellish layer of glowing rock droplets and steam.

“Incredible,” David shouted. The Earth is collecting an atmosphere of rock vapour, forty or fifty kilometres thick, exerting hundreds of times the pressure of our air. The heat energy contained in it is stupendous… The planet’s cloud tops must be glowing. Earth is shining, a star of rock vapour.”

But the rock rain was drawing heat away from the battered land and — rapidly, within a few months — the land had cooled to solidity. Beneath a glowing sky, liquid water was beginning to form again, new oceans coalescing out of the cooling clouds. But the oceans were formed boiling, their surfaces in contact with rock vapour. And between the oceans, mountains formed, unmelting from puddles of slag.

And now a wall of light swept past Bobby, dragging after it a front of boiling clouds and steam in a burst of unimaginable violence. Bobby screamed -

David slowed their descent into time.

Earth was restored once again.

The blue-black oceans were calm. The sky, empty of cloud, was a greenish dome. The battered Moon was disturbingly huge, the Man’s face familiar to Bobby — save for a missing right eye… And there was a second sun, a glowing ball that outshone the Moon, with a tail that stretched across the sky.

“A green sky,” murmured David. “Strange. Methane, perhaps? But how…”

“What,” Bobby said, “the hell is that?”

“Oh, the comet? A real monster. The size of modern-day asteroids like Vesta or Pallas, perhaps five hundred kilometres across. A hundred thousand times the mass of the dinosaur killer.”

“The size of the Wormwood.”

“Yes. Remember that the Earth itself was formed from impacts, coalescing from a hail of planetesimals that orbited the young sun. The greatest impact of all was probably the collision with another young world that nearly cracked us open.”

“The impact that formed the Moon.”

“After that the surface became relatively stable — but still, the Earth was subject to immense impacts, tens or hundreds of them within a few hundred million years, a bombardment whose violence we can’t begin to imagine. The impact rate tailed off as the remnant planetesimals were soaked up by the planets, and there was a halcyon period of relative quiescence, lasting a few hundred million years… And then, this. Earth was unlucky to meet such a giant so late in the bombardment. An impact hot enough to boil the oceans, even melt the mountains.”

“But we survived,” Bobby said grimly.

“Yes. In our deep, hot niche.”

They fell down into the Earth once more, and Bobby was immersed in rock with his most distant ancestors, a scraping of thermophilic microbes.

He waited in darkness, as countless generations peeled back.

Then, in a blur, he saw light once more.

He was rising up some kind of shaft-like a well — toward a circle of green light, the sky of this alien, prebombardment Earth. The circle expanded until he was lifted into the light.

He had some trouble interpreting what he saw next.

He seemed to be inside a box of some glassy material. The ancestor must be here with him, one crude cell among millions subsisting in this container. The box was set on some form of stand, and from here, he could look out over -

“Oh, dear God,” said David.

It was a city.

Bobby glimpsed an archipelago of small volcanic islands, rising from the blue sea. But the islands had been linked by wide, flat bridges. On the land, low walls marked out geometrical forms — they looked like fields — but this was not a human landscape; the shapes of these fields seemed to be variants of hexagons. There were even buildings, low and rectangular, like airplane hangars. He glimpsed movement between the buildings, some kind of traffic, too distant to resolve.

And now something was moving toward him.

It looked like a trilobite, perhaps. A low segmented body that glittered under the green sky. Sets of legs — six or eight? — that flickered with movement. Something like a head at the front.

A head with a mouth that held a tool of gleaming metal.

The head was raised toward him. He tried to make out the eyes of this impossible creature. He felt as if he could reach out and touch that chitinous face, and — and the world imploded into darkness.

They were two old men who had spent too long in virtual reality, and the Search Engine had thrown them out Bobby, lying there stunned, thought it was probably a blessing.

He stood, stretched, rubbed his eyes.

He blundered through the Wormworks, its solidity and grime seeming unreal after the four-billion-year spectacle he had endured. He found a coffee drone, ordered two cups, gulped down a hot mouthful. Then, feeling somewhat restored to humanity, he returned to his brother. He held out the coffee until David — mouth open, eyes glazed — sat up to take it.

“The Sisyphans,” David murmured, his voice dry.

“What?”

“That’s what we must call them. They evolved on early Earth, in the interval of stability between the early and late bombardments. They were different from us… That methane sky. What could that have meant? Perhaps even their biochemistry was novel, based on sulphur compounds, or with ammonia as a solvent, or…” He grabbed Bobby’s arm. “And of course you understand that they need have had little in common with the creatures they selected for the cache. The cache of our ancestors. No more than we have with the exotic flora and fauna which still cling to the deep-sea vents in our world. But they — the thermophiles, our ancestors — were the best hope for survival…”

“David, slow down. What are you talking about?”

David looked at him, baffled. “Don’t you understand yet? They were intelligent. The Sisyphans. But they were doomed. They saw it coming, you see.”

“The great comet.”

“Yes. Just as we can see our own Wormwood. And they knew what it would do to their world: boil the oceans, even melt the rock for hundreds of metres down. You saw them. Their technology was primitive. They were a young species. They had no way to escape the planet, or outlive the impact themselves, or deflect the impactor. They were doomed, without recourse. And yet they did not succumb to despair.”

“They buried the cache — deep enough so the heat pulse couldn’t reach it.”

“Yes. You see? They laboured to preserve life — us, Bobby — even in the midst of the greatest catastrophe the planet has suffered.

“And that is our destiny, Bobby. Just as the Sisyphans preserved their handful of thermophilic microbes to outlive the impact — just as those algal mats and seaweed struggled to outlast the savage glaciation episodes, just as complex life, evolving and adapting, survived the later catastrophes of volcanism and impact and geological accident — so must we. Even the Joined, the new evolution of mind, are part of a single thread which reaches back to the dawn of life itself.”

Bobby smiled. “Remember what Hiram used to say? ‘There’s no limit to what we can achieve, if we work together.’ ”

“Yes. That’s it exactly. Hiram was no fool.”

Fondly, Bobby touched his brother’s shoulder. “I think -”

— and, once again, without warning, the world imploded into darkness.