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.