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.