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?