Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other Days

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1
The Light Of Other Days
Arthur C. Clarke
&
Stephen Baxter
2
Is it not possible I often wonder that things
we have felt with great intensity have an
experience independent of our minds; are in fact
still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible,
in time, that some device will be invented by which
we can tap them? Instead of remembering here
a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the
wall; and listen in to the past…
— Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
3
ONE
THE GOLDFISH BOWL
We know how cruel the truth often is, and we
wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
— Henri Poincaré (1884-1912)
4
Prologue
Bobby could see the Earth, complete and serene, within its cage of silver light.
Fingers of green and blue pushed into the new deserts of Asia and the North American Midwest. Artificial reefs
glimmered in the Caribbean, pale blue against the deeper ocean. Great wispy machines laboured over the poles to
repair the atmosphere. The air was clear as glass, for now mankind drew its energy from the core of Earth itself.
And Bobby knew that if he chose, with a mere effort of will, he could look back into time.
He could watch cities bloom on Earth’s patient surface, to dwindle and vanish like rusty dew. He could see
species shrivel and devolve like leaves curling into their buds. He could watch the slow dance of the continents
as Earth gathered its primordial heat back into its iron heart. The present was a glimmering, expanding bubble of
life and awareness, with the past locked within, trapped unmoving like an insect in amber.
For a long time, on this rich, growing Earth, embedded in knowledge, an enhanced humankind had been at
peace: a peace unimaginable when he was born.
And all of this had derived from the ambition of one man a venal, flawed man, a man who had never even
understood where his dreams would lead.
How remarkable, he thought.
Bobby looked into his past, and into his heart.
5
Chapter 1
The Casimir Engine
A little after dawn, Vitaly Keldysh climbed stiffly into his car, engaged the SmartDrive, and let the car sweep
him away from the run-down hotel.
The streets of Leninsk were empty, the road surface cracked, many windows boarded up. He remembered how
this place had been at its peak, in the 1970s perhaps: a bustling science city with a population of tens of
thousands, with schools, cinemas, a swimming pool, a sports stadium, cafes, restaurants and hotels, even its own
TV station. Still, as he passed the main gateway to the north of the city, there was the old blue sign with its white
pointing arrow: TO BAIKONUR, still proclaiming that ancient deceptive name. And still, here at the empty heart
of Asia, Russian engineers built spaceships and fired them into the sky.
But, he reflected sadly, not for much longer.
The sun rose at last, and banished the stars: all but one, he saw, the brightest of all. It moved with a leisurely but
unnatural speed across the southern sky. It was the ruin of the International Space Station: never completed,
abandoned in 2010 after the crash of an ageing Space Shuttle. But still the Station drifted around the Earth, an
unwelcome guest at a party long over.
The landscape beyond the city was barren. He passed a camel standing patiently at the side of the road, a
wizened woman beside it dressed in rags. It was a scene he might have encountered any time in the last thousand
years, he thought, as if all the great changes, political and technical and social, that had swept across this land
had been for nothing. Which was, perhaps, the reality.
But in the gathering sunlight of this spring dawn, the steppe was green and littered with bright yellow flowers.
He wound down his window and tried to detect the meadow fragrance he remembered so well; but his nose,
ruined by a lifetime of tobacco, let him down. He felt a stab of sadness, as he always did at this time of year. The
grass and flowers would soon be gone; the steppe spring was brief, as tragically brief as life itself.
He reached the range.
It was a place of steel towers pointing to the sky, of enormous concrete mounds. The cosmodrome far vaster
than its western competitors covered thousands of square kilometres of this empty land. Much of it was
abandoned now, of course, and the great gantries were rusting slowly in the dry air, or else had been pulled down
for scrap — with or without the consent of the authorities.
But this morning there was much activity around one pad. He could see technicians in their protective suits and
orange hats scurrying around the great gantry, like faithful at the feet of some immense god.
A voice floated across the steppe from a speaker tower. Gotovnosty dyesyat minut. Ten minutes and counting.
The walk from the car to the viewing stand, short as it was, tired him greatly. He tried to ignore the hammering
of his recalcitrant heart, the prickling of sweat over his neck and brow, his gasping breathlessness, the stiff pain
that plagued his arm and neck.
As he took his place those already here greeted him. There were the corpulent, complacent men and women who,
in this new Russia, moved seamlessly between legitimate authority and murky underworld; and there were young
technicians, like all of the new generations rat-faced with the hunger that had plagued his country since the fall of
the Soviet Union.
He accepted their greetings, but was happy to sink into isolated anonymity. The men and women of this hard
future cared nothing for him and his memories of a better past.
6
And nor did they care much for what was about to happen here. All their gossip was of events far away: of Hiram
Patterson and his wormholes, his promise to make the Earth itself as transparent as glass.
It was very obvious to Vitaly that he was the oldest person here. The last survivor of the old days, perhaps. That
thought gave him a certain sour pleasure.
It was, in fact, almost exactly seventy years since the launch of the first Molniya "lightning" in 1965. It
might have been seventy days, so vivid were the events in Vitaly’s mind, when the young army of scientists,
rocket engineers, technicians, labourers, cooks, carpenters and masons had come to this unpromising steppe and
living in huts and tents, alternately baking and freezing, armed with little but their dedication and Korolev’s
genius — had built and launched mankind’s first spaceships.
The design of the Molniya satellites had been utterly ingenious. Korolev’s great boosters were incapable of
launching a satellite to geosynchronous orbit, that high radius where the station would hover above a fixed point
on Earth’s surface. So Korolev launched his satellites on elliptical eight-hour trajectories. With such orbits,
carefully chosen, three Molniyas could provide coverage for most of the Soviet Union. For decades the U.S.S.R.
and then Russia had maintained constellations of Molniyas in their eccentric orbits, providing the great,
sprawling country with essential social and economic unity.
Vitaly regarded the Molniya comsats as Korolev’s greatest achievement, outshining even the Designer’s
accomplishments in launching robots and humans into space, touching Mars and Venus, even so nearly
beating the Americans to the Moon.
But now, perhaps, the need for those marvellous birds was dying at last.
The great launch tower rolled back, and the last power umbilicals fell away, writhing slowly like fat black
snakes. The slim form of the booster itself was revealed, a needle shape with the baroque fluting typical of
Korolev’s antique, marvellous, utterly reliable designs. Although the sun was now high in the sky, the rocket was
bathed in brilliant artificial light, wreathed in vapour breathed by the mass of cryogenic fuels in its tanks.
Tri. Dva. Odin. Zashiganiye!
Ignition…
As Kate Manzoni approached the OurWorld campus, she wondered if she had contrived to be a little more than
fashionably just-late-enough for this spectacular event, so brightly was the Washington State sky painted by
Hiram Patterson’s light show.
Small planes criss-crossed the sky, maintaining a layer of (no doubt environmentally friendly) dust on which the
lasers painted virtual images of a turning Earth. Every few seconds the globe turned transparent, to reveal the
familiar OurWorld corporate logo embedded in its core. It was all utterly tacky, of course, and it only served to
obscure the real beauty of the tall, clear night sky.
She opaqued the car’s roof, and found after-images drifting across her vision.
A drone hovered outside the car. It was another Earth globe, slowly spinning, and when it spoke its voice was
smooth, utterly synthetic, devoid of emotion. "This way, Ms. Manzoni."
"Just a moment." She whispered, "Search Engine. Mirror."
An image of herself crystallized in the middle of her field of vision, disconcertingly overlaying the spinning
drone. She checked her dress front and back, turned on the programmable tattoos that adorned her shoulders, and
tucked stray wisps of hair back where they should be. The self-image, synthesized from feeds from the car’s
cameras and relayed to her retinal implants, was a little grainy and prone to break up into blocky pixels if she
moved too quickly, but that was a limitation of her old-fashioned sense-organ implant technology she was
prepared to accept. Better she suffer a little fuzziness than let some hack-handed CNS-augment surgeon open up
her skull.
When she was ready she dismissed the image and clambered out of the car, as gracefully as she could manage in
her ludicrously tight and impractical dress.
OurWorld’s campus turned out to be a carpet of neat grass quadrangles separating three-story office buildings,
fat, top-heavy boxes of blue glass held up by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete. It was ugly and quaint,
1990s corporate chic. The bottom story of each building was an open car lot, in one of which her car had parked
itself.
7
She joined a river of people that flowed into the campus cafeteria, drones bobbing over their heads.
The cafeteria was a showpiece, a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide
graffiti-laden Berlin Wall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little
stone bridges spanning it. Tonight perhaps a thousand guests milled across the glassy floor, groups of them
coalescing and dispersing, a cloud of conversation bubbling around them.
Heads turned toward her, some in recognition, and some male and female alike with frankly lustful
calculation.
She picked out face after face, repeated shocks of recognition startling her. There were presidents, dictators,
royalty, powers in industry and finance, and the usual scattering of celebrities from movies and music and the
other arts. She didn’t spot President Juarez herself, but several of her cabinet were here. Hiram had gathered
quite a crowd for his latest spectacle, she conceded.
Of course she knew she wasn’t here herself solely for her glittering journalistic talent or conversational skills, but
for her own combination of beauty and the minor celebrity that had followed her exposure of the Wormwood
discovery. But that was an angle she’d been happy to exploit herself ever since her big break.
Drones floated overhead, bearing canapé s and drinks. She accepted a cocktail. Some of the drones carried
images from one or another of Hiram’s channels. The images were mostly ignored in the excitement, even the
most spectacular here was one, for example, bearing the image of a space rocket on the point of being
launched, evidently from some dusty steppe in Asia — but she couldn’t deny that the cumulative effect of all this
technology was impressive, as if reinforcing Hiram’s famous boast that OurWorld’s mission was to inform a
planet.
She gravitated toward one of the larger knots of people nearby, trying to see who, or what, was the centre of
attention. She made out a slim young man with dark hair, a walrus moustache and round glasses, wearing a rather
absurd pantomime-soldier uniform of bright lime green with scarlet piping. He seemed to be holding a brass
musical instrument, perhaps a euphonium. She recognized him, of course, and as soon as she did so she lost
interest. Just a virtual. She began to survey the crowd around him observing their child-like fascination with this
simulacrum of a long-dead, saintly celebrity.
One older man was regarding her a little too closely. His eyes were odd, an unnaturally pale grey. She wondered
if he had possession of the new breed of retinal implants that were rumoured by operating at millimetre
wavelengths, at which textiles were transparent, and with a little subtle image enhancement to enable the
wearer to see through clothes. He took a tentative step toward her, and orthotic aids, his invisible walking
machine, whirred stiffly.
Kate turned away.
"… He’s only a virtual, I’m afraid. Our young sergeant over there, that is. Like his three companions, who are
likewise scattered around the room. Even my father’s grasp doesn’t yet extend to resurrecting the dead. But of
course you knew that."
The voice in her ear had made her jump. She turned, and found herself looking into the face of a young man:
perhaps twenty-five, jet-black hair, a proud Roman nose, a chin with a cleft to die for. His mixed ancestry told in
the pale brown of his skin, the heavy black brows over startling, cloudy blue eyes. But his gaze roamed,
restlessly, even in these first few seconds of meeting her, as if he had trouble maintaining eye contact.
He said, "You’re staring at me."
She came out fighting. "Well, you startled me. Anyhow I know who you are." This was Bobby Patterson,
Hiram’s only son and heir and a notorious sexual predator. She wondered how many other unaccompanied
women this man had targeted tonight.
"And I know you, Ms. Manzoni. Or can I call you Kate?"
"You may as well — I call your father Hiram, as everyone does, though I’ve never met him."
"Do you want to? I could arrange it."
"I’m sure you could."
He studied her a little more closely now, evidently enjoying the gentle verbal duel. "You know, I could have
guessed you were a journalist — a writer, anyhow. The way you were watching the people reacting to the virtual,
rather than the virtual itself… I saw your pieces on the Wormwood, of course. You made quite a splash."
8
"Not as much as the real thing will when it hits the Pacific on May 27, 2534 A.D."
He smiled, and his teeth were like rows of pearls. "You intrigue me, Kate Manzoni," he said. "You’re accessing
the Search Engine right now, aren’t you? You’re asking it about me."
"No." She was annoyed by the suggestion. "I’m a journalist. I don’t need a memory crutch."
"I do, evidently. I remembered your face, your story, but not your name. Are you offended?"
She bristled. "Why should I be? As a matter of fact — "
"As a matter of fact, I smell a little sexual chemistry in the air. Am I right?"
There was a heavy arm around her shoulder, a powerful scent of cheap cologne. It was Hiram Patterson himself:
one of the most famous people on the planet.
Bobby grinned and, gently, pushed his father’s arm away. "Dad, you’re embarrassing me again."
"Oh, bugger that. Life’s too short, isn’t it?" Hiram’s accent bore strong traces of his origins, the long, nasal
vowels of Norfolk, England. He was very like his son, but darker, bald with a fringe of wiry black hair around his
head; his eyes were intense blue over that prominent family nose, and he grinned easily, showing teeth stained by
nicotine. He looked energetic, younger than his late sixties. "Ms. Manzoni, I’m a great admirer of your work.
And may I say you look terrific."
"Which is why I’m here, no doubt."
He laughed, pleased. "Well, that too. But I did want to be sure there was one intelligent person in among the
air-head politicos and pretty-pretties who crowd out these events. Somebody who would be able to record this
moment of history."
"I’m flattered."
"No, you’re not," Hiram said bluntly. "You’re being ironic. You’ve heard the buzz about what I’m going to say
tonight. You probably even generated some of it yourself. You think I’m a megalomaniac nutcase."
"I don’t think I’d say that. What I see is a man with a new gadget. Hiram, do you really believe a gadget can
change the world?"
"But gadgets do, you know! Once it was the wheel, agriculture, iron-making inventions that took thousands of
years to spread around the planet. But now it takes a generation or less. Think about the car, the television. When
I was a kid computers were giant walk-in wardrobes served by a priesthood with punch cards. Now we all spend
half our lives plugged into SoftScreens. And my gadget is going to top them all… Well. You’ll have to decide
for yourself." He studied Kate. "Enjoy tonight. If this young waster hasn’t invited you already, come to dinner,
and we’ll show you more, as much as you want to see. I mean it. Talk to one of the drones. Now, do excuse
me… " Hiram squeezed her shoulders briefly, then began to make his way through the crowd, smiling and
waving and glad-handing as he went.
Kate took a deep breath. "I feel as if a bomb just went off."
Bobby laughed. "He does have that effect. By the way — "
"What?"
"I was going to ask you anyhow before the old fool jumped in. Come have dinner. And maybe we can have a
little fun, get to know each other better… "
As his patter continued, she tuned him out and focused on what she knew about Hiram Patterson and OurWorld.
Hiram Patterson born Hirdamani Patel had dragged himself out of impoverished origins in the fen country
of eastern England, a land which had now disappeared beneath the encroaching North Sea. He had made his first
fortune by using Japanese cloning technologies to manufacture ingredients for traditional medicines once made
from the bodies of tigers whiskers, paws, claws, even bones and exporting them to Chinese communities
around the world. That had gained him notoriety: brickbats for using advanced technology to serve such
primitive needs, praise for reducing the pressure on the remaining populations of tigers in India, China, Russia,
and Indonesia. (Not that there were any tigers left now anyhow.)
After that Hiram had diversified. He had developed the world’s first successful SoftScreen, a flexible image
system based on polymer pixels capable of emitting multi-coloured light. With the success of the SoftScreen
9
Hiram began to grow seriously rich. Soon his corporation, OurWorld, had become a powerhouse in advanced
technologies, broadcasting, news, sport and entertainment.
But Britain was declining. As part of unified Europe deprived of tools of macroeconomic policy like control
of exchange and interest rates, and yet unsheltered by the imperfectly integrated greater economy the British
government was unable to arrest a sharp economic collapse. At last, in 2010, social unrest and climate collapse
forced Britain out of the European Union, and the United Kingdom fell apart, Scotland going its own separate
way. Through all this Hiram had struggled to maintain OurWorld’s fortunes.
Then, in 2019, England, with Wales, ceded Northern Ireland to Eire, packed off the Royals to Australia — where
they were still welcome and had become the fifty-second state of the United States of America. With the
benefit of labour mobility, interregional financial transfers and other protective features of the truly unified
American economy, England thrived. But it had to thrive without Hiram. As a U.S. citizen, Hiram had quickly
taken the opportunity to relocate to the outskirts of Seattle, Washington, and had delighted in establishing a new
corporate headquarters here, at what used to be the Microsoft campus. Hiram liked to boast that he would
become the Bill Gates of the twenty-first century. And indeed his corporate and personal power had, in the richer
soil of the American economy, grown exponentially.
Still, Kate knew, he was only one of a number of powerful players in a crowded and competitive market. She
was here tonight because so went the buzz and as he had just hinted Hiram was to reveal something new,
something that would change all that.
Bobby Patterson, by contrast, had grown up enveloped by Hiram’s power.
Educated at Eton, Cambridge and Harvard, he had taken various positions within his father’s companies, and
enjoyed the spectacular life of an international playboy and the world’s most eligible bachelor. As far as Kate
knew he had never once demonstrated any spark of initiative of his own, nor any desire to escape his father’s
embrace — better yet, to supplant him.
Kate gazed at his perfect face. This is a bird who is happy with his gilded cage, she thought. A spoilt rich kid.
But she felt herself flush under his gaze, and despised her biology.
She hadn’t spoken for some seconds; Bobby was still waiting for her to respond to his dinner invitation.
"I’ll think about it, Bobby."
He seemed puzzled — as if he’d never received such a hesitant response before. "Is there a problem? If you want
I can — "
"Ladies and gentlemen."
Every head turned; Kate was relieved.
Hiram had mounted a stage at one end of the cafeteria. Behind him, a giant SoftScreen showed a blown-up image
of his head and shoulders. He was smiling over them all, like some beneficent god, and drones drifted around his
head bearing jewel-like images of the multiple OurWorld channels. "May I say, first of all, thank you all for
coming to witness this moment of history, and for your patience. Now the show is about to begin."
The dandy-like virtual in the lime green soldier suit materialized on the stage beside Hiram, his granny glasses
glinting in the lights. He was joined by three others, in pink, blue and scarlet, each carrying a musical instrument
an oboe, a trumpet, a piccolo. There was scattered applause. The four took an easy bow, and stepped lightly to
an area at the back of the stage where a drum kit and three electric guitars were waiting for them.
Hiram said easily, "This imagery is being broadcast to us, here in Seattle, from a station near Brisbane, Australia
bounced off various comsats, with a time delay of a few seconds. I don’t mind telling you these boys have
made a mountain of money in the last couple of years their new song Let Me Love You was number one
around the world for four weeks over Christmas, and all the profit from that went to charity."
"New song," Kate murmured cynically.
Bobby leaned closer. "You don’t like the V-Fabs?"
"Oh, come on," she said. "The originals broke up sixty-five years ago. Two of them died before I was born. Their
guitars and drums are so clunky and old-fashioned compared to the new airware bands, where the music emerges
from the performers’ dance… and anyhow all these new songs are just expert-system extrapolated garbage."
"All part of our — what do you call it in your polemics? — our cultural decay." he said gently.
10
"Hell, yes," she. said, but before his easy grace she felt a little embarrassed by her sourness.
Hiram was still talking. "… not just a stunt. I was born in 1967, during the Summer of Love. Of course some say
the sixties were a cultural revolution that led nowhere. Perhaps that’s true directly. But it, and its music of
love and hope, played a great part in shaping me, and others of my generation."
Bobby caught Kate’s eye. He mimed vomiting with a splayed hand, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from
laughing.
"… And at the height of that summer, on 25 June 1967, a global television show was mounted to demonstrate the
power of the nascent communications network." Behind Hiram the V-Fab drummer counted out a beat, and the
group started playing, a dirge-like parody of the Marseillaise that gave way to finely sung three part harmony.
"This was Britain’s contribution," Hiram called over the music. "A song about love, sung to two hundred million
people around the world. That show was called Our World. Yes, that’s right. That’s where I got the name from. I
know it’s a little corny. But as soon as I saw the tapes of that event, at ten years old, I knew what I wanted to do
with my life."
Corny, yes, thought Kate, but undeniably effective; the audience was gazing spellbound at Hiram’s giant image
as the music of a summer seven decades gone reverberated around the cafeteria.
"And now," said Hiram with a showman’s nourish, "I believe I have achieved my life’s goal. I’d suggest holding
on to something — even someone else’s hand… "
The floor turned transparent.
Suddenly suspended over empty space, Kate felt herself stagger, her eyes deceived despite the solidity of the
floor beneath her feet. There was a gale of nervous laughter, a few screams, the gentle tinkle of dropped glass.
Kate was surprised to find she had grabbed on to Bobby’s arm. She could feel a knot of muscle there. He had
covered her hand with his, apparently without calculation.
She let her hand stay where it was. For now.
She seemed to be hovering over a starry sky, as if this cafeteria had been transported into space. But these
"stars," arrayed against a black sky, were gathered and harnessed into a cubical lattice, linked by a subtle tracery
of multi-coloured light. Looking into the lattice, the images receding with distance, Kate felt as if she were
staring down an infinitely long tunnel.
With the music still playing around him so artfully, subtly different from the original recording Hiram
said, "You aren’t looking up into the sky, into space. Instead you are looking down, into the deepest structure of
matter. This is a crystal of diamond. The white points you see are carbon atoms. The links are the valence forces
that join them. I want to emphasize that what you are going to see, though enhanced, is not a simulation. With
modern technology-scanning tunnelling microscopes, for instance we can build up images of matter even at
this most fundamental of levels. Everything you see is real. Now — come further."
Holographic images rose to fill the room, as if the cafeteria and all its occupants were sinking into the lattice, and
shrinking the while. Carbon atoms swelled over Kate’s head like pale grey balloons; there were tantalizing hints
of structure in their interior. And all around her space sparkled. Points of light winked into existence, only to be
snuffed out immediately. It was quite extraordinarily beautiful, like swimming through a firefly cloud.
"You’re looking at space," said Hiram. "’Empty’ space. This is the stuff that fills the universe. But now we are
seeing space at a resolution far finer than the limits of the human eye, a level at which individual electrons are
visible and at this level, quantum effects become important. ’Empty’ space is actually full, full of fluctuating
energy fields. And these fields manifest themselves as particles: photons, electron-positron pairs, quarks… They
flash into a brief existence, bankrolled by borrowed mass-energy, then disappear as the law of conservation of
energy reasserts itself. We humans see space and energy and matter from far above, like an astronaut flying over
an ocean. We are too high to see the waves, the flecks of foam they carry. But they are there.
"And we haven’t reached the end of our journey yet. Hang on to your drinks, folks."
The scale exploded again. Kate found herself flying into the glassy onion-shell interior of one of the carbon
atoms. There was a hard, shining lump at its very centre, a cluster of misshapen spheres. Was it the nucleus?
and were those inner spheres protons and neutrons?
As the nucleus flew at her she heard people cry out. Still clutching Bobby’s arm, she tried not to flinch as she
摘要:

1TheLightOfOtherDaysArthurC.Clarke&StephenBaxter2IsitnotpossibleÐIoftenwonderÐthatthingswehavefeltwithgreatintensityhaveanexperienceindependentofourminds;areinfactstillinexistence?Andifso,willitnotbepossible,intime,thatsomedevicewillbeinventedbywhichwecantapthem?¼Insteadofrememberinghereasceneandthe...

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