“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No!” David snapped. “It is like a child turning to the answers at the back of an exercise book. The point, you see, is not the answers themselves, but the mental development we enjoy through striving for those answers. The WormCam is going to overwhelm a whole range of sciences — planetology, geology, astronomy. For generations to come our scientists will merely count and classify, like an eighteenth-century butterfly collector. Science will become taxonomy.”

Hiram said slyly, “You forgot history.”

“History?”

“You were the one who found out that a WormCam that can reach across four light-years could just as easily reach four years into the past. Our grasp in time is puny compared to space; but it will surely develop. And then all hell’s going to break loose.

“Think about it. Right now we can reach back days, weeks, months. We can spy on our wives, watch ourselves on the john, the coppers can track and watch criminals in the act. Facing your own past self is hard enough. But this is nothing, personal trivia. When we can reach back, years, you’re talking about opening up history. And what a can of worms that is going to be.

“Some people out there are preparing the ground already. You must have heard of the 12,000 Days. A Jesuit project, on the orders of the Vatican: to complete a comprehensive firsthand history of the development of the Church — all the way back to Christ Himself.” Hiram grimaced. “Much of that won’t make pretty viewing. But the Pope is smart. Better the Church should do this first than somebody else. Even so, it’s going to make Christianity fall apart like a sandcastle. And the other religions will follow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hell, yes.” Hiram’s eyes gleamed in red light. “Didn’t Bobby expose RevelationLand as a fraud dreamed up by a criminal?”

Actually, David thought, though Bobby helped, that was Kate Manzoni’s triumph. “Hiram, Christ was no Billybob Meeks.”

“Are you sure? Do you think you could bear to find out? Could your Church bear it?”

…Perhaps not, David thought. But we must fervently hope so.

Hiram had been right to drag him out of his monkish academic ceil, he realized, to see all this. It was wrong of him to hide away, to work on the WormCam with no sense of its wider implications. He made a resolution to immerse himself in the ’Cam’s application as well as its theory.

Hiram looked up at the hull of the sun. “I think it’s getting colder. Sometimes it snows here. Come on.” He began to work the invisible abort buttons on his helmet.

David peered up at the splinter of light that was distant Sol, and imagined his soul returning home, flying from this desolate beach up to that primal warmth.

Chapter 15

Confabulation

Bobby found the interview room, in the bowels of this ageing courthouse, deeply depressing. The dingy walls looked as if they hadn’t been painted since the turn of the century, and even then only in government-issue pale green.

And it was in this room that Kate’s privacy was to be flayed, piece by piece.

Kate and her attorney — an unsmiling, overweight woman — sat on hard plastic chairs behind a scuffed wooden table, on which sat an array of recording devices. Bobby himself was perched on a hard bench at the back of the room, there at Kate’s request, the only witness to this strange tableau. Clive Manning, the psychologist appointed by the court to Kate’s case, was standing at the front of the room, tapping at a SoftScreen fixed to the wall. WormCam images, dimly lit and suffering a little fisheye distortion, flickered as Manning sought his starting point. At last he found the place he wanted. It was a frozen image of Kate with a man. They were standing in a cluttered living room, evidently in the middle of a heated row, screaming at each other.

Manning — tall, thin, bald, fiftyish — took off his wire spectacles and tapped the frame against his teeth, a mannerism Bobby was already finding gratingly irritating, the spectacles themselves an antiquated affectation. “What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience — as perhaps he was. “It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a storytelling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain’s neural structure.

“And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.

“In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and re-creates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it’s true to say that everything I remember is false.” Bobby thought a note of awe entered Manning’s voice.

“This frightens you,” Kate said, wondering.

“I’d be a fool not to be frightened. We’re all complex, flawed creatures, Kate, stumbling around in the dark. Perhaps our minds, little transient bubbles of consciousness adrift in this overwhelmingly hostile universe, need an inflated sense of their own importance, of the logic of the universe, in order to summon up the will to survive. But now the WormCam, without pity, will never again let us evade the truth.” He was silent for a moment, then smiled at her. “Perhaps we will all be driven mad by truth. Or perhaps, stripped of illusion at last, we will all become sane, and I will be out of a job. What do you think?”

Kate, wearing a drab black one-piece, sat with her hands tucked between her thighs, her shoulders hunched. “I think you should get on with your show-and-tell.”

Manning sighed and replaced his glasses. He tapped the ’Screen’s corner, and the fragment of Kate’s vanished life began to play itself out.

On-screen Kate hurled something at the guy. He ducked; it splashed against the wall.

“What was that? A peach?”

“As I recall,” Kate said, “it was a kumquat. A little overripe.”

“Good choice,” Manning murmured. “You need to work on your aim, however.”

…asshole. You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?

What’s it to do with you?

It’s got everything to do with me, you piece of shit. Why you think I’m going to put up with this I don’t know…

The man on the ’Screen was called Kingsley, Bobby had learned. He and Kate had been lovers for several years, and had lived with each other for three — up to this point, the moment at which Kate had finally thrown him out.

Watching was difficult for Bobby. He felt he was participating in voyeurism of this younger, different woman who hadn’t at the time even known he existed, events of which she’d told him nothing. And, like most WormCam-recorded slices of life, it was hard to follow, the conversation illogical, meandering and repetitive, the words designed to express their users’ emotions rather than to progress the encounter in any rational way.

A century and more of scripted TV and cinema had been poor training for the reality of the WormCam. But his real-life drama was typical of life: messy, unstructured, confusing, the participants groping like people in a darkened room toward an understanding of what was happening to them, how they were feeling.

The action shifted from the living room to a catastrophically untidy bedroom. Now Kingsley was cramming clothes into a leather bag, and Kate was grabbing more of his stuff and throwing it out of the room. All the time they maintained a screaming dialogue.