But, she thought, in our world we’re still stuck here on Earth, and even the future seems to end in a black hurtling wall of rock, and all we want to do is spy on each other.

She shut down the wormhole link and added new security protocols to her terminal. It wouldn’t keep Mary out forever, but it would slow her down a little.

That done — exhausted, depressed — she returned to work.

Chapter 17

The debunk machine

David and Heather sat before a flickering SoftScreen, their faces illuminated by the harsh sunlight of a day long gone.

…He was a private, a soldier of the first Maryland Infantry. He was one of a line which stretched into the distance, muskets raised. A drumbeat was audible, steady and ominous. They hadn’t yet learned his name.

His face was begrimed, smeared by sweat, his uniform filthy, rain-stained and heavily patched. He was becoming visibly more nervous as he approached the front.

Smoke covered the lines in the distance. But already David and Heather could hear the crackle of small arms, the booming of cannon.

Their soldier passed a field hospital now, tents set up at the centre of a muddy field. There were rows of unmoving bodies, uncovered, lying outside the nearest tent, and — somehow more horrific — a pile of severed arms and legs, some still bearing scraps of cloth. Two men were feeding the limbs into a brazier. The cries of the wounded within the tents were scratchy, remote, agonizing.

The soldier dug into his jacket and produced a pack of playing cards, battered and bound up with string, and a photograph.

David, working the WormCam controls, froze the image, and zoomed in on the little photograph, much thumbed, its image a crude black-and-white graininess. “It’s a woman,” he said slowly. “And that looks like a donkey. And… Oh.”

Heather was smiling. “He’s afraid. He thinks he might not live through the day. He doesn’t want that stuff sent home with his personal effects.”

David resumed the sequence. The soldier dropped his possessions into the mud and ground them in with his heel.

Heather said, “Listen. What’s he singing?”

David adjusted the volume and frequency filters. The private’s accent was remarkably broad, but the words were recognizable: …Into the ward of the clean whitewashed halls / Where the dead slept and the dying lay / Wounded by bayonets, sabres and balls / Somebody’s darling was borne one day…

A mounted officer came by behind the line, his black, sweating horse visibly nervous. Close up. Dress, there… Close up. His accent was stiff, alien to David’s ear -

There was an explosion, flying earth. The bodies of soldiers seemed simply to burst, into large, bloody fragments.

David recoiled. It had been a shell. Suddenly, startlingly quickly, war was here.

The noise level rose abruptly: there was cheering, swearing, a rattle of rifle-muskets and pistols. The private raised his musket, fired rapidly, and dug another cartridge from his belt. He bit into it, exposing the powder and ball, and particles of black powder clung to his lips.

Heather murmured, “They say the powder tasted like pepper.”

Another shell landed near the wheel of an artillery piece. A horse close to the gun seemed to explode, bloody scraps flying. A man walking alongside fell, and he looked down in apparent surprise at the stump which now terminated his leg.

All around the private now there was horror: smoke, fire, mutilated bodies, many men littered on the ground, writhing. But he seemed to be growing more calm. He continued to advance.

David said, “I don’t understand. He’s in the middle of a mass slaughter. Wouldn’t it be rational to retreat, to hide?”

Heather said, “He may not even understand what the war is about. Soldiers often don’t. Right now, he’s responsible for himself; his destiny is in his own hands. Perhaps he feels relief that the moment has come. And he has his reputation, esteem from his buddies.”

“It’s a form of madness,” David said.

“Of course it is…”

They didn’t hear the musket ball coming.

It passed through one eye socket and out the back of the private’s head, taking a palm-sized chunk of skull with it. David could see matter within, red and grey.

The private stood there a few seconds more, still bearing his weapon, but his body was shaking, his legs convulsing. Then he fell in a heap.

Another soldier dropped his musket and got to his knees beside him. He lifted the private’s head, gently, and seemed to be trying to tuck his brain back into his shattered skull -

David tapped his control. The SoftScreen went blank. He ripped his headphones from his ears.

For a moment he sat still, letting the images and sounds of the gruesome Civil War battlefield fade from his head, to be replaced by the composed scientific calm of the Wormworks, the subdued murmur of the researchers. In rows of similar cubicles all around them, people toiled at dim WormCam images: tapping at SoftScreens, listening to the mutter of ancient voices in headphones, making notes on yellow legal pads. Most had gained admittance by submitting research proposals which were screened by a committee David had established, and then selected by lottery. Others had been brought in as guests of Hiram’s, like Heather and her daughter. They were journalists, researchers, academics seeking to resolve historical disputes and special-interest types — including a few conspiracy theorists — with points to prove.

Somewhere, somebody was softly whistling a nursery rhyme. The melody made an odd counterpoint to the horrors still rattling around David’s head — but he knew the significance immediately. One of the more enthusiastic researchers here had been determined to uncover the simple tune said to have formed the basis of Edward Elgar’s 1899 Enigma Variations. Many candidates had been proposed, from Negro spirituals and forgotten music-hall hits to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Now, though, it sounded as if the researcher had uncovered the truth, and David let his mind supply the words to the gentle melody: Mary Had a Little Lamb…

The researchers had been drawn here because OurWorld was still far ahead of the competition in the power of its WormCam technology. The depth of the past accessible to modern scrutiny was increasing all the time; some researchers had already reached as far back as three centuries. But for now — for better or worse — the use of the powerful past-viewer WormCams remained tightly controlled, offered only in facilities like this, where its users were screened and prioritized and monitored, their results edited carefully and given interpretative glosses before public release.

But David knew that no matter how far back he looked, whatever he witnessed, however the images were analysed and discussed, the fifteen minutes of the War Between the States he had just endured would stay with him forever.

Heather touched his arm. “You don’t have a very strong stomach, do you? We’ve only scratched the surface of this war — barely begun to study the past.”

“But it is a vast, banal butchery.”

“Of course. Isn’t it always? In fact the Civil War was one of the first truly modern wars. More than six hundred thousand dead, nearly half a million wounded, in a country whose population was only thirty million. It’s as if, today, we lost five million. It was a peculiarly American triumph for such a young country to stage such a vast conflict.”

“But it was just…” Heather was working on the Civil War period as part of her research for the first WormCam-compiled TrueBio of Abraham Lincoln, funded by an historical association. “Will that be your conclusion? After all the war led to the eradication of slavery in the United States.”