“But that wasn’t what the war was about. We’re about to lose our romantic illusions about it — to confront the truth that the braver historians have faced all along. The war was a clash of economic interests. North against South. The slaves were an economic asset worth billions of dollars. And it was a bloody affair, erupting out of a class-ridden, unequal society. Troops from Gettysburg were sent to New York to put down antidraft riots. Lincoln jailed around thirty thousand political prisoners, without trial.”
David whistled. “You think Lincoln’s reputation can survive our seeing all that?” He began to set up a new run.
She shrugged. “Lincoln remains an impressive figure. Even though he wasn’t gay.”
That jolted David. “What? Are you sure?”
She smiled. “Not even bi.”
From the neighbouring cubicle he could hear a faint sound of high-pitched screaming.
Heather smiled at him tiredly. “Mary. She’s watching the Beatles again.”
“The Beatles?”
Heather listened for a moment. “The Top Ten Club in Hamburg. April 1961, probably. Legendary performances, where the Beatles are thought to have played better than they ever did again. Never filmed, and so of course never seen again until now. Mary is working her way through the performances, night after night of them.”
“Umm. How are things between you?”
She glanced at the partition, spoke in a subdued whisper. “I’m worried that our relationship is heading for a full-scale breakdown. David, I don’t know what she does half the time, where she goes, who she meets… All I get is her anger. It was only the bribe of using an OurWorld WormCam that brought her here today. Aside from the Beatles, I don’t even know what she’s using it for.”
He hesitated. “I’m somewhat dubious about the ethics of what I’m offering. But — would you like me to find out?”
She frowned, and pushed greying hair out of her eyes. “Can you do that?”
“I’ll talk to her.”
The SoftScreen image stabilized.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here…
Lincoln’s audience — in their stiff top hats and black coats, almost all of them male — looked unutterably alien, David thought. And Lincoln himself towered above them, so tall and spare he seemed almost grotesque, his voice an irritatingly high, nasal whine. And yet -
“And yet,” he said, “his words still have the power to move.”
“Yes,” Heather said. “I think Lincoln will survive the TrueBio process. He was complex, ambiguous, never straightforward. He told audiences what they wanted to hear — sometimes pro-Abolition, sometimes not. He certainly wasn’t the Abe of the legend. Old Abe, honest Abe, father Abe… But he was living in difficult times. He came through a hellish war by turning it into a crusade. If not for Abe, who knows if the nation could have survived?”
“And he wasn’t gay.”
“Nope.”
“What about the Joshua Speed diary?”
“A clever forgery, put together after Lincoln’s death by the ring of Confederate sympathizers who were behind his assassination. All designed to blacken his character, even after they’d taken his life…”
Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality had come under scrutiny following the discovery of a diary supposedly written by Joshua Speed, a merchant in Springfield, Illinois, with whom Lincoln, as a young, impoverished lawyer, had lodged for some years. Although both Speed and Lincoln had later married — and in fact both had reputations as womanisers — rumours had developed that they had lived as gay lovers.
In the difficult opening years of the twenty-first century, Lincoln had been reborn as a figure of toleration and broad appeal. “Pink Lincoln,” a divided hero for a divided age. At Easter 2015, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, this had climaxed in an open-air celebration around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.; for a single night, the great stone figure had been bathed in gaudy pink spotlights.
“…I have notarized WormCam records to prove it,” Heather said now. “I’ve had expert systems fast-forward through Lincoln’s every sexual encounter. There’s not a single trace of gay or bi behaviour in there.”
“But Speed.”
“He and Lincoln shared a bed, those years in Illinois. But that wasn’t uncommon back then — Lincoln couldn’t afford a bed of his own!”
David scratched his head. “This,” he said, “is going to annoy everybody.”
She said, “You know, we’re going to have to get used to this. No more heroes, no more fairy tales. Successful leaders are pragmatic. Almost every choice they make is between bad options; the wisest of them, like Lincoln, pick out the least worst, consistently. And that’s about all you can ask of them.”
David nodded. “Perhaps. But you Americans are lucky that you are already running out of history. We Europeans have thousands more years left to witness.”
They fell silent, and gazed at the stiff images of Lincoln and his audience, the tinny voices, the rustle of applause from men long dead.
Chapter 18
Hindsight
After six months, Kate’s case was still held up. Bobby put in calls every few days to see FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens. Mavens steadfastly refused to see him.
Then, abruptly, to Bobby’s surprise, Mavens invited Bobby to come out to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Bobby hastily arranged a flight.
He found Mavens in his office, a small anonymous box, windowless and stuffy. Mavens was sitting behind his littered desk — feet propped up on a pile of file boxes, jacket off, tie loose — watching a news show on a small SoftScreen. He waved Bobby silent.
The piece was about the extension of the scope of citizens’ truth squad activities to the murkier corners of the past, now that — in response to a powerful and immediate clamour — past-viewing WormCam facilities had at last been made available for private use.
In the midst of poring over each other’s grubby past, in between staring at their own younger selves in awe or amazement or shame, people had been turning the WormCam’s unforgiving gaze on the rich and powerful. There had been a whole new spate of resignations from public office and prominent organizations and corporations, as various past crimes were disinterred. A whole series of old outrages were being turned over. The coals of the old scandal of the tobacco companies’ knowledge of, indeed manipulation of, the addictive and toxic effects of their products, were being raked once more. The involvement and profit-making of the world’s larger companies in Nazi Germany — many of them still operating, some of them American — had been even more extensive than imagined; the justification that de-Nazification had been left incomplete in order to assist economic recovery after the war looked, at this remove, dubious. Most computer manufacturers had indeed made inadequate provisions to shield their customers when microwave-frequency microchips had come on the market in the first decade of the century, leading to a rash of cancers.
Bobby said, “So much for the scare predictions of how we ordinary folk wouldn’t be mature enough to handle a technology as powerful as the past viewer. All this seems pretty responsible to me.”
Mavens grunted. “Maybe. Although we’re all using WormCams for the sleazy stuff too. At least these crusading citizen types aren’t just beating up on the government. I always thought the big corporations were a bigger threat to freedom than anything we were likely to do. In fact we in government were the ones holding them in check.”
Bobby smiled. “We — OurWorld — were caught by the microwave row. The compensation claims are still being assessed.”
“Everybody’s apologizing to everybody else. What a world… Bobby, I got to tell you I still don’t think we can achieve much progress on Ms. Manzoni’s case. But we can talk about it, if you like.” Mavens looked exhausted, his eyes black-rimmed, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.