He was irresistible, as vividly real as any personage from “true” history, and Miriam knew he would live on into the future. And given that, did it matter that Moses never truly existed?

It was a new obsession, Bobby saw, as millions of figures from history — renowned and otherwise — came briefly to life once more, under the gaze of this first generation of WormCam witnesses.

Absenteeism seemed to be reaching an all-time high, as people abandoned their work, their vocations, even their loved ones to devote themselves to the endless fascination of the WormCam. It was as if the human race had become suddenly old, content to hide away, feeding on its memories.

And perhaps that was how it was, Bobby thought. After all, if the Wormwood couldn’t be turned away, there was no future to speak of. Maybe the WormCam, with its gift of the past, was precisely what the human race required right now; a bolt-hole.

And each of those witnesses was coming to understand that one day she too would be no more than a thing of light and shadow, embedded in time, perhaps scrutinized in her turn from some unknowable future.

But to Bobby, it was not the mass of mankind that concerned him, not the great currents of history and thought that were stirred, but the breaking heart of his brother.

Chapter 20

Crisis of faith

David had turned into a recluse, it seemed to Bobby. He would come to the Wormworks unannounced, perform obscure experiments, and return to his apartment, where — according to OurWorld records — he continued to make extensive use of WormCam technology, pursuing his own obscure, undeclared projects.

After three weeks, Bobby sought him out. David met him at his door, seemed on the point of refusing to let him in. Then he stood aside.

The apartment was cluttered, books and SoftScreens everywhere. A place where a man was living alone, habits unmoderated by consideration of others.

“What the hell happened to you?”

David managed to smile. “The WormCam, Bobby. What else?”

“Heather said you assisted her with the Lincoln project.”

“Yes. That was what gave me the bug, perhaps. But now I have seen too much history… I am a bad host. Would you like a drink, some beer.”

“Come on, David. Talk to me.”

David rubbed his blond scalp. “This is called a crisis of faith, Bobby. I don’t expect you to understand.”

In fact Bobby, irritated, did understand, and he was disappointed with the mundanity of his brother’s condition. Every day, WormCam addicts, hooked on history, beat on OurWorld’s corporate doors, demanding ever more ’Cam access. But then David had isolated himself; perhaps he didn’t know how much a part of the human race he remained, how common his addiction had become.

But how to tell him?

Bobby said carefully, “You’re suffering history shock. It’s a — fashionable — condition right now. It will pass.”

“Fashionable, is it?” David glowered at him.

“We’re all feeling the same.” He cast around for examples. “I watched the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth: the Kamtnertor Theatre, Vienna, 1824. Did you see that?” The symphony performance had been professionally recorded and rebroadcast by one of the media conglomerates. But the ratings had been poor. “It was a mess. The playing was lousy, the choir discordant. The Shakespeare was even worse.”

“Shakespeare?”

“You really have been locked away, haven’t you? It was the premiere of Hamlet, at the Globe in 1601. The playing was amateurish, the costumes ridiculous, the crowd a drunken rabble, the Theatre not much more than a thatched cesspit. And the accents were so foreign the play had to be subtitled. The deeper into the past we look, the stranger it all seems.

“A lot of people are finding the new history hard to accept. OurWorld is a scapegoat for their anger, so I know that’s true. Hiram has been hit by endless suits — libel, incitement to riot, incitement to provoke racial hatred — from national and patriotic groups, religious organizations, families of debunked heroes, even a few national governments. That’s aside from the physical threats. Of course it isn’t helping that he is trying to copyright history.”

David couldn’t help but guffaw. “You’re joking.”

“Nope. He’s arguing that history is out there to be discovered, like the human genome; if you can patent pieces of that, why not history — or at any rate those stretches of it OurWorld ’Cams have been first to reach? The fourteenth century is the current test case. If that fails, he has plans to copyright the snowmen. Like Robin Hood.”

Like many semi-mythical heroes of the past, under the WormCam’s pitiless glare Robin had simply melted away into legend and confabulation, leaving not a trace of historical truth. The legend had stemmed, in fact, from a series of fourteenth-century English ballads born out of a time of baronial rebellions and agrarian discontent, which had culminated in the Peasants’ revolt of 1381.

David smiled. “I like that. Hiram always did like Robin Hood. I think he fancies himself as a modern equivalent — even if he’s deluding himself; in fact he probably has more in common with King John… How ironic if Hiram came to own Robin.”

“Look, David — many people feel just as you do. History is full of horror, of forgotten people, of slaves, of people whose lives were stolen. But we can’t change the past. All we can do is to move on, resolving not to make the same mistakes again.”

“You think so?” David snapped bitterly. He stood, and with brisk movements he opaqued the windows of his cluttered apartment, shutting out the afternoon light. Then he sat beside Bobby and unrolled a SoftScreen. “Watch now, and see if you still believe it is so easy.” With confident keystrokes he initiated a stored WormCam recording.

Side by side, the brothers sat, bathed in the light of other days.

…The small, round, battered sailing ship approached the shore. Two more ships could be seen on the horizon. The sand was pure, the water still and blue, the sky huge.

People came out onto the beaches: men and women naked, dark, handsome. They seemed full of wonder. Some of the natives swam out to meet the approaching vessel.

“Columbus,” Bobby breathed.

“Yes. These are the Arawaks. The natives of the Bahamas. They were friendly. They gave the Europeans gifts, parrots and balls of cotton and spears made of cane. But they also had gold, which they wore as ornaments in their ears.

“Columbus immediately took some of the Arawaks by force, so that he could extract information about the gold. And it developed from there. The Spaniards had armour and muskets and horses. The Arawaks had no iron, no means of defending themselves from the Europeans’ weapons and discipline.

“The Arawaks were taken as slave labor. On Haiti, for example, mountains were stripped from top to bottom, in the search for gold. The Arawaks died by the thousands, roughly a third of the workers every six months. Soon mass suicides began, using cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. And so on. There seem to have been about a quarter of a million Arawaks on Haiti when Columbus arrived. Within a few years, half of them were dead of murder, mutilation or suicide. And by 1650, after decades of ferocious slave labor, none of the original Arawaks or their descendants were left on Haiti.

“It turned out there were no gold fields after all: only bits of dust the Arawaks garnered from streams for their pathetic, deadly jewellry.

“And that, Bobby, was how our invasion of the Americas began.”

“David.”

“Watch.” He tapped the ’Screen and brought up a new scene.