"The Light of Other Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C., Baxter Stephen)Chapter 19 TimeAs the availability and power of the WormCam extended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snowflakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time… His good humour, in those last hours, struck his visitors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed to regard his approaching end as simply an expected natural phenomenon. And, of course, even to the end, he issued gruff orders. He was concerned not to become an object of pilgrimage, and he instructed that his office at the Institute should not be preserved as he left it, and that his home should not become a shrine, and so on. Doctor Dean looked in on him for the last time at eleven P.M., and found him sleeping peacefully. But a little after midnight his nurse — Mrs. Alberta Roszel — noticed a change in his breathing. She called for help and, with the help of another nurse, cranked up the head of the bed. He was muttering, and Mrs. Roszel came close to hear. Even as the finest mind since Newton began, at last, to unravel, final thoughts floated to the surface of his consciousness. Perhaps he regretted the great physics unification project he had left unfinished. Perhaps he wondered if his pacifism had after all been the right course — if he had been correct to encourage Roosevelt to enter the nuclear age. Perhaps, simply, he regretted how he had always put science first, even over those who loved him. But it was too late for all that. His life, so vivid and complex in youth and middle age, was now reducing, as all lives must, to a single thread of utter simplicity. Mrs. Roszel bent close to hear his soft voice. But his words were in German, the language of his youth, and she did not understand. …And she did not see, could not see, the swarm of spacetime flaws which, in these last moments, crowded around the trembling lips of Einstein to hear those final words: “ As soon as it became apparent that the WormCam can reach, not just through walls, but into the past, a global obsession of the human species with its own history opened up. At first we were treated to professionally-made “factual” WormCam movies showing such great events as wars, assassinations, political scandals. In the dusty calm of his study, he took down his beloved copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica. With great excitement he turned to Book II, Problem 8, and hunted for a quill. Bernadette Winstanley, a fourteen-year-old student from Harare, Zimbabwe, booked time on her high-school WormCam and devoted herself to tracking back from the moment of Fermat’s brief scribbling in that margin. …This was where it had started for him, and so it was appropriate that it was here that it should end. It was after all Diophantus’ eighth problem which had so intrigued him, and sent him on his voyage of mathematical discovery: Ah, but what of an extension of the notion beyond this geometric triviality? Were there numbers which could be expressed as sums of It was clear the ancients had known of no such cases — nor had they known a proof of impossibility. But now Bernadette imaged sheets of notes expressing the essence of the proof Fermat believed he had found, and, with some help from a teacher, deciphered their meaning. …For now he was pressed by his duties, but when he had time he would assemble a formal expression of his proof from the scribbled notes and sketches he had accumulated. Then he would communicate it to Desargues, Descartes, Pascal, Bernoulli and the others — how they would marvel at its far-reaching elegance! And then he could explore the numbers further: those pellucid yet stubbornly complex entities, which seemed at times so strange he fancied they must have an existence independent of the human mind which had conceived them… Pierre de Fermat never wrote out the proof of what would become known as his Last Theorem. But that brief marginalia, discovered after Fermat’s death by his son, would tantalize and fascinate later generations of mathematicians. A proof Then, in the year 2037, to general amazement, armed with no more than high-school math, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Winstanley was able to prove that Fermat had been right And when at last Fermat’s proof was published, a revolution in mathematics began. Bernice would readily admit she was no more than a junior researcher in the Louvre’s curatorial office. And so it was a surprise — a welcome one! — when she was asked to perform the first provenance check on one of the museum’s most famous paintings. Even if the result was less welcome. At first the search had been simple: in fact, confined to the walls of the Louvre itself. Before a blur of visitors, attended by generations of curators, the fine old lady sat in semi-darkness behind her panes of protective glass, silently watching time unravel. The years before the transfer to the Louvre were more complex. Bernice glimpsed a series of fine houses, generations of elegance and power punctuated by intervals of war and social unrest and poverty. Much of this, back as deep as the seventeenth century, confirmed the painting’s documented record. Then — in the early years of that century, more than a hundred years after the painting’s supposed composition — came the first surprise. Bernice watched, stunned, as a scrawny, hungry-looking young painter stood before two side-by-side copies of the famous image-and, time-reversed, with brushstroke after brushstroke, eliminated the copy that had passed down the centuries to the care of the Louvre. Briefly she detoured to track forward in time, following the fate of the older “original” from which the Louvre’s copy — just a copy, a replica! — had been made. That “original” was to last little-more than two centuries, she saw, before being lost in a massive house fire in Revolutionary France. WormCam studies had exposed many of the world’s best-known works of art as forgeries and copies — more than But still there had been no indication that But then, Bernice reflected, composition techniques and records could be faked too. Bewildered, she returned down the decades to that dingy room, the ingenious, forging painter. And she began to follow the “original” he had copied deeper into the past. More decades flickered by, more transfers of ownership, all of it an uninteresting blur around the changeless painting itself. At last she approached the start of the sixteenth century, and was nearing Perhaps there would be no more surprises. She was to be proved wrong. Oh, it was true that But not the execution. The master — distracted by many commissions and his wider interests in science and technology — left Bernice, awe and dismay swirling in her heart, watched as a young man from the provinces called Raphael Sanzio painstakingly applied the last touches to that gentle, puzzling smile… It was an elemental world: black rock, blue sky, hard white ice. This was one of the highest passes in the Alps. The man, alone, moved through this lethal environment with utter confidence. But Marcus knew the man he watched was already approaching the place where, slumped over a boulder and with his Neolithic tool kit stacked neatly at his side, he would meet his death. At first — as he had explored the possibilities of the WormCam, here at the Institute of Alpine Studies at the University of Innsbruck-Marcus Pinch had feared that the WormCam would destroy archaeology and replace it with something more resembling butterfly hunting: the crude observation of “the truth,” perhaps by untrained eyes. There would be no more Schliemanns, no more Troys, no more patient unravelling of the past from shards and traces. But as it turned out there was still a role for the accumulated wisdom of archaeology, as the best intellectual reconstruction available of the true past. There was just too much to see — and the WormCam horizon expanded all the time. For the time being, the role of the WormCam was be to supplement conventional archaeological techniques: to provide key pieces of evidence to resolve disputes, to reinforce or overthrow hypotheses, as a more correct consensual narrative of the past slowly emerged. And in this case, for Marcus, the truth that would be revealed — here now, by the blue-white-black images relayed through time and space to his SoftScreen — would provide answers to the most compelling questions in his own professional career. This man, this hunter, had been dug out of the ice fifty-three centuries after he died. The smears of blood, tissue, starch, hair and fragments of feather on his tools and clothing had enabled the scientists, Marcus included, to reconstruct much of his life. Modern researchers had even, whimsically, given him a name: Ötzi, the Ice Man. His two arrows were of particular interest to Marcus — in fact, they had served as the basis of Marcus’s doctorate. Both the arrows were broken, and Marcus had been able to demonstrate that before he died, the hunter had been trying to dismantle the arrows, intent on making one good arrow out of the two broken ones, by fitting the better arrowhead into the good shaft. It was such painstaking detective work as this that had drawn Marcus into archaeology. Marcus saw no limit to the reach of such techniques. Perhaps in some sense every event left some mark on the universe, a mark that could one day be decoded by sufficiently ingenious instruments. In a sense the WormCam was the crystallization of the unspoken intuition of every archaeologist: that the past is a country, real, out there somewhere, which can be explored, fingertip by fingertip. But a new book of truth was opening. For the ’Cam could answer questions left untouched by traditional archaeology, no matter how powerful the techniques — even about this man, Ötzi, who had become the best known human of all those who had lived throughout prehistory. What had never been answered — what was impossible to answer from the fragments recovered — was Marcus had intuited that all these explanations were parochial, projections of a modern world on a more austere past. But he longed, along with the rest of the world, to know the truth. But now the world had forgotten Ötzi, with his skin clothes and tools of flint and copper, the mystery of his lonely death. Now, in a world where Nobody save Marcus. So Marcus had sat in the chill gloom of this university facility, struggling through that Alpine pass at Ötzi’s shoulder, until the truth had become apparent. Ötzi was a high-status Alpine hunter. His copper axehead and bearskin hat were marks of hunting prowess and prestige — And his goal, on this fatal expedition, had been the most elusive quarry of all, the only Alpine animal which retires to high rocky areas at night: the ibex. But Ötzi was old — at forty-six, he had already reached an advanced age for a man of his period. He was plagued by arthritis, and afflicted today by an intestinal infection which had given him chronic diarrhoea. Perhaps he had grown weaker, slower than he knew — or cared to admit. He had followed his quarry ever deeper into the cold heights of the mountains. He had made his simple camp in this pass, intending to repair the arrowheads he had broken, continue his pursuit the next day. He had taken a final meal, of salted goat flesh and dried plums. But the night had turned crystal clear, and the wind had howled through the pass, drawing Ötzi’s life heat with it. It was a sad, lonely death, and Marcus, watching, thought there was a moment when Ötzi tried to rise, as if aware of his terrible mistake, as if he knew he was dying. But he could not rise; and Marcus could not reach through the WormCam to help him. And so Ötzi would lie alone, entombed in his ice, for five thousand years. Marcus shut down the WormCam, and once more Ötzi was at peace. Miriam was a tutor of accounting expert systems: certainly no professional historian. But, like almost everybody else she knew, she had gotten hold of WormCam time as soon as it had become available, and started to research her own passions. And, in Miriam’s case, that passion focused on a single man: a man whose story had been her lifelong inspiration. But the closer the WormCam brought Miriam to her subject, the more, maddeningly, he seemed to dissolve. The very act of observing was destroying him, as if he was obeying some unwelcome form of historical uncertainty principle. Yet she persisted. At last, having spent long hours searching for him in the harsh, confusing sunlight of those ancient deserts, she began to consult the professional historians who had gone before her into these wastes of time. And, piece by piece, she confirmed for herself what they had deduced. The career of the man himself — shorn of its supernatural elements — was a fairly crude conflation of the biographies of several leaders of that era, as the nation of Israel had coalesced from groups of Palestinian refugees fleeing the collapse of Canaanite city-states. The rest was invention or theft. That business, for instance, of being concealed in a wicker basket and floated down the Nile, in order to save him from murder as a firstborn Israelite: that was no more than a conflation of older legends from Mesopotamia and Egypt — about the god Horns, for example — none of which was based on fact either. And he’d never been an Egyptian prince. That fragment seemed to come from the story of a Syrian called Bay who had served as Egypt’s chief treasurer, and had made it to Pharaoh, as Ramosekhayemnetjeru. But what is truth? After all, as preserved by the myth, he had been a complex, human, inspiring man. He was marked by imperfection: he had stammered, and often fell out with the very people he led. He even argued with God. But his triumph over those imperfections had been an inspiration, over three thousand years, to many people, including Miriam herself — named for his beloved sister — who had had to overcome the obstacles set in her own life by her cerebral palsy. 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 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. |
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