The Light of Other Days. Stephen Baxter

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      …The SoftScreen lit up. Kate leaned forward.

      The image was heavily distorted, a circular smear of light, orange and brown and yellow, as if she was looking through a silvered tunnel. There was a sense of movement, patches of light coming and going across the image, but she could make out no detail.

      ‘I can't see a damn thing,’ she said querulously.

      Bobby tapped at the SoftScreen. ‘Patience. Now I have to cut in the deconvolution routines.’

      ‘The what?’

      ‘The wormhole mouth isn't a camera lens, remember. It's a little sphere on which light falls from all around, in three dimensions. And that global image is pretty much smeared out by its passage through the wormhole itself. But we can use software routines to unscramble all that. It's kind of interesting. The software is based on programs the astronomers use to factor out atmospheric distortion, twinkling and blurring and refraction, when they study the stars –’

      The image abruptly cleared, and Kate gasped.

      They saw a massive desk with a globe-lamp hovering above. There were papers and SoftScreens scattered over the desk top. Behind the desk was an empty chair, casually pushed back. On the walls there were performance graphs and bar charts, what looked like accounting statements.

      There was luxury here. The wallpaper looked like hand-made English stuff, probably the most expensive in the world. And on the floor, casually thrown there, was a pair of rhino hides, gaping mouths and glassy eyes staring, horns proud even in death.

      And there was a simple animated display, a total counting steadily upwards. It was labelled CONVERTS: human souls being counted like a fast food chain's sushi-burger sales.

      The image was far from perfect. It was dark, grainy, sometimes unstable, given to freezing or breaking up into clouds of pixels. But still –

      ‘I can't believe it,’ Kate breathed. ‘It's working. It's as if all the walls in the world just turned to glass. Welcome to the goldfish bowl…’

      Bobby worked his SoftScreen, making the reconstructed image pan around. ‘I thought rhinos were extinct.’

      ‘They are now. Billybob was involved in a consortium which bought out the last breeding pair from a private zoo in France. The geneticists had been trying to get hold of the rhinos to store genetic material, maybe eggs and sperm and even zygotes, in the hope of restoring the species in the future. But Billybob got there first. And so he owns the last rhino skins there will ever be. It was good business, if you look at it that way. These skins command unbelievably high prices now.’

      ‘But illegal.’

      ‘Yes. But nobody is likely to have the guts to pursue a prosecution against someone as powerful as Billybob. After all, come Wormwood Day, all the rhinos will be extinct anyhow; what difference does it make?…Can you zoom with this thing?’

      ‘Metaphorically. I can magnify and enhance selectively.’

      ‘Can we see those papers on the desk?’

      With a fingernail Bobby marked out zoom boxes, and the software's focus progressively moved in on the litter of papers on the desk top. The wormhole mouth seemed to be positioned about a metre from the ground, some two metres from the desk – Kate wondered if it would be visible, a tiny reflective bead hovering in the air – so the papers were foreshortened by perspective. And besides they hadn't been laid out for convenient reading; some of them were lying face down or were obscured by others. Still, Bobby was able to pick out sections – he inverted the images and corrected for perspective distortion, cleaned them up with intelligent-software enhancement routines – enough for Kate to get a sense of what much of the material was about.

      It was mostly routine corporate stuff – chilling evidence of Billybob's industrial-scale mining of gullible Americans – but nothing illegal. She had Bobby scan on, rooting hastily through the scattered material.

      And then, at last, she hit pay dirt.

      ‘Hold it,’ she said. ‘Enhance…Well, well.’ It was a report, technical, closely printed, replete with figures, on the adverse effects of dopamine stimulation in elderly subjects. ‘That's it,’ she breathed. ‘The smoking gun.’ She got up and started to pace the room, unable to contain her restless energy. ‘What an asshole. Once a drug-dealer, always a drug-dealer. If we can get an image of Billybob himself reading that, better yet signing it off – Bobby, we need to find him.’

      Bobby sighed and sat back. ‘Then ask David. I can swivel and zoom, but right now I don't know how to make this WormCam pan.’

      ‘“WormCam”?’ Kate grinned.

      ‘Dad works his marketeers even harder than his engineers. Look, Kate, it's 3.30 in the morning. Let's be patient. I have security lock-out here until noon tomorrow. Surely we can catch Billybob in his office before then. If not, we can try again another day.’

      ‘Yes.’ She nodded, tense. ‘You're right. It's just I'm used to working fast.’

      He smiled. ‘Before some other hot journo muscles in on your scoop?’

      ‘It happens.’

      ‘Hey.’ Bobby reached out and cupped her chin in his hands. His dark face was all but invisible in the cavernous gloom of the Wormworks, but his touch was warm, dry, confident. ‘You don't have to worry. Just think of it. Right now nobody else on the planet, nobody, has access to WormCam technology. There's no way Billybob can detect what we're up to, or anyone else can beat you to the punch. What's a few hours?’

      Her breathing was shallow, her heart pumping; she seemed to sense him before her in the dark, at a level deeper than sight or scent or even touch, as if some deep core inside her was responding to the warm bulk of his body.

      She reached up, covered his hand, and kissed it. ‘You're right. We have to wait. But I'm burning energy anyhow. So let's do something constructive with it.’

      He seemed to hesitate, as if trying to puzzle out her meaning.

      Well, Kate, she told herself, you aren't like the other girls he's met in his gilded life. Maybe he needs a little help.

      She put her free hand around his neck, pulled him towards her, and felt his mouth on hers. Her tongue, hot and inquisitive, pushed into his mouth, and ran along a ridge of perfect lower teeth; his lips responded eagerly.

      

      At first he was tender, even loving. But, as passion built, she became aware of a change in his posture, his manner. As she responded to his unspoken commands she was aware that she was letting him take control, and – even as he brought her to a deep climax with expert ease – she felt he was distracted, lost in the mysteries of his own strange, wounded mind, engaged with the physical act, and not with her.

      He knows how to make love, she thought, maybe better than anybody I know. But he doesn't know how to love. What a cliche that was. But it was true. And terribly sad.

      And, even as his body closed on hers, her fingers, digging into the hair at the back of his neck, found something round and hard under his covering of hair, about the size of a nickel, metallic and cold.

      It was a brain stud.

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