But not the execution. The master — distracted by many commissions and his wider interests in science and technology — left that to others.

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…

Patefield Testimony: It is a matter of regret that many cherished — and harmless — myths, now exposed to the cold light of this future day, are evaporating. Betsy Ross is a notorious recent instance. There really was a Betsy Ross. But she was never visited by George Washington; she was not asked to make a flag for the new nation; she did not work on its design with Washington; she did not make up the flag in her back parlor. As far as can be determined, all this stuff was a concoction of her grandson’s, almost a century later. Davy Crockett’s myth was self-manufactured, his coonskin legend developed fairly cynically to create popularity by the Whig party in Congress. There has been not one WormCam observation of him using the phrase “bar-hunting” on Capitol Hill. Paul Revere, on the other hand, has had his reputation enhanced by the WormCam. For many years Revere served as the principal rider for Boston’s Committee of Safety. His most famous ride — to Lexington to warn revolutionary leaders that the British were on the march — was, ironically, more hazardous, Revere’s achievement still more heroic, even than the legend of Longfellow’s poem. But still, many modern Americans have been dismayed by the heavy French accent Revere had inherited from his father. And so it goes on — not just in America, but around the world. There are even some famous figures — the commentators call them “snowmen” — who prove never to have existed at all! What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts — indeed, sometimes from no facts — in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control. We must wonder where this will lead us. Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples. But, just as each human will now have to learn to construct a personality in the glare of pitiless WormCam inspection, so communities will have to come to terms with the stripped-bare truth of their own past — and find new ways to express their common values and history, if they are to survive the future. And the sooner we get on with it, the better.

Similaun Glacier, Alps. April, 2321 B.C.:

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 why the Ice Man had died. Perhaps he was fleeing warfare, or pursuing a love affair. Perhaps he was a criminal, fleeing the rough justice of his time.

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 any figure from the past could be made to come to vibrant life, Ötzi was no longer a novelty, nor even particularly interesting. Nobody cared to learn how, after all, he had died.

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.