These were Romulus masks, the latest fashion accessory from OurWorld. Romulus, founder of the city, had become quite a character for the young Romans since the WormCam had proved he really existed — even if his brother and all that stuff about the wolf had proved mythical. Each mask was just a SoftScreen, moulded to the face, with inbuilt WormCam feeds, and it showed the face of Romulus as he had been at the exact age, to the minute, of the wearer. OurWorld was targeting other parts of the world with regional variants of the same idea.

It was a terrific piece of marketing. But David knew it would take him a lifetime to get used to the sight of the face of a young Iron Age male above a pair of pert bare breasts.

They passed through a small square, a patch of unhealthy-looking greenery surrounded by tall, antique buildings. On a bench here David noticed a young couple, boy and girl, both naked. They were perhaps sixteen. The girl was on the boy’s lap, and they were kissing ardently. The boy’s hand was urgently squeezing the girl’s small breast. And her hand, dug in between their bodies, was wrapped around his erection.

David knew that some (older) commentators dismissed all this as hedonism, a mad dancing of the young before the onset of the fire. It was a mindless, youthful reflection of the awful, despairing nihilist philosophies that had grown recently in response to the looming existence of the Wormwood: philosophies in which the universe was seen as little more than a giant fist intent on smashing flat all of life and beauty and thought, over and over. There never had been a way to survive the universe’s slow decline, of course; now the Wormwood had made that cosmic terminus gruesomely real, and there was nothing to do but dance and rut and cry.

Such notions were dismally seductive. But the explanation for the ways of modern youth was surely simpler than that, David thought. It was surely another WormCam consequence: the relentless, disconcerting shedding of taboos, in a world where all the walls had come down.

A handful of people had stopped to watch the couple. One man — naked too, perhaps in his twenties — was slowly masturbating.

Technically that was still illegal. But nobody was trying to enforce such laws any more. After all, that lonely man could go back to his hotel room and use his WormCam to zoom in on anybody he chose, any time of the day or night — which was what people had been using the WormCam for since it was released, and movies and magazines and such for a lot longer than that. At least, in this age of the WormCam, there was no more hypocrisy.

But such incidents were already becoming rare. New social norms were emerging The world seemed to David to be a little like a crowded restaurant. Yes, you could listen in to what the man on the next table was saying to his wife. But it was impolite; if you indulged, you would be ostracized. And, after all, many people actually relished crowded, public places; the buzz, the excitement, the sense of belonging could override any desire for privacy.

As David watched, the girl broke away, smiling at her lover, and she slid down his body, smooth as a seal, and took his erection in her mouth. And -

David turned away, face burning.

Their lovemaking had been clumsy, amateurish, perhaps overeager; their two bodies, though young, were not specially attractive specimens. But then, this was not art, or even pornography; this was human life, in all its clumsy animal beauty. David tried to imagine how it must be to be that boy, here and now, freed of taboos, reveling in the power of his body and his lover’s.

Heather, however, saw none of his. Wandering beside him, eyes glinting, she was still immersed in the deep past — and perhaps it was time he joined her there. With a sense of relief — and a brief word to the Search Engine, requesting guidance — David donned his own Mind’sEye and slid into another time.

…He walked into daylight But this crowded street, lined by great, boxy multi-storey apartment blocks, was dark. Hemmed in by the peculiar topography of the site — the famous seven hills — Romans, already a million strong, had built up.

In many ways, the city had a remarkably modern feel. But this was not the twenty-first century: he was glimpsing this swarming, vibrant capital on a bright Italian summer afternoon just five years after the cruel death of Christ Himself. There were no motor vehicles, of course, and few animal-drawn carts or carriages. The most common form of transport, other than by foot, was by hired litter or sedan chair. Even so, the streets were so crowded that even foot traffic could circulate at little more than a crawl.

There was a crush of humanity — citizens, soldiers, paupers and slaves — all around them. David and Heather towered over most of these people; and besides, walking on the modern ground surface, they were hovering above the cobbled floor of the ancient city. The poor and the slaves looked stunted, some visibly ravaged by malnourishment and disease, even rat-like, as they crowded around the public water fountains. But many of the citizens — some in brilliant-white gold-stitched togas, benefiting from generations of affluence funded by the expanding Empire — were as tall and well fed as David, and, in suitable clothes, would surely not have looked out of place in the streets of any city of the twenty-first century.

But David could not get used to the way the swarming crowds simply pushed through him. It was hard to accept that to these Romans, busily engaged with their own concerns, he was no more than an insubstantial ghost. He longed to be here, to play a part.

They came now to a more open place. This was the Forum Romanum: a finely paved rectangular court surrounded by grand, two-story public buildings, fronted by rows of narrow marble columns. A line of triumphal columns, each capped by gold-leafed statues, strode boldly down the centre of the court, and farther ahead, beyond a clutter of characteristically Roman red-tiled, sloping roofs, he could see the curving bulk of the Colosseum.

In one corner he noticed a group of citizens, grandly dressed — Senators, perhaps — arguing vehemently, tapping at tablets, oblivious of the beauty and marvel around them. They were proof that this city was no museum, but very obviously the operational capital of a huge, complex and well-run empire — the Washington of its day — and its very mundanity was exhilarating, so different from the seamless, shining, depopulated reconstructions of the old, pre-WormCam museums, movies and books.

But this Imperial city, already ancient, had just a few centuries more to survive. The great aqueducts would fall, the public fountains fail; and for a thousand years afterwards the Romans would be reduced to drawing their water by hand from the Tiber.

There was a tap on his shoulder.

David turned, startled. A man stood there, dressed in a drab, charcoal-grey suit and tie, utterly out of place here. He had short-cropped blond hair, and he was holding up a badge. And, like David and Heather, he was floating a few metres above the ground of Imperial Rome.

It was FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens.

“You,” David said. “What do you want with us? Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage to my family, Special Agent?”

“I never intended any damage, sir.”

“And now.”

“And now I need your help.”

Suppressing a sigh, David lifted his hands to his Mind’sEye headband. He could feel the indefinable tingle that came with the breaking of the equipment’s transceiver link to his cortex.

Suddenly he was immersed in the hot Roman night.

And around him the Forum Romanum was reduced. Great chunks of marble rubble littered the floor, their surfaces brown, decaying in the foul air of the city. Of the great buildings, only a handful of columns and crosspieces survived, poking out of the ground like exposed bones, and sickly urban-poisoned grass grew through cracks in the flags.