Bizarrely, amid the gaudy twenty-first-century tourists, grey-suited Mavens looked even more out of place than in ancient Rome.

Michael Mavens turned and studied Heather. Her eyes, dilated widely, sparkled with the unmistakable pearly glint of viewpoints, cast by the miniature WormCam generators implanted in her retinas. David took her hand. She squeezed gently.

Mavens caught David’s eye. He nodded, understanding. But he pressed: “We need to talk, sir. It’s important.”

“My brother?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Will you accompany us back to our hotel? It isn’t far.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

So David walked from the ruined Forum Romanum, gently guiding Heather around the fallen masonry. Heather turned her head like a camera stand, still immersed in the bright glories of a city long dead, and spacetime distortion shone in her eyes.

They reached the hotel.

Heather had barely spoken since the Forum Romanum. She allowed David to kiss her on the cheek before she went to her room. There she lay down in the dark, facing the ceiling, her wormhole eyes sparkling.

David realized, uneasily, that he had absolutely no idea what she was looking at.

When he returned to his own room, Mavens was waiting. David prepared them drinks from the minibar: a single malt for himself, a bourbon for the agent.

Mavens made small talk. “You know, Hiram Patterson’s reach is awesome. In your bathroom just now I used a WormCam mirror to pick the spinach out of my teeth. My wife has a wormhole NannyCam at home. My brother and his wife are using a WormCam monitor to keep track of their thirteen-year-old daughter, who’s a little wild, in their opinion… And so on. To think of it: the miracle technology of the age, and we use it in such trivial ways.”

David said briskly, “As long as he continues to sell it, Hiram doesn’t care what we do with it. Why don’t you tell me why you’ve come so far to see me, Special Agent Mavens?”

Mavens dug into a pocket of his crumpled jacket, and pulled out a thumbnail-sized data disk; he turned it like a coin, and David saw hologram shimmers in its surface. Mavens placed the disk carefully on the small polished table beside his drink. “I’m looking for Kate Manzoni,” he said. “And Bobby Patterson, and Mary Mays. I drove them into hiding. I want to bring them back. Help them rebuild their lives.”

“What can I do?” David asked sourly. “After all, you have the resources of the FBI behind you.”

“Not for this. To tell the truth the Agency has given up on the three of them. I haven’t.”

“Why? You want to punish them some more?”

“Not at all,” Mavens said uncomfortably. “Manzoni’s was the first high-profile case which hinged on WormCam evidence. And we got it wrong.” He smiled, looking tired. “I’ve been checking. That’s the wonderful thing about the WormCam, isn’t it? It’s the world’s greatest second-guess machine.

“You see, it’s now possible to read many types of information through the WormCam: particularly, the contents of computer memories and storage devices. I checked through the equipment Kate Manzoni was using at the time of her alleged crime. And, eventually, I found that what Manzoni claimed had been true all along.”

“Which is?”

“That Hiram Patterson was responsible for the crime — though it would be difficult to pin it on him, even using the WormCam. And he framed Manzoni.” He shook his head. “I knew and admired Kate Manzoni’s journalism long before the case came up. The way she exposed the Wormwood cover-up.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” David said levelly. “You were only doing your job.”

Mavens said harshly, “It’s a job I screwed up. Not the first. But those who were harmed — Bobby and Kate — have dropped out of sight. And they aren’t the only ones.”

“Hiding from the WormCam,” David said.

“Of course. It’s changing everybody…”

It was true. In the new openness, businesses boomed. Crime seemed to have dropped to an irreducible minimum, a bump driven by mental disorder. Politicians had, cautiously, found ways to operate in the new glass-walled world, with their every move open to scrutiny by a concerned and online citizenry, now and in the future. Beyond the triviality of time tourism, a new true history, cleansed of myths and lies — and no less wonderful for that — was entering the consciousness of the species; nations and religions and corporations seemed almost to have worked through their round of apologies to each other and to the people. The surviving religions, refounded and cleansed, purged of corruption and greed, were re-emerging into the light, and — it seemed to David — were beginning to address their true mission, which was humanity’s search for the transcendent.

From the highest to the lowest. Even manners had changed. People seemed to be becoming a little more tolerant of one another, able to accept each other’s differences and faults — because each person knew he or she was under scrutiny too.

Mavens was saying, “You know, it’s as if we have all been standing in spotlights on a darkened stage. Now the theatre lights are up, and we can see all the way to the wings — like it or not. I guess you’ve heard of MAS? — Mutually Assured Surveillance — a consequence of the fact that everybody carries a WormCam; everybody is watching everybody else. Suddenly our nation is full of courteous, wary, watchful citizens. But it can be harmful. Some people seem to be becoming surveillance obsessives, unwilling to do anything that will mark them out as different from the norm. It’s like living in a village dominated by prying gossips…”

“But surely the WormCam has been, on balance, a force for good. Open Skies, for instance.”

Open Skies had been President Eisenhower’s old dream of international transparency. Even before the WormCam there had been an implementation of something like that vision, with aerial reconnaissance, surveillance satellites, weapons inspectors. But it was always limited: inspectors could be thrown out, missile silos camouflaged by tarpaulins.

“But now,” said Mavens, “in this wonderful WormCam world, we’re watching them, and we know they are watching us. And nothing can be hidden. Arms reduction treaties can be verified; a number of armed conflicts have been frozen into impasse, both sides knowing what the other is about to do. Not only that, the citizens are watching as well. All over the planet…”

Dictatorial and repressive regimes, exposed to the light, were crumbling. Though some totalitarian governments had sought to use the new technology as an instrument of oppression, the (deliberate) flooding of those countries by the democracies with WormCams had resulted in openness and accountability. This was an extension of past work done by groups like the Witness Program, who for decades had supplied video equipment to human-rights groups: Let truth do the fighting.

“Believe me,” Mavens said, “the U.S. is getting off lightly. The worst scandal we suffered recently was the exposure of the Wormwood bunkers.” A pathetic, half-hearted exercise, a handful of hollowed-out mountains and converted mines, meant as a refuge for the rich and powerful — or at least their children — on Wormwood Day. The existence of such facilities had long been suspected; when they were exposed, their futility as refuges was quickly demonstrated by the scientists, and their builders mocked into harmlessness. Mavens said, “If you think about it, there was usually a lot more scandal than that to be exposed, at any moment in the past. We’re all getting cleaner. There are some who argue that we may be on the brink of a true consensual world government at last — even a Utopia.”

“Do you believe it?”

Mavens grinned sourly. “Not for a second. I have the feeling that wherever we’re going, wherever the WormCam is taking us, it’s somewhere much stranger.”