The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780002247047
Publisher: London : Voyager, c2000.
Published: 2010-06-04T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 17 - THE DEBUNK MACHINE

David and Heather sat before a flickering SoftScreen, their faces illuminated by the harsh sunlight of a day long gone.

... He was a private, a soldier of the first Maryland Infantry. He was one of a line which stretched into the distance, muskets raised. A drumbeat was audible, steady and ominous They hadn't yet learned his name.

His face was begrimed, smeared by sweat, his uniform filthy, rain-stained and heavily patched. He was becoming visibly more nervous as he approached the front.

Smoke covered the lines in the distance. But already David and Heather could hear the crackle of small arms, the booming of cannon.

Their soldier passed a field hospital now, tents set up at the center of a muddy field. There were rows of unmoving bodies, uncovered, lying outside the nearest tent, and-somehow more horrific-a pile of severed arms and legs, some still bearing scraps of cloth. Two men were feeding the limbs into a brazier. The cries of the wounded within the tents were scratchy, remote, agonizing.

The soldier dug into his jacket and produced a pack of playing cards, battered and bound up with string, and a photograph.

David, working the WormCam controls, froze the image, and zoomed in on the little photograph, much thumbed, its image a crude black-and-white graininess. 'It's a woman,' he said slowly. 'And that looks like a donkey. And ... Oh.'

Heather was smiling. 'He's afraid. He thinks he might not live through the day. He doesn't want that stuff sent home with his personal effects.'

David resumed the sequence. The soldier dropped his possessions into the mud and ground them in with his heel.

Heather said, 'Listen. What's he singing?'

David adjusted the volume and frequency filters. The private's accent was remarkably broad, but the words were recognizable: ... Into the ward of the clean whitewashed halls / Where the dead slept and the dying lay / Wounded by bayonets, sabers and balls / Somebody's darling was borne one day ...

A mounted officer came by behind the line, his black, sweating horse visibly nervous. Close up. Dress, there ... Close up. His accent was stiff, alien to David's ear-

There was an explosion, flying earth. The bodies of soldiers seemed simply to burst, into large, bloody fragments.

David recoiled. It had been a shell. Suddenly, startlingly quickly, war was here.

The noise level rose abruptly: there was cheering, swearing, a rattle of rifle-muskets and pistols- The private raised his musket, fired rapidly, and dug another cartridge from his belt. He bit into it, exposing the powder and ball, and particles of black powder clung to his lips.

Heather murmured, 'They say the powder tasted like pepper.'

Another shell landed near the wheel of an artillery piece. A horse close to the gun seemed to explode, bloody scraps flying. A man walking alongside fell, and he looked down in apparent surprise at the stump which now terminated his leg.

All around the private now there was horror: smoke, fire, mutilated bodies, many men littered on the ground, writhing. But he seemed to be growing more calm.

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