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Davout had himself disassembled
for the return journey. He had already been torn in half, he felt:
the remainder, the dumb beast still alive, did not matter. The
captain had ruled, and Katrin would not be brought back. Davout did
not want to spend the years between the stars in pain, confronting
the gaping absence in his quarters, surrounded by the quiet sympathy
of the crew.
Besides, he was no longer
needed. The terraforming team had done its work, and then, but for
Davout, had died.
Davout lay down on a bed of
nano and let the little machines take him apart piece by piece, turn
his body, his mind, and his unquenchable longing into long strings
of numbers. The nanomachines crawled into his brain first, mapping,
recording, and then shut down his mind piece by piece, so that he
would feel no discomfort during what followed, or suffer a memory of
his own body being taken apart.
Davout hoped that the nanos
would shut down the pain before his consciousness failed, so that he
could remember what it was like to live without the anguish that was
now a part of his life, but it didn’t work out that way. When his
consciousness ebbed, he was aware, even to the last fading of the
light, of the knife-blade of loss still buried in his
heart.
The pain was there when Davout
awoke, a wailing voice that cried, a pure contralto keen of agony,
in his first dawning awareness. He found himself in an
early-Victorian bedroom, blue-striped wallpaper, silhouettes in oval
frames, silk flowers in vases. Crisp sheets, light streaming in the
window. A stranger–shoulder-length hair, black frock coat, cravat
carelessly tied–looked at him from a gothic-revival armchair. The
man held a pipe in the right hand and tamped down tobacco with the
prehensile big toe of his left foot.
"I’m not on the Beagle,"
Davout said.
The man gave a grave nod. His
left hand formed the mudra for <correct>. "Yes."
"And this isn’t a
virtual?"
<Correct> again.
"No."
"Then something has gone
wrong."
<Correct> "Yes. A moment,
sir, if you please." The man finished tamping, slipped his foot into
a waiting boot, then lit the pipe with the anachronistic lighter in
his left hand. He puffed, drew in smoke, exhaled, put the lighter in
his pocket, and settled back in the walnut embrace of his
chair.
"I am Dr. Li," he said.
<Stand by> said the left hand, the old finger position for a
now-obsolete palmtop computer, a finger position that had once meant
pause, as <correct> had once meant enter, enter
because it was correct. "Please remain in bed for a few more minutes
while the nanos doublecheck their work. Redundancy is frustrating,"
puffing smoke, "but good for peace of mind."
"What happens if they find
they’ve made a mistake?"
<Don’t be concerned.> "It
can’t be a very large mistake," said Li, "or we wouldn’t be
communicating so rationally. At worst, you will sleep for a bit
while things are corrected."
"May I take my hands out from
under the covers?" he asked.
"Yes."
Davout did so. His hands, he
observed, were brown and leathery, hands suitable for the hot, dry
world of Sarpedon. They had not, then, changed his body for one more
suited to Earth, but given him something familiar.
If, he realized, they were on
Earth.
His right fingers made the
mudra <thank you>.
<Don’t mention it> signed
Li.
Davout passed a hand over his
forehead, discovered that the forehead, hand, and the gesture itself
were perfectly familiar.
Strange, but the gesture
convinced him that he was, in a vital way, still himself. Still
Davout.
Still alive, he thought.
Alas.
"Tell me what happened," he
said. "Tell me why I’m here."
Li signed <stand by>,
made a visible effort to collect himself. "We believe," he said,
"that the Beagle was destroyed. If so, you are the only
survivor."
Davout found his shock
curiously veiled. The loss of the other lives–friends, most of
them–stood muted by the precedent of his own earlier, overriding
grief. It was as if the two losses were weighed in a balance, and
the Beagle found wanting.
Li, Davout observed, was
waiting for Davout to absorb this information before
continuing.
<Go on> Davout
signed.
"The accident happened seven
light-years out," Li said. "Beagle began to yaw wildly, and
both automatic systems and the crew failed to correct the maneuver.
Beagle’s automatic systems concluded that the ship was
unlikely to survive the increasing oscillations, and began to use
its communications lasers to download personality data to collectors
in Earth orbit. As the only crew member to elect disassembly during
the return journey, you were first in the queue. The others, we
presume, ran to nano disassembly stations, but communication was
lost with the Beagle before we retrieved any of their
data."
"Did Katrin’s come
through?"
Li stirred uneasily in his
chair. <Regrettably> "I’m afraid not."
Davout closed his eyes. He had
lost her again. Over the bubble of hopelessness in his throat he
asked, "How long has it been since my data arrived?"
"A little over eight
days."
They had waited eight days,
then, for Beagle–for the Beagle of seven years ago–to
correct its problem and reestablish communication. If Beagle
had resumed contact, the mass of data that was Davout might have
been erased as redundant.
"The government has announced
the loss," Li said. "Though there is a remote chance that the
Beagle may come flying in or through the system in eleven
years as scheduled, we have detected no more transmissions, and
we’ve been unable to observe any blueshifted deceleration torch
aimed at our system. The government decided that it would be unfair
to keep sibs and survivors in the dark any longer."
<Concur> Davout
signed.
He envisioned the last moments
of the Beagle, the crew being flung back and forth as the
ship slammed through increasing pendulum swings, the desperate
attempts, fighting wildly fluctuating gravity and inertia, to reach
the emergency nanobeds . . . no panic, Davout thought, Captain
Moshweshwe had trained his people too well for that. Just
desperation, and determination, and, as the oscillations grew worse,
an increasing sense of futility, and impending death.
No one expected to die anymore.
It was always a shock when it happened near you. Or to
you.
"The cause of the
Beagle’s problem remains unknown," Li said, the voice far
away. "The Bureau is working with simulators to try to discover what
happened."
Davout leaned back against his
pillow. Pain throbbed in his veins, pain and loss, knowledge that
his past, his joy, was irrecoverable. "The whole voyage," he said,
"was a catastrophe."
<I respectfully
contradict> Li signed. "You terraformed and explored two worlds,"
he said. "Downloads are already living on these worlds, hundreds of
thousands now, millions later. There would have been a third world
added to our commonwealth if your mission had not been cut short due
to the, ah, first accident . . ."
<Concur> Davout signed,
but only because his words would have come out with too much
bitterness.
<Sorry>, a curt jerk of
Li’s fingers. "There are messages from your sibs," Li said, "and
downloads from them also. The sibs and friends of Beagle’s
crew will try to contact you, no doubt. You need not answer any of
these messages until you’re ready."
<Understood.>
Davout hesitated, but the words
were insistent; he gave them tongue. "Have Katrin’s sibs sent
messages?" he asked.
Li’s grave expression scarcely
changed. "I believe so." He tilted his head. "Is there anything I
can do for you? Anything I can arrange?"
"Not now, no," said Davout.
<Thank you> he signed. "Can I move from the bed
now?"
Li’s look turned abstract as he
scanned indicators projected somewhere in his mind. <Yes> "You
may," he said. He rose from his chair, took the pipe from his mouth.
"You are in a hospital, I should add," he said, "but you do not have
the formal status of patient, and may leave at any time. Likewise,
you may stay here for the foreseeable future, as long as you feel it
necessary."
<Thank you> "Where is
this hospital, by the way?"
"West Java. The city of
Bandung."
Earth, then. Which Davout had
not seen in seventy-seven years. Memory’s gentle fingers touched his
mind with the scent of durian, of ocean, of mace, cloves, and
turmeric.
He knew he had never been in
Java before, though, and wondered whence the memory came. From one
of his sibs, perhaps?
<Thank you> Davout signed
again, putting a touch of finality, a kind of dismissal, into the
twist of his fingers.
Dr. Li left Davout alone, in
his new/old body, in the room that whispered of memory and
pain.
In a dark wood armoire, Davout
found identification and clothing, and a record confirming that his
account had received seventy-eight years’ back pay. His electronic
inbox contained downloads from his sibs and more personal messages
than he could cope with–he would have to construct an electronic
personality to answer most of them.
He dressed and left the
hospital. Whoever supervised his reassembly–Dr. Li perhaps–had
thoughtfully included a complete Earth atlas in his internal ROM,
and he accessed it as he walked, making random turnings but never
getting lost. The furious sun burned down with tropical intensity,
but his current body was constructed to bear heat, and a breeze off
the mountains made pleasant even the blazing noontide.
The joyful metal music of the
gamelans clattered from almost every doorway. People in
bright clothing, agile as the siamang of near Sumatra, sped overhead
along treeways and ropeways, arms and hands modified for
brachiation. Robots, immune to the heat, shimmered past on silent
tires. Davout found it all strangely familiar, as if he had been
here in a dream.
And then he found himself by
the sea, and a pang of familiarity knifed through his heart.
Home! cried his thoughts. Other worlds he had built, other
beauties he had seen, but he had never beheld this blue,
this perfection, anywhere else but on his native sphere.
Subtle differences in atmospherics had rendered this color unnatural
on any other world.
And with the cry of familiarity
came a memory: it had been Davout the Silent who had come here, a
century or more ago, and Katrin had been by his side.
But Davout’s Katrin was dead.
And as he looked on Earth’s beauty, he felt his world of joy turn to
bitter ashes.
<Alas!> His fingers
formed the word unbidden. <Alas!>
He lived in a world where no
one died, and nothing was ever lost. One understood that such things
occasionally occurred, but never–hardly ever–to anyone that one
knew. Physical immortality was cheap and easy, and was supported by
so many alternate systems: backing up the mind by downloading, or
downloading into a virtual reality system or into a durable machine.
Nanosystems duplicated the body or improved it, adapted it for
different environments. Data slumbered in secure storage, awaiting
the electron kiss that returned it to life. Bringing a child to term
in the womb was now the rarest form of reproduction, and bringing a
child to life in a machine womb the next rarest.
It was so much easier to have
the nanos duplicate you as an adult. Then, at least, you had someone
to talk to.
No one died, and nothing was
ever lost. But Katrin died, Davout thought, and now I am lost, and
it was not supposed to be this way.
<Alas!> Fingers wailed
the grief that was stopped up in Davout’s throat.
<Alas!>
Davout and Katrin had met in
school, members of the last generation in which womb-breeding
outnumbered the alternatives. Immortality whispered its covenant
into their receptive ears. On their first meeting, attending a
lecture (Dolphus on "Reinventing the Humboldt Sea") at the College
of Mystery, they looked at each other and knew, as if angels
had whispered into their ears, that there was now one less mystery
in the world, that each served as an answer to another, that each
fitted neatly into a hollow that the other had perceived in his or
her soul, dropping into place as neatly as a butter-smooth piece in
a finely made teak puzzle–or, considering their interests, as easily
as a carbolic functional group nested into place on an indole ring.
Their rapport was, they freely
admitted, miraculous. Still young, they exploded into the world,
into a universe that welcomed them.
He could not bear to be away
from her. Twenty-four hours was the absolute limit before Davout’s
nerves began to beat a frustrated little tattoo, and he found
himself conjuring a phantom Katrin in his imagination, just to have
someone to share the world with–he needed her there, needed
this human lens through which he viewed the universe.
Without her, Davout found the
cosmos veiled in a kind of uncertainty. While it was possible to
apprehend certain things (the usefulness of a coenocytic arrangement
of cells in the transmission of information-bearing proteins and
nuclei, the historical significance of the Yucatan astrobleme, the
limitations of the Benard cell model in predicting thermic
instabilities in the atmosphere), these things lacked nóesis,
existed only as a series of singular, purposeless accidents.
Reflected through Katrin, however, the world took on brilliance,
purpose, and genius. With Katrin he could feast upon the universe;
without her the world lacked savor.
Their interests were similar
enough for each to generate enthusiasm in the other, diverse enough
that each was able to add perspective to the other’s work. They
worked in cozy harmony, back to back, two desks set in the same
room. Sometimes Davout would return from a meeting, or a coffee
break, and find that Katrin had added new paragraphs, sometimes an
entire new direction, to his latest effort. On occasion he would
return the favor. Their early work–eccentric, proliferating in too
many directions, toward too many specialties–showed life and promise
and more than a hint of brilliance.
Too much, they decided, for
just the two of them. They wanted to do too much, and all at once,
and an immortal lifetime was not time enough.
And so, as soon as they could
afford it, Red Katrin, the original, was duplicated–with a few
cosmetic alterations–in Dark Katrin and later Katrin the Fair; and
nanomachines read Old Davout, blood and bone and the long strands of
numbers that were his soul, and created perfect copies in Dangerous
Davout, later called the Conqueror, and Davout the
Silent.
Two had become six, and half a
dozen, they now agreed, was about all the universe could handle for
the present. The wild tangle of overlapping interests was parceled
out between the three couples, each taking one of the three most
noble paths to understanding. The eldest couple chose History as
their domain, a part of which involved chronicling the adventures of
their sibs; the second couple took Science; the third Psyche, the
exploration of the human mind. Any developments, any insights, on
the part of one of the sibs could be shared with the others through
downloads. In the beginning they downloaded themselves almost
continually, sharing their thoughts and experiences and plans in a
creative frenzy. Later, as separate lives and more specialized
careers developed, the downloads grew less frequent, though there
were no interruptions until Dangerous Davout and Dark Katrin took
their first voyage to another star. They spent over fifty years
away, though to them it was less than thirty; and the downloads from
Earth, pulsed over immense distances by communications lasers, were
less frequent, and less frequently resorted to. The lives of the
other couples, lived at what seemed speeded-up rates, were of
decreasing relevance to their own existence, as if they were lives
that dwelled in a half-remembered dream.
<Alas!> the fingers
signed. <Alas!> for the dream turned to savage
nightmare.
The sea, a perfect terrestrial
blue, gazed back into Davout’s eyes, indifferent to the sadness
frozen into his fingers.
"Your doctors knew that to wake
here, after such an absence, would result in a feeling of
anachronism," said Davout’s sib, "so they put you in this Victorian
room, where you would at least feel at ease with the kind of
anachronism by which you are surrounded." He smiled at Davout from
the neo-gothic armchair. "If you were in a modern room, you might
experience a sensation of obsolescence. But everyone can feel
superior to the Victorians, and besides, one is always more
comfortable in one’s past."
"Is one?" Davout asked, fingers
signing <irony>. The past and the present, he found, were
alike a place of torment.
"I discover," he continued,
"that my thoughts stray for comfort not to the past, but to the
future."
"Ah." A smile. "That is why we
call you Davout the Conqueror."
"I do not seem to inhabit that
name," Davout said, "if I ever did."
Concern shadowed the face of
Davout’s sib. <Sorry> he signed, and then made another sign
for <profoundly>, the old multiply sign, multiples of
sorrow in his gesture.
"I understand," he said. "I
experienced your last download. It was . . . intensely disturbing. I
have never felt such terror, such loss."
"Nor had I," said
Davout.
It was Old Davout whose image
was projected into the gothic-revival armchair, the original,
womb-born Davout of whom the two sibs were copies. When Davout
looked at him it was like looking into a mirror in which his
reflection had been retarded for several centuries, then
unexpectedly released–Davout remembered, several bodies back, once
possessing that tall forehead, the fair hair, the small ears
flattened close to the skull. The grey eyes he had still, but he
could never picture himself wearing the professorial little goatee.
"How is our other sib?" Davout
asked.
The concern on Old Davout’s
face deepened. "You will find Silent Davout much changed. You
haven’t uploaded him, then?"
<No> "Due to the delays,
I’m thirty years behind on my uploading."
"Ah." <Regret> "Perhaps
you should speak to him, then, before you upload all those
years."
"I will." He looked at his sib
and hoped the longing did not burn in his eyes. "Please give my best
to Katrin, will you?"
"I will give her your
love," said Old Davout, wisest of the sibs.
The pain was there when Davout
awoke next day, fresh as the moment it first knifed through him, on
the day their fifth child, the planet Sarpedon, was christened.
Sarpedon had been discovered by astronomers a couple of centuries
before, and named, with due regard for tradition, after yet another
minor character in Homer; it had been mapped and analyzed by robot
probes; but it had been the Beagle’s terraforming team that
had made the windswept place, with its barren mountain ranges and
endless deserts, its angry radiation and furious dust storms, into a
place suitable for life.
Katrin was the head of the
terraforming team. Davout led its research division. Between them,
raining nano from Sarpedon’s black skies, they nursed the planet to
life, enriched its atmosphere, filled its seas, crafted tough,
versatile vegetation capable of withstanding the angry environment.
Seeded life by the tens of millions, insects, reptiles, birds,
mammals, fish, and amphibians. Re-created themselves, with dark,
leathery skin and slit pupils, as human forms suitable for
Sarpedon’s environment, so that they could examine the place they
had built.
And–unknown to the
others–Davout and Katrin had slipped bits of their own genetics into
almost every Sarpedan life-form. Bits of redundant coding, mostly,
but enough so that they could claim Sarpedon’s entire world of
creatures as their children. Even when they were junior terraformers
on the Cheng Ho’s mission to Rhea, they had, partly as a
joke, partly as something more calculated, populated their creations
with their genes.
Katrin and Davout spent the
last two years of their project on Sarpedon among their children,
examining the different ecosystems, different interactions,
tinkering with new adaptations. In the end, Sarpedon was certified
as suitable for human habitation. Preprogrammed nanos constructed
small towns, laid out fields, parks, and roads. The first human
Sarpedans would be constructed in nanobeds, and their minds filled
with the downloaded personalities of volunteers from Earth. There
was no need to go to the expense and trouble of shipping out
millions of warm bodies from Earth, running the risks of traveling
for decades in remote space. Not when nanos could construct them all
new on site.
The first Sarpedans–bald,
leather-skinned, slit-eyed–emerged blinking into their new red dawn.
Any further terraforming, any attempts to fine-tune the planet and
make it more Earthlike, would be a long-term project and up to them.
In a splendid ceremony, Captain Moshweshwe formally turned the
future of Sarpedon over to its new inhabitants. Davout had a few
last formalities to perform, handing certain computer codes and
protocols over to the Sarpedans, but the rest of the terraforming
team, most fairly drunk on champagne, filed into the shuttle for the
return journey to the Beagle. As Davout bent over a terminal
with his Sarpedan colleagues and the Beagle’s first officer,
he could hear the roar of the shuttle on its pad, the sustained
thunder as it climbed for orbit, the thud as it crashed through the
sound barrier, and then he saw out of the corner of his eye the
sudden red-gold flare . . .
When he raced outside, it was
to see the blazing poppy unfolding in the sky, a blossom of fire and
metal falling slowly to the surface of the newly christened planet.
There she was–her image
anyway–in the neo-gothic armchair: Red Katrin, the green-eyed lady
with whom he in memory, and Old Davout in reality, had first
exchanged glances two centuries ago while Dolphus expanded on what
he called his "lunaforming."
Davout had hesitated about
returning her call of condolence. He did not know whether his heart
could sustain two knife-thrusts, both Katrin’s death and the
sight of her sib, alive, sympathetic, and forever beyond his reach.
But he couldn’t not call
her. Even when he was trying not to think about her, he still found
Katrin on the edge of his perceptions, drifting though his thoughts
like the persistent trace of some familiar perfume.
Time to get it over with, he
thought. If it was more than he could stand, he could apologize and
end the call. But he had to know . . .
"And there are no backups?" she
said. A pensive frown touched her lips.
"No recent backups,"
Davout said. "We always thought that, if we were to die, we would
die together. Space travel is hazardous, after all, and when
catastrophe strikes it is not a small catastrophe. We didn’t
anticipate one of us surviving on Earth, and the other dying
light-years away." He scowled.
"Damn Mosheshwe anyway! There
were recent backups on the Beagle, but with so many dead from
an undetermined cause, he decided not to resurrect anyone, to cancel
our trip to Astoreth, return to Earth, and sort out all the
complications once he got home."
"He made the right decision,"
Katrin said. "If my sib had been resurrected, you both would have
died together."
<Better so> Davout’s
fingers began to form the mudra, but he thought better of it, made a
gesture of negation.
The green eyes narrowed. "There
are older backups on Earth, yes?"
"Katrin’s latest surviving
backup dates from the return of the Cheng Ho."
"Almost ninety years ago."
Thoughtfully. "But she could upload the memories she has been
sending me . . . the problem does not seem insurmountable."
Red Katrin clasped her hands
around one knee. At the familiar gesture, memories rang through
Davout’s mind like change-bells. Vertigo overwhelmed him, and he
closed his eyes.
"The problem is the
instructions Katrin–we both–left," he said. "Again, we anticipated
that if we died, we’d die together. And so we left instructions that
our backups on Earth were not to be employed. We reasoned that we
had two sibs apiece on Earth, and if they–you–missed us, you could
simply duplicate yourselves."
"I see." A pause, then concern.
"Are you all right?"
<No> "Of course not," he
said. He opened his eyes. The world eddied for a moment, then
stilled, the growing calmness centered on Red Katrin’s green eyes.
"I’ve got seventy-odd years’
back pay," he said. "I suppose that I could hire some lawyers, try
to get Katrin’s backup released to my custody."
Red Katrin bit her nether lip.
"Recent court decisions are not in your favor."
"I’m very persistent. And I’m
cash-rich."
She cocked her head, looked at
him. "Are you all right talking to me? Should I blank my
image?"
<No.> He shook his head.
"It helps, actually, to see you."
He had feared agony in seeing
her, but instead he found a growing joy, a happiness that mounted in
his heart. As always, his Katrin was helping him to understand,
helping him to make sense of the bitter confusion of the
world.
An idea began to creep into his
mind on stealthy feet.
"I worry that you’re alone
there," Red Katrin said. "Would you like to come stay with us? Would
you like us to come to Java?"
<No, thanks> "I’ll come
see you soon," Davout said. "But while I’m in the hospital, I think
I’ll have a few cosmetic procedures." He looked down at himself,
spread his leathery hands. "Perhaps I should look a little more
Earthlike."
After his talk with Katrin
ended, Davout called Dr. Li and told him that he wanted a new body
constructed.
Something familiar, he said,
already in the files. His own, original form.
Age twenty or so.
"It is a surprise to see you .
. . as you are," said Silent Davout.
Deep-voiced, black-skinned, and
somber, Davout’s sib stood by his bed.
"It was a useful body when I
wore it," Davout answered. "I take comfort in . . . familiar things
. . . now that my life is so uncertain." He looked up. "It was good
of you to come in person."
"A holographic body," he said,
taking Davout’s hand, "however welcome, however familiar, is not the
same as a real person."
Davout squeezed the hand.
"Welcome, then," he said. Dr. Li, who had supervised in person
through the new/old body’s assembly, had left after saying the nanos
were done, so it seemed appropriate for Davout to stand and embrace
his sib.
The youngest of the sibs was
not tall, but he was built solidly, as if for permanence, and his
head seemed slightly oversized for his body. With his older sibs, he
had always maintained a kind of formal reserve that had resulted in
his being nicknamed "the Silent." Accepting the name, he remarked
that the reason he spoke little when the others were around was that
his older sibs had already said everything that needed saying before
he got to it.
Davout stepped back and smiled.
"Your patients must think you a tower of strength."
"I have no patients these days.
Mostly I work in the realm of theory."
"I will have to look up your
work. I’m so far behind on uploads–I don’t have any idea what you
and Katrin have been doing these last decades."
Silent Davout stepped to the
armoire and opened its ponderous mahogany doors. "Perhaps you should
put on some clothing," he said. "I am feeling chill in this
conditioned air, and so must you."
Amused, Davout clothed himself,
then sat across the little rosewood side table from his sib. Davout
the Silent looked at him for a long moment–eyes placid and
thoughtful–and then spoke.
"You are experiencing something
that is very rare in our time," he said. "Loss, anger, frustration,
terror. All the emotions that in their totality equal
grief."
"You forgot sadness and
regret," Davout said. "You forgot memory, and how the memories keep
replaying. You forgot imagination, and how imagination only
makes those memories worse, because imagination allows you to write
a different ending, but the world will not."
Silent Davout nodded. "People
in my profession," fingers forming <irony>, "anyway those born
too late to remember how common these things once were, must view
you with a certain clinical interest. I must commend Dr. Li on his
restraint."
"Dr. Li is a shrink?" Davout
asked.
<Yes.> A casual press of
fingers. "Among other things. I’m sure he’s watching you very
carefully and making little notes every time he leaves the
room."
"I’m happy to be useful."
<Irony> in his hand, bitterness on his tongue. "I would give
those people my memories, if they want them so much."
<Of course> "You can do
that."
Davout looked up in something
like surprise.
"You know it is possible," his
sib said. "You can download your memories, preserve them like amber
or simply hand them to someone else to experience. And you can erase
them from your mind completely, walk on into a new life, tabula
rasa and free of pain."
His deep voice was soft. It was
a voice without affect, one he no doubt used on his patients,
quietly insistent without being officious. A voice that made
suggestions, or presented alternatives, but which never, ever, gave
orders.
"I don’t want that," Davout
said.
Silent Davout’s fingers were
still set in <of course>. "You are not of the generation that
accepts such things as a matter of course," he said. "But this, this
modular approach to memory, to being, constitutes much of my
work these days."
Davout looked at him. "It must
be like losing a piece of yourself, to give up a memory. Memories
are what make you."
Silent Davout’s face remained
impassive as his deep voice sounded through the void between them.
"What forms a human psyche is not a memory, we have come to believe,
but a pattern of thought. When our sib duplicated himself, he
duplicated his pattern in us; and when we assembled new bodies to
live in, the pattern did not change. Have you felt yourself to be a
different person when you took a new body?"
Davout passed a hand over his
head, felt the fine blond hair covering his scalp. This time
yesterday, his head had been bald and leathery. Now he felt subtle
differences in his perceptions–his vision was more acute, his
hearing less so–and his muscle memory was somewhat askew. He
remembered having a shorter reach, a slightly different center of
gravity.
But as for himself, his
essence–no, he felt himself unchanged. He was still Davout.
<No> he
signed.
"People have more choices than
ever before," said Silent Davout. "They choose their bodies, they
choose their memories. They can upload new knowledge, new skills. If
they feel a lack of confidence, or feel that their behavior is too
impulsive, they can tweak their body chemistry to produce a
different effect. If they find themselves the victim of an
unfortunate or destructive compulsion, the compulsion can be edited
from their being. If they lack the power to change their
circumstances, they can at least elect to feel happier about them.
If a memory cannot be overcome, it can be eliminated."
"And you now spend your time
dealing with these problems?" Davout asked.
"They are not problems,"
his sib said gently. "They are not syndromes or
neuroses. They are circumstances. They are part of the
condition of life as it exists today. They are environmental." The
large, impassive eyes gazed steadily at Davout. "People choose
happiness over sorrow, fulfillment over frustration. Can you blame
them?"
<Yes> Davout signed. "If
they deny the evidence of their own lives," he said. "We define our
existence by the challenges we overcome, or those we don’t. Even our
tragedies define us."
His sib nodded. "That is an
admirable philosophy–for Davout the Conqueror. But not all people
are conquerors."
Davout strove to keep the
impatience from his voice. "Lessons are learned from failures as
well as successes. Experience is gained, life’s knowledge is applied
to subsequent occurrence. If we deny the uses of experience, what is
there to make us human?"
His sib was patient. "Sometimes
the experiences are negative, and so are the lessons. Would you have
a person live forever under the shadow of great guilt, say for a
foolish mistake that resulted in injury or death to someone else; or
would you have them live with the consequences of damage inflicted
by a sociopath, or an abusive family member? Traumas like these can
cripple the whole being. Why should the damage not be
repaired?"
Davout smiled thinly. "You
can’t tell me that these techniques are used only in cases of deep
trauma," he said. "You can’t tell me that people aren’t using these
techniques for reasons that might be deemed trivial. Editing out a
foolish remark made at a party, or eliminating a bad vacation or an
argument with the spouse."
Silent Davout returned his
smile. "I would not insult your intelligence by suggesting these
things do not happen."
<Q.E.D.> Davout signed.
"So how do such people mature? Change? Grow in wisdom?"
"They cannot edit out
everything. There is sufficient friction and conflict in the
course of ordinary life to provide everyone with their allotted
portion of wisdom. Nowadays our lives are very, very long, and we
have a long time to learn, however slowly. And after all," he said,
smiling, "the average person’s capacity for wisdom has never been so
large as all that! I think you will find that as a species we
are far less prone to folly than we once were."
Davout looked at his sib
grimly. "You are suggesting that I undergo this
technique?"
"It is called
Lethe."
"That I undergo Lethe? Forget
Katrin? Or forget what I feel for her?"
Silent Davout slowly shook his
grave head. "I make no such suggestion."
"Good."
The youngest Davout gazed
steadily into the eyes of his older twin. "Only you know what you
can bear. I merely point out that this remedy exists, should you
find your anguish beyond what you can endure."
"Katrin deserves mourning,"
Davout said.
Another grave nod.
"Yes."
"She deserves to be remembered.
Who will remember her if I do not?"
"I understand," said Silent
Davout. "I understand your desire to feel, and the necessity. I only
mention Lethe because I comprehend all too well what you endure now.
Because"–he licked his lips–"I, too, have lost Katrin."
Davout gaped at him. "You–" he
stammered. "She is–she was killed?"
<No.> His sib’s face
retained its remarkable placidity. "She left me, sixteen years
ago."
Davout could only stare. The
fact, stated so plainly, was incomprehensible.
"I–" he began, and then his
fingers found another thought. <What happened?>
"We were together for a century
and a half. We grew apart. It happens."
Not to us it
doesn’t! Davout’s mind
protested. Not to Davout and Katrin!
Not to the two people who make
up a whole greater than its parts. Not to us. Not
ever.
But looking into his sib’s
accepting, melancholy face, Davout knew that it had to be
true.
And then, in a way he knew to
be utterly disloyal, he began to hope.
"Shocking?" said Old Davout.
"Not to us, I suppose."
"It was their downloads," said
Red Katrin. "Fair Katrin in particular was careful to edit out some
of her feelings and judgments before she let me upload them, but
still I could see her attitudes changing. And knowing her, I could
make guesses by what she left out . . . I remember telling Davout
three years before the split that the relationship was in
jeopardy."
"The Silent One was still
surprised, though, when it happened," Old Davout said.
"Sophisticated though he may be about human nature, he had a blind
spot where Katrin was concerned." He put an arm around Red Katrin
and kissed her cheek. "As I suppose we all do," he added.
Katrin accepted the kiss with a
gracious inclination of her head, then asked Davout, "Would you like
the blue room here, or the green room upstairs? The green room has a
window seat and a fine view of the bay, but it’s small."
"I’ll take the green room,"
Davout said. I do not need so much room, he thought, now that I am
alone.
Katrin took him up the creaking
wooden stair and showed him the room, the narrow bed of the old
house. Through the window, he could look south to a storm on
Chesapeake Bay, bluegray cloud, bright eruptions of lightning,
slanting beams of sunlight that dropped through rents in the storm
to tease bright winking light from the foam. He watched it for a
long moment, then was startled out of reverie by Katrin’s hand on
his shoulder, and a soft voice in his ear.
"Are there sights like this on
other worlds?"
"The storms on Rhea were vast,"
Davout said, "like nothing on this world. The ocean area is greater
than that on Earth, and lies mostly in the tropics–the planet was
almost called Oceanus on that account. The hurricanes built up
around the equatorial belts with nothing to stop them, sometimes
more than a thousand kilometers across, and they came roaring into
the temperate zones like multi-armed demons, sometimes one after
another for months. They spawned waterspots and cyclones in their
vanguard, inundated whole areas with a storm surge the size of a
small ocean, dumped enough rain to flood an entire province away. .
. . We thought seriously that the storms might make life on land
untenable."
He went on to explain the
solution he and Katrin had devised for the enormous problem: huge
strings of tall, rocky barrier islands built at a furious rate by
nanomachines, a wall for wind and storm surge to break against; a
species of silvery, tropical floating weed, a flowery girdle about
Rhea’s thick waist, that radically increased surface albedo,
reflecting more heat back into space. Many species of deep-rooted,
vinelike plants to anchor slopes and prevent erosion, other species
of thirsty trees, adaptations of cottonwoods and willows, to line
streambeds and break the power of flash floods.
Planetary engineering on such
an enormous scale, in such a short time, had never been attempted,
not even on Mars, and it had been difficult for Katrin and Davout to
sell the project to the project managers on the Cheng Ho.
Their superiors had initially preferred a different approach, huge
equatorial solar curtains deployed in orbit to reflect heat,
squadrons of orbital beam weapons to blast and disperse storms as
they formed, secure underground dwellings for the inhabitants,
complex lock and canal systems to control flooding . . . Katrin and
Davout had argued for a more elegant approach to Rhea’s problems, a
reliance on organic systems to modify the planet’s extreme weather
instead of assaulting Rhea with macro-tech and engineering. Theirs
was the approach that finally won the support of the majority of the
terraforming team, and resulted in their subsequent appointment as
heads of Beagle’s terraforming team.
"Dark Katrin’s memories were
very exciting to upload during that time," said Katrin the Red.
"That delirious explosion of creativity! Watching a whole globe take
shape beneath her feet!" Her green eyes look up into Davout’s. "We
were jealous of you then. All that abundance being created, all that
talent going to shaping an entire world. And we were confined to
scholarship, which seemed so lifeless by comparison."
He looked at her. <Query>
"Are you sorry for the choice you made? You two were senior: you
could have chosen our path if you’d wished. You still could, come to
that."
A smile drifts across her face.
"You tempt me, truly. But Old Davout and I are happy in our work–and
besides, you and Katrin needed someone to provide a proper record of
your adventures." She tilted her head, and mischief glittered in her
eyes. "Perhaps you should ask Blonde Katrin. Maybe she could use a
change."
Davout gave a guilty start: she
was, he thought, seeing too near, too soon. "Do you think so?" he
asked. "I didn’t even know if I should see her."
"Her grudge is with the Silent
One, not with you."
"Well." He managed a smile.
"Perhaps I will at least call."
Davout called Katrin the Fair,
received an offer of dinner on the following day, accepted. From his
room, he followed the smell of coffee into his hosts’ office, and
felt a bubble of grief lodge in his heart: two desks, back-to-back,
two computer terminals, layers of papers and books and printout and
dust . . . he could imagine himself and Katrin here, sipping coffee,
working in pleasant compatibility.
<How goes it?> he
signed.
His sib looked up. "I just sent
a chapter to Sheol," he said. "I was making Maxwell far too
wise." He fingered his little goatee. "The temptation is always to
view the past solely as a vehicle that leads to our present
grandeur. These people’s sole function was to produce us, who
are of course perfectly wise and noble and far superior to our
ancestors. So one assumes that these people had us in mind
all along, that we were what they were working toward. I have to
keep reminding myself that these people lived amid unimaginable
tragedy, disease and ignorance and superstition, vile little wars,
terrible poverty, and death . . ."
He stopped, suddenly aware that
he’d said something awkward–Davout felt the word vibrate in his
bones, as if he were stranded inside a bell that was still singing
after it had been struck–but he said, "Go on."
"I remind myself," his sib
continued, "that the fact that we live in a modern culture doesn’t
make us better, it doesn’t make us superior to these people–in fact
it enlarges them, because they had to overcome so much more
than we in order to realize themselves, in order to accomplish as
much as they did." A shy smile drifted across his face. "And so a
rather smug chapter is wiped out of digital existence."
"Lavoisier is looming,"
commented Red Katrin from her machine.
"Yes, that too," Old Davout
agreed. His Lavoisier and his Age had won the
McEldowney Prize and been shortlisted for other awards. Davout could
well imagine that bringing Maxwell up to Lavoisier’s
magisterial standards would be intimidating.
Red Katrin leaned back in her
chair, combed her hair back with her fingers. "I made a few notes
about the Beagle project," she said. "I have other
commitments to deal with first, of course."
She and Old Davout had avoided
any conflicts of interest and interpretation by conveniently
dividing history between them: she would write of the "modern" world
and her near-contemporaries, while he wrote of those securely in the
past. Davout thought his sib had the advantage in this arrangement,
because her subjects, as time progressed, gradually entered his
domain, and became liable to his reinterpretation.
Davout cleared away some
printout, sat on the edge of Red Katrin’s desk. "A thought keeps
bothering me," he said. "In our civilization we record everything.
But the last moments of the crew of the Beagle went
unrecorded. Does that mean they do not exist? Never existed at all?
That death was always their state, and they returned to it,
like virtual matter dying into the vacuum from which it
came?"
Concern darkened Red Katrin’s
eyes. "They will be remembered," she said. "I will see to
it."
"Katrin didn’t download the
last months, did she?"
<No> "The last eight
months were never sent. She was very busy, and–"
"Virtual months, then. Gone
back to the phantom zone."
"There are records. Other crew
sent downloads home, and I will see if I can gain access either to
the downloads, or to their friends and relations who have
experienced them. There is your memory, your
downloads."
He looked at her. "Will you
upload my memory, then? My sib has everything in his files, I’m
sure." Glancing at Old Davout.
She pressed her lips together.
"That would be difficult for me. Me viewing you
viewing her. . . ." She shook her head. "I don’t dare. Not
now. Not when we’re all still in shock."
Disappointment gnawed at his
insides with sharp rodent teeth. He did not want to be so alone in
his grief; he didn’t want to nourish all the sadness by himself.
He wanted to share it with
Katrin, he knew, the person with whom he shared everything.
Katrin could help him make sense of it, the way she clarified all
the world for him. Katrin would comprehend the way he
felt.
<I understand> he signed.
His frustration must have been plain to Red Katrin, because she took
his hand, lifted her green eyes to his.
"I will," she said. "But not
now. I’m not ready."
"I don’t want two wrecks
in the house," called Old Davout over his shoulder.
Interfering old bastard, Davout
thought. But with his free hand he signed, again, <I
understand>.
Katrin the Fair kissed Davout’s
cheek, then stood back, holding his hands, and narrowed her grey
eyes. "I’m not sure I approve of this youthful body of yours," she
said. "You haven’t looked like this in–what–over a
century?"
"Perhaps I seek to evoke
happier times," Davout said.
A little frown touched the
corners of her mouth. "That is always dangerous," she judged.
"But I wish you every success." She stepped back from the door,
flung out an arm. "Please come in."
She lived in a small apartment
in Toulouse, with a view of the Allée Saint-Michel and the rose-red
brick of the Vieux Quartier. On the whitewashed walls hung
terra-cotta icons of Usil and Tiv, the Etruscan gods of the sun and
moon, and a well cover with a figure of the demon Charun emerging
from the underworld. The Etruscan deities were confronted, on
another wall, by a bronze figure of the Gaulish Rosmerta, consort of
the absent Mercurius.
Her little balcony was bedecked
with wrought iron and a gay striped awning. In front of the balcony
a table shimmered under a red-and-white checked tablecloth: crystal,
porcelain, a wicker basket of bread, a bottle of wine. Cooking
scents floated in from the kitchen.
"It smells wonderful," Davout
said.
<Drink?> Lifting the
bottle.
<Why not?>
Wine was poured. They settled
onto the sofa, chatted of weather, crowds, Java. Davout’s memories
of the trip that Silent Davout and his Katrin had taken to the
island were more recent than hers.
Fair Katrin took his hand. "I
have uploaded Dark Katrin’s memories, so far as I have them," she
said. "She loved you, you know–absolutely, deeply." <Truth.>
She bit her lip. "It was a remarkable thing."
<Truth> Davout answered.
He touched cool crystal to his lips, took a careful sip of his
cabernet. Pain throbbed in the hollows of his heart.
"Yes," he said. "I
know."
"I felt I should tell you about
her feelings. Particularly in view of what happened with me and the
Silent One."
He looked at her. "I confess I
do not understand that business."
She made a little frown of
distaste. "We and our work and our situation grew irksome.
Oppressive. You may upload his memories if you like–I daresay you
will be able to observe the signs that he was determined to
ignore."
<I am sorry.>
Clouds gathered in her grey
eyes. "I, too, have regrets."
"There is no chance of
reconciliation?"
<Absolutely not>,
accompanied by a brief shake of the head. "It was over."
<Finished> "And, in any case, Davout the Silent is not the man
he was."
<Yes?>
"He took Lethe. It was the only
way he had of getting over my leaving him."
Pure amazement throbbed in
Davout’s soul. Fair Katrin looked at him in surprise.
"You didn’t know?"
He blinked at her. "I
should have. But I thought he was talking about me,
about a way of getting over . . ." Aching sadness brimmed in his
throat. "Over the way my Dark Katrin left me."
Scorn whitened the flesh about
Fair Katrin’s nostrils. "That’s the Silent One for you. He didn’t
have the nerve to tell you outright."
"I’m not sure that’s true. He
may have thought he was speaking plainly enough–"
Her fingers formed a mudra that
gave vent to a brand of disdain that did not translate into words.
"He knows his effects perfectly well," she said. "He was trying to
suggest the idea without making it clear that this was his
choice for you, that he wanted you to fall in line with his
theories."
Anger was clear in her voice.
She rose, stalked angrily to the bronze of Rosmerta, adjusted its
place on the wall by a millimeter or so. Turned, waved an arm.
<Apologies>, flung to the
air. "Let’s eat. Silent Davout is the last person I want to talk
about right now."
"I’m sorry I upset you." Davout
was not sorry at all: he found this display fascinating. The
gestures, the tone of voice, were utterly familiar, ringing like
chimes in his heart; but the style, the way Fair Katrin
avoided the issue, was different. Dark Katrin never would have fled
a subject this way: she would have knit her brows and confronted the
problem direct, engaged with it until she’d either reached
understanding or catastrophe. Either way, she’d have laughed, and
tossed her dark hair, and announced that now she
understood.
"It’s peasant cooking," Katrin
the Fair said as she bustled to the kitchen, "which of course is the
best kind."
The main course was a ragoût of
veal in a velouté sauce, beans cooked simply in butter and garlic,
tossed salad, bread. Davout waited until it was half consumed, and
the bottle of wine mostly gone, before he dared to speak again of
his sib.
"You mentioned the Silent One
and his theories," he said. "I’m thirty years behind on his
downloads, and I haven’t read his latest work–what is he up to?
What’s all this theorizing about?"
She sighed, fingers ringing a
frustrated rhythm on her glass. Looked out the window for a moment,
then conceded. "Has he mentioned the modular theory of the
psyche?"
Davout tried to remember. "He
said something about modular memory, I seem to
recall."
<Yes> "That’s a part of
it. It’s a fairly radical theory that states that people should edit
their personality and abilities at will, as circumstances dictate.
That one morning, say, if you’re going to work, you upload
appropriate memories, and work skills, along with a dose of
ambition, of resolution, and some appropriate emotions like
satisfaction and eagerness to solve problems, or endure drudgery, as
the case may be."
Davout looked at his plate.
"Like cookery, then," he said. "Like this dish–veal, carrots,
onions, celery, mushrooms, parsley."
Fair Katrin made a mudra that
Davout didn’t recognize. <Sorry?> he signed.
"Oh. Apologies. That one means,
roughly, ‘har-de-har-har.’ " Fingers formed <laughter>, then
<sarcasm>, then slurred them together. "See?"
<Understood.> He poured
more wine into her glass.
She leaned forward across her
plate. "Recipes are fine if one wants to be consumed," she
said. "Survival is another matter. The human mind is more than just
ingredients to be tossed together. The atomistic view of the psyche
is simplistic, dangerous, and wrong. You cannot will a
psyche to be whole, no matter how many wholeness modules are
uploaded. A psyche is more than the sum of its parts."
Wine and agitation burnished
her cheeks. Conviction blazed from her eyes. "It takes time
to integrate new experience, new abilities. The modular theorists
claim this will be done by a ‘conductor,’ an artificial intelligence
that will be able to judge between alternate personalities and
abilities and upload whatever’s needed. But that’s such
rubbish, I–" She looked at the knife she was waving, then
permitted it to return to the table.
"How far are the Silent One and
his cohorts toward realizing this ambition?" Davout said.
<Beg pardon?> She looked
at him. "I didn’t make that clear?" she said. "The technology is
already here. It’s happening. People are fragmenting their psyches
deliberately and trusting to their conductors to make sense of it
all. And they’re happy with their choices, because that’s the
only emotion they permit themselves to upload from their supply."
She clenched her teeth, glanced angrily out the window at the Vieux
Quartier’s sunset-burnished walls. "All traditional psychology is
aimed at integration, at wholeness. And now it’s all to be thrown
away. . . ." She flung her hand out the window. Davout’s eyes
automatically followed an invisible object on its arc from her
fingers toward the street.
"And how does this theory work
in practice?" Davout asked. "Are the streets filled with
psychological wrecks?"
Bitterness twisted her lips.
"Psychological imbeciles, more like. Executing their conductors’
orders, docile as well-fed children, happy as clams. They upload
passions–anger, grief, loss–as artificial experiences, secondhand
from someone else, usually so they can tell their conductor to avoid
such emotions in the future. They are not people any more,
they’re . . ." Her eyes turned to Davout.
"You saw the Silent One," she
said. "Would you call him a person?"
"I was with him for only a
day," Davout said. "I noticed something of a . . ." <Stand by>
he signed, searching for the word.
"Lack of affect?" she
interposed. "A demeanor marked by an extreme placidity?"
<Truth> he
signed.
"When it was clear I wouldn’t
come back to him, he wrote me out of his memory," Fair Katrin said.
"He replaced the memories with facts–he knows he was married
to me, he knows we went to such-and-such a place or wrote
such-and-such a paper–but there’s nothing else there. No feelings,
no real memories good or bad, no understanding, nothing left from
almost two centuries together." Tears glittered in her eyes. "I’d
rather he felt anything at all–I’d rather he hated me than feel this
apathy!"
Davout reached across the
little table and took her hand. "It is his decision," he said, "and
his loss."
"It is all our loss,"
she said. Reflected sunset flavored her tears with the color of
roses. "The man we loved is gone. And millions are gone with
him–millions of little half-alive souls, programmed for happiness
and unconcern." She tipped the bottle into her glass, received only
a sluicing of dregs.
"Let’s have another," she
said.
When he left, some hours later,
he embraced her, kissed her, let his lips linger on hers for perhaps
an extra half-second. She blinked up at him in wine-muddled
surprise, and then he took his leave.
"How did you find my sib?" Red
Katrin asked.
"Unhappy," Davout said.
"Confused. Lonely, I think. Living in a little apartment like a
cell, with icons and memories."
<I know> she signed, and
turned on him a knowing green-eyed look.
"Are you planning on taking her
away from all that? To the stars, perhaps?"
Davout’s surprise was brief. He
looked away and murmured, "I didn’t know I was so
transparent.
A smile touched her lips.
<Apologies> she signed. "I’ve lived with Old Davout for nearly
two hundred years. You and he haven’t grown so very far apart in
that time. My fair sib deserves happiness, and so do you . . . if
you can provide it, so much the better. But I wonder if you are not
moving too fast, if you have thought it all out."
Moving fast, Davout wondered.
His life seemed so very slow now, a creeping dance with agony, each
move a lifetime.
He glanced out at Chesapeake
Bay, saw his second perfect sunset in only a few hours–the same
sunset he’d watched from Fair Katrin’s apartment, now radiating its
red glories on the other side of the Atlantic. A few water-skaters
sped toward home on their silver blades. He sat with Red Katrin on a
porch swing, looking down the long green sward to the bayfront, the
old wooden pier, and the sparkling water, that profound, deep blue
that sang of home to Davout’s soul. Red Katrin wrapped herself
against the breeze in a fringed, autumn-colored shawl. Davout sipped
coffee from gold-rimmed porcelain, set the cup into its saucer.
"I wondered if I was being
untrue to my Katrin," he said. "But they are really the same
person, aren’t they? If I were to pursue some other woman now, I
would know I was committing a betrayal. But how can I betray Katrin
with herself?"
An uncertain look crossed Red
Katrin’s face. "I’ve downloaded them both," she said hesitantly,
"and I’m not certain that the Dark and Fair Katrins are quite the
same person. Or ever were."
Not the same–of course he knew
that. Fair Katrin was not a perfect copy of her older sib–she had
flaws, clear enough. She had been damaged, somehow. But the flaws
could be worked on, the damage repaired. Conquered. There was
infinite time. He would see it done.
<Question> "And how do
your sibs differ, then?" he asked. "Other than obvious differences
in condition and profession?"
She drew her legs up and rested
her chin on her knees. Her green eyes were pensive. "Matters of
love," she said, "and happiness."
And further she would not
say.
Davout took Fair Katrin to
Tangier for the afternoon and walked with her up on the old palace
walls. Below them, white in the sun, the curved mole built by
Charles II cleaved the Middle Sea, a thin crescent moon laid upon
the perfect shimmering azure. (Home! home!, the waters cried.) The
sea breeze lashed her blonde hair across her face, snapped little
sonic booms from the sleeves of his shirt.
"I have sampled some of the
Silent One’s downloads," Davout said. "I wished to discover the
nature of this artificial tranquility with which he has endowed
himself."
Fair Katrin’s lips twisted in
distaste, and her fingers formed a scatologue.
"It was . . . interesting,"
Davout said. "There was a strange, uncomplicated quality of bliss to
it. I remember experiencing the download of a master sitting zazen
once, and it was an experience of a similar cast."
"It may have been the exact
same sensation." Sourly. "He may have just copied the Zen master’s
experience and slotted it into his brain. That’s how most of
the vampires do it–award themselves the joy they haven’t
earned."
"That’s a Calvinistic point of
view," Davout offered. "That happiness can’t just happen, that it
has to be earned."
She frowned out at the sea.
"There is a difference between real experience and artificial or
recapitulative experience. If that’s Calvinist, so be
it."
<Yes> Davout signed.
"Call me a Calvinist sympathizer, then. I have been enough places,
done enough things, so that it matters to me that I was actually
there and not living out some programmed dream of life on other
worlds. I’ve experienced my sibs’ downloads–lived significant parts
of their lives, moment by moment–but it is not the same as my
life, as being me. I am," he said, leaning elbows on the
palace wall, "I am myself, I am the sum of everything that happened
to me, I stand on this wall, I am watching this sea, I am watching
it with you, and no one else has had this experience, nor ever
shall, it is ours, it belongs to us . . ."
She looked up at him,
straw-hair flying over an unreadable expression. "Davout the
Conqueror," she said.
<No> he signed. "I did
not conquer alone."
She nodded, holding his eyes
for a long moment. "Yes," she said. "I know."
He took Katrin the Fair in his
arms and kissed her. There was a moment’s stiff surprise, and then
she began to laugh, helpless peals bursting against his lips. He
held her for a moment, too surprised to react, and then she broke
free. She reeled along the wall, leaning for support against the old
stones. Davout followed, babbling, "I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
to–"
She leaned back against the
wall. Words burst half-hysterical from her lips, in between bursts
of desperate, unamused laughter. "So that’s what you were
after! My God! As if I hadn’t had enough of you all after all these
years!"
"I apologize," Davout said.
"Let’s forget this happened. I’ll take you home."
She looked up at him, the
laughter gone, blazing anger in its place. "The Silent One and I
would have been all right if it hadn’t been for you–for our
sibs!" She flung her words like daggers, her voice breaking with
passion. "You lot were the eldest, you’d already parceled out the
world between you. You were only interested in psychology because my
damned Red sib and your Old one wanted insight into the characters
in their histories, and because you and your dark bitch wanted a
theory of the psyche to aid you in building communities on other
worlds. We only got created because you were too damned lazy to
do your own research!"
Davout stood, stunned.
<No> he signed, "That’s not–"
"We were third," she
cried. "We were born in third place. We got the jobs you
wanted least, and while you older sibs were winning fame and
glory, we were stuck in work that didn’t suit, that you’d cast
off, awarded to us as if we were charity cases–" She stepped
closer, and Davout was amazed to find a white-knuckled fist being
shaken in his face. "My husband was called The Silent because his
sibs had already used up all the words! He was third-rate and
knew it! It destroyed him! Now he’s plugging
artificial satisfaction into his head because it’s the only way
he’ll ever feel it."
"If you didn’t like your life,"
Davout said, "you could have changed it. People start over all the
time–we’d have helped." He reached toward her. "I can help you to
the stars, if that’s what you want."
She backed away. "The only help
we ever needed was to get rid of you!" A mudra,
<har-de-har-har>, echoed the sarcastic laughter on Fair
Katrin’s lips. "And now there’s another gap in your life, and you
want me to fill it–not this time."
<Never> her
fingers echoed. <Never.> The laughter bubbled from her
throat again.
She fled, leaving him alone and
dazed on the palace wall, as the booming wind mocked his feeble
protests.
"I am truly sorry," Red Katrin
said. She leaned close to him on the porch swing, touched soft lips
to his cheek. "Even though she edited her downloads, I could tell
she resented us–but I truly did not know how she would
react."
Davout was frantic. He could
feel Katrin slipping farther and farther away, as if she were on the
edge of a precipice and her handholds were crumbling away beneath
her clawed fingers.
"Is what she said true?" he
asked. "Have we been slighting them all these years? Using them, as
she claims?"
"Perhaps she had some
justification once," Red Katrin said. "I do not remember anything of
the sort when we were young, when I was uploading Fair Katrin almost
every day. But now . . ." Her expression grew severe. "These are
mature people, not without resources or intelligence–I can’t help
but think that surely after a person is a century old, any problems
that remain are her fault."
As he rocked on the porch swing
he could feel a wildness rising in him. My God, he thought,
I am going to be alone.
His brief days of hope were
gone. He stared out at the bay–the choppy water was too rough for
any but the most dedicated water-skaters–and felt the pain pressing
on his brain, like the two thumbs of a practiced sadist digging into
the back of his skull.
"I wonder," he said. "Have you
given any further thought to uploading my memories?"
She looked at him curiously.
"It’s scarcely time yet."
"I feel a need to share . . .
some things."
"Old Davout has uploaded them.
You could speak to him."
This perfectly intelligent
suggestion only made him clench his teeth. He needed sense
made of things, he needed things put in order, and that was
not the job of his sib. Old Davout would only confirm what he
already knew.
"I’ll talk to him, then," he
said.
And then never did.
The pain was worst at night. It
wasn’t the sleeping alone, or merely Katrin’s absence: it was the
knowledge that she would always be absent, that the empty
space next to him would be there forever. It was then that the
horror fully struck him, and he would lie awake for hours, eyes
staring into the terrible void that wrapped him in its dark cloak,
while fits of trembling sped through his limbs.
I will go
mad, he sometimes
thought. It seemed something he could choose, as if he were a
character in an Elizabethan drama who turns to the audience to
announce that he will be mad now, and then in the next scene is
found gnawing bones dug out of the family sepulcher. Davout could
see himself being found outside, running on all fours and barking at
the stars.
And then, as dawn crept across
the windowsill, he would look out the window and realize, to his
sorrow, that he was not yet mad, that he was condemned to another
day of sanity, of pain, and of grief.
Then, one night, he did
go mad. He found himself squatting on the floor in his nightshirt,
the room a ruin around him: mirrors smashed, furniture broken. Blood
was running down his forearms.
The door leapt off its hinges
with a heave of Old Davout’s shoulder. Davout realized, in a vague
way, that his sib had been trying to get in for some time. He saw
Red Katrin’s silhouette in the door, an aureate halo around her
auburn hair in the instant before Old Davout snapped on the
light.
Afterward Katrin pulled the
bits of broken mirror out of Davout’s hands, washed and disinfected
them, while his sib tried to reconstruct the green room and its
antique furniture.
Davout watched his spatters of
blood stain the water, threads of scarlet whirling in coreolis
spirals. "I’m sorry," he said. "I think I may be losing my
mind."
"I doubt that." Frowning at a
bit of glass in her tweezers.
"I want to know."
Something in his voice made her
look up. "Yes?"
He could see his staring
reflection in her green eyes. "Read my downloads. Please. I want to
know if . . . I’m reacting normally in all this. If I’m lucid or
just . . ." He fell silent. Do it, he thought. Just do
this one thing.
"I don’t upload other people.
Davout can do that. Old Davout, I mean."
No, Davout thought. His sib
would understand all too well what he was up to.
"But he’s me!" he said. "He’d
think I’m normal!"
"Silent Davout, then. Crazy
people are his specialty."
Davout wanted to make a mudra
of scorn, but Red Katrin held his hands captive. Instead he gave a
laugh. "He’d want me to take Lethe. Any advice he gave would be . .
. in that direction." He made a fist of one hand, saw drops of blood
well up through the cuts. "I need to know if I can stand this," he
said. "If–something drastic is required."
She nodded, looked again at the
sharp little spear of glass, put it deliberately on the edge of the
porcelain. Her eyes narrowed in thought–Davout felt his heart vault
at that look, at the familiar lines forming at the corner of Red
Katrin’s right eye, each one known and adored.
Please do
it, he thought
desperately.
"If it’s that important to
you," she said, "I will."
"Thank you," he said.
He bent his head over her and
the basin, raised her hand, and pressed his lips to the flesh beaded
with water and streaked with blood.
It was almost like conducting
an affair, all clandestine meetings and whispered arrangements. Red
Katrin did not want Old Davout to know she was uploading his sib’s
memories–"I would just as soon not deal with his disapproval"–and so
she and Davout had to wait until he was gone for a few hours, a trip
to record a lecture for Cavor’s series on Ideas and
Manners.
She settled onto the settee in
the front room and covered herself with her fringed shawl. Closed
her eyes. Let Davout’s memories roll through her.
He sat in a chair nearby, his
mouth dry. Though nearly thirty years had passed since Dark Katrin’s
death, he had experienced only a few weeks of that time; and Red
Katrin was floating through these memories at speed, tasting here
and there, skipping redundancies or moments that seemed
inconsequential . . .
He tried to guess from her face
where in his life she dwelt. The expression of shock and horror near
the start was clear enough, the shuttle bursting into flames. After
the shock faded, he recognized the discomfort that came with
experiencing a strange mind, and flickering across her face came
expressions of grief, anger, and here and there amusement; but
gradually there was only a growing sadness, and lashes wet with
tears. He crossed the room to kneel by her chair and take her hand.
Her fingers pressed his in response . . . she took a breath, rolled
her head away . . . he wanted to weep not for his grief, but for
hers.
The eyes fluttered open. She
shook her head. "I had to stop," she said. "I couldn’t take it–" She
looked at him, a kind of awe in her wide green eyes. "My God, the
sadness! And the need. I had no idea. I’ve never felt such
need. I wonder what it is to be needed that way."
He kissed her hand, her damp
cheek. Her arms went around him. He felt a leap of joy, of clarity.
The need was hers, now.
Davout carried her to the bed
she shared with his sib, and together they worshipped memories of
his Katrin.
"I will take you there," Davout
said. His finger reached into the night sky, counted stars, one,
two, three. . . . "The planet’s called Atugan. It’s boiling hot,
nothing but rock and desert, sulphur and slag. But we can make it
home for ourselves and our children–all the species of children we
desire, fish and fowl." A bubble of happiness filled his heart.
"Dinosaurs, if you like," he said. "Would you like to be parent to a
dinosaur?"
He felt Katrin leave the
shelter of his arm, step toward the moonlit bay. Waves rumbled under
the old wooden pier. "I’m not trained for terraforming," she said.
"I’d be useless on such a trip."
"I’m decades behind in my own
field," Davout said. "You could learn while I caught up. You’ll have
Dark Katrin’s downloads to help. It’s all possible."
She turned toward him. The
lights of the house glowed yellow off her pale face, off her swift
fingers as she signed.
<Regret> "I have lived
with Old Davout for near two centuries," she said.
His life, for a moment, seemed
to skip off its internal track; he felt himself suspended, poised at
the top of an arc just before the fall.
Her eyes brooded up at the
house, where Old Davout paced and sipped coffee and pondered his
life of Maxwell. The mudras at her fingertips were unreadable in the
dark.
"I will do as I did before,"
she said. "I cannot go with you, but my other self will."
Davout felt his life resume.
"Yes," he said, because he was in shadow and could not sign. "By all
means." He stepped nearer to her. "I would rather it be you," he
whispered.
He saw wry amusement touch the
corners of her mouth. "It will be me," she said. She stood on
tiptoe, kissed his cheek. "But now I am your sister again, yes?" Her
eyes looked level into his. "Be patient. I will arrange
it."
"I will in all things obey you,
madam," he said, and felt wild hope singing in his heart.
Davout was present at her
awakening, and her hand was in his as she opened her violet eyes,
the eyes of his Dark Katrin. She looked at him in perfect
comprehension, lifted a hand to her black hair; and then the eyes
turned to the pair standing behind him, to Old Davout and Red
Katrin.
"Young man," Davout said,
putting his hand on Davout’s shoulder, "allow me to present you to
my wife." And then (wisest of the sibs), he bent over and whispered,
a bit pointedly, into Davout’s ear, "I trust you will do the same
for me, one day."
Davout concluded, through his
surprise, that the secret of a marriage that lasts two hundred years
is knowing when to turn a blind eye.
"I confess I am somewhat
envious," Red Katrin said as she and Old Davout took their leave. "I
envy my twin her new life."
"It’s your life as well," he
said. "She is you." But she looked at him soberly, and her
fingers formed a mudra he could not read.
He took her on honeymoon to the
Rockies, used some of his seventy-eight years’ back pay to rent a
sprawling cabin in a high valley above the headwaters of the Rio
Grande, where the wind rolled grandly through the pines, hawks spun
lazy high circles on the afternoon thermals, and the brilliant clear
light blazed on white starflowers and Indian paintbrush. They went
on long walks in the high hills, cooked simply in the cramped
kitchen, slept beneath scratchy trade blankets, made love on crisp
cotton sheets.
He arranged an office there,
two desks and two chairs, back-to-back. Katrin applied herself to
learning biology, ecology, nanotech, and quantum physics–she already
had a good grounding, but a specialist’s knowledge was lacking.
Davout tutored her, and worked hard at catching up with the latest
developments in the field. She–they did not have a name for her yet,
though Davout thought of her as "New Katrin"–would review Dark
Katrin’s old downloads, concentrating on her work, the way she
visualized a problem.
Once, opening her eyes after an
upload, she looked at Davout and shook her head. "It’s strange," she
said. "It’s me, I know it’s me, but the way she
thinks–" <I don’t understand> she signed. "It’s not
memories that make us, we’re told, but patterns of thought. We are
who we are because we think using certain patterns . . . but I do
not seem to think like her at all."
"It’s habit," Davout said.
"Your habit is to think a different way."
<Possibly> she conceded,
brows knit.
<Truth> "You–Red
Katrin–uploaded Dark Katrin before. You had no difficulty in
understanding her then."
"I did not concentrate on the
technical aspects of her work, on the way she visualized and solved
problems. They were beyond my skill to interpret–I paid more
attention to other moments in her life." She lifted her eyes to
Davout. "Her moments with you, for instance. Which were very rich,
and very intense, and which sometimes made me jealous."
"No need for jealousy
now."
<Perhaps> she signed, but
her dark eyes were thoughtful, and she turned away.
He felt Katrin’s silence after
that, an absence that seemed to fill the cabin with the invisible,
weighty cloud of her somber thought. Katrin spent her time studying
by herself or restlessly paging through Dark Katrin’s downloads. At
meals and in bed, she was quiet, meditative–perfectly friendly, and,
he thought, not unhappy–but keeping her thoughts to
herself.
She is
adjusting, he thought.
It is not an easy thing for someone two centuries old to change.
"I have realized," she said ten
days later at breakfast, "that my sib–that Red Katrin–is a coward.
That I am created–and the other sibs, too–to do what she would not,
or dared not." Her violet eyes gazed levelly at Davout. "She wanted
to go with you to Atugan, she wanted to feel the power of your
desire . . . but something held her back. So I am created to do the
job for her. It is my purpose . . . to fulfill her
purpose."
"It’s her loss, then," Davout
said, though his fingers signed <surprise>.
<Alas!> she signed, and
Davout felt a shiver caress his spine. "But I am a coward, too!"
Katrin cried. "I am not your brave Dark Katrin, and I cannot
become her!"
"Katrin," he said. "You are the
same person–you all are!"
She shook her head. "I do not
think like your Katrin. I do not have her courage. I do not know
what liberated her from her fear, but it is something I do not have.
And–" She reached across the table to clasp his hand. "I do not have
the feelings for you that she possessed. I simply do not. I have
tried, I have had that world-eating passion read into my mind, and I
compare it with what I feel, and–what I have is as nothing. I
wish I felt as she did, I truly do. But if I love anyone, it
is Old Davout. And . . ." She let go his hand, and rose from the
table. "I am a coward, and I will take the coward’s way out. I must
leave."
<No> his fingers formed,
then <please>. "You can change that," he said. He followed her
into the bedroom. "It’s just a switch in your mind, Silent Davout
can throw it for you, we can love each other forever. . . ." She
made no answer. As she began to pack, grief seized him by the throat
and the words dried up. He retreated to the little kitchen, sat at
the table, held his head in his hands. He looked up when she paused
in the door, and froze like a deer in the violet light of her
eyes.
"Fair Katrin was right," she
said. "Our elder sibs are bastards–they use us, and not
kindly."
A few moments later he heard a
car drive up, then leave. <Alas!> his fingers signed.
<Alas!>
He spent the day unable to
leave the cabin, unable to work, terror shivering through him. After
dark, he was driven outside by the realization that he would have to
sleep on sheets that were touched with Katrin’s scent. He wandered
by starlight across the high mountain meadow, dry soil crunching
beneath his boots, and when his legs began to ache he sat down
heavily in the dust.
"I am weary of my
groaning. . . ." he thought.
It was summer, but the high
mountains were chill at night, and the deep cold soaked his
thoughts. The word Lethe floated through his mind. Who would
not choose to be happy? he asked himself. It is a switch in your
mind, and someone can throw it for you.
He felt the slow, aching
droplets of mourning being squeezed from his heart, one after the
other, and wondered how long he could endure them, the relentless
moments, each striking with the impact of a hammer, each a stunning,
percussive blow. . . .
Throw a switch, he thought, and
the hammerblows would end.
"Katrin deserves mourning," he
had told Davout the Silent, and now he had so many more Katrins to
mourn, Dark Katrin and Katrin the Fair, Katrin the New and Katrin
the Old. All the Katrins webbed by fate, alive or dead or merely
enduring. And so he would, from necessity, endure. . . . So long
lives this, and this gives life to thee.
He lay on his back, on the cold
ground, gazed up at the world of stars, and tried to find the
worlds, among the glittering teardrops of the heavens, where he and
Katrin had rained from the sky their millions of
children. |
