Lethe

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Lethe Page 5

by Walter Jon Williams


  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.

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