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.
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."
"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."
Clouds gathered in her grey eyes. "I, too, have regrets."
"There is no chance of reconciliation?"
"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.
"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 would never 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 ragout 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."
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.
"Oh. Apologies. That one means, roughly, 'har-de-har-har.'" Fingers formed
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.
"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 anymore, 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 . . . "
"Lack of affect?" she interposed. "A demeanor marked by an extreme placidity?"
"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."
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.
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," 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
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."
She looked up at him, straw-hair flying over an unreadable expression. "Davout the Conqueror," she said.
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.
"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,
She fled, leaving him alone and dazed on the palace wall, the booming wind mocking 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 anythi
ng of the sort when we were young, when I was uploading Fair Katrin almost every day. But now," her expression growing 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 sensible 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 lie 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. 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 sepulchre. Davout could see himself being found outside, running on all fours and barking at the stars.
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 7