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.
Afterwards 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 Coriolis 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 affaire, 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, sulfur 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.
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—" 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."
"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."
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 gaze 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
"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."
"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.
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.
Afterword: Lethe
I started my career as a writer of historical fiction, specifically novels taking place in the Age of Sail, a genre pioneered by James Fenimore Cooper and later practiced successfully by C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, among others. I enjoyed writing these journeyman works, but over time I grew frustrated by the sameness of the setting. Book after book, I had a cast of a couple hundred males aboard a small ship. I longed to break free into the universe, which I eventually did by becoming a science fiction writer.
When I began writing SF, I realized that I could tell practically any story that appealed to me, as long as I set it in a science fiction context, and so I made a list of the sorts of stories I longed to write. The list was as follows:
A future in which everything went right. (This became my novel Knight Moves.)
A future in which everything went wrong. (This became Hardwired.)
A mystery/thriller. (Voice of the Whirlwind)
A first-contact story. (Angel Station)
A Restoration-style comedy of manners. (The Crown Jewels and its sequels)
A hard-boiled mystery. (Days of Atonement)
Within a six-to-eight month period, I had these works outlined, at least in my head. (Voice of the Whirlwind, which I had begun some years earlier, took a little longer.) For the next several years, I went about the task of realizing the works that I had envisioned during that one manic period of creativity.
As I worked my way to the end of the list, I began to worry that maybe I'd lost my creative spark: I hadn't had anything like that period of creativity in the time since.
Then I wrote Aristoi, and I stopped worrying.
None of this has any direct bearing on "Lethe," except to note that the very first thing I wanted to write was the future in which everything went right.
In my versions of this future, every box has been checked on humanity's collective wish list: there is no poverty, war, disease, or death. Some might claim that this deprives the future of the raw material for fiction, but my own view is that, with our inherited burden of tragic distractions out of the way, we might be able to get on with the actual search for meaning.
In any case, getting rid of war and death makes the search for a story all that much more imaginative.
I wrote "Lethe" in a period in which I was looking for just that kind of challenge. In order to challenge myself further, I decided to outdo Comedy of Errors by making the story about two sets of triplets.
And I couldn't avoid death altogether. The foundation of the story, after all, is what happens when death occurs in a culture where death simply does not happen.
It occurred to me that it would make an interesting challenge to write this same story over again from the point of view of any of the other Davouts or Katrins, but I haven't taken up the challenge as yet.
This was the first, but not the last, story taking place in what I call the College of Mystery sequence.
The Last Ride of
German Freddie
"Ecce homo," said German Freddie with a smile. "That is your man, I believe."
"That's him," Brocius agreed. "That's Virgil Earp, the lawman."
"What do you suppose he wants?" asked Freddie.
"He's got a warrant for someone," said Brocius, "or he wouldn't be here."
Freddie gazed without enthusiasm at the lawman walking along the opposite side of Allen Street in Tombstone. His spurred boots clumped on the wooden sidewalk. He looked as if he had somewhere to go.
"Entities should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary," said Freddie, "or so Occam is understood to have said. If he is here for one of us, then so much the worse for him. If not, what does it matter to us?"
Curly Bill Brocius looked thoughtful. "I don't know about this Occam fellow, but as my mamma would say, those fellers don't chew their own tobacco. Kansas lawmen come at you in packs."
"So do we," said Freddie. "And this is not Kansas."
"No," said Brocius. "It's Tombstone." He gave Freddie a warning look from his lazy eyes. "Remember that, my friend," he said, "and watch your back."
Brocius drifted up Allen Street in the direction of Hafford's Saloon while Freddie contemplated Deputy U.S. Marshal Earp. The man was dressed like the parson of a particularly gloomy Protestant sect, with a black flat-crowned hat, black frock coat, black trousers, and immaculate white linen.
German Freddie decided he might as well meet this paradigm.
He walked across the dusty Tombstone street, stepped onto the sidewalk, and raised his grey sombrero.
"Pardon me," he said. "But are you Virgil Earp?"
The man looked at him, light eyes over fair mustache. "No," he said. "I'm his brother."
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 8