Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny

Davout signed, but only because his words would have come out with too much bitterness.

, 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.”

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. he signed. “Can I move from the bed now?”

Li’s look turned abstract as he scanned indicators projected somewhere in his mind. “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.”

“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?

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.

His fingers formed the word unbidden.

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.

Fingers wailed the grief that was stopped up in Davout’s throat.

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.

the fingers signed. 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 . 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. he signed, and then made another sign for , 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?”

“Due to the delays, I’m thirty years behind on my uploading.”

“Ah.” “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.”

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?”

“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?”

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?”

“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 , “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.

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.” in his hand, bitterness on his tongue. “I would give those people my memories, if they want them so much.”

“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 . “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.

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?”

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.”

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?”

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.

“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. “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.

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?”

“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.

he signed. His frustration must have been plain to Red Katrin, because she took his hand, lifted her green eyes to his.