Lethe Read online

  Lethe

  Walter Jon Williams

  Walter Jon Williams

  Lethe

  First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1997. Nominated for Best Novellette.

  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 s
omewhere 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 noesis, 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 armc
hair. "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.