Lethe - Williams Walter Jon - Страница 4

"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?"

No "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?"

No. 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?"

No, thanks "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 irony, "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.

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

Of course "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 of course. "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.

No 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?"

Yes 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."