Lethe

Lethe

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 . “Yes.” “And this isn’t a virtual?” again. “No.” “Then something has gone wrong.”

“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. said the left hand, the old finger position for a now-obsolete palmtop computer, a finger position that had once meant pause, as 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?”

“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 .

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 , 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.