“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.
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.
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?”