Lethe

“How far are the Silent One and his cohorts toward realizing this ambition?” Davout said.

She looked at him. “I didn’t make that clear?” she said. “The technology is already here. It’s happening. People are fragmenting their psyches deliberately and trusting to their conductors to make sense of it all. And they’re happy with their choices, because that’s the only emotion they permit themselves to upload from their supply.” She clenched her teeth, glanced angrily out the window at the Vieux Quartier’s sunset-burnished walls. “All traditional psychology is aimed at integration, at wholeness. And now it’s all to be thrown away. . . .” She flung her hand out the window. Davout’s eyes automatically followed an invisible object on its arc from her fingers toward the street.

“And how does this theory work in practice?” Davout asked. “Are the streets filled with psychological wrecks?”

Bitterness twisted her lips. “Psychological imbeciles, more like. Executing their conductors’ orders, docile as well-fed children, happy as clams. They upload passions–anger, grief, loss–as artificial experiences, secondhand from someone else, usually so they can tell their conductor to avoid such emotions in the future. They are not people any more, they’re . . .” Her eyes turned to Davout.

“You saw the Silent One,” she said. “Would you call him a person?”

“I was with him for only a day,” Davout said. “I noticed something of a . . .” he signed, searching for the word.

“Lack of affect?” she interposed. “A demeanor marked by an extreme placidity?”

he signed.

“When it was clear I wouldn’t come back to him, he wrote me out of his memory,” Fair Katrin said. “He replaced the memories with facts–he knows he was married to me, he knows we went to such-and-such a place or wrote such-and-such a paper–but there’s nothing else there. No feelings, no real memories good or bad, no understanding, nothing left from almost two centuries together.” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I’d rather he felt anything at all–I’d rather he hated me than feel this apathy!”

Davout reached across the little table and took her hand. “It is his decision,” he said, “and his loss.”

“It is all our loss,” she said. Reflected sunset flavored her tears with the color of roses. “The man we loved is gone. And millions are gone with him–millions of little half-alive souls, programmed for happiness and unconcern.” She tipped the bottle into her glass, received only a sluicing of dregs.

“Let’s have another,” she said.

When he left, some hours later, he embraced her, kissed her, let his lips linger on hers for perhaps an extra half-second. She blinked up at him in wine-muddled surprise, and then he took his leave.

“How did you find my sib?” Red Katrin asked.

“Unhappy,” Davout said. “Confused. Lonely, I think. Living in a little apartment like a cell, with icons and memories.”

she signed, and turned on him a knowing green-eyed look.

“Are you planning on taking her away from all that? To the stars, perhaps?”

Davout’s surprise was brief. He looked away and murmured, “I didn’t know I was so transparent.

A smile touched her lips. she signed. “I’ve lived with Old Davout for nearly two hundred years. You and he haven’t grown so very far apart in that time. My fair sib deserves happiness, and so do you . . . if you can provide it, so much the better. But I wonder if you are not moving too fast, if you have thought it all out.”

Moving fast, Davout wondered. His life seemed so very slow now, a creeping dance with agony, each move a lifetime.

He glanced out at Chesapeake Bay, saw his second perfect sunset in only a few hours–the same sunset he’d watched from Fair Katrin’s apartment, now radiating its red glories on the other side of the Atlantic. A few water-skaters sped toward home on their silver blades. He sat with Red Katrin on a porch swing, looking down the long green sward to the bayfront, the old wooden pier, and the sparkling water, that profound, deep blue that sang of home to Davout’s soul. Red Katrin wrapped herself against the breeze in a fringed, autumn-colored shawl. Davout sipped coffee from gold-rimmed porcelain, set the cup into its saucer.