Davout stood, stunned.
“We were third,” she cried. “We were born in third place. We got the jobs you wanted least, and while you older sibs were winning fame and glory, we were stuck in work that didn’t suit, that you’d cast off, awarded to us as if we were charity cases–” She stepped closer, and Davout was amazed to find a white-knuckled fist being shaken in his face. “My husband was called The Silent because his sibs had already used up all the words! He was third-rate and knew it! It destroyed him! Now he’s plugging artificial satisfaction into his head because it’s the only way he’ll ever feel it.”
“If you didn’t like your life,” Davout said, “you could have changed it. People start over all the time–we’d have helped.” He reached toward her. “I can help you to the stars, if that’s what you want.”
She backed away. “The only help we ever needed was to get rid of you!” A mudra,
She fled, leaving him alone and dazed on the palace wall, as the booming wind mocked his feeble protests.
“I am truly sorry,” Red Katrin said. She leaned close to him on the porch swing, touched soft lips to his cheek. “Even though she edited her downloads, I could tell she resented us–but I truly did not know how she would react.”
Davout was frantic. He could feel Katrin slipping farther and farther away, as if she were on the edge of a precipice and her handholds were crumbling away beneath her clawed fingers.
“Is what she said true?” he asked. “Have we been slighting them all these years? Using them, as she claims?”
“Perhaps she had some justification once,” Red Katrin said. “I do not remember anything of the sort when we were young, when I was uploading Fair Katrin almost every day. But now . . .” Her expression grew severe. “These are mature people, not without resources or intelligence–I can’t help but think that surely after a person is a century old, any problems that remain are her fault.”
As he rocked on the porch swing he could feel a wildness rising in him. My God, he thought, I am going to be alone.
His brief days of hope were gone. He stared out at the bay–the choppy water was too rough for any but the most dedicated water-skaters–and felt the pain pressing on his brain, like the two thumbs of a practiced sadist digging into the back of his skull.
“I wonder,” he said. “Have you given any further thought to uploading my memories?”
She looked at him curiously. “It’s scarcely time yet.”
“I feel a need to share . . . some things.”
“Old Davout has uploaded them. You could speak to him.”
This perfectly intelligent suggestion only made him clench his teeth. He needed sense made of things, he needed things put in order, and that was not the job of his sib. Old Davout would only confirm what he already knew.
“I’ll talk to him, then,” he said.
And then never did.
The pain was worst at night. It wasn’t the sleeping alone, or merely Katrin’s absence: it was the knowledge that she would always be absent, that the empty space next to him would be there forever. It was then that the horror fully struck him, and he would lie awake for hours, eyes staring into the terrible void that wrapped him in its dark cloak, while fits of trembling sped through his limbs.
I will go mad, he sometimes thought. It seemed something he could choose, as if he were a character in an Elizabethan drama who turns to the audience to announce that he will be mad now, and then in the next scene is found gnawing bones dug out of the family sepulcher. Davout could see himself being found outside, running on all fours and barking at the stars.
And then, as dawn crept across the windowsill, he would look out the window and realize, to his sorrow, that he was not yet mad, that he was condemned to another day of sanity, of pain, and of grief.