He kissed her hand, her damp cheek. Her arms went around him. He felt a leap of joy, of clarity. The need was hers, now.
Davout carried her to the bed she shared with his sib, and together they worshipped memories of his Katrin.
“I will take you there,” Davout said. His finger reached into the night sky, counted stars, one, two, three. . . . “The planet’s called Atugan. It’s boiling hot, nothing but rock and desert, sulphur and slag. But we can make it home for ourselves and our children–all the species of children we desire, fish and fowl.” A bubble of happiness filled his heart. “Dinosaurs, if you like,” he said. “Would you like to be parent to a dinosaur?”
He felt Katrin leave the shelter of his arm, step toward the moonlit bay. Waves rumbled under the old wooden pier. “I’m not trained for terraforming,” she said. “I’d be useless on such a trip.”
“I’m decades behind in my own field,” Davout said. “You could learn while I caught up. You’ll have Dark Katrin’s downloads to help. It’s all possible.”
She turned toward him. The lights of the house glowed yellow off her pale face, off her swift fingers as she signed.
His life, for a moment, seemed to skip off its internal track; he felt himself suspended, poised at the top of an arc just before the fall.
Her eyes brooded up at the house, where Old Davout paced and sipped coffee and pondered his life of Maxwell. The mudras at her fingertips were unreadable in the dark.
“I will do as I did before,” she said. “I cannot go with you, but my other self will.”
Davout felt his life resume. “Yes,” he said, because he was in shadow and could not sign. “By all means.” He stepped nearer to her. “I would rather it be you,” he whispered.
He saw wry amusement touch the corners of her mouth. “It will be me,” she said. She stood on tiptoe, kissed his cheek. “But now I am your sister again, yes?” Her eyes looked level into his. “Be patient. I will arrange it.”
“I will in all things obey you, madam,” he said, and felt wild hope singing in his heart.
Davout was present at her awakening, and her hand was in his as she opened her violet eyes, the eyes of his Dark Katrin. She looked at him in perfect comprehension, lifted a hand to her black hair; and then the eyes turned to the pair standing behind him, to Old Davout and Red Katrin.
“Young man,” Davout said, putting his hand on Davout’s shoulder, “allow me to present you to my wife.” And then (wisest of the sibs), he bent over and whispered, a bit pointedly, into Davout’s ear, “I trust you will do the same for me, one day.”
Davout concluded, through his surprise, that the secret of a marriage that lasts two hundred years is knowing when to turn a blind eye.
“I confess I am somewhat envious,” Red Katrin said as she and Old Davout took their leave. “I envy my twin her new life.”
“It’s your life as well,” he said. “She is you.” But she looked at him soberly, and her fingers formed a mudra he could not read.
He took her on honeymoon to the Rockies, used some of his seventy-eight years’ back pay to rent a sprawling cabin in a high valley above the headwaters of the Rio Grande, where the wind rolled grandly through the pines, hawks spun lazy high circles on the afternoon thermals, and the brilliant clear light blazed on white starflowers and Indian paintbrush. They went on long walks in the high hills, cooked simply in the cramped kitchen, slept beneath scratchy trade blankets, made love on crisp cotton sheets.
He arranged an office there, two desks and two chairs, back-to-back. Katrin applied herself to learning biology, ecology, nanotech, and quantum physics–she already had a good grounding, but a specialist’s knowledge was lacking. Davout tutored her, and worked hard at catching up with the latest developments in the field. She–they did not have a name for her yet, though Davout thought of her as “New Katrin”–would review Dark Katrin’s old downloads, concentrating on her work, the way she visualized a problem.