Lethe

“It’s habit,” Davout said. “Your habit is to think a different way.”

she conceded, brows knit.

“You–Red Katrin–uploaded Dark Katrin before. You had no difficulty in understanding her then.”

“I did not concentrate on the technical aspects of her work, on the way she visualized and solved problems. They were beyond my skill to interpret–I paid more attention to other moments in her life.” She lifted her eyes to Davout. “Her moments with you, for instance. Which were very rich, and very intense, and which sometimes made me jealous.”

“No need for jealousy now.”

she signed, but her dark eyes were thoughtful, and she turned away.

He felt Katrin’s silence after that, an absence that seemed to fill the cabin with the invisible, weighty cloud of her somber thought. Katrin spent her time studying by herself or restlessly paging through Dark Katrin’s downloads. At meals and in bed, she was quiet, meditative–perfectly friendly, and, he thought, not unhappy–but keeping her thoughts to herself.

She is adjusting, he thought. It is not an easy thing for someone two centuries old to change.

“I have realized,” she said ten days later at breakfast, “that my sib–that Red Katrin–is a coward. That I am created–and the other sibs, too–to do what she would not, or dared not.” Her violet eyes gazed levelly at Davout. “She wanted to go with you to Atugan, she wanted to feel the power of your desire . . . but something held her back. So I am created to do the job for her. It is my purpose . . . to fulfill her purpose.”

“It’s her loss, then,” Davout said, though his fingers signed .

she signed, and Davout felt a shiver caress his spine. “But I am a coward, too!” Katrin cried. “I am not your brave Dark Katrin, and I cannot become her!”

“Katrin,” he said. “You are the same person–you all are!”

She shook her head. “I do not think like your Katrin. I do not have her courage. I do not know what liberated her from her fear, but it is something I do not have. And–” She reached across the table to clasp his hand. “I do not have the feelings for you that she possessed. I simply do not. I have tried, I have had that world-eating passion read into my mind, and I compare it with what I feel, and–what I have is as nothing. I wish I felt as she did, I truly do. But if I love anyone, it is Old Davout. And . . .” She let go his hand, and rose from the table. “I am a coward, and I will take the coward’s way out. I must leave.”

his fingers formed, then . “You can change that,” he said. He followed her into the bedroom. “It’s just a switch in your mind, Silent Davout can throw it for you, we can love each other forever. . . .” She made no answer. As she began to pack, grief seized him by the throat and the words dried up. He retreated to the little kitchen, sat at the table, held his head in his hands. He looked up when she paused in the door, and froze like a deer in the violet light of her eyes.

“Fair Katrin was right,” she said. “Our elder sibs are bastards–they use us, and not kindly.”

A few moments later he heard a car drive up, then leave. his fingers signed.

He spent the day unable to leave the cabin, unable to work, terror shivering through him. After dark, he was driven outside by the realization that he would have to sleep on sheets that were touched with Katrin’s scent. He wandered by starlight across the high mountain meadow, dry soil crunching beneath his boots, and when his legs began to ache he sat down heavily in the dust.