He knew he had never been in Java before, though, and wondered whence the memory came. From one of his sibs, perhaps?
Dr. Li left Davout alone, in his new/old body, in the room that whispered of memory and pain.
In a dark wood armoire, Davout found identification and clothing, and a record confirming that his account had received seventy-eight years’ back pay. His electronic inbox contained downloads from his sibs and more personal messages than he could cope with–he would have to construct an electronic personality to answer most of them.
He dressed and left the hospital. Whoever supervised his reassembly–Dr. Li perhaps–had thoughtfully included a complete Earth atlas in his internal ROM, and he accessed it as he walked, making random turnings but never getting lost. The furious sun burned down with tropical intensity, but his current body was constructed to bear heat, and a breeze off the mountains made pleasant even the blazing noontide.
The joyful metal music of the gamelans clattered from almost every doorway. People in bright clothing, agile as the siamang of near Sumatra, sped overhead along treeways and ropeways, arms and hands modified for brachiation. Robots, immune to the heat, shimmered past on silent tires. Davout found it all strangely familiar, as if he had been here in a dream.
And then he found himself by the sea, and a pang of familiarity knifed through his heart. Home! cried his thoughts. Other worlds he had built, other beauties he had seen, but he had never beheld this blue, this perfection, anywhere else but on his native sphere. Subtle differences in atmospherics had rendered this color unnatural on any other world.
And with the cry of familiarity came a memory: it had been Davout the Silent who had come here, a century or more ago, and Katrin had been by his side.
But Davout’s Katrin was dead. And as he looked on Earth’s beauty, he felt his world of joy turn to bitter ashes.
He lived in a world where no one died, and nothing was ever lost. One understood that such things occasionally occurred, but never–hardly ever–to anyone that one knew. Physical immortality was cheap and easy, and was supported by so many alternate systems: backing up the mind by downloading, or downloading into a virtual reality system or into a durable machine. Nanosystems duplicated the body or improved it, adapted it for different environments. Data slumbered in secure storage, awaiting the electron kiss that returned it to life. Bringing a child to term in the womb was now the rarest form of reproduction, and bringing a child to life in a machine womb the next rarest.
It was so much easier to have the nanos duplicate you as an adult. Then, at least, you had someone to talk to.
No one died, and nothing was ever lost. But Katrin died, Davout thought, and now I am lost, and it was not supposed to be this way.
Davout and Katrin had met in school, members of the last generation in which womb-breeding outnumbered the alternatives. Immortality whispered its covenant into their receptive ears. On their first meeting, attending a lecture (Dolphus on “Reinventing the Humboldt Sea”) at the College of Mystery, they looked at each other and knew, as if angels had whispered into their ears, that there was now one less mystery in the world, that each served as an answer to another, that each fitted neatly into a hollow that the other had perceived in his or her soul, dropping into place as neatly as a butter-smooth piece in a finely made teak puzzle–or, considering their interests, as easily as a carbolic functional group nested into place on an indole ring.
Their rapport was, they freely admitted, miraculous. Still young, they exploded into the world, into a universe that welcomed them.
He could not bear to be away from her. Twenty-four hours was the absolute limit before Davout’s nerves began to beat a frustrated little tattoo, and he found himself conjuring a phantom Katrin in his imagination, just to have someone to share the world with–he needed her there, needed this human lens through which he viewed the universe.