The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

by Walter Jon Williams

  The youngest of the sibs was not tall, but he was built solidly, as if for permanence, and his head seemed slightly oversized for his body. With his older sibs he had always maintained a kind of formal reserve that had resulted in his being nicknamed "the Silent." Accepting the name, he remarked that the reason he spoke little when the others were around is that his older sibs had already said everything that needed saying before he got to it.

  Davout stepped back and smiled. "Your patients must think you a tower of strength."

  "I have no patients these days. Mostly I work in the realm of theory."

  "I will have to look up your work. I'm so far behind on uploads—I don't have any idea what you and Katrin have been doing these last decades."

  Silent Davout stepped to the armoire and opened its ponderous mahogany doors. "Perhaps you should put on some clothing," he said. "I am feeling a chill in this conditioned air, and so must you."

  Amused, Davout clothed himself, then sat across the little rosewood side table from his sib. Davout the Silent looked at him for a long moment—eyes placid and thoughtful—and then spoke.

  "You are experiencing something that is very rare in our time," he said. "Loss, anger, frustration, terror. All the emotions that in their totality equal grief."

  "You forgot sadness and regret," Davout said. "You forget memory, and how the memories keep replaying. You forgot imagination, and how imagination only makes those memories worse, because imagination allows you to write a different ending, but the world will not."

  Silent Davout nodded. "People in my profession," fingers forming , "anyway those born too late to remember how common these things once were, must view you with a certain clinical interest. I must commend Dr. Li on his restraint."

  "Dr. Li is a shrink?" Davout asks.

  A casual press of fingers. "Among other things. I'm sure he's watching you very carefully and making little notes every time he leaves the room."

  "I'm happy to be useful." in his hand, bitterness on his tongue. "I would give those people my memories, if they want them so much."

  "You can do that." Davout looked up in something like surprise.

  "You know it is possible," his sib said. "You can download your memories, preserve them like amber or simply hand them to someone else to experience. And you can erase them from your mind completely, walk on into a new life, tabula rasa and free of pain."

  His deep voice was soft. It was a voice without affect, one he no doubt used on his patients, quietly insistent without being officious. A voice that made suggestions, or presented alternatives, but which never, ever, gave orders.

  "I don't want that," Davout said.

  Silent Davout's fingers were still set in . "You are not of the generation that accepts such things as a matter of course," he said. "But this, this modular approach to memory, to being, constitutes much of my work these days."

  Davout looked at him. "It must be like losing a piece of yourself, to give up a memory. Memories are what make you."

  Silent Davout's face remained impassive as his deep voice sounded through the void between them. "What forms a human psyche is not a memory, we have come to believe, but a pattern of thought. When our sib duplicated himself, he duplicated his pattern in us; and when we assembled new bodies to live in, the pattern did not change. Have you felt yourself a different person when you took a new body?"

  Davout passed a hand over his head, felt the fine blond hair covering his scalp. This time yesterday, his head had been bald and leathery. Now he felt subtle differences in his perceptions—his vision was more acute, his hearing less so—and his muscle memory was somewhat askew. He remembered having a shorter reach, a slightly different center of gravity.

  But as for himself, his essence—no, he felt himself unchanged. He was still Davout.

  he signed.

  "People have more choices than ever before," said Silent Davout. "They choose their bodies, they choose their memories. They can upload new knowledge, new skills. If they feel a lack of confidence, or feel that their behavior is too impulsive, they can tweak their body chemistry to produce a different effect. If they find themselves the victim of an unfortunate or destructive compulsion, the compulsion can be edited from their being. If they lack the power to change their circumstances, they can at least elect to feel happier about them. If a memory cannot be overcome, it can be eliminated."

  "And you now spend your time dealing with these problems?" Davout asked.

  "They are not problems," his sib said gently. "They are not syndromes or neuroses. They are circumstances. They are part of the condition of life as it exists today. They are environmental." The large, impassive eyes gazed steadily at Davout. "People choose happiness over sorrow, fulfillment over frustration. Can you blame them?"

  Davout signed. "If they deny the evidence of their own lives," he said. "We define our existence by the challenges we overcome, or those we don't. Even our tragedies define us."

  His sib nodded. "That is an admirable philosophy—for Davout the Conqueror. But not all people are conquerors."

  Davout strove to keep the impatience from his voice. "Lessons are learned from failures as well as successes. Experience is gained, life's knowledge is applied to subsequent occurrence. If we deny the uses of experience, what is there to make us human?"

  His sib was patient. "Sometimes the experiences are negative, and so are the lessons. Would you have a person live forever under the shadow of great guilt, say for a foolish mistake that resulted in injury or death to someone else; or would you have them live with the consequences of damage inflicted by a sociopath, or an abusive family member? Traumas like these can cripple the whole being. Why should the damage not be repaired?"

  Davout smiled thinly. "You can't tell me that these techniques are used only in cases of deep trauma," he said. "You can't tell me that people aren't using these techniques for reasons that might be deemed trivial. Editing out a foolish remark made at a party, or eliminating a bad vacation or an argument with the spouse."

  Silent Davout returned his smile. "I would not insult your intelligence by suggesting these things do not happen."

  Davout signed. "So how do such people mature? Change? Grow in wisdom?"

  "They cannot edit out everything. There is sufficient friction and conflict in the course of ordinary life to provide everyone with their allotted portion of wisdom. Nowadays our lives are very, very long, and we have a long time to learn, however slowly. And after all," smiling, "the average person's capacity for wisdom has never been so large as all that. I think you will find that as a species we are far less prone to folly than we once were."

  Davout looked at his sib grimly. "You are suggesting that I undergo this technique?"

  "It is called Lethe."

  "That I undergo Lethe? Forget Katrin? Or forget what I feel for her?"

  Silent Davout slowly shakes his grave head. "I make no such suggestion."

  "Good."

  The youngest Davout gazed steadily into the eyes of his older twin. "Only you know what you can bear. I merely point out that this remedy exists, should you find your anguish beyond what you can endure."

  "Katrin deserves mourning," Davout said.

  Another grave nod. "Yes."

  "She deserves to be remembered. Who will remember her if I do not?"

  "I understand," said Silent Davout. "I understand your desire to feel, and the necessity. I only mention Lethe because I comprehend all too well what you endure now. Because," he licked his lips, "I, too, have lost Katrin."

  Davout gaped at him. "You—" he stammered. "She is—she was killed?"

  His sib's face retains its remarkable placidity. "She left me, sixteen years ago."

  Davout could only stare. The fact, stated so plainly, was incomprehensible.

  "I—" he began, and then his fingers found another thought.

  "We were together for a century and a half. We grew
apart. It happens."

  Not to us it doesn't! Davout's mind protested. Not to Davout and Katrin!

  Not to the two people who make up a whole greater than its parts. Not to us. Not ever.

  But looking into his sib's accepting, melancholy face, Davout knew that it had to be true.

  And then, in a way he knew to be utterly disloyal, he began to hope.

  "Shocking?" said Old Davout. "Not to us, I suppose."

  "It was their downloads," said Red Katrin. "Fair Katrin in particular was careful to edit out some of her feelings and judgments before she let me upload them, but still I could see her attitudes changing. And knowing her, I could make guesses by what she left out . . . I remember telling Davout three years before the split that the relationship was in jeopardy."

  "The Silent One was still surprised, though, when it happened," Old Davout said. "Sophisticated though he may be about human nature, he had a blind spot where Katrin was concerned." He put an arm around Red Katrin and kissed her cheek. "As I suppose we all do," he added.

  Katrin accepted the kiss with a gracious inclination of her head, then asked Davout, "Would you like the blue room here, or the green room upstairs? The green room has a window seat and a fine view of the bay, but it's small."

  "I'll take the green room," Davout said. I do not need so much room, he thought, now that I am alone.

  Katrin took him up the creaking wooden stair and showed him the room, the narrow bed of the old house. Through the window he could look south to a storm on Chesapeake Bay, bluegrey cloud, bright eruptions of lightning, slanting beams of sunlight that dropped through rents in the storm to tease bright winking light from the foam. He watched it for a long moment, then was startled out of reverie by Katrin's hand on his shoulder, and a soft voice in his ear.

  "Are there sights like this on other worlds?"

  "The storms on Rhea were vast," Davout said, "like nothing on this world. The ocean area is greater than that on Earth, and lies mostly in the tropics—the planet was almost called Oceanus on that account. The hurricanes built up around the equatorial belts with nothing to stop them, sometimes more than a thousand kilometers across, and they came roaring into the temperate zones like multi-armed demons, sometimes one after another for months. They spawned waterspots and cyclones in their vanguard, inundated whole areas with a storm surge the size of a small ocean, dumped enough rain to flood an entire province away . . . We thought seriously that the storms might make life on land untenable."

  He went on to explain the solution he and Katrin had devised for the enormous problem: huge strings of tall, rocky barrier islands built at a furious rate by nanomachines, a wall for wind and storm surge to break against; a species of silvery, tropical floating weed, a flowery girdle about Rhea's thick waist, that radically increased surface albedo, reflecting more heat back into space. Many species of deep-rooted, vinelike plants to anchor slopes and prevent erosion, other species of thirsty trees, adaptations of cottonwoods and willows, to line streambeds and break the power of flash floods.

  Planetary engineering on such an enormous scale, in such a short time, had never been attempted, not even on Mars, and it had been difficult for Katrin and Davout to sell the project to the project managers on the Cheng Ho. Their superiors had initially preferred a different approach, huge equatorial solar curtains deployed in orbit to reflect heat, squadrons of orbital beam weapons to blast and disperse storms as they formed, secure underground dwellings for the inhabitants, complex lock and canal systems to control flooding . . . Katrin and Davout had argued for a more elegant approach to Rhea's problems, a reliance on organic systems to modify the planet's extreme weather instead of assaulting Rhea with macro-tech and engineering. Theirs was the approach that finally won the support of the majority of the terraforming team, and resulted in their subsequent appointment as heads of Beagle's terraforming team.

  "Dark Katrin's memories were very exciting to upload during that time," said Katrin the Red. "That delirious explosion of creativity! Watching a whole globe take shape beneath her feet!" Her green eyes look up into Davout's. "We were jealous of you then. All that abundance being created, all that talent going to shaping an entire world. And we were confined to scholarship, which seemed so lifeless by comparison."

  He looked at her. "Are you sorry for the choice you made? You two were senior: you could have chosen our path if you'd wished. You still could, come to that."

  A smile drifts across her face. "You tempt me, truly. But Old Davout and I are happy in our work—and besides, you and Katrin needed someone to provide a proper record of your adventures." She tilted her head, and mischief glittered in her eyes. "Perhaps you should ask Blonde Katrin. Maybe she could use a change."

  Davout gave a guilty start: she was, he thought, seeing too near, too soon. "Do you think so?" he asked. "I didn't even know if I should see her."

  "Her grudge is with the Silent One, not with you."

  "Well." He manages a smile. "Perhaps I will at least call."

  Davout called Katrin the Fair, received an offer of dinner on the following day, accepted. From his room he followed the smell of coffee into his hosts' office, and felt a bubble of grief lodge in his heart: two desks, back-to-back, two computer terminals, layers of papers and books and printout and dust . . . he could imagine himself and Katrin here, sipping coffee, working in pleasant compatibility.

  he signed.

  His sib looked up. "I just sent a chapter to Sheol," he said. "I was making Maxwell far too wise." He fingered his little goatee. "The temptation is always to view the past solely as a vehicle that leads to our present grandeur. These people's sole function was to produce us, who are of course perfectly wise and noble and far superior to our ancestors. So one assumes that these people had us in mind all along, that we were what they were working toward. I have to keep reminding myself that these people lived amid unimaginable tragedy, disease and ignorance and superstition, vile little wars, terrible poverty, and death . . . "

  He stopped, suddenly aware that he'd said something awkward—Davout felt the word vibrate in his bones, as if he were stranded inside a bell that was still singing after it had been struck—but he said, "Go on."

  "I remind myself," his sib continued, "that the fact that we live in a modern culture doesn't make us better, it doesn't make us superior to these people—in fact it enlarges them, because they had to overcome so much more than we in order to realize themselves, in order to accomplish as much as they did." A shy smile drifted across his face. "And so a rather smug chapter is wiped out of digital existence."

  "Lavoisier is looming," commented Red Katrin from her machine.

  "Yes, that too," Old Davout agreed. His Lavoisier and His Age had won the McEldowney Prize and been shortlisted for other awards. Davout could well imagine that bringing Maxwell up to Lavoisier's magisterial standards would be intimidating.

  Red Katrin leans back in her chair, combs her hair back with her fingers. "I made a few notes about the Beagle project," she said. "I have other commitments to deal with first, of course."

  She and Old Davout had avoided any conflicts of interest and interpretation by conveniently dividing history between them: she would write of the "modern" world and her near-contemporaries, while he wrote of those securely in the past. Davout thought his sib had the advantage in this arrangement, because her subjects, as time progressed, gradually entered his domain, and became liable to his reinterpretation.

  Davout cleared away some printout, sat on the edge of Red Katrin's desk. "A thought keeps bothering me," he said. "In our civilization we record everything. But the last moments of the crew of the Beagle went unrecorded. Does that mean they do not exist? Never existed at all? That death was always their state, and they returned to it, like virtual matter dying into the vacuum from which it came?"

  Concern darkened Red Katrin's eyes. "They will be remembered," she said. "I will see to it."

  "Katrin didn't download the last months, did she
?"

  "The last eight months were never sent. She was very busy, and—"

  "Virtual months, then. Gone back to the phantom zone."

  "There are records. Other crew sent downloads home, and I will see if I can gain access either to the downloads, or to their friends and relations who have experienced them. There is your memory, your downloads."

  He looked at her. "Will you upload my memory, then? My sib has everything in his files, I'm sure." Glancing at Old Davout.

  She pressed her lips together. "That would be difficult for me. Me viewing you viewing her . . . " She shook her head. "I don't dare. Not now. Not when we're all still in shock."

  Disappointment gnawed at his insides with sharp rodent teeth. He did not want to be so alone in his grief; he didn't want to nourish all the sadness by himself.

  He wanted to share it with Katrin, he knew, the person with whom he shared everything. Katrin could help him make sense of it, the way she clarified all the world for him. Katrin would comprehend the way he felt.

  he signed. His frustration must have been plain to Red Katrin, because she took his hand, lifted her green eyes to his.

  "I will," she said. "But not now. I'm not ready."

  "I don't want two wrecks in the house," called Old Davout over his shoulder.

  Interfering old bastard, Davout thought. But with his free hand he signed, again, .

  Katrin the Fair kissed Davout's cheek, then stood back, holding his hands, and narrowed her grey eyes. "I'm not sure I approve of this youthful body of yours," she said. "You haven't looked like this in—what—over a century?"

  "Perhaps I seek to evoke happier times," Davout said.

  A little frown touched the corners of her mouth. "That is always dangerous," she judged. "But I wish you every success." She stepped back from the door, flung out an arm. "Please come in."

  She lived in a small apartment in Toulouse, with a view of the Allée Saint-Michel and the rose-red brick of the Vieux Quartier. On the whitewashed walls hung terracotta icons of Usil and Tiv, the Etruscan gods of the sun and moon, and a well cover with a figure of the demon Charun emerging from the underworld. The Etruscan deities were confronted, on another wall, by a bronze figure of the Gaulish Rosmerta, consort of the absent Mercurius.