"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.
Once, opening her eyes after an upload, she looked at Davout and shook her head. "It’s strange," she said. "It’s me, I know it’s me, but the way she thinks-" I don’t understand she signed. "It’s not memories that make us, we’re told, but patterns of thought. We are who we are because we think using certain patterns… but I do not seem to think like her at all."
"It’s habit," Davout said. "Your habit is to think a different way."
Possibly she conceded, brows knit.
Truth "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."
Perhaps 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 surprise.
Alas! 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."
No his fingers formed, then please. "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. Alas! his fingers signed. Alas!
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.
"I am weary of my groaning…." he thought.
It was summer, but the high mountains were chill at night, and the deep cold soaked his thoughts. The word Lethe floated through his mind. Who would not choose to be happy? he asked himself. It is a switch in your mind, and someone can throw it for you.
He felt the slow, aching droplets of mourning being squeezed from his heart, one after the other, and wondered how long he could endure them, the relentless moments, each striking with the impact of a hammer, each a stunning, percussive blow…
Throw a switch, he thought, and the hammerblows would end.
"Katrin deserves mourning," he had told Davout the Silent, and now he had so many more Katrins to mourn, Dark Katrin and Katrin the Fair, Katrin the New and Katrin the Old. All the Katrins webbed by fate, alive or dead or merely enduring. And so he would, from necessity, endure… So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
He lay on his back, on the cold ground, gazed up at the world of stars, and tried to find the worlds, among the glittering teardrops of the heavens, where he and Katrin had rained from the sky their millions of children.