Read Online The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories by Walter Jon Williams - Free Book Online

heart. As always, his Katrin was helping him to understand, helping him to make sense of the bitter confusion of the world.
    An idea began to creep into his mind on stealthy feet.
    "I worry that you're alone there," Red Katrin said. "Would you like to come stay with us? Would you like us to come to Java?"
     "I'll come see you soon," Davout said. "But while I'm in the hospital, I think I'll have a few cosmetic procedures." He looked down at himself, spread his leathery hands. "Perhaps I should look a little more Earthlike."
    After his talk with Katrin ended, Davout called Dr. Li and told him that he wanted a new body constructed.
    Something familiar, he said, already in the files. His own, original form.
    Age twenty or so.
    Â 
    "It is a surprise to see you . . . as you are," said Silent Davout.
    Deep-voiced, black-skinned, and somber, Davout's sib stood by his bed.
    "It was a useful body when I wore it," Davout answered. "I take comfort in . . . familiar things . . . now that my life is so uncertain." He looked up. "It was good of you to come in person."
    "A holographic body," taking Davout's hand, "however welcome, however familiar, is not the same as a real person."
    Davout squeezed the hand. "Welcome, then," he said. Dr. Li, who had supervised in person through the new/old body's assembly, had left after saying the nanos were done, so it seemed appropriate for Davout to stand and embrace his sib.
    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