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

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.
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    "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