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

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.
     His fingers formed the word unbidden.
    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 is ever lost. But Katrin died, Davout thought, and now I am lost, and it was not supposed to be this way.
     Fingers wailed the grief that was stopped up in Davout's throat.
    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 Humbolt 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.
    Without her, Davout found the cosmos veiled in a kind of uncertainty. While it was possible to apprehend certain things (the usefulness of a coenocytic arrangement of cells in the transmission of