He managed to say, “Why clones?”
“Because of how we look, what we are, what human beings have become in our blighted time. We can’t pass secretly among you as ourselves. We’re too . . . different. We’d inspire disgust and terror.”
David looked into her singular blue eyes and felt that he was meeting the stare of an animated mannequin or robot or some alien life-form mimicking Emily.
At the moment, he had no capacity for amazement and wonder. His grief was resurgent, and under it swelled a rising anger. He felt that he had been the victim of an unconscionable deception.
Striving not to reveal his anger, sensing it would be dangerous to do so, he said, “You came back in time a year after Nanette died. That’s eleven years ago.”
“Yes.”
“For eleven years you’ve been trying to change the course of history through highly selective assassinations.”
“History shows us who the fanatics are, the sociopaths and narcissists who wanted to change the world at any cost. Who have changed it so much for the worse.”
“You’ve had success?”
“Some. Not much. Time is a hard river to divert. The future wants to continue being what the past made it. When we eliminate an historical threat, it often recurs in a different way, driven by a different person from the one we cut out of the fabric of history. Sometimes it’s a misguided obsessive with no malicious intent, like Ephraim and Renata Zabdi. But often it’s a fanatic seeking power.”
Her hand in his felt like a claw. Yet when he looked at her, he couldn’t hate her, because he had loved that face for half his life.
If he couldn’t hate her, he was gradually coming to fear her.
Her recent words were sinister in memory:
I feel safe here. Only here. With you. I feel so safe. Tell me it’s forever.
I’ll never leave you. This is what I want. It’s all I want.
So then say it.
Say what?
Say this is forever, you and me.
This is forever.
Say it again.
This is forever.
It better be.
In recollection, those last three words that she had spoken in bed, with her head resting on his chest, sounded menacing now, which they had not at the time.
He got up from the bed and went to the window and gazed into the storm. If he walked out into the night, if he retraced the route that Emily had taken ten years earlier, off the headland and across the meadows and to the viewpoint, perhaps some arbiter of justice behind the veil of nature would finish him with a bolt of lightning and put an end to his yearning.
With the ultimate truth revealed, nothing else mattered. Yet he wondered, and in his wondering, he asked, “It wasn’t by chance that we met that night in the restaurant, was it, Anna?”
“No.”
“You drew me into all this.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She was silent.
He turned from the window. “Why?”
“Because I have experienced hours and hours, weeks and weeks of the memory scan we made of Emily as she lay dying. We possess the technology to copy anyone’s memory as if it were just a long digital document, upload it to the cloud, and experience it as our own. In my way, I have lived the years she was with you, from the day you met. Your courtship of her, the romance you shared with her—all of that is now a part of my experience, my heart. She loved you more than she loved herself, and I came to love you, too.”
| 91 |
Cold to the bone, David regarded the collection of thirty-two photographs.
In the white dress of innocence but in fact a pretender, Anna had risen from the bed. “For years I loved you from a distance, but that became intolerable. From Emily’s memory scan, I knew what it felt like to love and be loved. I have never been loved as you loved her, as she loved you. There is little love in the brutal future from which I come. Much despair, hatred, self-loathing, fear. So I yearned to know such love from more than another’s memory scan. And at long last, I contrived to meet you, to bring Emily back to you. From that scan, I know her, I can be her. I take such delight in being her.”
Distraught, discomposed, David turned away from her, once more facing the night beyond the window, to which the storm’s fireworks had returned. The lightning was a promise of release from a life that had spiraled into a darkness from which he saw no way out but vanishment into a storm, as Emily had vanished.
“What do you expect now?” he asked, dreading her answer.
“I have my mission, my work, but I don’t see why I can’t also still have you, why we can’t have each other.”