Real people are lonely, and they need a companion. Could a synthetic person be the companion you need, or are there drawbacks to sharing the intimacies of your life, the highs and lows of emotion, with an artificial being? And, can artificial beings return that emotion?
—
“We bring into existence a being that can know happiness. Isn’t that what you want to give her, happiness?” The RealMatch counselor-cum-salesman sat back, cocked his handsome head, and paused until Auguste met his eyes. “One more happy person in the world, one more happy relationship,” he continued. “What’s wrong with that?”
“‘Relationship,’ Stephen.” Auguste shifted uncomfortably. “Synths never fail to bond, do they?”
Stephen nodded in too-quick understanding, “Neither do any other two people in this world who are meant for each other. And by chance, they may find each other. Tragically, they usually don’t. Our study of your personality” — he nodded at his computer screen — “and our proprietary ingrains mean not only that she will be perfect for you, but you are perfect for her.”
Auguste registered the answers with a slight nod and no expression. The counselor smiled and lifted a hand palm-up to beg a reply.
“Okay, let’s say I accept that…” Auguste began and faded.
Stephen waited, but there was no more. Auguste took a deep breath and looked out the window intently, as if escape from uncertainty lay there. Stephen leaned in again, his dark eyes and firm jaw with its five o’clock shadow lending a touch of sternness to assurance as he assumed and seized the fear that crippled sales. “I know that someone with any sensitivity, any regard for his reputation, has a concern with this. What will people think?” With a lifted eyebrow and intent stare, he seemed to invite Auguste to ask what he was thinking and answered, “They’ll be asking themselves, ‘Why a Synth? Is there something wrong? Low self-esteem, fat, too old?’ None of that applies to you! You’re a trim, handsome man who truly looks the part of a gallery owner.”
Auguste wondered what reassurance Stephen would find for portly gentlemen of a certain age.
“Look,” the counselor continued, “no one feels more vulnerable than someone who is alone.” Auguste stared at his hands in his lap, and then gave Stephen his full attention. “But with a Synth at your side…” he put hand to mouth and slowly moved the index finger up and down, assembling the pieces in his mind before displaying the finished product. His voice carried conviction, his eyes struggled to conceal the wonder, fresh with every new day, every new sale. “She will stand just inside your bubble, that little sphere of untouchable vulnerability that separates each of us from the…unintimate. She will be calm, eyes clear, the planes of her face speaking of her intelligence.” He and Auguste locked eyes and each knew the other understood this hope, this dream, and its fulfillment.
“Damn it,” Stephen shook his head and chuckled as he concluded, “you would swear there is light shining on her brow. Any ass with the inclination to mock you will look at that face, the face of your lover and ally, and the bullshit dies in his mouth.”
Auguste heaved a sigh, and he did not know if it was from relief, or the years-long fatigue of his heart.
“Thank you, Stephen.” The next words were lame, but he could think of nothing else to say to a man who could make him the perfect companion. “It is a lot to think about.”
Stephen nodded, his slight air of distraction suggesting the imminent arrival of someone else in need of counseling. “Give it some time, but don’t let the trolls influence your life or what would have been the life of your Synth.”
A friendly, businesslike escort to the door, and Auguste went out into the world he had known for years: Exhibit openings, business details, a hundred obligatory conversations a day, and a quiet walk up the stairs to his apartment above the gallery at the end of every day.
#
That night, Auguste dreamed of a warm darkness. A mist of stars appeared, soft and dim at first, and then became the Milky Way bright as a mother’s approving smile. White birds were flying along the Way, faltering, falling from heaven toward welcoming flesh. He wanted to tell them not to be afraid.
#
A few weeks later and in a different waiting room, Stephen greeted him like the father of the bride. They were the only ones there, and behind them, the door to the outer offices was locked. Before them, the door to another room was half open. The air of that room was very warm, mother’s breath on their faces. They both shifted a little, the usual human response to repose in the face of anticipation.
“Any last questions?”
Auguste wished his last questions had occurred to him in the first conversation with the counselor. Asking those particular questions now seemed jittery, the words of a man who just realized it was too late. They were moody questions, dark blue atmosphere shot through with faint lines of red anxiety. His shifting stopped.
“What will she feel when I die?” The loneliness that led him here called out to a future grief to be felt by a being who had not existed until now.
“A concern like that makes me glad to know you, Auguste,” Stephen said with every appearance of sincerity. “Some men don’t care about anything but their own needs.” He craned his neck looking for some sign in the next room. “Well, though they are made largely of the same DNA as us, they don’t age. So, no way but that she’ll see you die.” He looked at Auguste, blinked, and nodded quickly a few times in what could have been sympathy for his client’s widow. “Of course, she’ll be sad. You’ll be missed.” He smiled and again peered through the half-open door.
“We — some of us — are comforted by the thought of a loved one’s soul going on.” Auguste stopped at Stephen’s frown. The man had not been paid to listen to philosophy or religion from someone he would probably never see again.
The frown reconsidered itself and launched into a smile that almost reached the eyes. “You could try telling her that, Auguste.”
Auguste was embarrassed, and that irritated him, so he doubled up and added a touch of sarcasm. After all, he wasn’t going to see the man again. “I could try telling her she has a soul herself, right?”
Another nod, accompanied by a quick movement of the eyes that might generate a twinkle under the right conditions, and Stephen concluded emolliently, “Maybe God has a stockpile of souls and passes them out to Synths as well as…you and me. Don’t know.” He smiled and barely put his hand on Auguste’s shoulder. “Way above my pay grade. Just enjoy the moment, all the moments of the time you have together. Be here now. That is what she is going to do.”
The door opened further. The counselor moved his light hand and stepped back.
A female attendant guided the newly minted person into the room with both hands on her blanket-wrapped shoulders. Auguste knew this part. The room the Synth came from was warm because she was still adding muscle, could not fully warm herself, and thus the blanket over the white shift she wore. He knew that the attendant was a woman, and that Stephen was gone because it was better that Auguste was the first male that the virgo intacta saw. “Ingrains,” pieces of synthetic soul, had given her a largely developed intellectual and emotional being, and they would continue to guide input, but some care should be taken with the input.
Now the part that he did not know: What in his profile had been used to determine the effect of her appearance on him? Brown hair with a tint of silver in the way it reflected light, or so it seemed, but then again it was gone. She raised her large eyes, set in a fine-featured face framed by slightly waving hair, hazel eyes with a mysterious touch of gray-silver that could be doubted. She did not look like any well-known beauty he admired, and now, he could imagine no other beauty.
The attendant mouthed “one hour” and stepped back, silently closing the door to the room of origins. Auguste knew this part, too. They were alone, and he must talk to this person who would become his wife — no, that was not permitted by law — his mate. He would finish her attachment to him, and suddenly, he felt as if he had no right. She dropped her eyes and shivered a little. He instinctively arranged the blanket to better cover her. Perhaps also instinctively, by way of ingrain, she stepped closer to him at his touch. Had she thought he beckoned her? Or was he a source of heat? They stood close enough that the warm currents that circulate around our bodies until death now joined, as did the scents they carried. Her scent he could not place with the scent of other women. Perhaps flower or honey with a touch of earth or musk.
He waited, as uncertain about speaking to her as to a sleepwalker. In a moment, she raised her head slightly and briefly in what seemed a question, but without meeting his eyes. She stood in an attitude of listening
He told her about himself, about art. He had rehearsed this, but forgot much of it and trailed off after a few minutes. In the silence, she raised her head again and made eye contact briefly, this time searching from eye to eye. She lowered her head once more, waiting to hear. He thought of her in his home and what she would see. He spoke of the flowers on the sill and the view of the park and hesitated. Would she know an oak from a linden? How much knowledge was in the ingrains? It was said to be encyclopedic. The Micropædia or the Macropædia?
He went on, mining the experiences of his life. Hearing them anew as she did, he found that they were richer than he remembered. She stirred a little from time to time, but never retreated from him. He caught her smiling once when he told her of a night camp in the Sahara and how there seemed to be more stars than black sky. She could hardly be closer, but after a time, somehow she tucked into him as if in acceptance, or having heard enough for now.
She stood before him with no history. Her reality, her integrity as a real person, demanded a history he knew did not exist. Yet, he asked this Aphrodite sprung fully formed from the verge of the Naether, “Do you remember anything?” wanting to know if the idea of the past had any shape in her mind, and praying that it was not an illusion of memory that her makers had given her.
For the first time he heard her voice, an alto flute turned to language. “You say ‘remember,’ but I don’t. All is here. In this light, I also see the warm dark. One from my eyes and one from nothing. Then I close my eyes so they see the dark, and from nothing I see light.”
His mind paused in the silence following her statement so simple and so mystically unified, and he felt the old fear that he could not be loved by a woman he admired. Nonetheless, with her closeness, he lightly stroked her hip through the blanket and shift beneath. Her neck flushed, she lifted parted lips to him, and she was just a maiden. Never had the word seemed so true for a woman so innocent of the world.
It was time to leave this antechamber to the world. They left discreetly through a garage shared by several businesses to leave a cold trail for anyone who would gawk at or protest the entrance of another Synth into the world.
#
“I don’t want to eat yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
She looked stronger. The house was cool, yet she took off the blanket, as if shedding something unneeded for confidence in this new world. She smoothed the fabric of the shift as if mulling its purpose.
“I bought a few simple things for you to wear.” Auguste opened a closet door. She viewed the contents mildly and said nothing. She tried a shrug, or a shrug tried her, and she smiled as if the mannerism surprised and pleased her.
“Um, then would you like to look at the shops?” Too soon no doubt. Another shrug. She smiled brightly at him.
“What, then?”
“I would like to lie down and listen to you.”
He talked and she listened, for a little while. He had not intended to consummate their union anytime soon. His plan was to give her space, as he thought of it, to become her own person, time to become real to herself—to him. His intention did not last the night, and she would not have understood it. A little embarrassed, he spoke of it afterward.
Her foot moved against his, “Why?”
“Because…” he barely breathed the word and suddenly dreaded all the words that must come after, to speak to someone so warm and near of her integrity. “For fear that you would do what you are meant to do.” My God am I calling her a whore?
Her gaze moved to the distance, like any human considering a broader view. “You did not do what you are meant to do?”
“I-I don’t have ingrains. That is what you were given, to shape your behavior. I am sorry. I know you are real.” Did he? He felt as if he were destroying both of them with doubt and clumsy words.
Her hand caressed his forehead. For a moment soon gone, there was the glint of silver in her eyes. “You were given DNA, much like mine, and instincts. Tell me how we are different so that I will understand how you see me.”
He was born, randomly. She was created, his requisition. If he pursued this and convinced her that the difference mattered, what was the alternative for her — other than listen to him fret over it? To go out into the world without him to figure it all out on her own, away from the first person to embrace her? Meaningless. A Synth would not be allowed to go her own way. To return to the Naether was her only option. His thoughts turned to lead, but then the face so close to his came closer and the weight disappeared.
#
A new day without the doubts of the old day. They walked hand-in-hand through the park across the street. She knew much about this world she was made for, and listened as he made shapes in the mist of her unknowing.
Some things could not be known. A young mother coming their way on the path stopped for the expected admiration of her infant. Auguste hung on a thread over the old day and its doubts, ready to drop. A Synth could not have children. A Synth could be, just be, but could not be married, or be created to have children or be allowed to adopt. This much distinction the world still insisted on: no mother ingrains for a Synth. Her response to a child was the same as her response to a pet, friendly interest and affection. The mother at first beamed. Then, the vague impression of something subtly wrong. Kind, and willing to work through the oddness of it, she asked their names. Auguste named himself and was sure he turned pale in the silence of what did not come next: his companion’s name.
Then his Synth—his Synth!—said with the care of someone assembling a house of cards, “I am his friend.” The woman took her way again, with a compassionate, perplexed look at the “friend” and a sharper glance at Auguste. The Synth watched mother and child leave. In her puzzled and quiet expression, Auguste sensed her consciousness hovering over an empty place in her psyche where surrounding affection ingrains led her perilously close to pondering a loss.
Green day turned to gray. They walked on. He could see that she was troubled by his mood; empathy was not a problem for a Synth.
“I am sorry for the embarrassment,” he said.
“Embarrass,” she nodded, and a slight redness appeared on her cheeks. “Because I was strange with the woman.”
“No. It is my fault. I should give you a name.” He addressed the only thing he could fix.
Her face came alive. They turned to each other, hands clasped as in nuptials. The name was one that Auguste had imagined long ago would be the name of the daughter he would now never have. He wanted to hear himself saying it every day to this new person in his care. “You are Seroia, a sound that makes me think of a breeze on a spring night, or of an exotic flower growing in a warm land. It is nobody’s name but yours.”
And so the breach was filled with rubble against the next attack.
#
She needed a safe place to learn society. The gallery parties would be too much, too soon. RealMatch provided the ancillary service of social support, ninety days no extra charge.
Party invitations were sent out to clients, privately, discreetly. Long after the failure of propositions to ban Synths, a resistance lingered. Some were idealists, others anal expressers, only too happy to crash a party and out the “Synth Masters.” Still it was better now, with just a chance of noisy embarrassment from time to time. The occasional murder of a Synth had been too pitiful even for radicals when they saw the blood was not green and the pain was real.
The party space was a reasonably intimate banquet room. There was food. There was no sign outside saying “Synth Party.”
Auguste would not have minded if the Synths—maybe not Seroia—had clustered like wives of the Filipina diaspora at an NCO party. But no, they stayed with their mates, serene and seemingly unaware of what they were, a pretension that everyone tried to accept.
At a certain point, something clicked, and real humans and their real matches suspended disbelief. Seroia was handling a conversation about art that sounded only a little encyclopedic, and Auguste excused himself to get some hors d’oeuvres.
As Auguste paused unwillingly between the platter of frozen banana slices and the chocolate-covered bacon strips, a tall impressive man ran his eyes over him in a quick evaluation and said, “You’re a reasonably handsome man, but you’re not a Synth.”
“What?”
“All these glorious women. Why so few glorious men?”
He bent so his eyes were level with Auguste’s. “Seems sexist, doesn’t it? Unsellable Y chromosomes left in the Naether tank.”
This was pointedly provocative. Auguste glanced at Seroia across the room. She looked like someone whose respect he wanted and whom he wanted respected.
He turned back to his challenger. “You call them women, and you’re right. They have the same right to existence that we do.”
With an expansive and yet somehow mocking gesture of his open hands and a blazing smile, he said, “I don’t doubt it forever or for a minute.”
Auguste took this as conciliation whether it was or not, which was easier in the face of this smooth but powerful personality, and met him halfway. “It may seem sexist—”
“But it’s not, is it?” A trace of a sneer. “It’s just part of human nature that RealMatch deals with. A receptive female is in demand by men, and a…somewhat…aggressive male is still in demand by women.”
Auguste cautiously followed his lead. “Yes, and that makes male Synths a little less stable”— the man laughed, almost a bark—“and there have been incidents. It’s natural that women will shy from that risk.”
The man was still, virility radiating off him, dark eyes like lasers evaporating Auguste’s confidence. A woman Auguste had not noticed before, a chubby little begonia under the canopy of gracile orchids, approached and touched the sleeve of the beautiful monster, leading him away.
A man Auguste and Seroia had talked with earlier was tardily at Auguste’s side saying, “RealMatch needs to be more careful with the ingrains they put in those things.” With perfect party manners he added, “Of course, ours aren’t ‘things.’”
#
She could not be kept in the upstairs apartment like a pet waiting for a lunchtime visit and the end of the day. This much Auguste knew. He would face his insecurity about a Synth companion, and she would face the world. Her knowledge of art was more complete than his own in regard to facts, and she quickly gained nuance in discussions with him and with the gallery visitors he let her greet.
“I am Seroia, and I live with Auguste.” The heat rose in Auguste’s face each time he overheard this because of what could not follow, a history. That Seroia was a work of art herself relieved the awkwardness. In the presence of her beauty and knowledge, disbelief was suspended by enough. Yet, in the beginning, the conversations fell a little flat once Auguste was included. Odd, he thought, the acceptance of a Synth as a person by herself, but returning doubt once her mate-procurer was considered. On the rare occasions that doubt turned to worse, it was just as Stephen had prophesied: Seroia stood at his side, a calm and beautiful ally countering rudeness with graciousness and touching Auguste to show their unity
#
Amherst was in town. Amherst, whose career Auguste had helped along in the same way that flipping a switch helped along a hundred megawatt generator. And Amherst would give a little talk at the Auguste’s little gallery this evening, and it would be the city’s biggest event of the art year.
The guest of honor and his host stood together after the presentation, with the usual clusters of people nearby trying to pretend they were not eavesdropping.
“The gallery seems smaller than I remember.” Amherst glanced around briefly as if ready to forget again.
Auguste, for his part, did not share his thoughts that the talk had been short on substance and long on the anti-bourgeois comments that the audience had loved. He said only, “It is small, but I am happy that it was enough to give you some early exposure.”
Amherst sneered, a small sneer, not in Auguste’s face but directed somewhere just beyond his former patron to whom he clearly did not want to owe anything. The sneer became a smile when he saw Seroia. He turned to Auguste. “She is a beauty. How do you meet women like that?”
Auguste could tell by the careful and amused way Amherst held his gaze that of course, he knew. Seroia had noticed their attention and approached. She began a greeting, but Amherst went on talking to Auguste.
“An excellent choice, sir. Why settle for the meat and potatoes that are the lot of most men when you can order confit de canard.” He nodded amiably at Seroia, trapping her between her duty to guests and her swift note of Auguste’s apprehension. Amherst sipped a little brandy, rubbed it on his lips with his tongue, glanced briefly at the eavesdroppers who had lost all pretense of discretion, and asked Auguste, “How long to marinate? Two days, one? No patience for the old ways? Push a button and it’s done in a minute?”
With a deep breath Auguste replied, “As you say, she is a beauty. She is more than that. She—”
“Do you ever share a dish?”
“I will have her respected!”
“I didn’t gain a reputation by being respectful.” Amherst then laughed lightly to dismiss the moment. “Auguste, Auguste, I would never have shown disrespect to your wife.”
“My wife!” Auguste reddened. “You know I can’t marry her.” Seroia shifted nervously.
“Exactly.”
For Amherst, this incident was notoriety, and notoriety was in demand. For Auguste, this was betrayal, and there were tears in his eyes that he willed not to fall. Amherst noticed, and in a tone that was simultaneously apologetic and irritated said, “It’s fine for a businessman. I wouldn’t do it because people might wonder about the integrity of my art. People are funny that way.”
Something akin to panic rose in Seroia’s eyes. Routine formalities she had become accustomed to were overwhelmed in this flood of rudeness from a man she had thought was Auguste’s friend. Auguste took her arm and led her away, every eye watching. Entering a disused hallway that was unlit except for the window at the end, he closed the door. He did not care if he opened it again. Amherst and the reception could go to hell.
Alone with him, Seroia relaxed a little. Auguste would not have it. “You have a right to be angry! Why aren’t you angry?”
She touched his hair. “You know that anger is not in me.” The faint scent of cinnamon was about her. Perfume? A new thing; it was calming. He wanted nothing more than to be alone with her and at peace with her. Yet, any human woman subjected to an outrage would have been furious now or in tears or both. Was Amherst right to mock him? Was there any integrity in this relationship?
It was dim in the hallway. They stood between the darkness of the closed door and the evening light from the window. Her eyes shone, as side-lit eyes in gloaming do. The narrowness of the passage held them close. More than ever, in the need of the moment, he knew intimacy. More than ever, in her nonhuman tolerance, he knew that she was alien.
He ran his hand with a hank of her hair down her warm neck. She kissed him, and her lips tasted faintly of honey and cinnamon. He cupped her face in his hands and pushed it gently away. He was almost weeping. “They gave you flavor for moments like this?”
With ever-patience, or a programmed lack of anger, she said, “Your genes gave you things that you act on, as do mine. Why and when do we act? It is not the genes. It is the why and when.”
Drawn in by her scent he held her, her beautiful face half in light and half in shadow, and he knew that if she was not truly human, he still could not let her go.
#
The sun was bright through the windows of the apartment. A chapbook of Symbolist poetry lay open in Seroia’s lap where she sat on the divan, within view of the park. It was her poetry, something she had begun after Auguste read her a few poems he admired. She was no mimic. Her work was very good, Auguste knew, but a Synth could not sign a contract or be the object of one, and few would ever read her work.
“Will Amherst come back?”
“It’s unlikely, Seroia. Why?”
“He hurt you, more than he hurt me. Others have done the same, in smaller ways.”
Auguste stood by the window looking out into the sunlit green morning. “We can’t run away from it. And you are worth it to me.”
He glanced at her and caught her in her fidget. The fingers of one hand lightly and rapidly traced patterns in the palm of the other. She did this only when she was anxious and stopped whenever she might be seen, as she stopped now.
He knelt before her and took her hand, palm up. “They were like cloud chamber tracings,” he said and raised his eyes in question. “Maybe they are designs given to you from the Naether?”
“‘That stew of DNA and ingrains,’ as some have remarked to you,” she said, ignoring the question. She was not quite bitter, but blunter than he had known her.
Auguste shook his head. “Dead hearts speak that way. They are the same people who would say that our minds are the gray slime of our brains.”
She took his hand now and said, “If I stay in the apartment, people will not mock you.”
“People are becoming accustomed to us, despite Amherst. You are too intelligent to be happy by yourself, shut in, for hours, but I don’t want you worried about the public.”
A compromise was reached. Seroia spent more time in the apartment, making it a comfortable refuge for both of them. Occasionally, she still worked in the gallery, particularly when Auguste’s close friends exhibited, and more and more they traveled.
All the dream vacations Auguste had dreamed came true with a perfect companion. No matter how often Seroia saw ocean or mountain, forest or field, she did not become jaded. There was something mystical in the way she passed through the world, holding sights and events lightly, letting them go, never consuming experience and becoming sated. Auguste at age thirty-five felt renewed by sharing the freshness of her vision.
Back in the cocoon of their apartment, evenings were rich with shared love and shared art. Seroia still worked on her poetry, and Auguste had some success in writing for art history journals.
Auguste at thirty-five. He held Seroia in the smooth darkness as she gasped a sweet bouquet in his face, and once again he left his seed buried in his ageless consort.
Mornings were quiet. They took turns preparing breakfast, something they could create for each other. Slush filled the streets outside as winter melted toward spring.
“Do you ever write poems about spring?”
“I could,” she said. “Or winter, fall, or summer,” she smiled.
“Spring. When life begins again. You turn the earth over with a spade, and a scent, sharp yet rich, rises. Roots grow down, green shoots go up.”
She looked away as she considered this, and asked, “Wouldn’t some of your — our — friends tell me it is trite?”
Auguste sighed and got up from the table. “Yes, even stupid.” She touched his sleeve in sudden concern, and he caressed her face briefly before going downstairs to begin his day in the gallery.
In half an hour, he returned.
“What if we could adopt a child?”
He could see that her desire to please him struggled with her knowledge of the proscription against Synth parenthood, natural, foster, or adoptive. Her expression was painful, one he had never seen. He looked away a moment in mercy, to relieve her from his own desires.
She composed herself with a heart-wrenching smile and said, “I would like a child.”
Auguste nodded. “Italy is considering allowing couples like us to adopt the children of refugees who have died or abandoned them.”
This was something. A first step perhaps to nowhere. He went back to the gallery. Of course, she would like a child and could probably perform the duties of a mother. But she could not be a mother and all that meant in the roots of the species where Mother and Child breathed meaning into each other.
#
Seroia opened the door to their apartment in answer to the tentative knock. Auguste looked over and saw the visitor take a deep breath. Then, he did. Two days before they were to leave for Italy for interviews with the refugee administration.
“Catherine,” he said.
Seroia turned her eyes to him and then back to the visitor, who shyly informed her, “Catherine Egeria.”
Awkwardly, Auguste passed Seroia and mumbled that he would be back. He took their visitor downstairs and then out on the sidewalk in this first warm night of spring.
A few pleasantries, some catching up. Then, “You are going to Italy, I heard.” Her voice was as musical as he remembered, and more cultured, and with sadness.
Auguste knew he replied in the present even as he lived again in a time fifteen years gone. Catherine’s auburn hair in the October sun as she ran toward him across the quad. Her fineness of feature and intelligence. His first love. His first failure. “Yes, it’s a chance, and it’s time.”
“Time,” she said. “This is the time of life when we should have made the choices we hope will make everything else worthwhile.” She looked away as if she did not have a right to speak this way.
Auguste was not sure she did, but he allowed it by asking, “You’ve not made these choices?”
With her chin lifted high but her eyes still turned away, she said, “I failed to understand that love could come so soon.” Her pose melted to vulnerability and she met his eyes. “I thought it was out there ahead of me, well ahead of me, with the rest of my future, and a time for children.”
Auguste was silent. In her presence his old feelings surged like adrenaline, and he could not endure them. She moved restlessly and her hair fell across the side of her face. Instinctively he brushed it back.
She gained confidence at his touch. “You are going to Italy, and I am in Trento these days.”
He froze. This was the moment—failure undone, perhaps a child from the two become one.
“I wasn’t going alone. Catherine…”
She blushed. “You love her then?”
#
Seroia rested her chin on the back of the sofa and through the window watched her mate and his friend hold each other’s hands in farewell. She made no effort to move away from the window before turning as she heard Auguste open the door after a moment. It was one of the nuances of human behavior that did not occur to her.
“An old friend,” he murmured.
“I thought so. She could not come from nowhere.”
“Seroia—”
“—or go back to nothing.”
He uttered empty words to fill the space. Then as if he had just heard her, he asked, “What do you mean?”
She heard the concern in his voice and smiled beneath downcast eyes. “Synth humor. I am only being ironic.”
He sat down beside her. Her hand was all she could think to offer him.
#
In their rented car, they climbed the spine of the ridge. Below them, clouds streamed down the valley toward the northern Italian plain scarred by the barrack lines of the refugee camps. There was beauty in the movement of the clouds; there was no child with them to see it.
As the media explained just the day before, money had been allocated to allow willing refugees to adopt orphaned or abandoned children, leaving them with their own culture, if little else. Those children unclaimed would go home with the most worthy of Western applicants.
As the Italian liaison for refugee adoption had explained just that morning, the couple before him was only half as worthy as most.
The road led to Parma, Verona, Trento. The sunny day was fine, though cool at this height. They pulled into a field for lunch alfresco, a nap less intimate than in times past, and a hike that took them at the end of day to the valley’s edge. Just beneath their feet it seemed, clouds still flowed, as if the distant sea called them. They dissipated in the warm air that lingered over the plain, betrayed, never making it to the sea.
“Trento is not far,” Seroia said.
Auguste’s insides churned. Yet, he was not surprised. It would have been easy enough for her to find Catherine Egeria on the internet. “No, not far,” he admitted.
“I can take my own way home,” she said, “if you need.”
Her eyes moved to Auguste, who remained silent, and then back to the vapors parading before them. Shifting forms, luminous at times, silver-white above, silver-gray in shadow, they drew her wet gaze.
“They are like the Naether…” she began, and fell silent.
“You remember the Naether?”
“I dream of it sometimes, and when I wake, I can feel it at the edge of my thoughts.”
“You spoke of it as darkness and light together, when you first came to me.”
“Now I speak of it as clouds.”
“Light is one side of them, shadow is another?”
She nodded. As if weary and searching the clouds for explanation, meaning, or refuge, she went on, “And like the clouds, it is formless in a way, but always creating shapes. One shape fades away, then another comes.” Her hands opened once and clutched.
Auguste could not imagine how this day would end. The path ahead of him flowed away like the clouds, flowed away in the beauty and sadness of her words.
“That doesn’t sound frightening, but would you desire it?”
“It is a resting place, I think, a womb where fear and desire are not possible. Only in this world of forms can there be fear, and regrets.” Her voice trembled as she went on. “And only here can there be desire, and hope.”
The changing light of the clouds reflected in her tears, now gray, now silver. When does gray become silver, Auguste wondered? She looked as alone as any being could, no tribe, no family if it was not him. Beyond the shadowed and cool valley, the light was bright all along the rim of the world. He stepped behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She became very still, and then nested into his chest. He led her back to the car.
The next day they passed Parma, Verona, and Trento without a pause.
#
Years went by quietly, evenings in the apartment, days in the small success of the gallery.
Creation of Synths was finally outlawed, and RealMatch was gone, other than the facility that housed the Naether, which the government thought best to keep intact, as an “avenue of choice” for Synths. Some mystics even thought it was part of the universe now, panentheistically inhabited by the boundless spirit that cared even for lesser creations.
Others spoke of a Renaissance of Real Humans. Yet, in the way of an institution that creates opposition, its removal largely ended opposition to individuals formed by the institution. More than tolerance, there was nostalgia and even respect for those who had come from the Naether to make their way in a circumscribed world. Auguste and Seroia rarely met ill will beyond a raised eyebrow.
#
Auguste in middle age sat on a hill with the late summer sun warm upon him and Seroia warm beside him, enjoying another idyllic vacation. The smell of lavender wafted up the slope from the Provencal fields below. In the distant west, thunderheads gathered in dress rehearsal for storms of the coming season.
From his vantage, the land fell away and roads disappeared over horizons. He felt that if he could see far enough, he would see the coming of autumn. He imagined that this was a scene where couples of a certain age turn to each other with smiles of understanding that say it is not the way it was when we were young, yet I love you still. They acknowledge that the wide horizons of younger years, the excitement of the road trip, have diminished. Many miles lay behind, and the destination they knew but really had not thought about is just around the bend. They are on this side of the bend, in the sun, though the curve going off into shadow tugs at their attention. They acknowledge this, but there is bravery in the smiles. They will live these moments in the sun and be warm against the dark horizon.
Auguste gave Seroia such a smile. She turned to him her face untouched by time, her hand upon his lined cheek, and responded the same way she always did when they were alone and he looked at her lovingly. One thing turned to another. He tried to hold on to the elegiac mood, but did not as the thought came that perhaps it was a blessing not accorded other men his age that his mate would not understand the shadows of time.
#
Auguste in shadow. In and out of the hospital as the pain came and went and came again. When it came, he saw pain of another sort in Seroia’s face. He knew that her sensitivity to mortality was growing with his cancer. Selling the gallery had given her a moment of dread, as if a part of Auguste had already died. To deal with it, she had turned away from everything that had been their life and given herself to his care when he was home, and rarely leaving when he was in the hospital.
During his last evening at home, before the hospice with only one exit, Seroia sat beside him on the sofa, gently against his side. He winced at a movement within of some tortured muscle, and she turned the lights down until inside and out it was evening. This always calmed him, as twilight calms those who have suffered a day that needs a night.
Auguste thought of the times in their life together, nearly fifty years now, that he had sensed or perhaps seen faint silver about her — in evening, in darkness, and in her moods of repose and reflection. With her face in profile next to him he was sure of it now, and whether he sensed or saw was not a question that needed answered now.
“My ending should not be yours,” he whispered. He reached for water to regain his voice. “The world should not lose someone like you.” The words did not come easily or smoothly. “It would not be wrong to find another love. No one is enforcing an end to a Synth’s life.” And yet, they go back to the Naether when their mates reject them or die, he knew.
“What about me should go on?” She faced him and silver filled his vision.
In a moment he stirred, provoking pain, and it was then he realized he had passed out. She was holding him as would a mother, and the beauty of her face was seen only by twilight.
“Are you strong enough to hear this?” she asked.
He remembered what they had been talking about and nodded. Cradling him, she watched night coming on outside. The faint glow of the lamps inside was now stronger against it.
“My heart was formed in you,” she said, “and had joy in it. Through you, I learned about art, literature, nature. From the Naether, I came with knowledge of many things in my mind, but not the understanding of them in my emotions. Every time I see a painting, I see you beside me as we talked about it or we stood in silence as I grew to know the heart of the artist. Every time I read poetry, I remember the evenings you helped me with my own poems, never dictating but always opening paths of sense and words that I could explore. And all the places we have been are now landscapes filled with you and me and what we felt there.
“To find someone else demands undoing all this, because there is no room in me now to share another’s life and no forgetting our life. I cannot forget. There is no undoing. If I linger, if I do not return to the Naether, I will always know the empty space where you were.”
For a moment, there was no pain, as if all burdens were hers, and he slept.
#
He awoke again, in the hospice. Bodily torment was distant beneath the drugs. He passed from waking to dreaming to remembering. While waking, he looked for Seroia. If she was not there, someone in a pastel uniform read to him from a best seller that spoke of souls rising into light. He had asked long ago if Synths had souls and had never received an answer other than his love’s luminous eyes. If the book was right, and there was an eternity, would his ever touch hers?
He dreamed of white birds burning, rising in sparks to the heavens where they disappeared in darkness. He found himself in warm darkness, warm as the room where Seroia had walked from the Naether, and as dark as a grave or a womb. Light grew again as he opened his eyes. Seroia was here. They had called her back.
She looked down at him with lips parted, as they were the first time the two of them moved to embrace. He remembered this. He did not remember the tears in her eyes, her eyes that held his as he rose toward her. Light, silvery white, grew about them and took all.
END
