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 was 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 Humboldt 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 n
