Year’s Best SF 15 (44 page)

Shall we talk about something else? I ask. I don't correct her about the rings of Saturn tour.

I sit here and feel an enormous guilt. We haven't seen each other for a long time. I had some extra money because of a business venture that, for once, went right, and I decided to travel out to this world, to fly to the regional capital, to take train after train to the extended forest where she now lives much like a hermit with books, all of them written before the start of the human diaspora.

I have been there for almost a week. The first days I was sick with sensory deprivation: abruptly living alone in just my head, with only the sounds of the world around me. Now that I've recovered, she takes me for walks, slow walks, where once she'd been the one to keep a terrible headlong pace. She points out birds, the scurry of animals; she bids me to listen for sounds I haven't listened for since I grew up by the lakes of my homeworld. At night I cook her favorite suppers, and we talk about people we've known and trips we've taken, living off the accumulated interest of her last name. She's started to forget events of our last lifetime together, and we talked more of our early adventures. Early on, I recommended medicines that would make her neurons supple just as the injections kept her joints pain-free and flexible. She said, “I don't like pain. I don't mind fading away.” Exhausted after our walks, she lies in bed once we finish supper, and we talk until she falls asleep. I sit there and listen to her breathe, her occasional murmur of a snore, and I wonder why I have come here. Was it to ask her to reconsider, to choose another life and rejoin me? We traveled so well together; we sat together so poorly when in chairs that moved only with the velocity of the planets where we had settled.

Now, we're both awake, I sit in the chair next to her bed, and I've asked her if I should change the subject. She extends her hand and places it on my knee. No, she says. I think I should have listened more carefully the first time. I listen more these days. I hear so few voices. And I think you tell things better these days. I've always liked you best when you were over thirty-five. So, it sounds to me like you were just a tool for Noriko's plea sure.

That was my biggest fear, that I might not truly exist for her
beyond her pleasure. But one night, or I think it was at night, it could have been in the morning, she had a powerful orgasm where she seemed to shake to pieces right under me. I remember what she said afterwards. “I hope I survive the next two battles. Then I'll be back at Haven, and this moment will become one of my permanent memories. But if I die this time out, I'll come back to life, and it'll be as if you never existed.”

In the gym, I felt like I was her mirror image, with all that's insubstantial about an image in the mirror. I knew exactly how to hit back a ball so she'd return it, exactly what moves to make when we wrestled, exactly how to move with her when we practiced duck and glide. “We work so well together,” she said. “I mean here in the gym. Maybe we should register as comrades-in-arms.” And I thought, if we die, we'll die together, and we'll be reborn together. We will have forgotten how we met, but we'll know we belong together.

That's why I hated those missing two days, the two days after the neuromap, the two days before I was shipped off to battle. I would have found out if she'd truly meant those words. It sounds sickly-sweet now, but I wanted to know if we'd faced things side by side.

My recovery progressed quickly. The morning-shift nurse said I should start walking through Haven. She gave me a set of clothes, leg-braces, and a cane. Once outside in the corridors I found the first public dataport and placed the tip of my left pinky against the circle. There was a delay. The pinky of my newborn body didn't have the same fingerprint as belonged to my previous body, but it had the same DNA, and one set of records had to align with the other. For a moment, I thought the old bank records wouldn't be found, that my entire past would disappear, but soon numbers layered like bricks appeared. I had some leftover money from my last visit in Haven, enough to buy a few meals and a few drinks at the Wake. If the military had paid me for my services, there was no record of it here.

Okay. And how long ago had I spent the shore-leave money they had given us when we first docked with Haven? It took me a while since Haven went by local calendar rather than the federal calendar. I checked for the day of my last
transaction, which had been four beers at the Wake the night before I was set to leave. I would never know with certainty with whom I had those beers, but it was six months ago. In those days it took a month to grow a body, so I must have died five months after I left Haven. How much had happened in those five months?

I walked for a bit, well, walking, then resting, all over Haven. One of the few things I remember now, benches in little niches with plants and the sound of a nearby forest or sea. I ended up at the Wake.

It was a slow night. I sat coffin-like, drinking something; maybe it was sake (even though I never really liked sake) because that's what Noriko and I drank together. The bartender seemed to avoid my gaze, and my glass sat out for a long time before he poured another.

“Not friendly tonight,” I said to the guy next to me who ran a lunchroom one bulkhead over.

“There's hardly any business,” the guy said. “We're all getting antsy.” I told him the date I had shipped out, and he said there had been a rash of rebirths about a month after that. But it had been quiet since then. There had been a unit of newbies, and several units for shore leave, but no new casualties for a while. “Usually they wait until they have two units' worth, enough to fill a ship. You don't want to pay for quartering people longer than you have to.”

A woman spoke my name and slipped her arm through mine. She was pale with red hair, and her green eyes gave her an alien look. I don't think I'd seen green eyes before. She looked at me so intently. The way I remember it, this is the woman I bought the drink for the night I met Noriko, but, as I said, I've begun to wonder if I made that up later, that maybe this was the first time I actually met her. “Let me buy you a drink,” she said.

I was protesting while the barman poured me another sake. Her hand very tenderly wrapped my hand, and just by touch she guided me to a booth. She sat down and slid over. She patted the space next to her. “Sit next to me, handsome.”

Only my mother had ever complimented my looks, so I became wary. I sat down opposite her.

She tilted her head, and I felt the disappointment registering in her green eyes. At first I felt like I'd let her down; then I felt like things hadn't gone as she'd planned. I didn't know which reaction to trust.

“You don't remember,” she said.

I tried. She looked at me like I should remember more than buying her a drink.

“Your friend and you.”

“Noriko?”

“Yes. You and Noriko. We spent a whole night together.”

Once while in bed Noriko had asked me my fantasies. After I had told her, she took firm hold of my penis. “This is what I like, and I don't share,” she said. Right then I knew this pale-skinned woman with red hair was conning me.

“You don't remember. We met too late. We met after your neuromap. And you're walking a little funny. Poor you, a new life.” She took my hand and again called me by name. I wanted to pull my hand away, but I liked the comfort of it after how-ever-many nights it had been sleeping alone in my private bed, my only company being therapy machines and the nurses who brought my food, the physical contact of the professional hand that never lingered, the touch that was never too light, that never grazed a nerve that mattered. “My name's Amanda Sam. And I want you to know that the two of you spent a very lovely night with me.”

She was holding my hand, and I couldn't work up the courage to tell her I didn't trust her.

“We met in this tavern. You and soldier girl were seated in that booth over there.” She pointed at the other side of the bar, and it was the booth where Noriko and I usually sat. Noriko and I had gravitated toward it, the booth where we'd first sat together. But Amanda Sam could have learned that just by watching us. “You two looked like it had been a bad day. It was a slow night and I decided to join you guys. I asked what was wrong.”

“Noriko wouldn't say,” I said.

“And she didn't. I told the two of you that I like working with couples who are going through a quiet phase. I offer the extra spark.”

“I'm not sure Noriko is the type who would want the extra spark.”

“Don't be sure,” she said. She was caressing my hand rather than just holding it, her fingertips every now and then sailing up along my forearm. Noriko had been a straightforward lover; every action and physical sensation had a utilitarian purpose in her pleasure. Only once, when Noriko had thought I was asleep, had her fingers traced the contours of my face. “I've been here for a while. I've seen her before. She does have a life or two extra under her belt, where you've got that innocence that some women find very attractive. I find it very attractive. I just want to take you into my arms and tell you everything will be okay. But, you know, hon, it is still innocence. A woman like Noriko, she might also want a spark.”

I was sure she was manipulating me, but she was right, also. Maybe Noriko wanted more. I had given Noriko precisely what she asked for, and I measured the results by the way she clung to me. But there were those silences. Maybe she wanted more than she knew to ask for. The one time she'd caressed my face when she thought I was sleeping, I'd wanted to ask her to do that more often, but I never did.

And now Amanda Sam was talking about Noriko herself, how she sat at the table, taut, like a soldier, or a weapon waiting to be used, and how she was in bed, like coiled energy released. And maybe there was a gleam in Amanda Sam's eye, the gleam of the gambler who's just seen her opening gambit work, but maybe I'm adding that now, because she
was
describing the Noriko I knew.

“But,” I said, and I remember how hard it was to say outright, partly because of the way I'd been raised, partly I wanted it clear that I still didn't trust her. It took me a while to explain how Noriko wasn't interested in women or in sharing me with another woman.

“Oh, honey,” she said. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Then looked at me with her green eyes. “I'm Amanda Sam. I was Amanda with you and Sam with her.”

I pictured the events of that night, events that might or might not have happened. It was all too much. I made excuses: I had to return to the hospital; I had yet to be discharged.
Amanda Sam accompanied me, her arm gently wrapped around mine. “I know it must be hard for you,” she said. “I would offer to stay with you, but it's illegal in a hospital.”

When the night-shift nurse saw Amanda Sam at my side, she glared at me and said nothing. Only at that point did I realize that Amanda Sam was a prostitute. I'm not sure when I understood she was a hermaphrodite.

She says, I don't remember that you ever told me this.

I told you about Amanda Sam, but you never wanted to hear the details.

You know, for some reason, I thought you'd met Amanda Sam first. I think I'd come to believe that Noriko had helped you get over what happened with Amanda Sam. Maybe that's why I thought you'd loved Noriko so much. Or maybe that's what I needed to think so I could fall in love with you. Tell me what happened next.

I think I was discharged from the hospital the next day, but that may have not been the case. Whenever they discharged me, they updated the chip in my pinky. Three nights paid for at a guesthouse, a set per diem for four days, and passage on a ship home, well, three ships with two connections. All I could picture was three months while I went out of my mind, not knowing how I would tell my family that I had no idea what had happened to me nor why I'd lost out on the opportunity to die three times and bring home desperately needed funds.

I found a niche with library capacity, but Haven lies in a sector where they consider wartime censorship to be patriotic. There was no news on any battles, so I couldn't find out how I might have died. I had begun to wonder if something stupid had killed me: a fall from a ladder, a strange electrocution while installing equipment, or the terrible aim of my comrades. But if I'd died from any of those embarrassments, they would have revived me, wouldn't they? Would any of that have disqualified me from future battles?

I decided to get something quiet, a book, I decided, and I read like I hadn't read since I was in my early teens, and I sat in the hospital foodstop, and I moved around, trying to sit as close to nurses as I could, and I listened, hoping someone
would say something about a group of newborns. After dinner I returned to my room, cleaned up, and went to the Wake.

There were a few people in booths. The bartender poured me a beer, then ignored me. Amanda Sam wasn't there, and two beers later, she was. I bought her a drink. She asked me a lot of questions. She sympathized. “I know what it's like,” she said, “when you start with so little.” Her first life she'd been a woman and had been taken advantage of so many times that she decided to charge men for that partic u lar pleasure. “I'm not the soldier type. I don't want to get killed to start fresh. But there's a demand for people like me who make anything possible, and so the people who paid for your new life paid for mine.”

I remember sitting stunned. With Noriko I'd experienced sex as glorious exercise and passionate language and had dreamed that it might one day be religious communion.

She talked as if sex were an economic transaction, just like any other human interaction.

I told her she was wrong.

She smiled, bemused. Noriko had looked that way when I'd told her my plans for the future. “Look,” Amanda Sam said. “I gotta go. If you want to talk some more, I'll be back in an hour and a half, two hours at the most.”