ANOTHER LIFE

by Charles Oberndorf

During my summer years, I worked eight weeks as a camp counselor, then joined my parents for a brief vacation in a small village in Michigan. Nearby Northport had two grocery stores and a pharmacy. Each time a parent headed to Northport, I’d hop in, hoping that the anniversary edition of F&SF had shown up. This was my closing ritual of the summer: the rocky beach, the bone-deep cold water, and several hundred expansive pages.—Charles Oberndorf

She says, Tell me about your first death.

After all these years she should be familiar with its details, but age seems to have erased the particulars that never interested her, so I remind her of the outline of events.

No, she says. I meant what it was like when you woke up?

She’s lying in her bed, and I’ve pulled up a chair to sit by her side. I say something like:

I opened my eyes, and there on the ceiling were shades of blues and yellows. You know how I usually don’t have a good memory for colors, but I took a psych test when I enlisted, and they told me those were the colors that would calm me when I woke up. I do remember lake water lapping the shore, the sounds of the birds I’d grown up with, because it was odd to hear them in this enclosed room. I expected the sound of the water to actually be the reverberation of a ventilation fan.

I sat up, but discovered I couldn’t. There was a nurse beside me, and she was explaining something. I don’t remember what she said. I just knew she wasn’t the same nurse who’d sat me down in the chair and placed gear around my head. I think I liked this one more. Her voice was calm, but it drifted around me along with the sounds of lake water. I was lying down, but I’d just been in a chair. The other nurse, the one I didn’t like, the one who had placed the gear around my head, had told me to relax. I’d closed my eyes. While I was unconscious, they had mapped my neural network. Now, awake, I should get up out of that chair and head over to the next bulkhead to the tavern we liked, to the Wake, where I’d arranged to meet Noriko.

Ah, Noriko, she says. There’s an edge to her voice, though you’d have to know her well to hear it. After all these years, the name Noriko still inspires an edge to her voice.

I say, I can tell another story.

No, she says. You only told me about Noriko when we were first together. And that was a long time ago.

This is also about when I met Amanda Sam.

Don’t be evasive. I’m too old for these games.

So I lay there in this unexpected reality. Of course, someone must have told me if you wake up sitting up, then you’re waking up right after they’ve completed the recording. If you wake up lying down, you died, and they’ve grown a new body and shaped your mind using the patterns of your last recorded neuromap. But I didn’t remember anyone telling me this, and maybe this was what the nurse was whispering to me, but it was my first death, and all I felt was panic and confusion.

I wasn’t in the body that had been sitting in the chair, the body that would wake up, walk down the corridor, cross a bulkhead, and head two levels up to the Wake, where I’d meet Noriko. I wasn’t in the body that was scheduled to spend two more days’ R&R on Haven before it boarded a troop carrier for the war zone.

Worse, if I had died in battle, I should be in a ward with other newborns, the other soldiers who’d died with me. But I was in a private ward with what appeared to be civilian nurses. Had I died so heroically that I had received some special discharge? Or had I made such a fatal mistake that I couldn’t even be reborn among my peers? I asked the nurses all sorts of questions. A nurse on one shift, let’s say the morning shift, said, I can’t talk about the war. It will just upset you. The afternoon-shift nurse said, No one tells us who pays for the treatment or the room. The night-shift nurse said, Maybe the money is coming out of your own account.

Of course, that was impossible. When I enlisted, I had been as poor as a miner without oxygen. The sign-up bonus had gone to pay off family debt.

The nurses taught me to sit up and helped me make my first steps. I learned how to gesture with my hands without knocking over cups of coffee. I imagined what it must be like in the ward among the soldiers, the taunts and the insults at each misstep, all of that making it less frustrating. And at some point, some captain or lieutenant, or maybe even some lowly sergeant, would come by and update us on the status of the war and announce who would go back and who had died the requisite third time and would be offered the honorable discharge plus bonus.

But one nurse, one day, while helping me sit in a machine that worked my leg muscles, said, mostly in exasperation, “There is no ward of newborns. You’re the only one right now. That’s why you got so many nurses. We’re bored.”

Depression weighed my every thought. I’d imagined that Noriko had died with me, that she would have been among the newborn. I imagined finding her and making sure she understood that whatever I’d done wrong, whatever had caused our deaths, I hadn’t meant it.

What exactly did you two have? she asks. How long had you been together?

I hesitate. I have been with this woman for several lifetimes. In our last lifetime together, I waited until I turned fifty before I decided it was time to start over in the body of a twenty-five-year-old. She said, I’ve lived a few more lives than you. I feel I’ve seen enough. This time I want to see things through to the end. She said she would like to spend those remaining years with me, growing old together, but I did not believe her. Our lives were so fraught with our time together: nouns weighted with multiple meanings, verbs sharpened by the years; we were best off, when the mood was right, with incomplete sentences that the other would finish with an automatic goodwill that was also born of all our time together.

After she left me, I died in an orbital collision, and insurance paid for the rebirth into a twenty-year-old body. My current body is thirty-five; she’s eighty-five. My answer to her question—How long had you been together?—now embarrasses me.

At this distance, it’s so hard to imagine how I felt. It was my first life. It was so new to me. I’d only known Noriko for three, maybe it was four days. Five at the most.

Five days? That’s all? How did you meet?

Two different units had been shipped to Haven. One unit was full of youths fresh out of training; the other unit had seen battle, probably several times. I hadn’t made any close friends during training. Everyone else had been so enthusiastic, and I had just barely made it through. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I wandered. It’s funny how little of Haven I remember after all the time I spent wandering it. Way Stations are so different and so homogenous—they have the cultural trappings of the locals, but there’s always entertainment after entertainment, gymnasium after gymnasium, tavern after tavern.

I went into the Wake by accident. Most people in my unit didn’t even know what the name meant. Where I grew up, the expense of a funeral was the same as a month or two of pay, but whatever a funeral cost, a new life cost a hundred times more. My parents were now past fifty and had both decided that it was too late for another new life. They were paying off my brother’s second new life. He was now mining in the asteroids to pay off his first. He had been a woman the second time around, gave birth to two kids, and was in debt from the advance trusts; he was paying for them in case his children died while raising their own children. My sister was on her third life, and she had established some new financial network in some distant solar system and we never heard from her. I was the baby of the family, the one my parents welcomed to their world after their circumstances forced them to take low-paying work that bought bread but no meat, that paid rent, but no heating. With children and grandchildren, they didn’t want to do risky things that paid off debt and built up savings for your next life—no wars, no world building, no mining. So I’d been to some wakes, and I’d liked the name of the tavern, and there inside was the bar itself, shaped like a long casket, shiny dark wood, but with a flat surface. I thought it was amusing.

I don’t remember what they called fresh recruits. Whatever it was, Newbie, or Sprout, or something vulgar, there was this table of boisterous men and women, and they called me over. There was something about them that communicated experience, a certainty to the way they held themselves, even though they were clearly a bit tipsy. I was sure they were talking to someone else. “No, you!” one of them called. He pointed to the young woman next to him. “She thinks you’re worthy.” She glared at him. I’d grown up with that game: the older kid calling you over just to make sure he could put you in your place before an audience of his peers. I think I made it to the bar. I think I bought a drink for the woman sitting next to me. I remember her saying to me, “So who do you think is cuter, the soldier girl or me?”

The soldier girl was at my side and took me by the elbow and muttered, “You need combat pay first before you can afford her.”

“Or him!” the guy at the table said.

Of course, who knows if that happened? Maybe I invented that part to explain what came later. Maybe I just went over to the table, happy that someone was interested in me. I remember staring at soldier girl when she was busy talking to the others. Like all the others, her hair was cut short, and her tunic was tight enough to suggest that like many reborn female soldiers, she’d opted to do without breasts in this life. She sat quietly when she listened, but when she spoke, she leaned forward, waved her hands, made a point of directing conversation away from her or me.

I remember a lot of laughing. Whenever they asked me questions, I felt like an adolescent answering adults. Where I was from, why I enlisted. I told them I wanted to see more of the universe, and I wouldn’t be able to do that where I’d grown up. I felt like the soldier girl, whose name was Noriko, was looking right through me, that she’d guessed the accumulated debt that weighed my family down as if they lived deep in the atmosphere of some gas giant.

At some point she wrapped her arm through mine. Later she pressed her thigh against mine. I had grown up in a conservative place; no girl had ever treated me like this, and I felt both excited and unworthy. We left the Wake as a group—I have a memory of the girl at the bar lifting her hand, her fingers dancing, a gesture of farewell—and I was certain my military companions would soon be rid of me. But we continued walking to where they were quartered, and the group had started to joke with Noriko, swearing they wouldn’t look, that they’d cover up their ears.

Noriko just shook her head as if everyone else was just too adolescent for her. At the Wake, she’d made me place my left pinky in some device that she’d held under the table. Now she handed something to one of her buddies. “Use this to check him in,” she said. She asked me where I was quartered. Then she handed something to another one. “And this will check me in. We’re going elsewhere.”

Later I found out that as long as you pretended to check in they didn’t care much what you did on Haven. The people on Haven needed to make money so that there would be a Haven to return to. I didn’t know this. I felt the thrill of the forbidden as she made her way to a different level, a different bulkhead. She signed us into a room, closed the door, and turned to me. I remember her looking at me for a moment before saying, “You have to take some of the initiative.” So I kissed her, and I clumsily undressed her. At some point, probably after it was over—I picture her lying next to me naked—she looked at me and said, “This is your first time, isn’t it?” She said it sweetly, and years later I wondered if that is exactly what she had wanted. But back then I was frozen. I knew I’d been a horrible lover and I didn’t know if it was worse to answer yes or no.

She kissed me. “We only got a few days, so I hope you aren’t the type who hates getting advice.”

Right now, you can look at me and tell me there was a kind of expediency. She was back from the front and wanted to absorb as much life into her body as she could before going back out. While I kept waiting for her to change her mind about me, we avoided her friends, we sampled her favorite dishes at restaurants she’d visited before, we strolled through the park she liked, and sat holding hands staring at the distant sun which Haven orbited, and the closer gas giants whose moons were the source of contention. “I can’t wait to go back,” she said, and her hand squeezed mine. I remember it as if it were a gesture of great intimacy and trust. “And I truly dread going back.”

I was eager to get back to the guesthouse room with her, whether it was in the morning or afternoon or night. Everything was new, whether it was giving a naked woman a back rub or the intimacy of listening to her pee while I waited in bed. I had so much wanted to hold a woman’s breasts, and there were no breasts to hold. Noriko had kept female-sized nipples, and she directed my attention there. “I’ll streamline my body,” she’d said, “but I won’t streamline my pleasure.”

At night, in the dark, she told me the kind of things she wouldn’t say during the day. She liked combat. She liked the thrill and fear of dying. She liked the constant test of herself: “Should I save a comrade in trouble or press on with the mission or run for my life? I actually like coming back to life. I hate that I can’t remember the last battle or two. I like that I don’t have to remember dying. I like the way my body yearns for sex.” She touched my chest or took hold of my penis when she said things like that, as if to remind me of my role in things. “You’d think, you know, being around for as long as I have, I wouldn’t be interested anymore. And you’d think that it being the same genes, and the same memories, my desires would be the same. But sometimes I wake up and just want main-course sex, and sometimes I want gourmet sex, and sometimes I want to be really rough. My last life I was with this guy and I was really into anal sex. Now I’m getting a kick out of oral sex.” I remember the way she kissed me right then. “You have a perfect mouth,” she said.

You’re gloating, she says.

Maybe I am, I reply. I’m sorry.

I remember how often we talked about her. Our first trip together. It was the rings of Saturn tour, right? And ever since I’ve felt like I had to live up to her. I don’t think I realized until now that you guys were only together for a few days.

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 chose 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 pleasure.

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 particular 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.”

She slipped off the stool, and she walked out of the tavern. I watched the fabric waver around her butt, and I thought that she couldn’t be a man at all. The bartender poured me another beer and looked at me like I was a fool, but he didn’t say anything. I thought of Noriko and decided to leave.

The next morning I felt like I didn’t have much time left. I walked all the way to the spaceport since I didn’t want to spend money on transport. After conversing with several machines and one human who looked like his life was answering simple questions a machine wouldn’t answer—it’s funny how he’s one of the few people from then that I can actually picture in my mind, but maybe I’m making him up—I found out that the ticket was military issue. Around here, the military did the bulk of the business, so the value of the ticket was a third of what it would have cost if I’d booked the passage as a civilian.

I tried to find an employment office, but there wasn’t one. Turned out everyone on Haven pretty much got work here from one military connection or another; the tavern and guesthouse owners all had their three deaths and bonuses, and all the staff and medical people had at least one military death behind them, and the prostitutes seemed to have come here from other military outposts. There was no enlistment office, but I found some offices representing the military, but one office turned out to be in charge of requisitions, another turned out to handle quartering, another salary disbursements. I finally found someone in some office, troop transportation, maybe, and he said he’d look up my records. He tried several different places, squeezed the bridge of his nose, and faced me with a smile. “I don’t know how you got here,” he said, “because according to this you never joined the military.”

“Is there any reason my name would disappear?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if you were a spy. I think we’d get rid of your name if you were a traitor, too.”

So maybe I had signed up to do some special work. Was my existence here an accident while the real me was off somewhere with Noriko discovering something important? Or had I been captured in battle, tortured, and the military thought I’d given up vital information? Why would they pay for a new body, for my rebirth, if I’d given up vital information? Maybe this forced exile was their way of punishing me for my coerced betrayal.

At the hospital foodstop, I was joined by a doctor who so much didn’t want to sit alone that he’d join other loners. He’d died only once. He didn’t know how, but he didn’t want to die again. He had his combat pay, but no big bonus, but they needed medics at Haven and employed him. “Such is the story of a lot of people here. We couldn’t do the three times. What’s your story?”

He would sympathize with my situation. Maybe he’d have a connection or two. He’d find out what had happened. I told him the story. He shrugged, got up, and left.

I was so disconsolate that I was relieved when I got to the Wake and Amanda Sam asked me to buy her a drink. She drank brandy. A slow sip at a time. “It makes me happy. I just have to make sure I don’t get too happy.” She asked me why I looked so bereft. She used that word, bereft, and I decided her first life had to have been more literate than I had first presumed.

I told her I must have done something terrible, but I didn’t know what it was. I liked the comfort of the way she looked at me, the comfort of my hand in her two hands. I was going to tell her how badly I wanted to see Noriko, but some guy snuck up and gave her a big hug from behind. “You free, Amanda?” he asked.

I looked at him, a thin guy with a beard. He’d been down the bar, glancing this way. He’d pointed once at me, and the bartender had shook his head to one question, then shrugged to another.

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I gotta go.” She leaned forward and kissed me before rising. To the guy with the beard she said, “For you, honey, I’m always free. Am I seeing just you tonight?”

“No, Cynthia just called me. She had a change of heart. She said I should ask you home if I found you.”

“Well, you have found me.”

“Would your friend like to come with us?”

Amanda looked at me and gave the kind of smile I’ve always associated with rejection. “He’s a friend, but not that kind of friend.” She leaned over to kiss me again. “Wait two hours, okay. Don’t run out on me like you did last night.”

I nursed a beer and worked up the nerve. I asked the bartender what the skinny guy had asked about me.

“He asked if you were a soldier on leave.”

“And the second question?”

“If you worked for Amanda Sam.”

I don’t remember if I stewed for a while or if I left immediately. I imagined sitting at a booth in the Wake and talking to Amanda Sam when Noriko walked in. But why would Noriko care? After what I must have done. I spent hours thinking of everything wrong I’d done in my life and couldn’t think of a thing that would have led me to this place in my life.

I returned to my room to avoid just those thoughts. I hid in a book; I lived in the book so I could hide. I don’t even remember the knock. Maybe it was a chime or the sound of the sea. I just remember Amanda Sam standing at my door with a bottle of wine. She talked about the couple she’d been with. I don’t remember what she said. I remember her saying that she felt like a prop that helped them act out their own pathologies. She told me how alone she was. Everyone here was ex-military or soon-to-be military. “I don’t have a military bone in my body. I just get boned by the military.”

At some point we had finished the wine, and I thought she’d leave, but instead we were kissing. I was thinking that any minute she was going to pull out of the embrace and ask for money. I think I was hoping she would because it would be such an easy way to put an end to what was happening. But she kept kissing me, and I drank kiss after kiss. And then one thing was leading to another.

And you’re going to skip over what happened? she asks. She has rolled onto her side, and is looking at me beneath the glow of the lamplight. Her hand still rests on my thigh.

I say, You never liked talking about these kinds of details.

I am at the point in my life where this is more like hearing about the mating behavior of some strange animal. She says this and gives me this familiar smile. She’s going to do something that I won’t like but that will amuse her. Her hand moves up my thigh. She laughs, a cackle of a laugh; it would be an old-lady laugh but she laughed like this when we met (she was thirty) and she laughed like that in her next life which she started at twenty-five, and she laughed like that when she was reborn as a sixteen-year-old, after one of the neocancers had ravaged her body with leaking sores and she’d said she’d make it up to me though there was nothing to make up, nor was it a making up: the woman in the sixteen-year-old body felt like such a striking sex object that she withdrew from my every touch. Now, in her final old woman’s body, she cackles and says, her voice full of sympathy, You’re aroused.

I say, You’re not making it easy to tell this story.

It’s such a lonely story, she says. Why don’t you cuddle with me?

I hesitate.

And she misinterprets my silence and turns off the light. She says, There, now you don’t have to see my wrinkles. You can hear my voice and know it’s me. Get undressed and cuddle with me.

I knock my knee against a bedpost, but finally I’m there. Her body feels bonier, more frail, and she pushes her back toward my chest. She has not removed her nightgown, but she places my hand over her breast. She says, I want you to feel my breast but not how it truly feels. I like this, just being close. Does this feel good? she asks and she gently rocks her hips.

I remember a night like this—I’m not sure when in our lives together it took place—but I think we were on some ship taking us somewhere. She told me how alone she felt. How she just wanted to be close. And we worked out this arrangement, this spooning together, my penis nested inside her, a sweet, low-electric connection while we talked. Now, with a quick touch of artificial moisture, we lie together in the dark as if the years apart had not existed at all.

Now, she says, stop telling me what you don’t remember and tell me the details.

Well, I don’t remember how her blouse came off, if I unbuttoned it or if she unbuttoned it while smiling impishly as she gauged my response. All I remember was staring at her naked breasts.

And that also causes me to remember something I forgot. Amanda Sam had always worn clothes that revealed or highlighted her breasts. Sometimes, when talking, she’d smile and look down and you’d have no choice but to follow her gaze. I was eager to hold and touch and kiss Amanda Sam’s breasts, and I thought of Noriko’s streamlined chest, her aroused nipples, and just the yearning for Amanda Sams’s breasts made me feel a terrible guilt.

She says, I’m sure you got over the guilt.

I’m not sure I got over the guilt.

But Amanda Sam had to urge me on. “They’re waiting for your attention.” She kissed me again. “I’m waiting for your attention. Soldier girl is gone, hon, I’m here.”

I should tell her I loved her breasts but I had no right to them. But I also thought about how she’d come to my room, how she’d chosen me, and how I knew she was right, that I probably would never see Noriko again. I kissed her breasts. I worshiped her nipples. I only had worshipped Noriko’s nipples and I thought there was only one way to pray before this altar. Amanda Sam directed my mouth and tongue in different ways, and I was surprised, even though it was obvious, that there were so many ways to go about this. Soon we were both naked, but she wore this little skirt thing. I knew what she was hiding, but I pretended that she was just wearing a skirt. I realized that when we kissed she never pressed herself against me.

She went down on me, and I thought after all my time with Noriko that I would last forever. But it was a new body and a new sensation to that body. Suddenly, after orgasm, Amanda Sam was a stranger. At that point, I was afraid. It was my turn to reciprocate. Or worse, sometimes, Noriko would just want to lie back and talk, and I had nothing to say to Amanda Sam. But she kissed me and did something I didn’t know you could do because Noriko had never done it. She used her mouth, and I was hard, and she had me lie down, then she turned her back to me before lowering herself down.

The sensation was wonderful, but I lay there and felt like a part of me was distant. I wanted to be with Noriko and the way her hands pulled me into the rhythm she wanted or the way she wrapped her arms around me as if she was going to pull my body into hers. I admired Amanda Sam’s back. I admired the way she leaned forward so I could admire her backside. I thought, So this is what sex is like when you don’t care. But I didn’t want it to stop for a second. I wanted to feel more. I sat up, and I leaned my cheek against her shoulder blade and I held her breasts, and she breathed about how good that felt, and maybe I was wrong about the nature of caring because now I felt like I was with her and how alone we both were and as she breathed nice exclamations, I felt my hand make its way down from her breast, down her belly, I’d truly somehow forgotten, because I somehow expected to touch those moist creases.

Not the most poetic naming you’ve done, she says.

The words are a distraction. I’ve lowered my own hand, feeling I should reciprocate the pleasure I now feel, but her hand returns my hand to her breast.

She says, So you don’t find a vulva. Were you shocked?

I pulled my hand away so fast. There were two shocks. The shock of memory, the realization that in spite of what I knew, I’d pictured Amanda Sam as a woman and now I couldn’t. But sweet breathing aside, her encouragements aside, I’d discovered that Amanda Sam was not aroused at all, and now I felt like we were just two mechanisms completing some insistent task.

Amanda Sam didn’t understand my mistake. She took my hand. Part of me wanted to pull back. Another part insisted that it was only fair to reciprocate. But she became more passionate, and it ended up with me on top, she kissing me, she holding her body against mine. After it was over, I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to get up and leave, but the bed was in my guesthouse room. She lay down in front of me, and we spooned, my hand on her breast, her back against my chest. I could lie there and go back to pretending she was a woman.

“I really like you,” she said.

“I like you, too.” I was relieved someone had booked me passage on a ship; I would soon be gone.

“If I sleep in your room again, I’ll have to charge you.”

“I understand.” I said. I didn’t have the money to sleep with her.

“But if you come with me to my room, at my invitation, that’s different.”

“How is it different?” I asked, because I knew I was supposed to ask.

“Because when I make love to someone I like, I prefer to be Sam rather than Amanda.”

I said nothing, and she asked what I was thinking. I told her that it was the Amanda part of her I liked.

“If you really liked me, the me inside, you wouldn’t notice the difference.”

I think it was the next day when I was back at the hospital dining hall. I maybe had two days left, and I overheard some nurses talk about how busy it would be the next day, my last full day on Haven. There would be a whole set of newborns. Noriko could be among them, but even if she wasn’t, there had to be people who knew something about what had happened to my unit. I pictured myself returning home without that knowledge. I imagined all the empty silences in that ruined house in that neighborhood where people went when they had no place left to go.

It would just take a few days, a few days before they were out and showing up in various eateries and taverns. If Noriko just happened to be among them, she would show up at the Wake, she’d see me with Amanda Sam. My whole adventure the night before now seemed sordid. I spent some of my per diem so the guest-house staff would change the bedclothes. I showered for a long time. I resolved I wouldn’t return to the Wake. But all alone in my bed that night, I couldn’t help but think that I was leaving Haven too soon.

The next morning I left for the spaceport to cash in my ticket. The woman there shook her head. “I can’t do it. You have to show a place of residence, not a guest house. This is not a tourist spot.”

I hung around at the hospital foodstop until I saw the same nurse. I went to get some food and sat down near her. She grumbled to a friend how tired she was. They had to rebirth more than a unit. The military wanted them turned around quickly.

“They’ll get some downtime, won’t they?” her friend asked.

“Of course. This place would close down otherwise. We gotta get them out of therapy two days sooner than usual. Can you imagine how they’ll look when they go ambulatory?”

I walked and walked. I kept counting out my options.

I showed up at the Wake and Amanda Sam was not there. The bartender offered me a drink on the house. “Amanda Sam says you’re a good one. Here’s one for the road.”

I decided that this drink was my farewell. I would never know what happened. I would never see Noriko again. Temptation is the sun drawing in a comet. Good sense is just some distant steady orbit.

I had a second beer and sat off in a corner. Amanda Sam walked in, and she scanned the tavern as if looking for someone. When she saw me, she smiled, and sat down next to me. “Hi, gorgeous,” she said. “Buy me a brandy.”

I told her my ship left tomorrow afternoon. She said she’d miss me. I told her about the unit being rebirthed tomorrow. I told her that I wanted to stay, to see if Noriko was among them.

“Your soldier girl won’t be there,” she said.

“But they’ll be able to tell me what’s happened. I’ll know my story.”

“That story was part of your other life,” she said.

I told her that, in the end, it didn’t matter. I didn’t have a place to stay. Staying was just wishful thinking.

“You can stay with me,” she said.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, and standing there was a couple. “Oh,” she said, “I was looking for you two. It’s been a while.” She turned and waved to me.

The next morning she was at my door and walked me down to the port. “If you want to stay, you’re going to have to establish residency and profession. There are no tourists here. I created documentation that says you’re living with me and that you’re my partner.”

“Your partner, like we’re married?”

“No, hon. Profession, I said profession. I’m more than happy to lie about your profession.” And she stopped me here. She looked me in the eye. “Your money is going to run out. You’re not going to find the soldier girl. All you lost was a few months of another life. How badly do you need them, hon?” Her two hands wrapped themselves warmly around one of mine. Her green eyes were warm. “You have a free ticket home. Take it.”

When we found the right office, she produced the document, and after some back and forth she got the full price of what the military had paid for the ticket. She laid down her pinky to get half; I got the other half. “We’ll say that’s rent for a month,” she said. What was left of my per diem had evaporated the moment the transaction was complete; all I had was one-sixth of the cost of passage.

Her apartment was tiny, half the size of the guesthouse room, a double bed, drawers built into the wall, and a cubicle for what’s necessary. There was no sofa to sleep on, no place to stretch out on the floor with a blanket.

She kissed me. “You don’t have to thank me tonight. We can wait until you’re ready. Go see if you can find your girl.”

At midday I haunted the hospital foodstop. I listened for whispers. The nurse turned up again, this time alone, and I stepped up to the food vendor so that I’d be next to her. She punched out her meal request. I found something to say, and we ended up at the same table. I remember that she looked familiar, that suddenly I worried she was the nurse who’d birthed me. But if she was, she didn’t seem to recognize me. I was worried that she’d ask me all sorts of questions about where I lived, what I did, but she was more than happy to complain about her husband, her job, the difficulty of having so many troops coming back to life.

I thought of the ship, how it was heading for the edge of this stellar system. I felt like there might be an alternate me on board, heading off, finding people to talk with, books to read, maybe even a lover, to ease the burden of three months of travel. But here I was, back in the hospital, listening to the nurse telling me how the war must be going badly because they’d received orders to start growing more bodies, to prepare another unit’s worth for rebirth.

I tried to get a sense of how many of these men and women she saw. Would she recognize a picture of Noriko if I showed it to her? Every now and then, she groused about something, then swore me to silence. “I’m really not supposed to talk about that.” Could I give her Noriko’s name and combat number to input into a computer? I didn’t dare.

In the evenings I stayed at the Wake as long as I could, only going home when I had drunk too much to stand. In bed, I pretended to be asleep while Amanda Sam cuddled up to me, one hand draped gently over my penis, her own penis erect against my backside. She whispered how much she liked me and desired me until one of us actually drifted off. More and more, she spent her evenings with me. If she disappeared, she told me which taverns she would visit. I realized how little work she’d been getting, what a relief it must have been to get one-sixth of the cost of passage. “The whole economy is drying up,” she said to me. “If they don’t give these reborns any shore leave, this place will go crazy. It happened once before, just watch.”

Suddenly I saw it, the way locals glared at me if I looked at them too long, the clipped sentences, the constant complaint in almost every conversation. The nurse joined me with a therapist friend. It was one of my therapists. He was sure to ask what I was doing here, but no, he talked about how he preferred working with civilians and officers. When you do therapy in groups.... He shook his head bitterly. “I hope they don’t send them back to battle before shore leave. There’s a major here who thinks shore leave is just for fun. My soldiers— “ His voice became high-pitched so the major might have been a woman or castrato “—don’t need to get drunk and get laid to fight well. Their morale is just fine. Well, fuck their morale. How about their fine motor skills? How about their gross motor skills? That’s what shore leave is about. They’re brand-new bodies and they need the real world to operate in before you throw on some body armor and throw them out into free fall.”

He kept going on, and I barely listened. He was angry enough, I thought, that maybe he would tell me anything, but the nurse was advising him to watch what he was saying, and he was nodding, his face red, his look recalcitrant, then chagrined.

One night, Amanda Sam insisted that we go back home—I always thought of it as the apartment—before I’d drunk too much. “You’ll spend up all your money,” she said, “and then what?” Back at her place, she said she wanted me so badly that she would be Amanda for me. I soaked up her skin’s warmth like a sponge.

It probably wasn’t the next day, but it’s the next thing I remember, how suddenly sections of Haven were flooded with stumbling reborns. Their hair was wild and shaggy. Most of them looked like they’d chosen to be in their twenties, but a few, probably officers, were in their thirties. A guy, his face dour, concentrated on every step he took. Another stumbled, fell, got up, laughing, looking to his more cautious friends. I kept walking where they walked. Every time I saw tanned skin, black hair, compact body, I’d walk to catch up, but before I even caught a glimpse of the face, I’d see that the shoulders were too wide, the hips too flat.

And what would I say to her, if she was there? I watched for her at various lunchrooms, where I saw the newborns shake their forks at each other as if angry, but their faces showed a range of reactions to their bodies’ refusal to learn their way through the world instantly.

The presence of all these newborns made Amanda Sam happy. “Tonight, the best brandy for me, the best beer for you,” she said, even though I think Haven only stocked one variety of each, the drinkable and the barely drinkable. I remember one night, probably the first night the newborns were around, I just sat at the Wake, drinking beer, imagining that Noriko would walk in, that she would take me off to a guesthouse room, and we’d make love. Several other nights I wandered from tavern to tavern, maybe checking in some dinner spots beforehand, looking for Noriko, knowing I wouldn’t see her, from time to time running into Amanda Sam gaily chatting with some man or woman, once a couple. Each time she waved to me, offered me that big smile that said, I’m delighted to see you, keep walking.

I spoke with some of the newborns. I heard the stories. One guy told me that their goal had been to take an orbital without destroying it, which meant they had to board it without using projectile weapons. At one point they were on the skin of the world, breaking into a compartment, and the enemy had fighters flying above. It was strange how silent everything was except for the way everyone was yelling orders and those voices reverberated in your helmet, voices darting about you as if your head was stuck in a fishbowl. The enemy couldn’t risk projectiles, either. They used harpoons, a joke when you first heard it in training, but when one pierced your suit, when you watched your air drain away as you were dragged off into space, it wasn’t so funny anymore. “Actually, if it happened to you, you’d never remember it,” he said. “But when you watched it happen to your buddy, you’d go to sleep night after night imagining what it would be like happening to you. Worse, you’d relive it happening to your friend, wondering what he felt and thought as it happened. Well, then you became hardened to the whole process.”

I tried to picture myself on the skin of a metal world, magnetic soles holding me in place, just enough of a pull to keep my balance, not enough to prevent a step, or a harpoon from pulling me away, and making a rush for an opened compartment, knowing that some of us would make it, and that some of us were there to die so others could make it, that our majors and colonels and generals felt free to overwhelm the other side with numbers because we’d all be back, the cost of our resurrection something for governors and senators and premiers at home to tally up. I felt a terrible beating in my heart just at the thought, and I was glad to have Amanda Sam wrap her arms around me, and most nights she was content and sated so there was no pressure to express my thanks for this half a bed in a tiny room.

I worked up the courage to ask questions. I gave Noriko’s full name. No one had heard of her. I named the unit I was with. Most didn’t know it. One or two knew that my unit was dealing with orbitals circling the neighboring gas giant, which at the time was too far away in its orbit for anyone to care. One woman had gotten word that the first foray had been successful, the second was disastrous, the third could happen at any moment.

When the newborns shipped out, I concluded I would never see Noriko, and I would never know what had happened to me. It was only then that I realized what a terrible situation I was in. Amanda Sam took me out to dinner to celebrate the great few days she’d had, and I drank brandy with her, and I told her that tonight would be the night. She kissed me passionately, and back in her apartment she was tender. She aroused me first, and the things she did to relax me actually felt good. She looked down at me and told me to hold her breasts, and entered me so slowly and carefully that it did not hurt at all. I suppose if I’d been in love with her or desiring this kind of moment, I might have felt something more than just the physical sensation, but instead I rubbed my hands up and down Amanda Sam’s back and remembered the one or two times Noriko had caressed my own back and said, “Let’s finish up, I’m ready to sleep,” and I now understood the distance Noriko must have felt (even though during the act I had been certain that because it was sex it must have felt good).

During the days I worked on making the tiny apartment look better. I thought of the people Amanda Sam brought there. I prepared meals. When she pressed herself against me at night, I turned and kissed her and wrapped my legs around her thighs. She got me drunk the night she wanted me to reciprocate her oral ministrations. The next day I searched for some kind of work, but as I already knew, there was nothing official available. “Pinky-up,” the guy in charge of sewage said. The fingerprint produced the documentation, and he shook his head. “You don’t even have one death to your credit. I can’t hire you. If you’re going to stay on Haven, you’re gonna have to keep doing the job you registered for. My apologies. I wouldn’t want to do it.”

When Amanda Sam took me out to dinner and then was Amanda for me in bed, I knew she was going to tell me it was time to work. “I warned you. I warned you. I warned you. And I’ll take good care of you and make sure you meet only the best of people. Some of my peers have taken new people under their wing and taken half. I’ll only take twenty percent, plus your share of rent and food.” The next morning she bought me a big breakfast, and she said how she’d loved every second in bed with me but it was time to learn how to do a few things a little differently. I asked feebly about women, and she laughed. “Young men, they can get for free.” Things were flush now, and she had found several people on Haven who would enjoy paying to break me in. And that’s how it all started.

I’ve heard other stories, and I know now how lucky I was. No one beat me or mistreated me. Amanda Sam always met me at the Wake at the end of an evening to find out how things went, to coach me on how to handle the rude and stingy ones and how to handle the ones who wanted to fall in love with me. And maybe if I were tuned that way, I might have enjoyed myself. Instead I felt like I was living someone else’s life. When I wasn’t working and when I wasn’t with Amanda Sam, I was walking. Long walks with long elaborate dreams. Noriko would appear in the Wake. She’d say she’s seen enough battles, and she now wants to take me with her, some place far away. I knew now I would never go home. What would I say? How many lies would I tell just to be comfortable?

She says, You always avoided the truth when it made other people uncomfortable.

I listen for something severe in her voice, but I don’t hear it. I say, I’m telling everything the best my memory will allow.

I know. That’s what I love about this visit. You know, she says, the subject changing with her tone of voice, I always wondered why you wouldn’t change. I did want to try out a life as a man, and I always thought you didn’t love me enough to be a woman.

You understand now? I ask. After all those men, after their insistence on their needs ... the only time they cared about my arousal was when they wanted to boost their own self-confidence ... after all that, I could never sleep with a man again. You probably would have been a great man, but I couldn’t bear to sleep with another one, no matter how nice.

I said I understood. But now I wonder this. Did you stay with me because you loved me or because you wanted a secure life?

There’s a giant difference between why I first sought your attentions and why I’m with you now.

It’s an awkward moment, given the way our bodies are touching, given the years of abstinence in our last life together, so I return to the story.

When the newborns came, it was a rush. I now dreaded the sight I had once longed for. Many of the newborns had not seen enough battle to afford a guesthouse, so Amanda Sam and I traded off with the apartment. There would be an occasional woman soldier who hired my services, but mostly I listened to men lament their lives after they’d relieved themselves of their burdens. I kept an eye out for Noriko, but now my plan was to spot her first so I could avoid her.

I started to hang out more with the nurse and the therapist, just to know people who had nothing to do with the Wake and Amanda Sam, though Haven is a small enough place that I’m sure they knew what I did. I’m sure when I got up from lunch, they probably said, He’s not so bad. Everyone’s got to make a living somehow.

Some nights, I decided just to do nothing, and I stayed in the Wake and drank. Sometimes Amanda Sam would rest her hand on my shoulder and I’d turn to her and she’d tell me it was time to go home. She’d make love to me, comfort me, and I’d pretend to be comforted. “I’ll always take care of you,” she said. “I’m so glad we found each other.” And the next morning she’d take her twenty-percent cut. So I sat in the Wake and foresaw years and years of this, and sometimes in the Wake, but never on my walks, which were just for dreams, I would tally up how long it’d take to build up savings, how long it would take to get off Haven, and how much I’d need to start a new life when her hand fell on my shoulder. I turned and Noriko was looking at me.

“I’ve been told you’ve been asking about me,” she said.

Oh, no, she says. She doesn’t recognize you. She died before she had another neuromap, and she doesn’t know you.

I hear the sadness in her voice. For decades and decades I couldn’t mention Noriko to her; now, after all these years apart, she sympathizes. How different life would have been if so much separation wasn’t necessary to erase whatever had made us bitter.

I stood up to face her. I thought for a second she looked older, as if the job had worn away her friendliness, but then I recalled this look, the way she’d gotten when she’d given out instructions to her companions. There was no recognition on her face, no joy at seeing me, just this military face accustomed to giving orders.

She said, “I thought you’d be gone by now. I made sure the cost of everything was covered.”

“I couldn’t go.”

She stood and waited for me to say more.

“I didn’t know what happened to you. I didn’t know what happened to me.”

She looked around, took my hand, and led me to a table. She sat across from me and ordered herself a beer. She held the glass in both her hands, and I wanted her to hold my hand again. She said nothing for the longest time. I surveyed the entire place, the bar, the booths, to make sure Amanda Sam was nowhere to be seen.

Noriko said, “Here’s what happened. We posted as comrades-in-arms. We were set to attack an orbital. They told us that ninety percent of our unit would die. You began to shake in your sleep. You talked about how when you died, once they’d grown you a new body, once you’d been re-assigned, that we’d be apart. But the truth was you were scared to die. When it came time to suit up, you were trembling so much that the captain ordered you to your quarters. He didn’t want you to put us at risk. I told you to pack up your gear and move out while I was away.

“The enemy was unprepared. We took the orbital with few casualties. When we got back, you’d hanged yourself.”

I felt myself shaking my head. I wasn’t the me that would do that.

“I blamed myself for what happened,” she said. “ Back on Haven, I was so involved in taking care of my own needs that I didn’t recognize the warning signs. The one thing I forgot about youth, real youth, the first youth, is how passionate you are about life itself. How it sometimes has to be all or nothing.”

I didn’t know what to say. I said something about there being no discharge papers.

“You forgot or ignored what you were told. In the military, your life is only to be lost for the cause. The military won’t pay for a new life if you kill yourself. They promoted me after that skirmish. I got a pay raise. I had enough money to cover your rebirth. I arranged for some loans to cover the cost of a berth back to your homeworld. I thought I’d made up for everything. I though I’d taken care of you.”

We sat there for a while and what more could we say? I wanted to know what warning signs she’d seen. I didn’t want to know. And what other subject was there? We’d only been together for three or four days.

Noriko didn’t ask about where I was living or what my plans were. She told me she’d recently been assigned to Haven in a supervisory capacity. There would be four units of newborns to organize, plus two units of newbies coming in. The big push was beginning.

She was talking about everything they had to do and how she had to get back to her duties when Amanda Sam walked in and said hello. Noriko looked up at her. There wasn’t a trace of recognition’s on Noriko’s face. “I’m sure I’ll see you,” Noriko said to me and left without saying a word to Amanda Sam.

“I see that soldier girl is back,” Amanda Sam said.

“She didn’t recognize you.”

Amanda Sam looked at me for a moment. I think she was tempted to explain why I was wrong, but she’d taught me the con. I’d already used it a few times, but because I was living such separate lives in my head, I hadn’t figured the whole thing out, how everything had stretched back to day one of my new life. The con: you sit down with a newborn, and you talk about the last time you’d been together, the one that must have taken place after the neuromap was recorded.

I walked and walked that night. I told myself I wasn’t a coward, I wasn’t the kind of person who’d kill himself. Look at what I was living through now. I hadn’t been tempted to kill myself in the past months with everything that had happened. And I reminded myself that Noriko had said we’d left Haven as comrades-in-arms. I thought of ways I could see her again, of things I could say to win her back.

But, of course, Haven was a military way station, even though it was run by civilians. Of course, people knew I’d been asking about her, and the local military intelligence guy, whoever he was, must have told her. They’d know how I was making a living, and so Noriko would know.

I didn’t see Noriko again. I avoided the hospital, and I avoided other taverns. I only conducted business out of the Wake, and she never returned. I stopped taking my walks. I’m sure she was on Haven until everyone involved with the big push had left. And by the time the newborns and the fresh recruits were gone, I had enough money to start a new life, to be reborn and not remember one bit of this. Instead, I worked for another year and had enough to fly to planets that people liked to talk about, to have some money to live for a little bit and try one unsuccessful business venture or another.

Amanda Sam cried when I told her I was leaving. “I made this possible for you,” she said. “I want you to remember that.” And my last night there, I let her make love to me the way she liked, and I was so moved by the way she felt that I had my first orgasm while I held her in my arms. This caused her to kiss me passionately. “Please don’t leave. Please stay. You think I took advantage of you, but I really do love you.” Right then I thought she was begging her twenty-percent cut to stay. Now I think she either loved me or, at least, my company. I think of all the booths I sat in, waiting alone to attract some eager company. I think of those same booths at the end of a long evening when she sat beside me and took my hand in hers.

And the ship I boarded later stopped at some planet or other, and you boarded, and that’s how I spent the rest of my lives.

She turns over in the bed and kisses me. I caress her face, and the way time has lined her skin feels wrong against my fingertips. My body betrays me. I say, Talk to me, and I hear her voice and she pulls me into her embrace and it’s her I make love to.

The next morning she makes me my favorite breakfast and she packs my bag. I tell her I was more than willing to stay indefinitely. I have no special plans and I like being with her.

She says, These last few days, well last night, especially, were perfect. When I first met you, you told me about Noriko, and I wanted to be with someone who could love so passionately. And I was jealous of her ever since because I couldn’t inspire the same kind of love. Last night, you told me about Noriko, and I remembered everything about you I loved when our lives together weren’t so difficult. Last night is the memory I want to have of you when I die.

I argue, but if I argue too fiercely, I’ll destroy everything these few days have come to mean. I leave her house in the woods, take train after train, come to a port and board a ship for elsewhere. In the decades we were apart—me in a fresh new body, she finding out what happens when the body finally ages—I always thought about her. During those years, I knew that one day, when I had the money for the voyage, I would track her down and see her at least one last time.

I leave her now, but I can’t imagine another life.