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 old
er 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 plea sure.”
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 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.
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