Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  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.”

  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 wou
ld 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.