Year’s Best SF 15 (45 page)

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 Sam'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 worshipped 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 bed-clothes. 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.