War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  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 tha
t 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.”