Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,163

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