I close my eyes, and the clench in my belly relaxes slightly.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I definitely have a serious problem with what you’re doing. How the hell did you get Bio to make you a multiple, anyway? That’s a capital offense for everyone involved, isn’t it?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t get them to make me a multiple. I know what the law says, and I don’t have any interest in getting turned into slurry. It was a mistake.”
She raises one eyebrow. “A mistake? Like somebody tripped and fell on the bio-printer, and you came squirting out the other end?”
“Sure,” I say. “Something like that.”
She opens her mouth, hesitates, then shakes her head. “You know what? I don’t want to know. If the shit winds up coming down on you, I don’t want to be implicated. That’s the other reason I didn’t want you in my room. I’ll tell you, though—it won’t be long before somebody who does want to know is going to figure out that something is up with you, and when they do, you’ll want to have a better story ready than, ‘It was a mistake.’”
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re probably right.”
We sit in silence for a while. I’d like to ask her what she brought me here for. It doesn’t look like she wants to kill me, and she hasn’t indicated anything about blackmail yet. My only other guess was that she wanted to pick up where we left off this morning, but “I definitely have a serious problem with what you’re doing” seemed to rule that one out. I’m thinking about wishing her a good evening and heading back up to my rack when she says, “Do you think you’re immortal?”
Did not expect that.
“What?”
“Do you think you’re immortal? You’ve been killed, what, seven times?”
“Six,” I say. “It’s only six so far. That’s kind of the root of the problem.”
“Whatever. Are you the same person you were when you boarded the shuttle off of Midgard?”
I have to think about that.
“Well,” I say finally. “This isn’t the same body, obviously.”
“Right,” Cat says. “That’s not what I was asking.”
“Yeah,” I say, “I know. So, yeah, I remember being Mickey Barnes back on Midgard. I remember the apartment he grew up in. I remember his first kiss. I remember the last time he saw his mother. I remember signing on for this stupid expedition. I remember all of that stuff as if it was me who did it, not someone else. Does that mean I am Mickey Barnes, though?” I shrug. “Who the hell knows?”
She’s staring at me. Her eyes are narrowed, and I feel that chill from this morning running down the back of my neck again.
“I looked up that Ship of Theseus thing. You did a terrible job describing it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know. That’s one of those things that I thought I remembered from training, but then when I started talking I realized that, no, I didn’t actually remember it at all.”
“I’m surprised. It’s a pretty tight analogy for your life. I’d think it would have stuck with you.”
I shrug. “Sorry.”
“It’s a pretty airtight argument, don’t you think?”
I start to answer, then shake my head and start again. “I’m confused, Cat. Where are you going with this?”
“Where I’m going is, I want to know if you’re Mickey Barnes, or if you’re just some other guy running around in his clothes.”
“I told you,” I say, “I don’t know. I know what Jemma told me back on Himmel Station, and I know that I feel like I’m the same person I was back on Midgard, but … I don’t know. That’s the flip side of the argument, isn’t it? The fact that it doesn’t make any measurable difference in any way whether I’m the same person or I’m not means that there’s no possible way for me to know for sure. It’s an unanswerable question.”
“Still,” she says, “you don’t know that you’re not him, right?”
“No,” I say. “I guess I don’t.”
She doesn’t respond. We sit in silence for a while. I’m about to ask if we’re done here when she says, “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot these past two days.”
“Um,” I say. “Okay. What about?”
“Dying. I’ve been thinking about dying. I’m only thirty-four years old. I shouldn’t have to think about dying for another fifty years, but here we are.”
Beachhead colonies are dangerous places. I wonder if they emphasized that as heavily in her training as they did in mine. I don’t get a chance to ask, though, because apparently she’s heard all that she needed to hear. She gets to her feet, and then offers me a hand up.
“Look,” she says. “I like you, Mickey.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I like you too.”
“You’re a good guy, I think. If it weren’t for this whole multiple thing…”
If it weren’t for that, I would have been with Nasha last night instead of with her, but this probably isn’t the time to say that. I’m standing there trying to come up with something that I can say when she rises up onto her toes and kisses my cheek. She steps back, gives me a sad smile, and opens the door.
“Tell the other you I said hello, huh?”
I stand staring, my jaw hanging slightly open, as she walks away.
* * *
THE DOOR TO my room is locked when I get there. I show my ocular, wait for the click of the latch disengaging, and then push it open. It’s dark inside, but in the wash of light from the corridor I can see that there are two people lying on my bed.
Two naked people.
One of them is Eight. The other is Nasha.
I stand there, frozen. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be feeling right now. Jealousy? Anger?
Abject terror?
“Get in here,” Eight says. “Close the door.”
“But you’re…” I sputter. “What the shit, Eight? What the actual shit?”
“Sorry,” he says. “I thought you’d be spending the night with Chen again. That or be dead, anyway.”
Nasha rises up on one elbow. “You slept with somebody else?”
“No,” I say. “I mean, yes, I slept in her room, but we didn’t…”
“Oh,” she says. “You just cuddled?”
I open my mouth to protest before realizing that she’s laughing at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You were with Eight.”
“Eight?” Nasha says. “Is that what you’re calling each other now? Seven and Eight?”
“Yeah,” Eight says. “Got a better suggestion?”
“No,” she says. “It’s kind of cute, I guess.”
“Eight,” I say.
“Seven,” he says. “Close the door.”
I do. It’s dark enough now that my ocular flips over to infrared. Eight shows up as dull orange. Nasha is bright, glowing red. I drop into the desk chair and lower my head into my hands.
“So,” Eight says. “How’d it go with Chen, anyway?”
I look up at him. “What? Who cares about Chen? What are you doing here, Eight?”
“Seriously?” Eight says. “I thought that was pretty obvious.”
“No!” I say. “What I mean is … fuck you! You know exactly what I mean!”
“What Eight is doing,” Nasha says, her voice a low, feline rumble, “is stealing away your woman. What’re you gonna do about it?”
“Eight,” I say, “we talked about this. Why didn’t you ask me before you brought Nasha into this?”