New Bodies, Same Hearts

By the end of the first week, they had stopped crying at breakfast.

It was a gradual thing. On the Monday, nobody could get through a bowl of cereal without somebody's lip beginning to go. On the Tuesday, Venn had to be removed from the cafeteria for spooning scrambled eggs into his mouth with a look of religious ecstasy. By Thursday the staff had learned to leave a box of tissues on each table and walk by quickly. By Saturday, a miracle: the whole company sat down to a meal, nine of them at a long refectory table in the sunlit hall, and the only wet face belonged to Gregor, who had been given a glass of orange juice and did not know what to say.

"It's cold," he said, in wonder.

"It's from the fridge."

"I haven't had a cold drink in fifteen years," he said.

"You'll get used to it."

"I don't want to." He drank, closed his eyes, and made a noise that Zoe, at the far end, mistook for a stroke.

They were in the old refectory of the Institute, which had once been a monastery, and was now a dining hall with a vaulted stone ceiling and tall arched windows that looked out on the pines. Autumn had come. The maples on the hill had turned red and gold, and the October sun lay across the long oak tables in slabs of honey. It smelled of coffee and toast and, from the kitchen, something garlicky and magnificent.

"Is that sauce?" said Venn, rising halfway out of his chair.

"Sit," said a deep voice. "It is not ready."

…

The Ferrara brothers had taken over the kitchen on the second day.

They had done it without asking. Luca had walked in with an apron, which he had found, in the manner of a conjuror, from nowhere, and Matteo had walked in behind him with a wooden spoon. The cooks, who had been on staff for twelve years and had never seen the director in the kitchen except on his way to the coffee machine, had retreated against the wall. There had been a brief, intense, Italian argument about the correct treatment of a tomato. At the end of it both brothers had stood glaring at one another over the stove, and then Matteo had said something very quiet, and Luca had put down his spoon and laughed until he cried.

They had been cooking ever since.

Archie could hear them now, through the hatch, arguing in rapid dialect, over the clash of pans. Occasionally Matteo's voice rose in outrage, and Luca's answered, rich and dry, and they both subsided into laughter. It was the best sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of two men who had spent fifteen years not saying a thing and were now, at last, catching up.

"They're like children," said Zoe, at his elbow.

"They are children."

"They are about eight." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "I love it. It's so ridiculous."

He did not move.

He sat very still, with his coffee going cold in his hand, and the weight of her head on his arm, and a feeling in his chest like a bird that has landed on a sill and is not quite sure it is allowed. She did not seem to notice. She watched the hatch with a soft pleased smile, her short dark hair brushing his sleeve, and he thought: This is a thing that happens now.

She leans on me. In daylight. In front of people.

He drank his coffee. It was, he noted, excellent.

…

There was a bench at the edge of the pines.

They found it that afternoon. It stood at the far end of the grounds, a plain gray wooden one under an old maple, looking out on a long slope of meadow and, beyond it, the blue-gray line of the hills. The grass was damp. The sky was high and clean. A few red leaves came down through the still air, one at a time, and turned slowly on their way.

Archie sat down.

He did it carefully. He had been learning a body for six days, the way one learns a new house, by touch, finding where the light switches were. His legs were longer than he remembered. His hands were quicker. He noticed, with a sort of dazed amusement, that he could run up a flight of stairs and talk at the same time, and he had not yet got used to the absence of the cough.

Zoe sat beside him.

She tucked her feet under her. She was wearing a gray jumper two sizes too large, borrowed from Otis, and a pair of the Institute's issue sweatpants, rolled at the ankle, and her hair stuck out in tufts. She looked about seventeen. She looked, he thought, like the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Yes."

"Do you feel like you?"

He turned his head.

"I mean, in there." She tapped her temple. "I keep thinking about it. Jin explained it to me, how it works, the cloning. He said the cells came from my own tissue, from the biopsy, grown in a tank for six months, and then, when I woke up, I was in it. That the body's mine, but it's," she wrinkled her nose, "it's new. It was never hurt. It never had a mother who worried over it. It never ate a bad hospital sandwich." She pulled her knees up. "I just. I look in the mirror, and I think, who's that? And I know it's me. I know it is. But I can't stop wondering if it's all of me. If the old one took something with her when she went."

"The old one?"

"The one who had the scar." She touched the base of her throat, where it had been. "The one who was afraid."

He was silent for a moment.

He thought of what he would say. He had a good many answers. There was the philosopher's answer, which he had heard Jin give at length, on the fourth night, with a diagram on a napkin: that identity is a pattern and not a substance, a song and not a violin. There was the one Matteo had given, gently, over a cup of tea: that a river is the same river though no drop in it is the same. There was the one that Elena, who knew a good deal about the question, had not given at all, but had left on his pillow in a note: Be kind to the one who is waking up. She is you and she is new.

None of them was quite right.

"I don't know," said Archie.

"No?"

"I really don't. I keep going back and forth. I've decided I'm not me about three times a day, and then I eat a sandwich and decide I am." He smiled. "But I'll tell you what I do know."

"What?"

"When I woke up. In the pod. Before I'd opened my eyes. I knew where you were."

She turned.

"I didn't see you. I didn't hear you. I just knew. You were on my left, about four feet away, and you were awake, and you were scared." His voice was quiet. "I'd have known it anywhere. It's not in the body. It isn't in the lungs or the hands. It's," he searched, "it's something else. It carried over."

She did not say anything.

"That's what I'm going on," said Archie. "That I'd know you. Whatever I was wearing. That's, I think that's what me means."

…

For a long time she said nothing.

A leaf came down between them and lay on the bench. She picked it up and turned it over in her fingers. It was red, with a streak of gold at the stem. She twirled it, and watched it, and he saw that her ears had gone pink.

"I remember everything," she said at last.

"Yes?"

"Every bit. The Hall. The Tree. The mirror." She kept her eyes on the leaf. "I remember how I felt. All of it. The first time I saw you. The way you held out your hand in that horrible little courtyard, like it was no big thing." She swallowed. "I remember how it felt when you, when you went quiet in the Mirror World. I remember how much I wanted you to look up."

"Zoe."

"So I think," she said, slowly, "if I remember loving you, and I still love you now, then I must be me."

She stopped.

Her hand went to her mouth.

"I mean," she said, through her fingers. "I didn't. That wasn't. Context. I meant it as, as an example. In, in a general sense, in the sense of, of abstract, it's just a, you can substitute any—"

"You said it."

"I did not."

"You said I still love you now."

"I said if."

"You said, if I remember loving you, and I still love you now."

"It's a conditional!" She was crimson to the hairline. "It's a hypothetical construct! It's a, a thought experiment! It doesn't, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't, oh my God. Oh my God." She dropped her face into her hands. "I can't believe I said that. Please forget it. Please. Please forget I said it."

Archie began to laugh.

It started somewhere low, near his ribs. It was a sensation he did not recognize at first, a warm, tickling, uncontrolled thing, climbing up through his chest like bubbles in a glass. It came out of him in a breath. Then another, louder. He put his head back against the maple, and the sound broke free and rolled across the meadow, and he laughed, simply, hugely, helplessly, with his whole body.

It was the first time in thirty-five years.

He had smiled before. He had chuckled, politely, at jokes in meetings. He had made small dry noises of amusement. But he had never, not once, laughed like this: with his mouth open and his head thrown back and his shoulders shaking, like a boy, like a fool, like a man who has been let out of school. Tears came to his eyes. His stomach ached. He couldn't stop.

Zoe lifted her head.

She stared at him, wide-eyed, through her fingers. Then her mouth began to twitch. She tried to hold it. She failed. A squeak escaped her, and she clapped both hands over her face, and then she was laughing too, doubled over on the bench, with her knees drawn up and her shoulders heaving. They laughed until they were weak. They laughed until a woman with a dog, on the far path, turned to look and smiled and walked on.

"I love you too," said Archie.

She went still.

He had not planned it. It simply came, in the middle of the laughter, as easy as breathing. He turned to her on the bench in the golden light with his face wet and his heart in his throat. "I do. I should have said it a month ago. I should have said it on the bridge. I should have said it under the Tree, with your hand on my chest, when I could barely stand." He took a breath. "I love you. I've loved you since you shouted at a Shade in a ruined hall."

"That's a very specific moment."

"It was a very specific shout."

She laughed. It broke in the middle, and turned to a hiccup, and she put both hands on his face and kissed him.

It was clumsy. Their noses collided. She tasted of coffee and tears. He didn't care. He put his hands in her hair, in the short soft tufts, and held her, and the red leaves came down round them in the golden light, and for a moment there was nothing in all the world but this.

…

"There he is," said Venn.

He stood at the top of the lawn, a tall black silhouette with his phone held high in front of him. Behind him came Jin, with a laptop under his arm, and Otis, trotting to keep up, and a procession of the newly alive. Elena, in a knitted cap. Gregor, with a hen on a lead. Sera in a long wool cardigan, her green hands tucked in the sleeves. Thomas Crane walking with the slow dignity of a man who has been told that he is about to be shown something very frightening.

"Don't move!" cried Venn. "Don't move, you two, I'm getting this! Hold it! Hold it, that's great, that's perfect, that's the cover of the album!"

"Venn," said Zoe, scarlet.

"Smile!"

"Venn, I swear to God."

"Say clone!"

They did not say it. But a flash went off anyway, and then a second, and then Venn had got them all into a line on the bench, nine people in the maple-light, squashed together, with Gregor in the middle holding a hen and Jin looking sourly at the lens and Zoe in Archie's lap. He took forty photographs. He chose the fourteenth. He sat down on the grass and typed with his thumbs for a full minute, tongue between his teeth, while the others looked over his shoulder.

It showed all of them, grinning, with the hills behind.

The caption read: New me. Same vibes. 🦵🦵

"Are those," said Thomas, peering, "are those legs?"

"They're emojis, Uncle."

"What's an emoji?"

"Oh, man," said Venn, and put an arm round the old man's shoulders, and his whole face lit with a wicked boundless joy. "Oh, Uncle Tom. Oh, we have so much to talk about."

…

Jin was on the phone.

He had been on it for most of an hour, pacing the edge of the lawn with a legal pad, his voice pitched in the clipped formal tone of a man who is enjoying himself and wishes not to be seen to. Archie listened without much attention. He caught the words asbestos and discovery and Whitfield & Hale. Then he caught his own name, and sat up.

"I don't," he said.

"Hold on," said Jin into the phone. He lowered it. "What?"

"I'm not suing anyone."

"I didn't ask your opinion."

"Jin."

"You don't need your old body," said Jin. "That's true. You've got a better one. It's a lovely new one with all its original parts. But you're forgetting the principle." He raised a finger. "A man spent thirty years breathing carcinogens in a building his employer knew was contaminated. He was told it was fine. He was lied to. His boss, Graham Whitfield, signed off on the air quality report in 1997, and I have the paper, because I spent the last three nights going through the court archives in a state of considerable happiness."

"I really don't—"

"I'm not asking. I'm an engineer. I build things. I'll build a case." He turned to the phone again. "Yes? Yes, I'm back. Give me the Whitfield file. Oh, and I'd like it noted that the firm's insurer has a clause about concealment that is, frankly, adorable."

He strolled off across the grass, humming.

"He's wonderful," said Zoe, with deep satisfaction.

"He's terrifying."

"That too." She nestled against him. "Archie."

"Yes?"

"You're an architect. Just sit there and look nice."

He did.

And the maple leaves came down in the late sun, red and gold, and the smell of garlic and basil drifted out from the hatch, and in the kitchen two old men were arguing about the proper time to add the salt. A hen clucked. A phone chimed. Somewhere in the pines a bird that had lost its way in the long summer began to sing.

It was a very ordinary afternoon.

He thought it was the best one he had ever been given.