Robert Silverberg - To Live Again

Risa disapproved of Tandy’s flightiness. Tandy disapproved of Risa’s aggressiveness. They had much to offer one another, by way of countervailing forces.

During their first few days of life together they spent long hours sorting through each other’s memory files. Risa withdrew to her apartment for what would have seemed to an outsider as passive meditation, but which was in fact an exciting, vivid, and unending colloquy of the most intimate kind. All in a rush she entered Tandy’s backlog of events, the love affairs, the trips, the parties. It was like gaining eight extra years of past in a moment. Tandy, at twenty-four on the date of her final persona recording, had done everything that Risa in her first sixteen years had done, and had gone beyond those first tentative experiments to a fullblown erotic career. Risa had had a few affairs, impulsive, fragmentary, hesitant, the fleeting curiosities of a girl on the edge of womanhood. Tandy had known love, or what she regarded as love, and the record of emotional storm and fervor, of sunrise and sunset, lay accessible to Risa.

She knew now the sensations of lying naked to couple in the Antarctic snows. She tasted strange cocktails in a hotel on the slopes of Everest. She experienced orgasm in free fall. She quarreled with lovers, raked their faces with clawed hands, kissed away the salty tricklings of blood.

Risa sensed that it would not take her very long to exhaust Tandy’s stock of incident. Oh, there would always be interesting formative events to return to, yes, and there would always be the useful presence of a second mind within hers, but Risa knew that the present keen stimulation of having Tandy with her would wear off in a year or two, and their relationship would settle into coziness, a marriage that had consumed its passion. Tandy simply did not have the complexity of personality that would permit indefinite mining of her experiences, colorful as those experiences had been. By the time Risa reached Tandy’s final age, she would be far beyond the point Tandy had reached at her death. Then it would be time to add another persona. An older woman, Risa thought. From Tandy she had acquired voluptuousness, a sense of physicality that her own lean body would never provide for her. From the next persona Risa wanted an advanced course in avarice and shrewdness. It would be useful to have the benefit of age to draw upon as she entered the larger world of conflict and achievement.

But that was for the future. For now, Risa had exactly what she wanted.

“You’re satisfied?” her father asked her. Spring sunlight flooded Risa’s apartment. She wore an airy gown that might have been made of woven cobwebs. “Very satisfied. It’s all I dreamed it would be.”

“The change in you is very pronounced.”

“A change for the better?”

“I think so,” Kaufmann said. “Then why did you fight me, Mark? Why couldn’t you have given your consent when I asked for it the first time?”

He looked sheepish, an expression she had never seen on his face before. “Sometimes I miscalculate too, Risa. It seemed to me you weren’t ready. I was wrong. I admit it. You and Tandy are good friends, eh?”

“Extremely.”

“What’s she like?”

“Very much like me, only eight years older, and much more relaxed about things. With one exception.”

“And that is?”

“The manner of her death. Tandy’s obsessed with that. She’s convinced she was murdered.”

“She died in a power-ski accident last summer, didn’t she?”

“That’s the official verdict,” Risa said. “Tandy tells me that it couldn’t have happened that way. She was an expert skier, and her equipment had safety devices anyhow.”

“Safety devices fail. Does she have any recollection of her last moments?”

“How could she?” Risa laughed. “She recorded her persona two months before she was killed! They don’t take recordings of dying girls at the scenes of accidents!”

Mark looked sheepish again. “Stupid of me. But does she have any basis for thinking she was murdered, or is it simply an irrational obsession?”

“Since she’s got no evidence, it has to be considered irrational,” Risa said. “But she’s asked me to do a little checking, and I will.”

“Checking? What sort of checking?”

“Detective work. Reconstructing her last day of life. Finding the man she was skiing with.”

Frowning, Mark said, “You could get yourself into trouble doing that, Risa. If you like, I’ll have a man assigned to—”

“No. I’ll handle it, Mark. I’m curious about it too.” It was time to get started on that project, Risa told herself. She had hesitated to make any outward moves, in this week of orientation; but now there was no further reason for waiting. She prodded Tandy for details of her final memories.

“Who would you have gone to St. Moritz with?” — I’m not sure. Perhaps Claude. Or maybe Stig. “They were both power-skiers?” — Yes. And I was seeing both of them last spring. You know that much already.

“Did you have any plans for power-skiing with either of them at St. Moritz?”

—How would I know? Risa studied Tandy’s recollections of her two escorts. Claude Villefranche was a Monegasque, a citizen of that anomalous little Mediterranean principality that so stubbornly retained its sovereignty in a day when such notions were long obsolete. Filtered though Tandy’s eyes, he was tall, wide-shouldered, dark, moderately sinister-looking, with a tapering sharp nose and thin, easily scowling lips. He was about thirty, it seemed, athletic, wealthy, a man of strong tastes and a somber, brooding nature.

As for Stig Hollenbeck, the Swede, he was Claude’s complement: sunny and open, a slender, lithe man in his late twenties, blond, fair, looking somewhat as Risa imagined Charles Noyes must have looked when younger, though not so tall and lanky. His family had shipbuilding money; Stig himself, like nearly everyone in the late Tandy Cushing’s orbit, was a non-worker.

Tandy had been sexually intimate with each of them on many occasions in the last two years of her life. Each had been aware of her interest in the other; neither had shown any flicker of jealousy. There was nothing in Tandy’s view of either one that led Risa to think they were capable of murder. Yet Tandy had a powerful conviction that one or the other of them had accompanied her to St. Moritz last August and had chosen to sabotage her equipment with intent to kill.

“I’ll look them up and find out if they can tell me anything about your final two months,” Risa said. “Which one should I begin with?”

—Stig. “Why?” — Because Claude’s got such an ominous face. He’s the kind of man who looks like a murderer. So we ought to begin with the less obvious suspect.

Risa was amused by that. But she humored Tandy; this entire enterprise struck Risa as frivolous, and so there was no point in trying to impose rational judgment on any segment of it. Murder was a rarity in the world Risa knew. Since everyone had a recent persona recording on file, and thus could be said always to be in transition from one carnate existence to the next, it was pointless to risk erasure by committing that crime. If you took life intentionally, your own recordings were destroyed and you were barred forever from participation in the rebirth program. Who would risk such a dread punishment? Why jeopardize one’s own eternal life for the sake of bringing a temporary interruption to another’s span?

Yet Tandy was convinced she had been murdered, doubtless because she could not accept the notion that some clumsiness of her own had led to her early death in the snows of St. Moritz. Risa dialed the master directory and requested information on the whereabouts of Stig Hollenbeck. To her surprise and relief, it turned out that Stig was currently living on his family estate just outside Stockholm. She placed a call to him the following morning, when it was early evening in Sweden.