To Live Again

Risa laughed. This building belonged to the Paul Kaufma

She let her unbound hair stream free in the morning breeze. She was a tall girl, close to six feet tall, with a slim, agile body, dark hair, dark, sparkling eyes, and what she liked to think of as a Semitic nose. It pleased her to pretend she was a Yemenite Jew, a lively daughter of the desert, a descendant in a straight line from the stock of Abraham and Sarah. Certainly she looked like some Bedouin princess; but the sad genetic truth was that the Kaufma

It might be interesting, she thought, to find out what it was like to be bosomy. To know what it is to carry all that meat below your clavicles. Risa made a mental note to request some top-heavy breasty wench when she applied for her first persona transplant. By checking through the memories she inherited, she’d get a notion of what voluptuousness was like without the bother of gaining all that nasty weight.

When will I get the transplant, though? That was the frustrating part. At sixteen she was medically old enough for the Scheffing process, but not legally competent to apply for it. She needed her father’s consent. It had been simpler last year when Risa decided it was time for her to part with her virginity; she merely took the next rocket to Ca

She looked over her shoulder and saw figures moving on the far side of the sliding glass door between the living room and the terrace. Risa got to her feet. Her father was coming toward her. His girl friend, the Italian bitch, Elena Volterra, was with him. Smiling, Risa lounged against the wall of the terrace and waited for them to come out to her.

Her father was wearing some sort of sprayon business suit, very chic, very shiny. His long black hair was slicked down across his skull in a style that highlighted the savage cragginess of his features, the hard thrust of the cheekbones, the vulpine chin, the corvine nose. Somehow he managed to be handsome, Mark did, despite the collection of outcroppings and bladed planes that was his face. Risa was desperately in love with him, and they both knew it of course. And hid the fact, as they must. His eyes barely flickered over his daughter’s angular nakedness.

“Looking to visit the hospital?” he asked. “April’s too early in the season for sunbathing in this latitude.”

“It’s warm enough out here, Mark,” she said sullenly. “Put something on.”

“Why should I if I’m not cold?”

“All right,” Mark said. “Don’t. But I don’t have to talk to you, either. Not while you’re bare.”

“How bourgeois of you. Mark. Since when have you enforced the nudity taboo?”

“This has nothing to do with taboos, Risa. Simply with your health. Now and then I have to take some sort of interest in your physical welfare, don’t I? And—”

“Very well,” Risa said. “We’ll talk inside.” Defiantly naked, she sauntered past them, through the glass door, and slung herself down in the abstract webfoam cradle near the great screen-window, wrapping her hands about an upraised knee. Her eyes passed from her father to Elena, who was clearly a

Mark and Elena came in from the terrace. Risa chuckled. She had won that round by a dozen points. Her father had come up here with Elena because he knew it a

His apartment was a floor below hers. She had left a message for him, asking that he come up and see her when he came home for lunch.

She said, “I wanted this to be a private conference, Mark.”

“You can talk in front of Elena. She’s practically a member of the family.”

“That’s odd. I didn’t see her at Uncle Paul’s funeral.” Mark winced. Risa chalked up another cluster of points. She was really sharp this morning. Elena was fuming!

Huskily, Elena said, “If this is a family conference and I’m intruding—”

“I’d just like to talk to my father a little while,” Risa said. “If it’s all right with the two of you. I hate to come between you, but—”

Mark shrugged a dismissal. Elena snorted in a way that made the pounds of flesh above her neckline ripple and dance. Wigwagging her hips, she stalked from the apartment.

“Now will you put something on?” Mark asked. “Does my body make you that uncomfortable, Mark?”

“Risa, it’s been a difficult morning, and—”

“Yes. Yes, all right” She knew when it was time to cash in her wi

She said, “I think you know what I want to ask you about?”

“Summer vacation on Mars?”

“No.”

“You need money?”

“Of course not.”

“Then—”

“You know.” He scowled. “Your transplant?”

“My transplant,” Risa agreed. “I’m well past sixteen. Uncle Paul’s funeral is out of the way. I’d like to sign up. Can I have your consent?”

“What’s your hurry, Risa? You’ve got a whole lifetime to add new personae.”