***

Later, when Arthur was able to walk a little each day, Ben brought others. Some were apparently women—very calm, straightforward types, like Ben. But none of them spoke English. They smiled a lot. They were all nice-looking, but a bit forceless, passive; and they all seemed young. He wondered if they had some way of staying young-looking whatever their ages. Probably so. Or maybe their bodies came from another factory in Cleveland.

He liked the sounds of the women’s voices, more like Chinese than Anglo-Saxon, soft and slurred in speech and with musical pitch. Sometimes they sang. He liked the way they moved around and looked over at him, in his bed, from time to time, with curiosity but with no hint of flirtatiousness.

Outside the room’s only window, where the view was of an empty field and, beyond that, a dark row of trees, it was raining heavily under an iron-colored sky. There was no work of human building to be seen from that window, only grass and sky and the line of trees.

Ben left the room for a while and returned with another woman, different from the others, and stood with her near the door and talked for a moment. Arthur looked at her. She was dressed like the others in some kind of a tan robe. But her hair was cut short and her face had a puzzled animation about it and a sense of some quality—urgency maybe—that was missing in the others. She had very pale skin and auburn hair; she was tall and her figure was splendid.

Ben brought her over and introduced her to him as Annabel. Surprisingly, she spoke English. He was astonished at this at first, until she smiled and said, “Ben tells me I’m from the same century you’re from. We thought it was the twenty-second at first.”

“Don’t you remember?” Arthur said.

“No,” she said, “I don’t remember. Something about the way the tapes were played into this body, Ben says. I know how to speak, but I don’t remember a thing…” She looked toward Ben.

“It is always amnesia,” Ben said. “She was the first to be made from ancient tapes a year ago. But the tapes were not right for her brain so she forgot it all. She forgot all the time long agone when she lived before. Then we made you and did always better with your tape.”

“Maybe it’s best not to remember,” Arthur said.

She smiled at him wistfully. “Still I’d like to know. I don’t even know what my name was. I’d like you to tell me about our time—the twentieth century—and maybe it’ll help me remember.”

“Sure,” Arthur said. “What do you want to know?”

***

For several weeks she came to his room at breakfast and asked questions. He told her about cities and government and clothing and animals and the way things looked and how people lived. But none of it touched her memory. Arthur liked her, and there seemed at times something familiar about her. It made sense that there would be, since she had probably been taped by Mel—possibly after the same dinner party, after he himself had been “copied” onto the tapes. She could be Denise. Except she wasn’t, and he knew that. Maybe she was the wife of someone he knew, some woman he had talked to briefly once and then forgot about. She was clearly as intelligent as he, and as quick; her vocabulary was excellent. And her personality—something about her personality sometimes haunted him. He would be drinking coffee with her and would happen to look at her hand holding the cup or at the way she brought the cup to her lips and there would be something terribly familiar about it. But he could not place it. It was like déjà vu.