She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “Sure.” She walked over to the table and carefully, thoughtfully, picked up the finished piece and held it between thumb and forefinger. “This is a knight,” she said.

He stared at her. “How did you know that?” Chess did not exist, as far as he had been able to find out, in this world. Ben’s people did not play games. “It’s a twentieth-century thing.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. I just know it’s called a knight.”

“Do you know what ‘chess’ means?” he said.

“‘Chess’?” She said the word carefully. “No. No, I don’t.”

He shook his head and then took the piece from her and set it down by the finished pawns. “Let’s take that walk.”

***

While they were walking and he had his hands in the pockets of his robe and his eyes down on the strange plastic shoes he had been given, he said, “Ben tells me I’ll be very strong when my body has a chance to… to ripen or whatever it is.”

“Do you look the way you looked before? In your other life?” she said.

“No,” he said. “God, no. I was white, and middle-aged. A professor of chemistry and getting pot-bellied.”

“Yes,” she said. “I have no idea what I looked like, but I know it wasn’t like this.” She extended her long and pale arms from her sides, palms upward, and looked earnestly at him. “I know I’m entirely different now from what I once was.”

“It’s a strange feeling,” he said. “Still, the way you look now is fine by me.” But that wasn’t exactly true; there was a touch of idle and self-assuring flattery in it. She was beautiful enough, but he still was not at ease with her beauty. Something about it haunted him as though at times there were superimposed upon her face and body another face and body, from his past, very faint but disquieting.

***

He did make it to the woods, although he was tired when he got there. Ben had told him it would take months to get the full strength of his new body. The body had been cloned from synthetic, composite genes, but it had never been exercised and its muscles were soft and new.

In the woods they sat on a fallen log and smoked the odd-tasting cigarettes that Ben supplied them with. Then they began to make love, slowly and cautiously, first with their hands and then with their mouths. He brought her to a light orgasm in the spotted daylight that filtered through old trees, while she sat on the log dreamily and he kneeled in front of her. After that they found a grassy clearing with dry ground and lay together. Somehow they were perfectly matched, and knew exactly what to do for each other.

But then, as he was beginning to feel the oncoming orgasm, she looked down on him from her position above him and said, “Jesus, do I love this.” The words fell somehow like lead on his spirit and he became suddenly afraid, frozen in his movements. The same fear came in her face. They stared at each other while his soul shrank from her. He did not know what had happened; he only knew that her words—words that were somehow terribly familiar to him—had frightened him. Forest light flecked her beautiful and glowing skin; her fine breasts were warm in his upward-reaching hands; somewhere a bird was singing jubilantly, and wind rustled the leaves of the trees. Inside himself he was cold, trembling. He rolled out from under her and lay on the grass in turmoil—frightened and angry. “What happened?” he said.