So who was this woman, or what was she? What of her life did she really remember? She looked like Gina, but she could have no memory of the experience of battle. Nobody could even have reconstructed what had happened to them down that hole.

“Eat your soup, you’ve been on life support, you’re too thin.”

“Gina, I’m just—I’m confused. I don’t know how to feel.”

She drew her fingers along his cheek. “How do you want to feel?”

He just so loved her, and even though he knew that this feeling had been programmed into him, he could not resist it.

“How do I want to feel?” He opened his arms to her.

She came in. She raised her face to him in a way that was deeply familiar, and for an instant the sense of the machine was completely gone, and he thought that this was surely how human beings—real ones—feel, and he touched his lips to hers and fulfilled the dream he’d had so long, of kissing her again.

The kiss felt like home but it was not home. Even in this place where he had spent his youth and discovered life, he was profoundly homeless. He was like a man in the air somewhere, with nothing above him and nothing below him, the way it felt at the top of a jump, just before the fall.

She was warm. She kissed him with intensity and concentration, then she broke away.

“I’ve been waiting for that.” Again, she offered the soup to him. “You need it, husband.” She gave him a smile. “Remember right before we jumped? We married ourselves.”

But how could she know?

And then he understood how they must have reconstructed her memories of battle. They had built them out of his own and so re-created the bond that had been between them.

They were structures, the two of them, the products not of nature but of human thought and human creativity, and that he found hard to bear. But he also wanted to be, he wanted to live.

She took his hand. “You understand, don’t you?”

“I understand.”

“Doc Emma said you would. She said you would want to hear this.” Gina went in her thin, white dress across to the small desk where he had read Heart of Darkness and The Jungle Book and where his Bible lay. She opened it. “‘And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’”