Mick had already seen Andrea standing a little further around the curve of the lake. It was where they had agreed to meet, and true to form Andrea was exactly on time. She stared pensively out across the water, seemingly oblivious to the commotion going on around her. She wore a white blouse, a knee-length burgundy skirt, sensible office shoes. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, styled differently and barely reaching her collar. For a moment—until she’d turned slightly—he hadn’t recognized her at all. Andrea held a Starbucks coffee holder in one hand, and every now and then she’d take a sip or glance at her wristwatch. Mick was five minutes late now, and he knew there was a risk Andrea would give up waiting. But in the shade of the boating shed, all his certainties had evaporated.
Andrea turned minutely. She glanced at her watch again. She sipped from the coffee holder, tilting it back in a way that told Mick she’d finished the last drop. He saw her looking around for a waste bin.
Mick stepped from the shade. He walked across the grass, onto concrete, acutely conscious of the slow awkwardness of his gait. His walking had improved since his first efforts, but it still felt as if he were trying to walk upright in a swimming pool filled with treacle. Joe had assured him that all his movements would become more normal as the nervelink bedded in, but that process was obviously taking longer than anticipated.
“Andrea,” he said, sounding slurred and drunk and too loud, even to his own ears.
She turned and met his eyes. There was a slight pause before she smiled, and when she did, the smile wasn’t quite right, as if she’d been asked to hold it too long for a photograph.
“Hello, Mick. I was beginning to think…”
“It’s okay.” He forced out each word with care, making sure it came out right before moving to the next. “I just had some second thoughts.”
“I don’t blame you. How does it feel?”
“A bit odd. It’ll get easier.”
“Yes, that’s what they told me.” She took another sip from the coffee, even though it must have been empty. They were standing about two meters apart, close enough to talk, close enough to look like two friends or colleagues who’d bumped into each other around the lake.
“It’s really good of you…” Mick began.
Andrea shook her head urgently. “Please. It’s okay. We talked it over. We both agreed it was the right thing to do. If the tables were turned, you wouldn’t have hesitated.”
“Maybe not.”
“I know you, Mick. Maybe better than you know yourself. You’d have done all that you could, and more.”
“I just want you to know…I’m not taking any of this lightly. Not you having to see me, like this…not what he has to go through while I’m around.”
“He said to tell you there are worse ways to spend a week.”
Mick tried to smile. He felt the muscles of his face move, but without a mirror there was no way to judge the outcome. The moment stretched. A football splashed into the lake and began to drift away from the edge. He heard a little boy start crying.
“Your hair looks different,” Mick said.
“You don’t like it.”
“No, I do. It really suits you. Did you have that done after…oh, wait. I see. You were on your way to the salon.”
He could see the scratch on her face where she’d grazed it on the curb, when the car knocked her down. She hadn’t even needed stitches. In a week it would hardly show at all.
“I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like for you,” Andrea said. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you.”
“It helps.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I want it to help. I think it’s going to. It’s just that right now it feels like I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.”
Andrea held up the coffee holder. “Do you fancy one? It’s my treat.”
Andrea was a solicitor. She worked for a small legal firm located in modern offices near the park. There was a Starbucks near her office building. “They don’t know me there, do they.”
“Not unless you’ve been moonlighting. Come on. I hate to say it, but you could use some practice walking.”
“As long as you won’t laugh.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Hold my hand, Mick. It’ll make it easier.”
Before he could step back, Andrea closed the distance between them and took his hand in hers. It was good of her to do that, Mick thought. He’d been wondering how he would initiate that first touch, and Andrea had spared him the fumbling awkwardness that would almost certainly have ensued. That was Andrea to a tee, always thinking of others and trying to make life a little easier for them, no matter how small the difference. It was why people liked her so much; why her friends were so fiercely loyal.
“It’s going to be okay, Mick,” Andrea said gently. “Everything that’s happened between us…it doesn’t matter now. I’ve said bad things to you and you’ve said bad things to me. But let’s forget about all that. Let’s just make the most of what time we have.”
“I’m scared of losing you.”
“You’re a good man. You’ve more friends than you realize.”
He was sweating in the heat, so much so that the glasses began to slip down his nose. The view tilted toward his shoes. He raised his free hand in a stiff, salutelike gesture and pushed the glasses back into place. Andrea’s hand tightened on his.
“I can’t go through with this,” Mick said. “I should go back.”
“You started it,” Andrea said sternly, but without rancor. “Now you finish it. All the way, Mick Leighton.”
TUESDAY
Things were much better by the morning of the second day. When he woke in Joe Liversedge’s lab there was a fluency in his movements that simply hadn’t been there the evening before, when he’d said goodbye to Andrea. He now felt as if he was inhabiting the host body, rather than simply shuffling it around like a puppet. He still needed the glasses to be able to see anything, but the nervelink was conveying sensation much more effectively now, so that when he touched something it came through without any of the fuzziness or lag he’d been experiencing the day before. Most tourists were able to achieve reasonable accuracy of touch differentiation within twenty-four hours. Within two days, their degree of proprioceptive immersion was generally good enough to allow complex motor tasks such as cycling, swimming, or skiing. Repeat-visit tourists, especially those that went back into the same body, got over the transition period even faster. To them it was like moving back into a house after a short absence.
Joe’s team gave Mick a thorough checkup in the annex. It was all routine stuff. Amy Flint, Joe’s senior graduate student, insisted on adding some more numbers to the tactile test database that she was building for the study. That meant Mick sitting at a table, without the glasses, being asked to hold various objects and decide what shape they were and what they were made of. He scored excellently, only failing to distinguish between wood and plastic balls of similar weight and texture. Flint was cheerfully casual around him, without any of the affectedness or oversensitivity Mick had quickly detected in his friends or colleagues. Clearly she didn’t know what had happened; she just thought Joe had opted to go for a different test subject than himself.