The words broke free before she knew. “Oh, Uncans, I’m so tired!- So old. I can’t go on.”
I’m sorry! she immediately meant to say. I don’t want to whimper.
He gave no opening for it. “No argument. Besides, you’ve paid your poll tax. You’ve earned some peace and quiet and spoiling the kids rotten when you see them.” When Lars Rydberg brought them, his youngest descendants, from Earth for a visit.
“I’ve tried. Everybody keeps … asking my advice, and then—”
“Uh-huh. One thing leads to another. They’ll never stop while you’re there for them.”
“But I’m less and less able.” She hugged herself against the chill and the trembling. “I’m afraid, hideously afraid I’ve … outlived whatever usefulness I had … and soon I’ll make some blunder that kills people.”
“I don’t expect you will right away. As for afterward, you don’t have to, ever. You can keep on helping, really helping, tirelessly, for as long as need be.”
She looked up at the ghost-face and said into its hard gentleness: “I guessed what you had in mind when you called to ask if you could come around.”
The head nodded. “You download your mentality.”
She stared past him, at Edmond’s quiescent picture, and was mute.
“Then you, this you, will be free,” he said.
Throughout her life, when she came to a crux of things, thought had gone clear and heartbeat steady. It was not that she had an answer yet, it was that she had the questions.
“But the other me,” she demurred.
For a second or two she dared not glance back at him. She reminded herself that what she would see was no vulnerable mortal countenance, it was a mask that he shaped and reshaped as he calculated was fitting. Regardless, how alive it seemed when she met those eyes again, how drolly understanding.
“I know,” he replied to her. “You were always too kind to come flat out and say it in front of me, but I knew. How can I endure being a machine? The notion of becoming one too freezes you.”
She lifted a hand to deny but let it sink. What he offered her was forthrightness. For his honor and hers, she must accept. “I’ve been amazed, whenever I thought about it. Other downloads—“ Of the few that had been made, how many remained besides him? Two, three, four? She tried and failed to remember any that had requested termination because they were miserable. No, hadn’t they, in their different ways, just said that they did not care to go on?
Guthrie smiled. “Me, I still find the universe interesting. You might very well also.”
“I wonder. I doubt.” Would she not in phantom fashion yearn for the flesh, little though she had left of it or of time? Was that emptiness not what the downloads wished escape from? Not that they grieved for what they had lost. What had they to grieve with? (Or did they, somehow? None had ever quite been able to explain, if it had tried at all.) But neither did they fear oblivion.
She gathered resolution. “Would I make a, an effective machine?” That was one solid reason some of them had giving for ending it, that they weren’t suited for this, they weren’t working right.
“You would,” Guthrie said, “whether you liked the condition or not. I know you.”
“Do you like it?” she forced out.
“Alive was better,” he admitted bluntly. “But I find my fun anyhow. And you’re of my blood, Diddy-boom.”
His blood, decades ash strewn over those Lunarmountains where the ash of his Juliana had waited for him. But also alive in her, Lars, her sons and daughters with ‘Mond, and theirs and theirs, maybe for millions of years to come, maybe to outlive the stars. If it got the chance.
She spoke carefully, to give him truth but no impression of self-pity. “I don’t suppose I’d want to continue indefinitely like you. I’m tired, Uncans. Not unhappy, on the contrary, but when the time comes for dying, I’ll be ready.” To follow ‘Mond.
Again he nodded. “Old and full of days. And those days were mighty full themselves.” Of achievement, said his tone, and love, mirth, adventure, passion; even the pain and sorrow were aliveness. “But Dagny, if you knew your work would not be for nothing but would go on, you—mortal you—could enjoy this last short while you’ve got, and lay you down with a will.”