“Yes,” she answered. “Six years, seven?”—since last he, the original he, guested her and ‘Mond. Afterward they had met once on Earth (how aged he had gotten, though salty as ever) and had talked occasionally by phone almost until the end … “This way, please.” She led him through the hall to the living room.
He halted near the center. She had set the viewscreen for a direct presentation, an outlook from the top of the ringwall. A wilderness of shadows and softly lighted upthrusts fell away to the near horizon. A Criswell collector shouldered above yonder worldrim, the single brightness in all that land. Overhead arched night, Earth waxing through the second quarter, blue-and-white majesty. She wasn’t sure why she had chosen this, rather than one of her usual scenes recorded on the mother planet. Maybe, down underneath, she hadn’t wanted to raise any pretense, or hadn’t dared.
“Nothing much changed here, either,” Guthrie observed.
She found that she too could make conversation. “Well, you know how old married couples get set in their ways.”
“I’d hardly say that of you and ‘Mond. Not yet. Probably never. Him off to hell-and-hooraw in space. You directing the construction at Astrebourg and, I gather, making the governor’s life miserable whenever he deserves it.”
No pretense! But what instead? Dagny bit her lip. “I don’t know what to—to offer you—”
A short laugh boomed. “Not a cup of tea.” A hand gestured, that looked as if it were forged in a furnace but had been grown in a nanovat. “Sit down if you like.” The voice dropped. “I can. I won’t crumple your chair, here on the Moon.”
“No need for me, really—here on the Moon,” she said.
They fell mute.
Guthrie broke through: “Is Caria—is Jinann still living with you?”
“Yes,” Dagny said, “but she’s tending her jewelry shop. I told her to phone before coming, and that I might want her to sleep elsewhere.”
“Why, for Pete’s sake?” he exclaimed, precisely the way the man would have done. Her heart cracked. “I’d like to see her again, and your whole family.”
“Again?” broke from her. She gasped, appalled. “Oh! Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said gently.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Excuse me.” She sought the table on which she had set out a decanter and several glasses. They were several because either a single glass or a pair would have uttered what had escaped her lips. Shakily, she poured a stiff slug and tossed off a fourth of it. The whisky smoked over tongue and gullet, bound for the bloodstream. She’d guessed the need might arise.
“No offense taken,” he was saying. “I make no bones about my condition.” A chuckle. “Nope, no bones at all.”
This had been his favorite Scotch. He had introduced her to it—how long ago? And now he would never taste it, never, unless maybe in an electronic virtuality-dream. Dagny turned about to confront him. “I shouldn’t be like this,” she protested bitterly. “Stupid old bat.”
He stroked hand across lower turret, as Guthrie had stroked his chin, and drawled, “I wouldn’t apply any of those words. You’re not just smart, you remain a damn sexy wench, Diddyboom.”
She blinked and blinked. She would not cry.
Doubtless he noticed, for he added in haste: “I speak abstractly about such things, these days. But I’ve got my memories.”
“Y-yes.”
“His memories,” Guthria said, once more serious. “Should I have put it that way?”
“I don’t know.” She took another swallow.
“It’s true. Sure. They pumped his nervous system full of nanoscanners, encoded what came out, used that to program a neural network custom-built to be an exact analog of his particular brain … Bueno, no point in rehashing it for you. I’m his aftermath.”
How much could a download hurt? Dagny drew breath. “Nevertheless, you soldier on.” His words, after Juliana died. What comfort might there be for a download? “Because they made you to be him.”
“To be like him, in certain ways,” Guthrie corrected. “No more than that.” He was quiet for a space. “When I called on him at his deathbed, I learned, or I was reminded of, several things about being a man.”