Against her will, Dagny shivered. “The world’s gone eerie, hasn’t it?”
“I figure it always was,” came the familiar tone. “How’d one of ‘Mond’s cavemen have reacted, seeing you in your simple small-town girlhood? What changes is just the kind of eeriness.”
The whisky began to warm her. “You are—quite a bit like … Uncans,” she ventured.
She believed that he thought a smile. “Gracias. I try.”
“Because Fireball needs you. We all need you.”
“That was the general idea. Personally, I take no stock in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or the indispensable man. But, yeah, there are loose ends to tie up before I can quit in reasonably good conscience.”
The chill struck back. “Quit.”
“Stop,” he said almost lightly. “Turn off. Wipe out. Whatever you call it.”
Cease to be. She drank afresh and gained courage to ask: “Do you want to?” When he could abide for thousands of years, maybe forever.
Mostly the robot stood moveless. Sometimes he appeared to remember body language. He shrugged. “Oh, I’m not sorry for myself. Por favor, credit me with analog guts. This is a hell of an interesting universe yet. But between us, and swear by Dr. Dolittle you won’t quote me, being alive was better.”
She shuddered. Never for her!
Yes, he was powerful, he had wonders open to him that mortals could barely imagine. Poor, brave wraith. “You always did your duty as you saw it, didn’t you?” Dagny said. “Coming to me, in person, when you’re so busy and harassed, that’s Christly kind of you. That’s my Uncans.”
Again he spoke awkwardly, while he shuffled a foot. “Um, well, my image when I make a public speech— it was a mistake using it when I phoned you, Dagny. I saw right away what a mistake it was, and I’m no end sorry.”
She recalled the pain, but dimly, as if across more than the few real-time daycycles. A synthesized audiovisual of Anson Guthrie in his vigorous middle age, controlled by the download as the living brain controls the living face, could inspire thousands or millions of watchers, or knife a solitary granddaughter. “That’s, okay,” she mumbled.
“No, it isn’t, and I aim to try and set it right,” he insisted. “You’re not one for smarmy fakes.” He lifted his hands toward her. “Let’s get straight with each other, you and me.” The timbre levelled. “Because I hope we’ll be working together pretty often in the future, same as you did with him.”
Him? she thought. A separate and lost being? What was a mind, a self, a soul, anyway?
“Thank you,” Dagny breathed. “Thank you more than I can ever say.”
He had laid the ghost in her to rest.
With a long low-weight step, she went over to him and took the outreaching hands in her own. They felt a little cold, but their massiveness reminded her of Uncans’s hands.
“Oh, Dagny,” he said. When she let go, he hugged her, very quickly and gently.
That was the real reason he came, she thought. He had loved her. He still did.
It was a senseless accident that killed Edmond Bey-nac. But then, every accident is senseless, as is most of history.
“No, this is not the ancient lost body of my hypothesis,” he had explained to Manyane Nkuhlu after his first quick survey upon it. The spaceman knew little geology but was interested in learning. “Bloody hell, I made that clear even before we left. No? Eh, bien. you were busy at the start, and later did not chance to listen.
“What we have here, it is principally metals, iron, nickel, et cetera, which were once fused. That means it is a piece from the core of a body large enough to have melted and formed a core—which it is not itself, do you understand? The flat section, that is the fracture where it was broken loose in a great collision. But I do not think that collision shattered the big planetoid entirely into minor objects like this. Such an impact would leave different traces. Quite possibly the force did push the major part and the fragments knocked off it into a more eccentric path, and this was when Jupiter seized them and flung them outward. If they did not escape the Solar System, the new orbit was enormous, and during billions of years, passing stars would raise its perihelion farther yet.”