Gladia raised her left arm and made the appropriate gesture. Her house was at once illuminated. In the soft light that now reached her, she was subliminally aware of the shadowy figures of several robots, but she paid no attention to that. In any well-ordered establishment, there were always robots within reach of human beings, both for security and for service.
Gladia took a last fugitive glimpse at the sky, where the stars had now dimmed in the scattered light. She shrugged lightly. It had been quixotic. What good would it have done even if she had been able to see the sun of that now-lost world, one faint dot among many? She might as well choose a dot at random, tell herself it was Solaria's sun, and stare at it.
Her attention turned to R. Daneel. He waited for her patiently, the planes of his face largely in shadow.
She found herself thinking again how little he had changed since she had seen him on arriving at Dr. Fastolfe's establishment so long ago. He had undergone repairs, of course. She knew that, but it was a vague knowledge that one pushed away and kept at a distance.
It was part of the general queasiness that held good for human beings, too. Spacers might boast of their iron health and of their life-spans of thirty to forty decades, but they, were not entirely immune to the ravages of age. One of Gladia's femurs fit into a titanium-silicone hip socket. Her left thumb was totally artificial, though no one could tell that without careful ultrasonograms. Even some of her nerves had been rewired. Such things would be true of any Spacer of similar age from any of the fifty Spacer worlds (no, forty-nine, for now Solaria could no longer be counted).
To make any reference to such things, however, was an ultimate obscenity. The medical records involved, which had to exist since further treatment might be necessary, were never revealed for any reason. Surgeons, whose incomes were considerably higher than those of the Chairman himself, were paid so well, in part, because they were virtually ostracized from polite society. After all, they knew.
It was all part of the Spacer fixation on long life, on their unwillingness to admit that old age existed, but Gladia didn't linger on any analysis of causes. She was restlessly, uneasy in thinking about herself in that connection. If she had a three dimensional map of herself with all prosthetic portions, all repairs, marked off in red against the gray of her natural self, what a general pinkness she would appear to have from a distance. Or so she imagined.
Her brain, however, was still intact and whole and while that was so, she was intact and whole, whatever happened to the rest of her body.
Which brought her back to Daneel. Though she had known him for twenty decades, it was only in the last year that he was hers. When Fastolfe died (his end hastened, perhaps, by despair), he had willed everything to the city of Eos, which was a common enough state of affairs. Two items, however, he had left to Gladia (aside from confirming her in the ownership of her establishment and its robots and other chattels, together with the grounds thereto appertaining).
One of them had been Daneel.
Gladia asked, "Do you remember everything you have ever committed to memory over the course of twenty decades, Daneel?"
Daneel said gravely, "I believe so, Madam Gladia. To be sure, if I forgot an item, I would not know that, for it would have been forgotten and I would not then recall ever having memorized it."
"That doesn't follow at all," said Gladia. "You might well remember knowing it, but be unable to think of it at the moment. I have frequently had something at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, and been unable to retrieve it."
Daneel said, "I do not understand, madam. If I knew something, surely it would be there when I needed it."
"Perfect retrieval?" They were walking slowly toward the house.
"Merely retrieval, madam. I am designed so."
"For how much longer?"
"I do not understand, madam."
"I mean, how much will your brain hold? With a little over twenty decades of accumulated memories, how much longer can it go on?"
"I do not know, madam. As yet I feel no difficulty."
"You might not - until you suddenly discover you can remember no more."
Daneel seemed thoughtful for a moment. "That may be so, madam."
"You know, Daneel, not all your memories are equally important."
"I cannot judge among them, madam."
"Others can. It would be perfectly possible to clean out your brain, Daneel, and then, under supervision, refill it with its important memory content only - say, ten percent of the whole. You would then be able to continue for centuries longer than you would otherwise. With repeated treatment of this sort, you could go on indefinitely. It is an expensive procedure, of course, but I would not cavil at that. You'd be worth it."
"Would I be consulted on the matter, madam? Would I be asked to agree to such treatment?"
"Of course. I would not order you in a matter like that. It would be a betrayal of Dr. Fastolfe's trust."
"Thank you, madam. In that case, I must tell you that I would never submit voluntarily to such a procedure unless I found myself to have actually lost my memory function."
They had reached the door and Gladia paused. She said, in honest puzzlement, "Why ever not, Daneel?"
Daneel said in a low Voice, "There are memories I cannot risk losing, madam, either through inadvertence or through poor judgment on the part of those conducting the procedure."
"Like the rising and setting of the stars? Forgive me, Daneel, I didn't mean to be joking. To what memories are you referring?"
Daneel said, his voice still lower, "Madam, I refer to my memories of my onetime partner, the Earthman Elijah Baley - "