the full name of the man he had known as Sir. Then, suddenly, the name was there: Gerald Martin. But now Andrew had forgotten the name of Little Miss's dark-haired older sister, and it took him hours more of diligent searching before "Melissa Martin" popped abruptly into his brain. Two hours! It should not have taken him two milliseconds!
It was all more or less what Andrew should have expected, and in an abstract way he had expected it. And yet the reality of the feelings themselves was far beyond anything that Andrew had anticipated. Physical weakness was something new to him. So were poor coordination, uncertain reflexes, imperfect eyesight, and episodes of impaired memory. It was humiliating to feel so imperfect-so human
No, he thought.
There is nothing humiliating about it. You have everything backward. It is human to feel imperfect. That was what you wanted, above all else: to be human. And now that is what you are. The imperfections-the weaknesses-the imprecisions-they are the very things which define humans as human. And which drive them to transcend their own failings.
You never had failings before, Andrew told himself. Now you do, and so be it. So be it. You have achieved the thing you set out to accomplish and you must feel no regrets.
Gradually, as one day slid into the next, things began to improve.
Gradually. Very gradually.
The memory functions returned first. Andrew was gratified to discover that he had full access again, instant and complete, to the whole of his past.
He sat in the grand high-winged chair by the fireplace in the great living room of what once had been Gerald Martin's house, and let images of years gone by play through his mind: the factory where he had been constructed, and his arrival at the Martin house, and Little Miss and Miss as children, walking with him on the beach. Sir and Ma'am at their dining table; his wooden sculptures and the furniture he had made; the U. S. Robots executives who came west to inspect him; his first visit from Little Sir; the time he had decided at last to begin wearing clothing; Little Sir's marriage and the birth of Paul Charney. Even less pleasant things like the episode of the two louts who had tried to disassemble him while he was on the way to the public library. And much, much more, nearly two hundred years of memory.
It was all there. His mind had not been permanently impaired, and he was tremendously relieved.
The floor stopped trying to jump up and hit him. His vision stopped playing tricks on him. His hands finally stopped their infuriating shaking. When he walked, he was no longer in danger of stumbling and falling. He was himself again, in most of the essential ways.
But a certain sense of weakness still remained with him, or so he thought: a pervasive chronic weariness, a feeling that he needed to sit down and rest awhile before going on to whatever might be his next task.
Perhaps it was only his imagination. The surgeon said that he was recovering quite well.
There was a syndrome called hypochondria, Andrew knew, in which you felt that you were suffering from conditions that in fact you did not have. It was a fairly common thing among human beings, he had heard. People who were hypochondriacs found all manner of symptoms in themselves that no medical tests could confirm; and the more thought they gave to the possibility that they might be ill, the more symptoms they discovered.
Andrew wondered whether in his long unceasing quest to attain full humanity he had somehow managed to contract a case of hypochondria, and smiled at the thought. Quite likely he had, he decided. His own testing equipment showed no measurable degrading of his performance capabilities. All parameters were well within permissible deviation. And yet-yet-he felt so tired
It had to be imaginary. Andrew ordered himself to give his feelings of weariness no further thought. And, tired or not, he made one more journey across the continent to the great green-glass tower of the World Legislature in New York to pay a call on Chee Li-hsing.
He entered her grand and lofty office and she beckoned him automatically to a seat before her desk, the way she would have done with any other visitor. But Andrew had always preferred to stand in her presence, out of some obscure impulse of courtesy that he had never tried to explain to himself, and he did not want to sit now-especially not now.