"Are you okay?" I said to Karen. My artificial eyes adjusted to semi-darkness faster than my biological ones had; another difference, I suppose, between an electronic and a chemical reaction.

"I'm fine," she said, and she sounded sincere.

"Say, have you been to space before?"

"No, although I always wanted to go. But by the time they started having significant space tourism, I was already in my sixties, and my doctor advised against it." A pause. "It's nice not to have to worry about such things anymore."

"Twelve hours," I said. "It's going to seem like forever, not being able to sleep. And I can't even relax emotionally. I mean, what the hell is going on up there, on the moon?"

"They've cured the other you's condition. If you hadn't had that condition, thata"

I moved my head slightly. "That birth defect. Might as well call a spade a spade."

"Well, if you hadn't had that, you wouldn't have uploaded this early in life."

"I * forgive me, Karen, I'm not criticizing your choice but, well, if I hadn't had that birth defect, I don't know that I would have ever uploaded. I wasn't looking to cheat death. I just didn't want to be cheated out of a normal life."

"I didn't much think about living forever when I was your age," said Karen. And then her body shifted slightly, as if squirming a bit. "I'm sorry; I shouldn't use that phrase, should I? I mean, I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable about our age gap.

But it's true. When you've got decades ahead of you, that seems like a long time.

It's all relative. Have you ever read Ray Bradbury?"

"Who?"

"Sigh." She said the word, rather than made the sound. "He was one of my favorite writers when I was growing up. One of his stories begins with him * or his character; as a writer I should know better than to conflate author and character * reflecting on being a school kid. He says, 'Imagine a summer that would never end.' A kid's summer off school! Just two short months, but it does seem like forever when you're young. But when you get into your eighties, and the doctor tells you that you've got only a few years left, then years, and even decades, don't seem like enough time to do all the things you want to do."

"Well, I* Kee-ryst! "

The engines were firing. Karen and I were pressed down hard, toward the floor of the cargo chamber. The roar of the rocket was too great to speak over, so we simply listened. Our artificial ears had cutoffs built in; the noise wasn't going to harm us.

Still, the volume of it was incredible, and the shaking of the ship was brutal. After a short time, there was a great clanking as, I presumed, the rocket was released from its restraining bolts and allowed to start its upward journey. Karen and I were now ascending into orbit faster than any human beings ever had before.

I held tightly onto her, and she grasped me equally firmly. I became aware of those parts of my artificial anatomy that were missing sensors. I was sure I should be feeling my teeth rattle, but they weren't. And doubtless my back should have hurt as the nylon rings separating my titanium vertebrae were compressed, but there was no sensation associated with that, either.

But the roaring noise was inescapable, and there was a sense of great weight and pressure on me from above. It was getting warm, although not unduly so; the chamber was well-insulated. And everything was still bathed in the glowstick's greenish light.

The roar of the engine continued for a full hour; massive amounts of fuel were being burned to put us on a fast-track to the moon. But finally the engine cut off, and everything was quiet and, for the first time, I understood what was meant by the phrase "deafening silence." The contrast was absolute * between the loudest sound my ears could register and nothing.

I could see Karen's face, centimeters from my own. It was in focus; artificial optics have more flexibility man do natural ones. She nodded, as if to indicate that she was okay, and we both enjoyed the silence a while longer.

But there was more to enjoy than just freedom from noise.

Perhaps if I were still biological, I would have been immediately aware of it: food trying to come up my esophagus, an imbalance in my inner ear. I could well imagine that biological people often got sick under such circumstances. But for me, it was simply a matter of no longer registering the downward push from above. There wasn't much room to move around * but, then, I'm sure it had seemed to Apollo astronauts that they'd had hardly any room until the gravity disappeared. I undid the buckles on the restraining straps, pushed off the floor, and floated slowly the meter toward the ceiling.

Karen laughed with delight, moving effortlessly within the small space. "It's wonderful!"

"My God, it is!" I said, managing to get an arm up to stop my head from hitting the padded ceiling * although, I quickly realized, the terms ceiling and floor no longer had any meaning.

Karen managed to turn herself around * her synthetic body was shorter than mine, and, after all, she'd once upon a time been a ballet dancer: she knew how to execute complex moves. For my part, I managed to curl around the curving inner wall of the tube, becoming essentially perpendicular to my position at liftoff.

It was exhilarating. I thought about what the launch attendant had said: people with artificial bodies are perfect for space exploration. Perhaps he was right, and*Something hit me in the face, soft, scrunchy.

"What the*?"

It took me a moment to make things out in the dim green light, especially since the glowstick was now on the far side of Karen, meaning her body was casting weird shadows across my field of view. The thing that had hit me in the face was Karen's shirt.

I looked down * across * over * up * at her.

"Come on, Jake," she said. "We may never have another chance like this."

I thought back to the one previous time we'd done this: with the stress of the trial, we hadn't tried again. "But*"

"We'll doubtless return home on a regular transport," Karen said, "full of other people. But right now, we've got an opportunity that may never happen again. Plus, unlike most people, we don't have to worry about getting bruised."

Her bra was flapping up toward me now, a seagull in our emerald twilight. It was a stimulating, watching her move as she bent and twisted, taking off her pants.

I caught her bra, wadded it up, and sent it on a trajectory that would get it out of the way, then began to remove my own shirt, which quickly billowed around me as its buttons were undone. My belt was next, a flat eel in the air. And then my pants joined Karen's, floating freely.

"All right," I said, to Karen. "Let's see if we can execute a docking maneuvera"

38.

We had to strap in again ten hours later, as the rocket decelerated for a full sixty minutes. Although most manned flights to the moon apparently went to something called LS One, we were going to land directly at Heaviside Crater.

The landing was done by remote control and there was nothing for us to see; the cargo hold had no window. Still, I knew we were setting down on our tail fins; Jesus at Cape Kennedy had quipped, "In the way that God and Robert Heinlein meant you to," but I didn't get it.

It was near the end of the lunar day, which lasted, as I'm sure that Smythe guy would say, a fortnight. The surface temperature apparently was a little over 100 degrees Celsius * but it's a dry heat. According to Dr. Porter, whom Smythe had consulted about this, we could manage ten or fifteen minutes out in the heat, not to mention the ultraviolet radiation, before we'd have a problem; the lack of air, of course, was a nonissue for us.

The cargo rocket didn't have an airlock, just a hatch, but it was easy enough to open from the inside; the same safety rules that existed for refrigerators also seemed to apply to spaceships. I hinged the door outward, and the atmosphere that had been carried along with us escaped in a white cloud.

We were inside Heaviside Crater, its rim rising up in the distance. The closest dome of High Eden was maybe a hundred meters away, and*

That must be it. The moonbus, a silvery brick with a blue-green fuel tank strapped to each side, sitting on a circular landing platform. It was attached to an adjacent building by a telescoping access tunnel.

The lunar surface was about twelve meters below my feet * far more than I'd want to fall under Earth's gravity, but it shouldn't be a problem here. I looked at Karen and smiled. There was no way for us to speak, since there was no air. But I mouthed the word "Geronimo!" as I stepped out of the hatchway.

The fall was gentle, and took what seemed like forever. When I hit * probably the first pair of Nikes ever to directly touch the lunar soil * a cloud of gray dust went up.

Some of it stuck to my clothes (static electricity, I presumed), but the rest filtered back down to the ground.

There were little meteor craters everywhere within this bigger crater: some were a few centimeters across, others a few meters. I turned around and looked up at Karen.

For a woman who had been frail a short time ago, who had had one hip replaced and had doubtless lived in fear of breaking the other, she was quite gutsy. With no hesitation, she copied what I'd done, stepping out of the hatch and beginning the slow descent to the ground.

She was carrying something tubular a of course! She'd remembered to grab the front section of the New York Times, and now had it rolled into a cylinder. It was astonishing not to see her hair billow upward, or her clothes ripple, but there was no air resistance to cause any of that. I took a few quick hopping steps to the right to give her plenty of room to land, and she did so, a big grin on her face.

The sky overhead was totally black. No stars were visible except the sun itself, which glowered fiercely. I reached out a hand, and Karen grasped it, and we took huge bouncing steps together, heading for High Eden, the place we were never supposed to see.

Gabriel Smythe turned out to be a compact man of perhaps sixty, with white-blond hair and a florid complexion. He had taken up residence in High Eden's transit-control room, which was a cramped space, dimly lit, full of monitor screens and glowing control panels. Through a wide window, we could see the moonbus, just twenty meters away, attached to the Jetway. It had coverings over all the windows I could see, preventing us from looking inside.

"Thank you for coming," Smythe said, pumping my hand. "Thank you."

I nodded. I didn't want to be here * at least not under these circumstances. But I felt a moral responsibility, I guess * although I hadn't done anything.

"And I see you brought the newspaper," continued Smythe. "Excellent! All right, there's a videophone connection between here and the moonbus. That's the microphone, and that's the camera pickup. He's covered all the security cameras inside the bus, but we can still see him through the phone's camera, when he deigns to transmit video, and he can see us. I'm going to call him now, and let him know you're here. He's being at least partially reasonable * he let one of the hostages go. Chandragupta says*"

"Chandragupta?" I repeated, startled. "Pandit Chandragupta?"

"Yes. Why?"

"What's he got to do with this?"

"He's the one who cured the other you," said Smythe.

I felt like slapping my forehead, but that would have been too theatrical. "Christ, of course! He's also the one who started this whole damn mess with the lawsuit. He issued a death certificate for the Karen Bessarian who died up here."

"Yes, yes. We saw. We've been watching the trial coverage, of course. Needless to say, we're not pleased. Anyway, he says your, uma"

"Skin," I said. "I know the slang. My shed skin."

"Right. He says your skin will have wildly fluctuating neurotransmitter levels in his brain for perhaps another couple of days. Sometimes he'll be quite rational, and sometimes he'll have a hair-trigger temper, or be totally paranoid."

"Christ," I said.

Smythe nodded. "Who'd have thought it'd be easier to copy a mind than to cure one? Anyway, remember, he's armed, and*"

"Armed?" Karen and I said in unison.

"Yes, yes. He's got a piton gun * it's for mountain climbing, and it shoots metal spikes. He could easily kill someone with it."

"My Goda" I said.

"Indeed," said Smythe. "I'll get him on the phone. Don't promise him anything we can't deliver, and do your best not to upset him. Okay?"

I nodded.

"Here goes." Smythe tapped some keys on a small keypad.

The phone bleeped a few times, then: "It better be good news, Gabe."

The picture on the screen showed the old me, all right: I'd forgotten how much gray I'd had in my hair. There was a wild look in his eyes that I don't think I'd ever seen before.

"It is, Jake," Gabe said. It was strange hearing him use my name but not be addressing me. "It's very good news indeed. Your * the other you is here, with me now, here, in the transit-control room at High Eden." He gestured for me to come into the camera's field of view, and I did so.

"Hello," I said, and my voice sounded mechanical, even to me. I'd forgotten how rich my real * my original * voice had been.

"Hmmph," said the other me. "Did you bring the newspaper?"

"Yes," I said. Karen, standing out of view, handed it to me. I held it up to the phone's lens, so he could read the date and see the main headline.

"I'll want to examine that later, of course, but for now, all right: I'll accept that a rocket really came from Earth today, and you might have been on it."

"Uncover the windows on the moonbus, and you'll see the rocket," I said. "It's about a hundred meters away, and * let's see * it should be visible off your left side."

"And you've got a sniper, just waiting to pick me off if my face appears in the window."

Gabe loomed in. "Honestly, Jake," he said, "there are no snipers on the moon."

"Not unless one came with him," the other Jake said, gesturing at me. I had never heard myself sounding paranoid before. I didn't like it.

Gabe looked at me. He lifted his shoulders and white-blond eyebrows slightly.

"Jake," I said, gently, "you wanted to see me?"

The me on the monitor nodded. "But how do I know it's really you?"

"It's me."

"No. At best, it's one of us. But it could be any consciousness loaded into that body; just because the exterior looks like me doesn't mean that it's my Mindscan inside."

"So ask me a question," I said.

There were endless numbers of things he could have asked me, things only one of us could possibly know. The name of the imaginary friend I had when I was a kid, the one I never told anyone about. The one and only item I'd ever shoplifted, as a teenager * a handheld gaming unit I really wanted.

And I would have gladly answered those questions. But he didn't ask them. No, he picked the one I didn't want to answer. Whether it was because he perversely wanted to humiliate me, even though the revelation would presumably hurt him, too, or because he wanted to show me, so that I would convey to Smythe and the others, just how far he was willing to go, I couldn't tell.

"Exactly where," he asked, "were we when our father suffered brain damage?"

I looked at Karen, then back at the camera. "In his den."

"And what were we doing?"

"Jakea"

"You don't know, do you?"

Oh, I know. I know. "Come on, Jake," I said.

"Smythe, if this is another trick, I'll kill Hades * I swear it."

"Don't do that," I said. "I'll answer. I'll answer." I really did miss being able to take a deep, calming breath. "We were arguing with him."