“I don’t blame you. You must know infinitely more than the legends.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “In those long-ago days, I was too preoccupied with the projects right before me to pay that much attention to the whole scheme of the planet. I thought I knew its geography, but what I knew was distorted, limited, primitive. Anyway, now I must go everywhere. I must roam jungles, deserts, mountain ranges. I must see the ice melting rapidly at the poles, see that for myself, the ice melting and breaking off and falling into the rising seas. And I have this dream that maybe one of my little satellite cities sank somewhere with the dome intact.” He paused, looking around him, and then back at me. “And then there is the work in our laboratories.”

“Can you fully duplicate the luracastria of the old days?” I asked.

“Oh, of course, Kapetria had to complete that before she could put me into a working body,” he said. “But luracastria begets other materials. That has always been the power of luracastria, it’s like a virus, mutating other chemicals in wholly unforeseen ways. I’m working on it constantly in here.” He tapped his right temple. “This ghost brain is organizing this biological brain and I’m recovering old knowledge and acquiring new knowledge all the time! But tell me, what is Fareed doing? What has he discovered? What is Seth up to? I want to know them. I must know them. And Louis, I must come to know Louis. Louis is over there watching us. Louis is making you happy? Before we were separated, I knew Louis through you and—.”

He broke off.

He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. “I lost all of you,” he whispered, “and I grieve for that loss.” The tears rose again.

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. And I lost you.” I fought my own tears. “You brought me together with Louis, you did that, and you gave Louis back to me. I have Louis now because of you.”

Ah, this was agony, and yet I treasured every second of it.

He reached inside his seersucker jacket and took out a white card and a pen. The pen was a very-fine-point gel-ink pen, and in a scrawling spidery hand he wrote numbers for me. This was for his phone. He gave the card to me and I put it in my pocket.

“Now give me your phone,” I said, “and I’ll tap in my numbers for you after I tap in yours.”