ROLLBACK: PART III OF IV
by Robert J. Sawyer

It isn’t enough just to communicate. What matters is what is communicated. 

* * * *

THE STORY SO FAR:

The year is 2048. Sarah and Donald Halifax , both eighty-seven, are celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary with their children and granndchildren at their Toronto home. Don is melancholy: he knows that this is the last milestone anniversary he and Sarah will be around for; their lives were good and full, but now are drawing to a close. 

Back in 2009, Sarah, then a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto, had decoded the only radio transmission from another star ever detected by the SETI project—a message from Sigma Draconis, 18.8 light-years away—and she orchestrated Earth’s reply to that message. 

A phone call comes during the anniversary party. As the astonished Sarah relays to her family: “The aliens from Sigma Draconis have responded to the radio message my team sent all those years ago.” 

Incredibly, though, the new message is encrypted—scrambled so that it can’t be read without a decryption key. It’s baffling: the whole point of SETI is to send messages that will be easy to read; the notion that a message would be designed not to be read makes no sense to Sarah.

The media begin inundating Sarah with phone calls—everyone wants to know what “the Grand Old Woman of SETI” makes of this; Sarah ignores the calls. But she’s intrigued when a humanoid robot shows up at her door. Sarah has often said that SETI depends on the kindness of strangers, and one of the most generous of those strangers has been Cody McGavin , the billionaire founder of McGavin Robotics. He’s sent this robot, carrying a cell phone, because he wants to talk to Sarah. She accepts his call, and he says he’s got a proposal for her, and wants to fly her and Don down to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his company is headquartered. 

Astonished, Sarah agrees, and she and Don meet with McGavin in his office. Sarah, according to McGavin, is the key to communicating with the aliens. Four decades ago, she was the one who figured out what the aliens were asking in their original message, and he’s sure that she’ll be pivotal in cracking the current one. 

As McGavin says, “Planets don’t talk to each other. People do. Some specific person on Sigma DraconisII sent the message, and one specific person on this planet—you, Dr. Sarah Halifax—figured out what he’d asked for, and organized our reply. You’ve got a pen pal, Dr. Halifax. It happens that I, not you, pay the postage, but he’s your pen pal.”

And so, McGavin says, Sarah needs to be around for subsequent exchanges of messages, even though, because of the speed-of-light time lag, decades will elapse between each one. 

Don thinks McGavin is being both ridiculous and cruel, and tells him so: he and Sarah both know that they have only a few years of life left. 

Maybe not, says McGavin. He offers to pay for a rollback for Sarah: a new technique that can rejuvenate a person. It costs billions, but it’ll return Sarah to being physically in her mid-twenties, giving her many decades of additional life to continue the dialogue with the aliens.

Sarah is startled but intrigued. But she immediately sets out one nonnegotiable condition: McGavin must also pay for a rollback for her husband Don. McGavin initially balks—Don was an audio engineer and producer for CBC Radio before he retired; he’s of no use to the SETI effort, and the process is supremely expensive. But the rich man relents, and, after considerable soul-searching, Sarah and Don agree to undergo the procedure. 

Tragically, though, the procedure works for Don, but not for Sarah. Rejuvenex, the company that performed the treatment, thinks the failure of Sarah to become young again may be related to experimental therapies she underwent decades previously for breast cancer—but regardless of the cause, there’s nothing they can do. Although it’ll take months for Don’s rolling back to complete, it’s inexorable: he’s going to end up being physically in his mid-twenties, while Sarah will remain in her late eighties. 

The current message from Sigma Draconis remains unreadable, locked behind an encryption algorithm that the aliens have clearly explained in a header to their message but to which they’ve failed to provide the decryption key. 

In trying to figure out what that key might be—and to keep her mind off the growing age gap between her and her husband—Sarah spends a lot of time contemplating the first message from Sigma Draconis, received way back in 2009. In it, the aliens established that although it’s technically correct to write the result of the question “What is eight divided by twelve?” as either 2/3 or 4/6, the answer 2/3 is preferable (because the fraction has been reduced). They also established that whether the number one is or isn’t a prime number is a matter of opinion. This mathematical vocabulary allowed them to explore moral issues in the rest of their message.

Sarah vividly recalls the fateful day all those years ago when she finally figured out exactly what the first message was, and what sort of reply the aliens wanted. Her breakthrough had been recognizing that the first message from Sigma Draconis was a survey—a questionnaire on moral and ethical conundrums, laid out with spaces for a thousand sets of replies; the aliens apparently wanted to see a cross-section of human responses. 

Sarah had ended up orchestrating the gathering of anonymous replies through a web site, and, at the urging of her son Carl , who had been sixteen then, she had included her own set of survey responses in the bundle of replies sent to Sigma Draconis. 

Now, though, in 2048, Sarah and Don are sadly growing apart. Don has much more physical energy than she does, and that’s leading to dissatisfaction in the bedroom. Also, Don’s mental acuity has improved since the rollback, causing him, despite his best intentions, to feel irritation at Sarah’s difficulty in remembering things. 

Don tries to get back his old job—or any job—at CBC Radio, but there’s no place for him there. His technical knowledge is decades out of date, and middle-aged employees won’t be happy being managed by someone who looks twenty-five. On top of all that, Don’s old friends, near the ends of their natural lives, are insanely jealous that he’s been given decades more to live. Don is so despondent that he contemplates suicide; after all, he reasons, his life had been almost over before this procedure—ending it now would just be setting things right. 

Sarah, believing the decryption key must be something in one of the thousand sets of survey replies sent to Sigma Draconis four decades ago, sends Don down to the University of Toronto to retrieve archived paper copies of those replies. There, Don meets Lenore Darby , a twenty-five-year-old SETI grad student working on a master’s degree. To Don’s delight, she shares his passion for the game Scrabble. They end up having an innocent lunch together, and later in the day, with Sarah’s permission, Don joins Lenore and other grad students for chicken wings at a pub. 

Lenore is under the impression that Don is Sarah’s grandson, rather than her husband, and she’s touched when Don vigorously defends Sarah against dismissive comments made by one of the other grad students. Lenore lives in a rough neighborhood a few blocks from the pub, and she asks Don to walk her home. Once there, she kisses him, and, before Don knows what’s happening, they’re in bed—the real twenty-five-year-old and the old married man who only appears that way ... 

* * * *

Chapter 24

Don fondly remembered the trip he and Sarah had taken to New Zealand in 1992. But Carl had been conceived on that trip, and his birth had put an end to them doing much traveling together for the next couple of decades; Sarah still went all sorts of places to attend conferences, but Don stayed home. He’d been quite sad to miss out on going to Paris with her in 2003 for a symposium with the nifty name “Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.” But he had gotten to go to Puerto Rico with her in 2010 for the transmission of the official reply to Sigma Draconis. His brother Bill looked after Carl and Emily while they were away.

The city of Arecibo is about seventy-five minutes west of San Juan, and the Arecibo Observatory is ten miles south of the city, although it seemed much farther, Don had thought, as they were driven there on the twisting mountain roads. The landscape was all karst, said the driver: limestone that had been eroded to produce fissures, underground streams, caverns, and sinkholes. The Caverns Rio Camuy, one of the most spectacular cave systems in the world, were southwest of the observatory. And the great radio-telescope dish itself had been built here because nature had kindly provided a thousand-foot-wide sinkhole, perfectly shaped to hold it.

Don had been surprised to see that the dish wasn’t solid. Instead, it was made of perforated aluminum slats with gaps between them, all held in place by steel guys. And beneath the dish, in the partial shade, was plenty of lush vegetation, including ferns, wild orchids, and begonias. Around the observatory grounds, Don was delighted to see mongooses, lizards, fist-sized toads, giant snails, and dragonflies.

He and Sarah were put up in one of the VSQs—”Visiting Scientist Quarters”—a wooden cabin on a hill, raised up above the uneven ground on ten cement-block pillars. The cabin had a small porch (excellent, they discovered, for watching the afternoon thunderstorms), a tiny kitchen, one little bedroom, a small bathroom, and a rotary phone. A boxy air conditioner was installed just below one of the windows, all of which were covered on the outside by wooden shutters.

Besides being technically a good choice for sending the message, Arecibo was also good symbolically. Seventy-nine-year-old Frank Drake was on hand in the control room overlooking the great dish when Sarah used a USB cable to connect her Dell notebook computer, containing the master version of the response, to the transmitter. Drake’s message to M13—until this moment, the most famous SETI broadcast—had been sent from here thirty-six years previously.

As planned, the response contained a thousand completed surveys, chosen at random from the 1,206,343 sets of responses that had been uploaded to the website Sarah had helped create. Well, actually, truth be told, 999 of the sets were randomly chosen; the one thousandth was Sarah’s own set, shuffled into the middle. Not that she’d snuck it in. Rather, after Don and Carl had put the notion in her head, she’d broached the topic of including her own answers at a meeting, and the PR officer for the SETI Institute had loved the idea. It made for a great human-interest angle, he said.

At the transmission ceremony, commemorative CD-ROMs containing archival copies of the message were distributed to key researchers, but the actual responses people had given weren’t being made public. As per the Dracons’ request, the answers were still being kept secret, so that the participants wouldn’t be influenced by each others’ responses when dealing with follow-up questions that might come at some point.

The control room had large floor tiles set on the diagonal, alternating in a checkerboard of beige and brown; it made Don more dizzy to look at them than it did to look out the angled window at the great dish, with its 600-ton triangular instrumentation platform mounted high above the dish.

Scientists, press, and a few other spouses were jammed into the control room. Electric fans were sitting on pieces of equipment or clamped to them, but, even though it was still early in the morning, the heat was oppressive. Don looked on as Sarah sat down at the central L-shaped desk and brought up the response on her notebook. He’d suggested she come up with a memorable phrase—her own “one small step” speech—but she’d declined; the important message was what was going to be transmitted, not anything she said. And so, with nothing more than an “All right, here we go!” Sarah clicked the on-screen button, and the word “Transmitting” appeared on the notebook’s display.

Shouts went up and champagne appeared. Don stood at the periphery, enjoying seeing Sarah so happy. After a bit, the beefy, silver-haired representative of the International Astronomical Union started tapping on the side of his champagne glass with a Mont Blanc pen until he had everyone’s attention.

“Sarah,” he said, “we’ve got a little something for you.” He opened one of the metal lockers mounted to the walls. Inside was a trophy, with a marble base, a central column with blue silk inserts, and, on top, winged Athena stretching toward the stars. The man bent down, picked it up, and held it at an angle in front of him, as though he were appraising a large bottle of wine. And then, in a loud, clear voice, he read out the inscription on the plaque for all to hear. “‘For Sarah Halifax,’” he said, “‘who figured it out ... ‘“

* * * *

Don climbed up the stairs, leaving Lenore’s basement apartment. It was past 11:00 P.M., and as Lenore had said, it was a rough neighborhood. But that wasn’t why his heart was pounding.

What had he done? 

It had all happened so quickly, although he supposed he was naïve to not have realized how Lenore had expected the evening to turn out. But it had been sixty years since he’d really been in his twenties, and, even then, he’d missed the sexual revolution by a decade. The free love of the 1960s had been a little too early for him; like Vietnam and Watergate, they were things he had only vague childhood recollections of, and certainly no firsthand experience.

When, at fifteen, he’d started his own fumbling forays into sexuality—at least, with a partner—people had been afraid of disease. And already one girl in his class at Humberside had gotten pregnant, and that had also had a chilling effect on promiscuity. And so, even though the morality of sex had not been at issue back then—everyone of Don’s generation wanted to do it, and few, at least in the middle-class Toronto suburb he grew up in, thought there was anything wrong with doing it before getting married—the act itself was still treated as a big deal, although, given what was to come a decade later, the fear of getting gonorrhea or crabs seemed downright quaint.

But how did the saying go? Everything old is new again. AIDS had been conquered, thank God—just about everyone Don’s age knew someone who had died from that miserable plague. Most other forms of sexually transmitted disease had been wiped out, or were trivial to cure. And safe, virtually infallible, over-the-counter birth-control drugs for men and women were available here in Canada. That, coupled with a general loosening up, had led to a second era of sexual openness not seen since the heyday of Haight-Ashbury, Rochdale College, and, yes, the Beatles.

But, as Don continued along the cracked sidewalk, he knew all of that was rationalization. It didn’t matter what the morality of young people today was; that wasn’t his world. What mattered was what his generation—his and Sarah’s—thought. He’d managed sixty years without ever once straying, and now, suddenly—boom!

As he rounded off of Euclid onto Bloor, he took out his datacom. “Call Sarah,” he said; he needed to hear her voice.

“Hello?”

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “How—how was the play?”

“It was fine. The guy playing Tevye didn’t have a strong enough voice, I thought, but it was still good. How were your wings?”

“Great. Great. I’m just heading to the subway now.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I won’t wait up.”

“No, no. Don’t. Just leave my pajamas in the bathroom for me.”

“Okay. See you later.”

“Right. And...”

“Yes.”

“I love you, Sarah.”

She sounded surprised when she replied. “I love you, too.”

“And I’m on my way home.”

* * * *

Chapter 25

“But I still don’t get it,” Don had said, back in 2009, after Sarah had figured out that the first message from Sigma Draconis was a survey. “I don’t see why aliens should care what we think about morals and ethics. I mean, why would they give a damn?”

Sarah and Don were out for another one of their nightly walks. “Because,” Sarah said, as they passed the Feins’ place, “all races will face comparable problems as time goes on, and if the race has any individual psychological variation—which it will, unless they’ve done as you suggest and become a hive mind—they’ll be debating those issues.”

“Why do you say they must have psychological variation?” he asked.

“Because variation is the sine qua non of evolution: without variation, there’s nothing for natural selection to act upon, and without natural selection, there’s nothing to lift a species up out of the slime. Psychology is no different from any other complex trait: it’s going to show variation, everywhere in the universe. And that means there’ll be arguments over fundamental issues.”

“Okay,” he said. There was a cool breeze; he wished he’d worn a long-sleeve shirt. “But the moral issues they argue about and the ones we argue about aren’t going to be the same.”

Sarah shook her head. “Actually, I bet they will be facing the same sorts of questions we are, because advances in science will always lead to the same basic moral quandaries.”

He kicked a pebble. “Like what?”

“Well, consider abortion. It was advancing science that propelled that into being a mainstream issue; the technology to reliably terminate a fetus without killing or maiming the mother is a scientific innovation. We can do this now, but should we do it?”

“But,” he said, “suppose the Dracons really are dragons—you know, suppose they’re reptiles. I know they probably aren’t; I know the name refers to the constellation they happen to be in from our point of view. But bear with me. If you had a race of intelligent reptiles, then abortion isn’t a technological issue. Smashing the egg in the nest doesn’t physically harm the mother in any way.”

“Yeah, okay, granted,” she said. The pebble Don had kicked was now in her path, and she sent it skittering ahead. “But that’s not the counterpart of abortion; the counterpart of abortion would be destroying the fertilized egg before it’s laid while it’s still inside the mother.”

“But some fish reproduce by having the female eject unfertilized eggs into the water, and the male eject semen into the water, so that fertilization takes place outside the female’s body.”

“Okay, all right,” said Sarah. “Beings like that wouldn’t have the abortion issue in precisely the same way, but, then again, like I said on As It Happens, aquatic beings probably don’t have radio or other technology.”

“But, still, why is abortion a moral issue? I mean, it is for people here because we believe at some point a soul enters the body; we just can’t all agree on what that point is. But the alien message made no mention of souls.”

“‘Souls’ is just a shorthand for discussing the question of when life begins, and that will be a universal debate—at least among those races who practice SETI.”

“Why?”

“Because SETI is an activity that says life, as opposed to nonlife, is important, that finding life is meaningful. If you didn’t care about the distinction between life and nonlife, all you’d do would be astronomy, not SETI. And where to draw that distinction will always be of interest to people who value life. I mean, most people would agree it’s wrong to kill a dog for no reason, because a dog is clearly alive—but is an embryo alive? That’s debatable; every race will have to define when life begins.”

“Well, it either begins at conception or at birth, no?”

Sarah shook her head. “No. Even here on Earth, there are cultures that don’t name kids until they’ve lived forty days, and I’ve even heard it argued that babies aren’t people until they turn three or so—until they begin to form long-term, permanent memories. And even then, there’s still room for moral debate. We know the Dracons reproduce sexually, shuffling their genes while doing so; that was clear from their message. And I rather suspect, by the way, that that sort of reproduction will be common throughout the universe: it provides a huge kick to evolution, getting a new genetic hand dealt with every generation instead of having to wait around for a cosmic ray to induce a random mutation in a being that otherwise just reproduces exact copies of itself. Remember, life first appeared on this planet four billion years ago, and it spent the first three and half billion of those years basically the same. But when sex was invented half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian explosion—boom!—suddenly evolution was proceeding by leaps and bounds. And any race that reproduces sexually might very well still argue about the ethics of destroying a unique combination of genetic material even if they’ve always held that such a thing wasn’t alive until the moment of birth.”

Don frowned. “That’s like saying it’s a moral quandary to worry about destroying snowflakes. Just because something is unique doesn’t make it valuable—especially when everything in that class of entities is unique.”

A chipmunk scampered across the road in front of them. “Besides,” continued Don, “speaking of evolution, doesn’t the abortion issue ultimately take care of itself, given enough time? I mean, natural selection obviously would favor those people who actually put into practice being pro-life over those who actually choose to personally have abortions, because every fetus you abort is one less set of your genes around. You wait enough generations, and being pro-choice should be bred out of the population.”

“Good grief!” Sarah said, shaking her head. “What a revolting thought! But, even so, that’s only true if the desire for reproductive choice is merely one of passing convenience, and has nothing to do with whether the kid will make it to reproductive age without too many resources being invested. I mean, look at Barb and Barry—they’ve essentially devoted their whole lives to raising Freddie.” Barb was Sarah’s cousin; her son was severely autistic. “I love Freddie, of course, but in effect, he’s replaced potential siblings who would have required a fraction of the investment and would have been far more likely to provide Barb and Barry with grandchildren.”

“You know as well as I do that a vanishingly small number of abortions are because the fetus is defective,” said Don. “Hell, we’ve had abortion for centuries, and only had prenatal screening for decades. Infanticide, that’s another thing, but...”

“Postpartum depression has its evolutionary roots in the mother recognizing that she has insufficient resources to insure that this particular offspring will survive to reproductive age, and so the mother conserves her parental investment by cutting her losses and failing to bond with the infant. No matter how you slice it, evolution will conserve mechanisms that don’t always lead to simply having the most offspring. Anyway, setting aside abortion, I still think most races will face very similar moral issues as they develop technology that expands their powers. I know the aliens didn’t mention God—”

“That’s right,” Don said smugly.

“—but every race that survives long enough will eventually struggle with the ramifications of getting to play God.”

It was growing dark; the streetlights flickered on. “‘God’ is a very loaded term,” he said.

“Maybe so, but we don’t have a lot of synonyms for the concept: if you define God as the creator of the universe, all races that live long enough eventually become Gods.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. We’ll eventually be able to simulate reality so well that it will be indistinguishable from ... well, from reality, right?”

“One of my favorite authors once said, ‘Virtual reality is nothing but air guitar writ large.’”

She snorted, then continued: “And a sufficiently complex virtual reality could simulate living beings so well that they themselves will actually think they’re alive.”

“I suppose,” he said.

“For sure. Have you seen that game The Sims that Carl likes to play? The simulations of reality we can make today are already amazing, and we’ve only had digital computers for—what?—sixty-five years now. Imagine what sort of reality you could simulate if you had a thousand or a million or a billion times more computing power at hand—which we, or any technological race that lives long enough, eventually will. Again, where do you draw the line between life and nonlife? What rights do those simulated lifeforms have? Those are moral issues all races will have to face.”

Another couple, also out for a walk, was coming toward them. Don smiled at them as they passed.

“In fact,” she continued, “you could argue there’s even some evidence that we ourselves are precisely that: digital creations.”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s a smallest possible length in our universe. The Planck length: 1.6 x 10-35 meters, or about 10-20 times the size of a proton; you can’t measure a length any smaller than that, supposedly because of quantum effects.”

“Okay.”

“And,” she said, “there must be a smallest unit of time, too, if you think about it: since a particle of light has to be either here, at Planck length unit A, or next to it, at Planck length unit B, then the time it takes to move from one unit to the next—the time it takes a photon to click over from being in this Planck space-unit to that Planck space-unit—is the smallest possible bit of time. And that unit, the Planck time, is 10-43 seconds.”

“The Clock of the Short Now,” said Don, pleased with himself.

“Exactly! But think about what that means! We live in a universe made up of discrete little bits of space that’s aging in discrete little chunks of time—a universe that has pixels of distance and duration. We are digital at the most fundamental level.”

“Quantum physics not as the basic nature of reality, but rather as the—how would you put it?—as a byproduct of the level of resolution of our simulated world.” He made an impressed face. “Cool.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But that means our world, with its pixels of time and space, might be nothing more than some far-advanced civilization’s version of The Sims—and that would mean there’s a programmer somewhere.”

“I wonder what his email address is,” Don said. “I’ve got some tech-support questions.”

“Yeah, well, just remember once you open the seal on the universe, you can’t get your money back.” They turned a corner. “And speaking of making universes, with particle accelerators we may eventually be able to create daughter universes, budding off from this one. Of course, we won’t create a full-blown universe, with stars and galaxies; we’d just create an appropriate singularity, like the one that our universe burst forth from in the big bang, and then the new universe will make itself from that. Physics says it’s possible—and I rather suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone successfully does it.”

“I get it,” said Don. “If you take a step back, that means we could be living in a universe created by a scientist in some parent universe’s particle accelerator.”

“Exactly!” said Sarah. “And, look, you know I love following all those debates in the US about the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. Well, I’m an evolutionist—you know that—but I don’t agree with the testimony that the scientists on the evolution side keep giving. They keep saying that science cannot admit supernatural causes, by which they mean that any scientific explanation has to, by definition, be limited to causes intrinsic to this universe.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Everything is wrong with it,” she said. “That definition of science prevents us from ever concluding that we are the product of the work of other scientists, working in a reality above this one. It leaves us with the cockeyed mess of having a scientific worldview that on the one hand freely acknowledges that we will eventually be able to simulate reality perfectly, or maybe even create daughter universes, but on the other hand is constrained against ever allowing that we ourselves might exist in one of those things.”

“Maybe science isn’t interested in that question simply because it doesn’t really answer anything,” Don said. “I suspect somebody like Richard Dawkins would say, so what if we are the creation of some other intelligent being? That doesn’t answer the question of where that other intelligent being came from.”

“But science—and in particular, evolutionary science, which is Dawkins’s forte—is largely about tracing lineages, and filling in the stages. If you took a comparable view of evolution, you’d have to say that wondering whether birds really evolved from dinosaurs is a dumb question to bother with, as is wondering whether Lucy was one of our ancestors, since the only truly interesting question is how the original, common ancestor of all life came into being. That’s wrong; it’s one interesting question, but it’s hardly the only one worth asking. Whether we live in a created universe is an inherently interesting question, and it’s worthy of scientific investigation. And if a creator does exist, or if a race becomes such a creator itself, that immediately raises the moral question of what, if any, accountability or obligation the creations have to that creator—and the flipside, and the part that I think we don’t spend nearly enough time debating, which is what if any accountability or obligation our possible creator has to us.”

Don took a big step sideways, and looked up at the dark sky. “Hey, God,” he said, “be careful with your aim...”

“No, seriously,” said Sarah. “Technology gives a species the power to prevent life, to create life, to take life on scales small and large; technology ultimately gives the power to be what we would call gods, and, even if our definition of science is blind to it, it raises the possibility that what we are is the result of the work of some other being that would, by virtue of having created us, also deserve that term God. Doesn’t mean we have to worship it—but it does mean that we, and any other technologically advanced race, will have to deal with ethical questions related both to potentially being Gods ourselves and potentially being the children of Gods.”

They jogged across the street, beating an oncoming car. “And so the aliens from Sigma Drac wrote to us asking for our advice?” asked Don. He shook his head. “Heaven help them.”

* * * *

Chapter 26

Sarah had said one of the appeals of becoming young again would be having time to read all the great books. Don couldn’t quite say that the book he was looking at now—a thriller of the type that would have been sold in drug-store spinner racks when he’d been young the first time—was great, but it was a pleasure to be able to read for hours without getting eye fatigue, and without having to put on his cheaters. Still, eventually, he did get bored with the book, and so he had his datacom scan the TV listings for anything that might interest him, and—

“Hey,” he said, looking up from the list the device had provided, “Discovery is showing that old documentary about the first message.”

Sarah, seated on the couch, looked over at him; he was leaning back in the chair. “What old documentary?” she said.

“You know,” he said, a little impatiently, “that hour-long thing they did when you sent the initial reply to Sigma Draconis.”

“Oh,” said Sarah. “Yeah.”

“Don’t you want to watch it?”

“No. I’m sure we’ve got a recording of it somewhere, anyway.”

“Doubtless in some format we can’t read anymore. I’m going to put it on.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Oh, come on!” said Don. “It’ll be fun.” He looked at the panel above the fireplace. “TV on; Discovery Channel.” The picture was razor-sharp and the colors vibrant. Don had forgotten they’d had high-definition TV that long ago; he found lots of older shows unwatchable now, because they’d been videotaped in low-res.

The documentary was already underway. Some aerial footage of the Arecibo radio telescope was being shown, and the voice of a Canadian actor—was it Maury Chaykin?—was doing the narration. Soon, that was replaced with a potted history of SETI: the Drake equation, Project OZMA, the Pioneer 10 plaque, the Voyager records—which, it was duly noted, this being the Canadian version of Discovery Channel, had been designed by Toronto’s own Jon Lomberg. Don had forgotten how much of the documentary wasn’t about Sarah and her work. Maybe he’d go into the kitchen to get a drink, and—

And suddenly, there she was, on the screen, and—

And he looked over at his wife, seated on the couch, then back at the monitor, then shifted his gaze between the two once more. She was steadfastly staring at the fireplace, it seemed, not the magphotic panel above it, and she was red in the face, as if embarrassed, because—

Because she looked so much younger, so much less frail, on the monitor. After all, this had been recorded thirty-eight years ago, back when she was forty-nine. It was a sort of rollback, a regressing to a younger state; oh, to be sure, not nearly as far back as he had gone, but still a bitter taste of what might have been.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said, softly, and then, more loudly, into the air: “TV off.”

She looked over at him, her face expressionless. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

As the day wore on, Sarah went up to Carl’s old room, to work through the giant stack of papers Don had brought her from the university.

Don, meanwhile, went down to the basement. He and Sarah had almost given up on using the rec room as they’d gotten older. The stairs down to it were particularly steep, and there was a banister only on the wall side. But he now had no trouble going down there, and, on these hot summer days, it was the coolest place in the house.

Not to mention the most private.

He sat on the old couch there, and looked about, a fluttering in his stomach. History had been made here. Right over there, Sarah had figured out the meat of the original message. And history might be made in this house again, if she could decrypt the Dracons’ latest transmission. Perhaps someday there’d be a plaque on their front lawn.

Don was holding his datacom tightly in his hand, and its plastic shell was now moist with his perspiration. Although he’d fantasized about seeing Lenore again, he knew that could never happen. But she’d made him promise to call, and he couldn’t just ignore her, couldn’t leave her hanging. That would be wrong, mean, petty. No, he had to call her up and say good-bye properly. He’d tell her the truth, tell her there was someone else.

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, opened the datacom, snapped it immediately shut, and then, at last, opened it once more, gingerly, as though lifting the lid on a coffin.

And he spoke to the little device, telling it who he wanted to contact, and—

Rings. The tolling of a bell. And then—

A squeaky voice. “Hello?”

“Hi, Lenore,” he said, his heart jackhammering. “It’s Don.”

Silence.

“You know, Don Halifax.”

“Hello,” Lenore said again, this time her tone icy cold.

“Look, I’m sorry I haven’t called you, but...”

“It has been three days.”

“Yes, I know, I know, and I’m sorry. I really did mean to call. I didn’t want you to think I was one of those guys who ... well, you know, one of those guys who doesn’t call.”

“Could have fooled me,” she said.

He cringed. “I’m sorry. You deserve way better—”

“Yes, I do.”

“I know. But, look, I—”

“Didn’t you have a good time?”

“I had a great time,” he said. And he had—just about the only time he’d been happy for weeks now. Not just the sex, but just being with someone who could keep up with him, and—

Lenore sounded relieved. “Good. ‘Cause, I did too. You ... you’re really something.”

“Um, thanks. So are you. But, um...”

“Look,” she said, her tone conveying that she was making a special dispensation, “I’m busy at the food bank tomorrow. But I’m free on Sunday. Maybe we could get together then?”

No, thought Don.

“What did you have in mind?” he said, astonished to hear himself speak the words.

“The forecast says it’s going to be gorgeous. Why don’t we go down to Centre Island?”

I cannot do this, he thought. I will not do this.

“Don?” said Lenore, into what had become an uncomfortable silence.

He closed his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, why not?”

* * * *

Don had arrived at the ferry docks at the foot of Bay Street about ten minutes early, and he kept scanning the crowds, looking for—

Ah, there she was: the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore. She came running over to him, in white short-shorts and a loose-fitting white top, clutching a giant sun hat. She stretched up and kissed him quickly on the mouth, and then pulled back, smiling, and—

And he was stunned. In his mind, he’d aged her forward: he’d been picturing her as being in her mid-thirties, which seemed a more appropriate age for someone he might want to talk to, but here she was, freckled and fresh-faced, looking ten years younger than that.

They boarded the Max Haines, a white, double-decker ferry, and took the kilometer-and-a-half journey to Centre Island, with its boardwalks, beaches, amusement park, and gardens.

Lenore had wanted to come down here, she said, because she missed the water. But the result was not proving entirely satisfactory: gulls eating garbage were no substitute for Vancouver’s great blue herons, and, besides, there was no salt tang to the air. Once they’d docked, they jogged for about half an hour. Don found that exhilarating, and he loved to feel his hair—yes, hair!—whipping in the breeze.

After that, they just strolled along a paved walkway, gingerly trying to avoid all the goose droppings. Off to their right was the bay, and across it was Toronto itself, with the skyline that Don had watched grow and spread over the better part of a century. It was still dominated by the CN Tower, once, but certainly no longer, the tallest freestanding structure in the world; as a teenager, he had gone downtown with his friend Ivan to watch a Sikorsky Skycrane assemble its huge components. Blockish skyscrapers, like the elements of a bar chart, trailed off left and right from the Tower. He recalled when Toronto’s downtown had been a tiny cluster of tall buildings, but now it went on and on along the lakeshore, west toward Mississauga, and east until the Scarborough Bluffs forced it to stop.

More than just the skyline had changed during Don’s lifetime—and yet some things hadn’t changed nearly as much as he’d expected. He remembered seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey with his dad when it had come out, back in 1968. The nice thing about being born in a year that ends in a zero was that it made math simple. Even as a kid, he knew he’d be forty-one in 2001, and his father, sitting next to him at Toronto’s Glendale Theatre, had been forty-three then, meaning Don would be younger than him when the wonders that film portrayed were supposed to come to pass: Pan Am space planes, giant wheel-shaped space stations with Howard Johnson hotels, cities on the moon, humans traveling out to Jupiter, cryogenic suspended animation, and—Open the pod-bay doors, Hal—true artificial intelligence.

But by the time the actual 2001 had rolled around, none of those things were realities. So perhaps Don shouldn’t have been too surprised that the extravagant wonders predicted in the science fiction of the first decade of the new millennium likewise hadn’t materialized. The technological singularity had never happened; extreme body modification, either through genetic engineering or with artificial parts, never became popular; the nanotech assembler that could turn anything into anything else was still the stuff of dreams.

Don looked out over the water, back at the city he’d been born in. Nestled at the foot of the CN Tower was the stadium where the Blue Jays played. He pointed at it. “See? The roof’s open on SkyDome.”

Lenore looked at him as though he were speaking a foreign language, and—

Oh, shit. He still referred to it as SkyDome; so did lots of people his age. But that hadn’t been its name for over forty years. Christ, the gap between them was everywhere, in everything. “The Rogers Centre, I mean. The, um, the roof is open.” It was such a trivial observation, he was sorry now he’d made it.

“Well, it is a lovely day,” said Lenore. It buoyed him that she made no further comment on what he’d said.

They were holding hands as they walked, skateboarders, hoverpadders, rollerbladers, and joggers passing them in both directions. She was wearing her big, floppy hat; with her pale skin, she doubtless burned easily. For his part, he was enjoying being out in the sun without having to wear a hat. After four decades of baldness, it was wonderful to have his own built-in protection.

They’d talked about this and that: a lively, animated conversation, so unlike—what had one of his friends called it?—the companionable silence of old married people who had, decades ago, run out of points of view to share or jokes to tell or issues to explore.

“Do you play tennis?” Lenore asked, as they passed a couple of people carrying racquets.

“I haven’t since...” Since before you were born.

“We should play sometime. I can get you a guest pass to Hart House.”

“That’d be great,” Don said. And he meant it. He’d been sedentary the first time he’d been this age; now, he was loving the sheer physicality of being alive. “You realize I’m going to beat your pants, off, though. I mean, I’m medically enhanced.”

She grinned. “Oh, yeah?”

“Sure. Just call me Bjorn Borg.”

She looked at him, totally baffled, and his heart fell a bit. Sarah would have gotten the joke.

“Um,” he said, painfully aware of Johnny Carson’s dictum that it isn’t funny if you have to explain it, “Bjorn Borg was a famous tennis player; won Wimbledon five times in a row. And the Borg, well, they’re this alien race on an old TV show called Star Trek. The Borg augment their bodies with technology, so, um...”

“You are a supremely silly man,” Lenore said, smiling warmly at him.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and looked—really looked, for the first time—at Lenore.

She was a grad student studying SETI.

She liked to eat in restaurants, to talk about philosophy and politics.

She was confident and funny and a joy to be with.

And now she was even talking like—

But he’d missed putting it together until just now. She reminded him of—

Of course. Of course.

She reminded him of Sarah as she’d been back in her twenties, back when Don had fallen in love with her.

Oh, true, they looked nothing alike physically, and perhaps that’s why he’d failed to notice all the other similarities when they’d been together before. Lenore was shorter than Sarah, or, at least, shorter than Sarah had been in her prime. And Sarah had originally had brown hair, and still had blue-gray eyes, while Lenore was redheaded, freckled, and green-eyed.

But in spirit, in attitude, in the joy they took in life, they were kindred spirits.

Coming toward them was a young couple: an Asian woman and a white man, the man pushing a stroller. Don was wearing sunglasses—as was Lenore—so he felt no compunction about looking at the beautiful young woman, with long black hair, wearing pink shorts and a red tank top.

“Cute kid,” said Lenore.

“Um, yeah,” said Don. He hadn’t even noticed.

“Do you—do you like kids?” Lenore asked, a tentative note in her voice.

“Sure. Of course.”

“Me, too,” she said.

There was a park bench on the grass a short distance from the walkway, facing back across the water toward the city. Don pointed at it with his chin, and they went over and sat. He put his arm around her shoulders, and they stared out at the water, watching a ferry coming toward them.

“Do you want to have kids of your own?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah. Definitely.”

“How soon?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair was blowing a bit in the breeze, occasionally gently slapping his cheek. “Oh, I don’t know. By the time I’m thirty, I suppose. I know that’s a long time from now, but...”

She trailed off, but he found himself shaking his head. Five years would go by like that; it seemed only yesterday he’d been in his seventies. Hell, it hardly seemed that long ago that he’d been in his sixties. The years just fly by, and—

And he wondered if that would still be true. He’d certainly experienced the phenomenon of time seeming to pass more quickly as he’d gotten older, and he’d read the pop-psychology explanation for it: that, when you’re a kid of ten, each year is a whopping ten percent of your life to date, and so seems ponderously long, but by the time you’re fifty, each year is just two percent of your life, and so passes in the wink of an eye. He wondered what would happen to his time sense now that he was young again. He’d be one of the first people ever to get to test the validity of the standard explanation.

Lenore said nothing more; she just looked out at the lake. Still, it was ironic, he realized. She was thinking farther into the future than he was. But he’d thought he was done with the future, and, although he knew that poem, too, he hadn’t planned on raging against the dying of the light...

In five years, Lenore would likely have a Ph.D., and be well on her way in her career.

And in five years, Sarah would probably be...

He hated to think about it, but it was all but inevitable. By 2053, Sarah would almost certainly be gone, and he’d—

He’d be alone. Unless—

Unless he...

Unless he found somebody else.

But he’d seen at the grad students’ wing night just how vapid most twenty-five-year-olds were. People who shared his apparent physical age would never appeal to him intellectually, emotionally. Lenore, somehow, was different, and—

And it was way too soon to go further with this conversation, but the reality was clear: his future with Lenore, or, he imagined, with just about any woman who was as young as he looked, would depend on his being willing to be a father again.

But, God, to have more kids! Could he face late-night feedings, and changing diapers, and being a disciplinarian?

And yet...

And yet perhaps people would forgive him his transgressions if someday he did start a second family. He knew that no matter how logical it might be for him to want the company of someone so much younger than Sarah, in the eyes of his friends and family that would be seen as tawdry, thinking with his dick instead of his brain. But if they thought his desire was to be a father again, well, then maybe that wasn’t quite so bad.

In this age of open sexuality, online and off, it was probably no longer true, but in Don’s day, many men he knew had had a favorite Playboy Playmate, and his had been Vicki Smith, or, at least, that had been the name he’d first encountered the five-foot-eleven, Rubenesque Texan under, when she was Miss May 1992. But by the time she’d been named Playmate of the Year in 1993, she’d changed her stage name to Anna Nicole Smith. And she became even more famous when, at twenty-six, she married a billionaire who was almost ninety.

That’s the comparison people of his generation would make, he knew. Except that he wasn’t a billionaire, although he’d gotten what that crazed old coot doubtless would have traded his entire fortune for. And it was he, not the woman, who was fake. Anna Nicole Smith had had an A-cup before breast implants pushed her three letters down the alphabet. But Lenore was natural—well, as natural as anyone these days. It was Don who’d had himself remade, although somehow, at least to him, gene therapy and the lengthening of telo-meres seemed less creepy than having your chest carved open and bags of silicone shoved inside.

Still, an eighty-seven-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old woman! The things people would say! But if he eventually had more kids, became a dad to little ones again, well, then, that was good and normal and right, and maybe everyone would understand, everyone would forgive.

Of course, that was no reason to become a father, but, hell, he hadn’t given it any thought the first time; it hadn’t taken any justification. It had just seemed the most natural thing in the world when he and Sarah had gotten married.

Three ducks landed on the lake, small wakes appearing behind them. Lenore snuggled closer to Don. “It’s such a beautiful day,” she said.

He nodded, and stroked her shoulder gently, wondering what the future might hold.

* * * *

Chapter 27

Don had had a truly wonderful time both down at the Island and afterward, back at Lenore’s. But she had a lot of reading to do for a seminar tomorrow, so extricating himself at the end of the day had not been an issue. Sarah, meanwhile, had said she was going to stay in all day—she was still sorting through the mountain of paper records about the first message—and as Don headed toward the subway, he was startled that the answering machine picked up when he tried to call his house. Of course, Sarah’s hearing wasn’t what it used to be; she might simply have not heard the phone ringing, or she might be out, or—

“Where is Sarah’s datacom?” he said to his own unit.

“At home,” the device replied, after connecting with its twin. “On her night stand.”

Don felt himself frowning; she wouldn’t have gone out without it, and he’d tried now calling both her datacom and their land-line household phone. Something was wrong; he just knew it.

He started jogging toward Bathurst subway station; the parts between here and that station, and between his home station of North York Centre and his front door, were the only segments of the journey he could speed up. The rest would happen at what he was sure would seem the snail’s pace of the Toronto Transit Commission’s trains—taking a taxi all the way up to North York would cost a fortune and would be no faster.

As luck would have it, he got through the turnstile and down the escalator just in time to see the doors close on the eastbound train, and he had to wait an interminable time—this being Sunday evening—for the next one to pull into the station.

His datacom worked just fine down in tunnels, but each time he called, his household phone rang and rang until his own voice—his own previous voice, the thin, weary version of it that sounded so different from the way he currently did—came on, saying, “Hello. Neither Sarah nor I can come to the phone right now...”

Don sat, looking down at the gray, dirty floor, holding his face up with his hands.

Finally, after an eternity, the subway arrived at North York Centre, and he bounded out of the car. He ran up the escalator, through a turnstile, and exited onto Park Home Avenue, which was dark and deserted. He jogged the three blocks to his house, trying once more to call along the way, but to no avail. At last, he opened his front door, and—

She was lying face down on the scuffed hardwood floor in front of the mirrored closet. “Sarah!”

Her limbs were splayed, and the lightweight summer dress she was wearing had billowed about her like a shroud. It seemed clear that she’d taken a tumble coming down the stairs to the entryway. “Sarah, are you all right?”

She stirred, lifting her head a little.

“No,” said Don. “No, no. Don’t move!”

“My leg,” she said softly. “My God, you should have heard the snap...”

He’d learned some first aid years ago. “This one?” he said, touching her right leg.

“No. The other one.”

He shifted the dress so that he could see her leg, and the bruising and swelling were obvious. He touched it gingerly, and he saw Sarah wince. There was no phone in the entryway; Sarah would have had to have pulled herself up the six stairs to the living room to call him; she had neither the sense of balance nor the strength in her other leg to hop. He got out his datacom, and said to it, “Nine-one-one,” a term now used as a name in this post-phone-number age.

“Fire, police, or ambulance?” asked the operator.

“Ambulance,” Don said. “Please hurry!”

“You’re calling from a mobile device,” the operator said, “but we have the GPS coordinates. You’re at—” and she read the address to him. “Correct?”

“Yes, yes.”

“What’s happened?”

He gulped for air. “My wife—she’s eighty-seven, and she’s fallen down some stairs.”

“I’ve dispatched the ambulance,” said the operator. “The datacom you’re calling from is registered to Donald R. Halifax; is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Is your wife conscious, Mr. Halifax?”

“Yes. But her leg is broken. I’m sure of it.”

“Don’t move her, then. Don’t try to move her.”

“I won’t. I haven’t.”

“Is the door to your house unlocked?”

He looked up. The door was still wide open. “Yes.”

“All right. Don’t leave her.”

Don took his wife’s hand. “No, no, I won’t.” God, why hadn’t he been here? He looked into her pale blue eyes, which were bloodshot and half-closed. “I won’t leave her. I swear I won’t ever leave her.”

He finished with the operator, and put the datacom down on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said to Sarah. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said, weakly. “I knew you’d be home soon, although...”

She left the thought unspoken, but doubtless she’d been thinking he should have been home earlier than this.

“I’m sorry,” said Don again, his gut clenching. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I am so sorry...”

“It’s okay,” insisted Sarah, and she managed a small smile. “No permanent damage done, I’m sure. After all, this is the age of miracle and wonder.” A song lyric, from their youth. Don recognized it, but shook his head slightly, lost. She gestured with her head at him, and, after a moment, he got it: she was referring to his new, younger form. Now she was holding his hand, comforting him. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

He couldn’t meet her eyes as they waited and waited until, at last, the ambulance’s siren drowned out the thoughts that were torturing him, and everything was bathed in strobing red through the open front door.

* * * *

Chapter 28

Fortunately, it was a clean, simple fracture. Orthopedics had come a long way since Don had broken his own leg in 1977, during a high-school football game. The pieces of Sarah’s femur were aligned, some of the excess fluid was drained off, Sarah was given the calcium infusion into her legs that she would have received anyway had the rejuvenation process worked on her, and a small external support was erected around her leg—these days, only dinosaur bones were wrapped in plaster. The doctor said she’d be fine in two months, and, with the support, which had its own little motors, she wouldn’t even need crutches while she healed, although a cane was advisable.

Fortunately, too, their provincial health plan covered all this. Most of the crises in Canadian health care had passed. Yes, there’d been a period when biotechnology had been young, during which costs had spiraled out of control, but all technologies come down in price with time, even medical ones. Procedures that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in Don’s youth now cost a tiny fraction of that. Even sophisticated pharmaceuticals were so inexpensive to develop and produce that governments could give them away in the Third World. Why, someday, even the magic of rejuvenation would be available to all those who wanted it.

Once they got home from the hospital, Don helped Sarah get ready for bed. Within minutes of lying down, she was asleep, helped into the arms of Morpheus, no doubt, by the painkillers the doctor had prescribed.

Don, however, couldn’t sleep. He just lay on his back, staring up in the dark at the ceiling, an occasional band of light caused by a passing car sweeping across it.

He loved Sarah. He’d loved her for almost his entire life. And he never, ever wanted to hurt her. But when she’d needed him, he wasn’t there for her.

He heard a siren in the distance; someone else with their own crisis, just like the one they’d faced today.

No. No, they hadn’t faced it. Sarah had faced it—face down, on the hard wooden floor, waiting hour after hour for him to return while he fucked a woman less than half—Christ, less than a third!—his age.

He rolled onto his side, his back to the sleeping Sarah, his body tucked into a fetal position, hugging himself. His eyes focussed on the softly glowing blue numerals of a digital clock on his nightstand, and he watched the minutes crawl by.

* * * *

For the first time in years, Sarah was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with it reclined. It was, she said, easier and more comfortable to have her injured leg stretched out.

Despite hardly sleeping at all the previous night, Don was unable to rest; he kept pacing. She had once quipped that they’d both fallen in love with this house at first sight—her because of the fireplace, him because of the long, narrow living room that just cried out for someone to march back and forth in it.

“What are you going to do today?” Sarah asked him. The foot-high digits on the wall monitor showed 9:22 A.M. The windows on either side of the fireplace had polarized, reducing the August sunshine to a tolerable level.

He halted in his pacing for a moment and looked at his wife. “Do?” he said. “I’m going to stay here, look after you.”

But she shook her head. “You can’t spend the rest of your life—the rest of my life—as a shut-in. I see how much energy you’ve got. Look at yourself! You can’t sit still.”

“Yes, but—”

“But what? I’ll be fine.”

“You weren’t fine yesterday,” he said, and he resumed walking. “And...”

“And what?” said Sarah.

He said nothing, his back to her. But people who’d been married so long could finish each other’s sentences, even when one of them didn’t want the other to do so. “And it’s only going to get worse, right?” said Sarah.

Don tilted his head, conceding that she’d guessed correctly. He looked out the brown-tinged window. They’d bought this place in 1988, just after getting married, his parents, and Sarah’s, too, helping with the down payment. Back then, Betty Ann Drive had had a few skinny trees here and there, plus one or two large blue spruces. Now, those skinny trees, planted for free by the City of North York, a municipality that didn’t even exist anymore, had grown to be tall, luxurious maples and oaks.

He continued walking, now approaching her. “You need me here,” he said, “to take care of you.”

She looked down at her leg encased in the armature. “I need someone, yes. Maybe Percy—”

“Percy starts grade eight in two weeks,” he said. “He’ll be too busy. And Carl and Emily both work during the day. And we can’t afford to hire a home-care worker.”

“We could if...” she began, and he mentally finished that sentence: if we sold the house.

He looked out one of the windows again. Yes, this house, small though it was, was bigger than they needed, and had been since Emily had moved out more than twenty years ago. Maybe they should sell it. As was now painfully obvious, Sarah was having real trouble with the stairs. Moving to an apartment would free up money and deal with that problem.

He’d reached the far end of the room and turned around, facing his wife again, and he saw her expression brighten. “You know what we need?” she said. “A Mozo.”

“Mozo?” He said it the way she had, with two long-O sounds.

She nodded. “You know what that is?”

“I know it’s worth fifteen points.”

Sarah frowned. “It means ‘male servant,’” she said. “It’s from the Spanish. But it’s also the brand name for a line of robots designed to help the elderly.”

Don narrowed his eyes. “They make such things?”

“See what I mean?” said Sarah. “You have got to get out more. Yes, they make such things, if by ‘they,’ you mean McGavin Robotics.”

He stopped pacing. “Even a low-end bot costs a fortune.”

“Sure. But Cody thinks I’ve got some special insight into decrypting the response from Sigma Drac. I’ll tell him I need a Mozo. It wouldn’t be a lie. I could easily get more done with someone to serve as a research assistant, get me coffee, and so on. And it would mean I’d never be alone. You could go out without worrying about me.”

He thought about complaining that the last time they’d taken charity from McGavin, it hadn’t worked out so well. But Sarah was right. He’d go nuts if he had to stay home all the time, and, well, a housebot would make a lot of things easier, wouldn’t it?

* * * *

Chapter 29

It was as though Ikea sold mechanical men. The Mozo arrived disassembled in a cubic crate that measured about a meter on a side. Don found it disconcerting seeing the head in a plastic bag, and it took him a good five minutes to figure out how to connect the legs (which were stored folded in half at the knee). But, at last, it was done. The robot was sky blue trimmed with silver; its body was covered with a soft material like that used to make wet suits. It had a round head about the size of a basketball, with two glassy eyes. And it had a mouth, of sorts. He had seen similar things on some other robots he’d run into: a horizontal black line beneath the eyes that could animate to match speech patterns. Although the market for robots that looked more or less human was small, people did like robots to have some facial expression.

Don couldn’t help comparing their new robot to the fictional bots of his youth. He decided that, except for the mouth, it looked most like one of those from the old Gold Key comic Magnus, Robot Fighter. And, he had to admit, it was way cool having one, and not just because it let him put a check mark beside another of those twenty items on his old high-school list of things to do.

He looked at the Mozo, another modern miracle they couldn’t afford. “Well,” he said, hands on his hips, “what do you think?”

“It looks nice enough,” said Sarah. “Shall we turn it on?”

Don was amused to see that the switch was a recessed button in the middle of the robot’s torso; their Mozo had an innie. He pressed the switch, and—

“Hello,” said a plain male voice. The mouth outline moved in a cartoonish approximation of the shapes human lips would have made. “Do you speak English? Hola. ¿Habla Español? Bonjour. Parlez-vous Français? Konichi-wa. Nihongo-o hanashimasu-ka?”

“English,” said Don.

“Hello,” said the robot again. “This is the first time I’ve been activated since leaving the factory, so I need to ask you a few questions, please. First, from whom do I take instructions?”

“Me and her,” Don said.

The robot nodded its basketball head. “By default, I will call you ma’am and you sir. However, if you prefer, I can address you any way you like.”

Don grinned. “I am the Great and All-Powerful Oz.”

The robot’s mouth outline moved in a way that suggested the machine knew Don was kidding. “A pleasure to meet you, Great and All-Powerful Oz.”

Sarah looked at the robot with a “see what I have to put up with” expression. Don smiled sheepishly, and she said, “Call him Don. And you can call me Sarah.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Don and Sarah. What you are hearing is my default voice. However, if you prefer me to use a female voice or a different accent, I can. Would you like that?”

Don looked at Sarah. “No, this is fine,” she said.

“All right,” said the robot. “Have you chosen a name for me yet?”

Sarah lifted her shoulders and looked at Don. “Gunter,” he said.

“Is that G-U-N-T-H-E-R?” asked the robot.

“No H,” said Don. And then, unable to help himself, “Get the H out.”

“My little boy,” Sarah said, smiling at Don. She’d said that often enough over the years, but, just now, it seemed to hit a little too close to home. She must have noticed his quickly suppressed wince, because she immediately said, “Sorry.”

Still, he thought, she was right. He was a kid at heart, at least when it came to robots. And his absolute favorite when he was growing up, as Sarah well knew, was the robot from Lost in Space. He got miffed whenever people called that robot Robby, although Robby, the robot from the movie Forbidden Planet, did bear a passing resemblance to the one from Lost in Space—not surprising, given that they were both designed by the same person, Robert Kinoshita. The Jupiter2’s robot was mostly just referred to as “the Robot” (or the “bubble-headed booby” and a hundred other alliterative insults by Dr. Smith). Still, many hardcore Lost in Space fans called it B-9, which was the model number it gave for itself in one episode. But Don had always contended that the barrel-chested automaton with vacuum-cleaner hoses for arms was actually named GUNTER, because another episode contained a flashback, showing the robot in its original packing crate, which was labeled “General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Robot.” Despite pointing this out to people for—God, for over seventy years now—Don hadn’t won many converts. But at least now there was a robot in the world who indisputably had that name.

Of course, thought Don, Sarah understood all this. She’d grown up watching Lost in Space, too, although what she’d loved most about it were the photos of real nebulas and galaxies used in space scenes (“Astronomical Photographs Copyrighted 1959 by the California Institute of Technology,” the card on the ending credits said). But, he realized sadly, none of this would mean anything to Lenore or anyone else who was as young as he felt.

They continued responding to Gunter’s questions for about half an hour, outlining the sorts of duties he was to perform, whether he should answer the phone or door, advising him not to enter the bathrooms when they were occupied unless he heard a call for help, and so on.

But Gunter’s principal job was making sure Sarah was safe and well. And so Don said, “Do you know CPR?”

“Yes.”

“What about the Heimlich maneuver?” asked Sarah.

“That, too. I’m fully trained in first aid. I can even perform an emergency tracheotomy, if need be, and my palms have built-in defibrillator pads.”

“See!” said Don. “He is like Gunter. The real Gunter could shoot lightning out of his claws.”

Sarah looked at Don with an affectionate grin. “The real Gunter?”

Don laughed. “You know what I mean.” He looked at the blue machine. “What do we do with you when we go to bed?” he asked. “Do we turn you off?”

“You may if you wish,” said Gunter, and he smiled reassuringly. “But I suggest you leave me on so that I can respond instantly to any emergency. You can also set me tasks to perform while you’re sleeping: I can dust and do other chores, and have a hot breakfast ready for you when you get up.”

Don looked around the living room, and his eyes landed on the fireplace. “Do you know how to make a fire?”

The robot tilted his head a little to one side, and, if glass lenses could be said to have a faraway look, Gunter’s did for a second. “I do now,” he said.

“Great,” said Don. “We’ll have to get some wood, come winter.”

“Do you get bored if you have nothing to do?” asked Sarah.

“No,” said the robot, and he smiled that reassuring smile again. “I’m content just to relax.”

“An admirable trait,” said Sarah, glancing at Don. “I wonder how we ever got along without one.”

* * * *

Chapter 30

Don found himself feeling more and more confused with each passing day. He’d had a handle on life, damn it all. He’d understood its rhythms, its stages, and he’d moved through them all, in the proper sequence, surviving each one.

Youth, he knew, had been for education, for the first phase of professional development, for exploring sexual relationships.

Mature adulthood had meant a committed marriage, raising children, and consolidating whatever material prosperity he had been entitled to.

After that had come middle age, a time for re-evaluation. He’d managed to avoid the affair and sports car then; his midlife crisis, precipitated by a minor heart attack, had finally spurred him to lose weight, and hearing so many women—and some men—tell him how good he looked, how he was hotter at forty-five than he’d been at thirty, had been tonic enough to help him weather those years without needing to do anything more to prove he was still attractive.

And, finally—or so it should have been—there had been the so-called golden years: retirement, becoming a grandparent, taking it easy, an epoch for acceptance and reflection, for companionship and peace, for winding things up as the end approached.

The stages of life; he knew them and understood them: collectively, an arc, a storyline, with a predicable, clichéd beginning, middle, and end.

But now there was suddenly more; not just an epilogue tacked on, but a whole new volume, and a totally unplanned one, at that. Rollback: Book Two of the Donald Halifax Story. And although Don understood he was its author, he had no idea what was supposed to happen, where it was all supposed to lead. There was no standard plot skeleton to follow, and he didn’t have a clue how it was going to end. He couldn’t begin to visualize what he should be doing decades down the road; he wasn’t even sure what he should be doing in the present day.

But there was one thing he knew he had to do soon, although he was dreading it.

“I have something to tell you,” Don said to Lenore the next time he saw her.

Lenore was lying naked in bed next to him, in her basement apartment on Euclid Avenue. She propped her head up with a crooked arm and looked at him. “What?”

He hesitated. This was more difficult than he’d thought it would be, and he’d thought it would be very difficult. How’d he ever get into a situation in which telling his ... his ... his whatever Lenore was ... that he was married would be the easy part?

He let the air out of his lungs through a small opening between his lips, puffing his cheeks out as he did so. “I—um, I’m older than you probably think I am,” he said at last.

Her eyes narrowed a bit. “Aren’t you the same age as me?”

He shook his head.

“Well, you can’t be any more than thirty,” she said.

“I’m older than that.”

“Thirty-one? Thirty-two? Don, I don’t care about six or seven years. I’ve got an uncle who is ten years older than my aunt.”

I can do ten years for breakfast, he thought. “Keep going.”

“Thirty-three?” Her tone was getting nervous. “Thirty-four? Thirty—”

“Lenore,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment. “I’m eighty-seven.”

She made a small raspberry sound. “Jesus, Don, you—”

“I’m eighty-seven,” he said, the words practically exploding from him. “I was born in 1960. You must have heard about the rejuvenation process they’ve got now. I underwent a rollback earlier this year. And this”—he indicated his face with a counterclockwise motion of his hand—”is the result.”

She scuttled sideways on the bed, like a crab on hot sands, increasing the distance between them. “My ... God,” she said. She was peering at him, studying him, clearly looking for some sign, one way or the other, of whether it was true. “But that procedure, it costs a fortune.”

He nodded. “I, um, had a benefactor.”

“I don’t believe you,” Lenore said, but she sounded as though she were lying. “I—I mean, it can’t...”

“It’s true. I could prove it in a hundred different ways. Do you want to see some photo ID, the way I looked before?”

“No!” An expression of ... of disgust, perhaps, had fleetingly passed over her face. Of course she didn’t want to see the old man she’d just had inside her.

“I should have told you sooner, but—”

“You’re damn right you should have. Shit, Don!” But then, perhaps the thought occurring because she’d just uttered his name, a glimmer of hope appeared in her eyes, as if she’d realized that this might all be some elaborate put-on. “But, wait, you’re Sarah Halifax’s grandson! You told me that.”

“No, I didn’t. You guessed that.”

She pulled even farther away, and managed to cover her breasts with the sheet, the first hint of modesty he’d ever seen from her. “Who the hell are you?” she said. “Are you even related to Sarah Halifax?”

“Yesss,” he said, protracting the word into a gentle hiss. “But”—he swallowed hard, trying to keep it all together—”but I’m not her grandson.” He found himself unable to meet her eyes, and so he looked down at the rumpled bedspread between them. “I’m her husband.”

“Fuck,” said Lenore. “Shit.”

“I am so sorry. Really, I am.”

“Her husband?” she said again, as if perhaps she’d misheard the first time.

He nodded.

“I think you should leave.”

The words tore into his heart, like bullets. “Please. I can—”

“What?” she demanded. “You can explain? There’s no fucking explanation for this.”

“No,” he said. “No, I can’t explain. And I can’t justify it. But, God, Lenore, I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt anyone.” His stomach was churning, and he felt disoriented. “But I want you to ... to know, to understand.”

“Understand what? That everything that has gone down between us has been a lie?”

“No!” he said. “No, no, God, no. This has been more ... more real than anything in my life for—”

“For what?” she sneered. “For years? For decades?”

He let out a long, shuddering sigh. He couldn’t even protest that she was being unfair. The fact that she was even still talking to him was more, he knew, than he had a right to. Still, he tried to defend himself, although, as soon as the words were out, he realized how ill-advised they were. “Look,” he said, “you’re the one who turned things physical.”

“Because I thought you were somebody you aren’t. You lied to me.”

He thought about protesting that he hadn’t, not technically, or at least not often. “And, anyway,” she continued, “who started things is so beside the point it’s not even in the same solar system. You’re an octogenarian, for God’s sake. You’re old enough to be my grandfather.”

He’d expected those last few words, but they didn’t hurt any less for that. “Sarah underwent the same treatment,” he said, blurting it out. “But it didn’t work for her. She’s still physically eighty-seven, and I’m ... this.”

Lenore said nothing, but her mouth was slightly downturned and her eyebrows were drawn together.

“Cody McGavin paid for it,” continued Don. “He wanted Sarah to be around when the next reply comes in from Sigma Draconis. I—I was just along for the ride, but...”

“But now you’re Sarah’s caregiver.”

“Please,” he said. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“No, no, of course not. It all just sort of happened—a multi-billion-dollar medical procedure.”

He shook his head. “I should have known you wouldn’t understand.”

“If you want understanding, go to a support group. There must be one for people like you.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. They’re meeting right now, in Vienna. I can’t afford to go there. I am—I worked it out—I am four orders of magnitude poorer than the next poorest person who has undergone this process. For every single dollar I’ve got, they’ve each got ten thousand dollars. That’s not being in the same solar system, Lenore.”

“Don’t snap at me. I haven’t done anything wrong here.”

He took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know what to do, and ... and I don’t want to lose you. I really do care about you; I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. And I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do know this: the only times of late I’ve been happy—the only times—are when I’m with you.”

“There must be somebody else who—”

“There’s no one. My friends—what few I have who are still alive—they don’t understand. And my kids—”

“Oh, crap. I hadn’t thought about that. You’ve got kids!”

In for a penny, in for a pound. “And grandkids. But my son is fifty-five and my daughter is about to turn fifty. I can’t expect them to understand a parent half their age.”

“This is crazy,” she said.

“We can work it out.”

“Are you nuts? You’re married. You’re sixty years older than me. You’ve got kids. You’ve got grandkids. And—God, you must be retired, right? You don’t even have a job.”

“I’ve got a pension.”

“A pension! Jesus.”

“This doesn’t have to change anything,” he said.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Lenore, please—”

“Get your clothes,” she snapped.

“Pardon?”

“Get your clothes, and get the hell out!”

* * * *

Chapter 31

It had been months since Don had seen his grandchildren. He missed them, but he’d been avoiding contact, having no idea how to explain what had happened to him. But, finally, there was no choice. Today, Thursday, September 10, was Emily’s fiftieth birthday, and just as attendance for everyone else had been mandatory at Don and Sarah’s anniversary party, so his attendance was non-negotiable as his daughter reached the half-century mark.

The party was being held at Emily’s house in Scarborough, about an hour away, but an easy journey on the 407. They had Gunter drive them. Don was happy about that. He would have felt silly being driven about by a woman who looked like his grandmother; he still hadn’t gotten his license renewed. He’d be required to attend the mandatory driver-safety lectures with a group of other people who were over eighty, and, although the examiner had the power to waive the actual in-car test, Don would still need to endure the gawks from the licensing staff and, even worse, from the old people who looked old, many of whom would doubtless resent that he’d managed to forestall the fate that the rest of them would face in the next few years.

When they pulled into the driveway of the house—a large home that almost completely filled its lot—Don hopped out of the rear and ran around to help Sarah get out of the front passenger’s seat. And then, cradling her elbow to guide her up the driveway, they went to the front door, leaving Gunter in the car, placidly looking out at the tiny strip of lawn. Carl and company were already here, but he’d parked his car on the street, leaving the driveway, and the shorter walk, for his parents.

Although the kids’ biometrics were programmed into Don and Sarah’s house, the reverse had never been the case, and so Don rang the doorbell. Emily appeared at once, looking out at them with apprehension on her face, and she hustled them indoors, glancing furtively back, as if concerned that her neighbors had seen the spectacle of her ancient mother arriving on the arm of some strange young man.

He tried to put that out of his mind, and managed the heartiest tone he could. “Happy birthday, Em!”

Sarah hugged Emily, and, as she did every year, she said, with a smile, “I remember precisely where I was when you were born.”

“Hi,” said Emily. Don sort of expected “Mom and Dad” to be appended to the greeting; the upward lilt to Emily’s “hi” seemed to demand it. But she couldn’t say the former without having to also give voice to the latter—and he hadn’t heard either of his children refer to him as Dad since the rollback.

This house, like Don and Sarah’s own, had stairs leading up from an entryway. Emily took her mother’s cane and helped her climb them, and Don followed.

“Grandma!” shouted Cassie, who was wearing a pink floral-print dress and had her wispy blond hair tied into pigtails with pink ribbons. She came rushing over, and Sarah bent down as much as she could to hug her. When she released Cassie, the little girl then looked at Don without a trace of recognition on her face.

Carl bent down and picked his daughter up, balancing her in a crooked set of arms, the way one might to let a child examine a painting in a museum. “Cassie,” said Carl, “this is your grandfather.”

Don saw Cassie’s little brow furrow. She had an arm around Carl’s neck, and she pulled herself closer to him. “Grandpa Marcynuk?” she said, sounding very unsure.

Don felt his heart sink. Gus Marcynuk was Cassie’s mother’s father; he lived in Winnipeg, and hadn’t been in Toronto for years.

“No, honey,” said Carl. “This is Grandpa Halifax.”

Cassie scrunched her face up even more tightly, and she looked at her daddy as if to gauge his expression—see if he was playing some trick. But his face was serious. “No, it’s not,” Cassie said, shaking her head so that the pigtails bounced. “Grandpa Halifax is old.”

Don tried to smile as much as he could. “Honest, cupcake, it’s really me.”

She tilted her head. Although his voice had changed somewhat, she should still recognize it. “What happened to your wrinkles?”

“They’re gone.”

Cassie rolled her blue eyes in a way that said he was stating the obvious. He went on. “There’s a process,” he said, but then he halted. “Process,” “procedure,” “technique,” “treatment”—all the words he’d use in describing this to an adult would be lost on a four-year-old. “I went to see a doctor,” Don said, “and he made me young again.”

Cassie’s eyes were wide. “Can they do that?”

He lifted his shoulders a bit. “Yup.”

Cassie looked at Sarah and then back at Don. “What about grandma? Is she going to get young, too?”

Don opened his mouth to reply, but Sarah beat him to it. “No, dear.”

“Why not? Do you like being all wrinkly?”

“Cassie!” exclaimed Carl.

But Sarah didn’t take offense. “I’ve earned every one of them,” she said. Sarah obviously saw the puzzled expression on Cassie’s face, so she went on. “No, dear, I don’t. But the process that worked on your grandfather didn’t work for me.”

Don watched Cassie nod; perhaps he’d underestimated what little kids could grasp. “That’s sad,” Cassie said.

Sarah nodded back at her, conceding that.

Cassie turned her attention to her father. “Grandpa looks younger than you do,” she said. Carl winced. “When I get old, will they be able to make me young again?”

Don could see that his son was about to respond in the negative; he’d moved his head to the left, ready to shake it. But that wasn’t the correct answer. “Yes,” said Don. “They will.” The process was bound to be cheap and common by the time his granddaughter needed it, and that thought pleased Don.

Carl looked as though he was reaching his limit for holding Cassie. He bent down, setting her on the ground. But then Don crouched low, and turned his back to her. Looking over his shoulder he said, “Want a piggyback ride?”

Cassie scrambled onto his back, and he straightened up. He swooped around the living room, Cassie hugging his neck from behind, and her giggles were music to his ears, and, at least for a few minutes, he was truly happy that he’d had this done to him.

* * * *

“Hey, Lennie, why so glum?”

Lenore was filling salt and pepper shakers. She looked up to see Gabby regarding her, hands on hips. “Hmm?”

“You’ve been down in the dumps all night. What’s up?”

This was the one evening a week that both Lenore and Gabby worked the same shift at the Duke of York.

“I broke up with Don a few days ago.”

“How come?” asked Gabby.

Lenore pondered how best to answer this. “For starters, he’s married.”

“The fucker.”

“Yeah. But, you know, there are, um, extenuating circumstances.”

“Is he separated?”

“No. No, he still lives with her, but...”

“But his old lady doesn’t understand him, right?”

Lenore felt her mouth twitch. “Something like that.”

“Girl, I’ve heard it a million times before. You’re better off without him.”

“Yeah, but...”

“But what?”

“I miss him.”

“Why? Was he good in the sack?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. But it’s not just...”

“What?”

“He’s gentle.”

“I like it a little rough myself,” Gabby said, smiling lasciviously.

“No, no. I mean in life. He’s gentle. He’s kind, considerate.”

“Except to his wife.”

Lenore winced. But she recalled when Don had been here before, how he’d defended Professor Halifax when Makoto had attacked her. “No, in his way, he’s good to her, too, I think. And she’s really sweet.”

“You know his wife?”

She nodded. “A bit.”

“Earth to Lenore! Wake up, girl!”

“I know, I know. But I just can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Let me get this straight. You dumped Makoto because he was a messy eater—”

“A girl has to have standards.”

“—but you want to go back to a married guy?”

“No,” said Lenore. “I want to go back to him despite the fact that he’s married.”

“I’m not working on any damn master’s degree,” said Gabby. “Maybe that kind of hair-splitting means something in your circles, but...”

“He’s unlike any guy I’ve ever met.”

“Why? Has he got three nipples?”

“Seriously, Gabs, I miss him so much.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Gabby was quiet for a moment. “Well, then, there’s only one thing to do.”

“What’s that?”

She started transferring the filled shakers onto a serving tray. “Follow your heart.”

* * * *

At dinner, Sarah ended up sitting next to her grandson Percy, who had turned thirteen over the summer. “So,” she said, “how is grade eight?”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“Just okay?”

“They give us a lot of homework. I’ve got tons to do by Monday.”

Sarah remembered being in grade eight, and getting her first calculator. Such things had only just started to appear on the market, and everybody was debating whether they should be allowed in the classroom. After all, with a machine that could do figuring for them, kids might never learn to really understand math, the critics said. A host of scenarios ranging from the unlikely to the downright silly had been suggested, including the notion that if civilization fell, we’d endure a protracted dark age once the supply of batteries had been exhausted, since the magic boxes that did math would no longer function. Sarah had often wondered if the early appearance of solar-powered calculators had been due to some anonymous Japanese engineer’s desire to put that canard to rest.

And she’d remembered the later debates about allowing datacoms into classrooms. Although that had affected all levels of instruction, it had gone down while she’d been teaching at U of T. Was there any point in asking students to memorize, for instance, that Sigma Draconis II was, according to data from the first Dracon message, a rocky world about 1.5 times as big as Earth, with an orbital radius of ninety-odd million kilometers and a year equal to 199 Earth days, when there was no conceivable working environment in which they couldn’t access that information in an instant?

“What sort of homework?” Sarah asked, genuinely curious.

“I’ve got some for my bioethics class,” Percy said. Sarah was impressed: bioethics in grade eight; you certainly could move a lot faster if you didn’t waste so much time on mere memorization.

“And what do you have to do?”

“Look up some stuff on the web, and do a report about what I think about it.”

“On any particular topic?”

“We get to choose,” Percy said. “But I haven’t picked mine yet.”

Sarah looked over at Don. She thought about suggesting Percy do something on the ethics of rollbacks, but Don was already too sensitive about that.

“I was thinking of maybe something about abortion,” Percy continued.

She was momentarily shocked. The boy was just thirteen, for God’s sake, but—

But abortion, birth control, and family planning were all things kids needed to know about. Percy’s birthday was in July, meaning he wouldn’t turn fourteen until after he’d finished this grade, but most of his classmates would have their birthdays during the academic year, and fourteen was plenty old enough to get pregnant, or make someone pregnant.

“What do you think about abortion, Grandma?” Percy asked.

Sarah shifted in her seat. She could feel the eyes of Angela, Percy’s mother, on her, as well as those of her own daughter, Emily. “I believe every child that’s born has the right to be wanted,” she said.

Percy considered this. “But what about if a guy and a girl decide they want to have a kid, but then, before it’s born, the pregnant girl changes her mind. What then?”

There was definitely some of her in her grandson; she’d wrestled a lot with the very issue he’d raised. Indeed, now that she thought about it, that was one of the points the aliens at Sig Drac had been interested in. Question forty-six had asked whether the partner actually carrying the child had the right to terminate a pregnancy that was initially mutually desired. Sarah remembered struggling with her own answer to that question when filling out the survey herself, all those years ago.

She took a sip from the glass of water in front of her. “I go back and forth on that one, dear,” she said. “But, today, I think my answer would be that the mother gets the final say.”

Percy considered this for a time, then: “You’re pretty skytop, Grandma, to talk to me about all this.”

“Why, thanks,” Sarah said. “I think.”

* * * *

Chapter 32

Don sat on the couch early the next morning, browsing email on his datacom. There were two messages from acquaintances asking for the same thing Randy Trenholm had wanted, an email from his brother forwarding a cartoon he thought Don would like, and—

Beep! 

A new message had just arrived. The sender’s address was—

My God ... 

The address was ldarby@utoronto.ca.

He opened the message, and his eyes flew all over it in mad saccades, trying to absorb it as a gestalt. And then, his pulse racing, he re-read it carefully, from top to bottom:

* * * *

Hey, Don—

Guess you thought you’d never hear from me again, and I guess I don’t expect you to answer cuz I know I wasn’t that understanding the last time we were together, but, dammitall, I miss you. Can’t believe I’m sending this—Gabby thought I was looped at first—but I was hoping you’d like to get together and talk a bit. Maybe play some Scrabble or ... Anyway, lemme know.

L.

* * * *

Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle—Plato 

* * * *

Don looked up. Gunter had a perfect sense of balance and could easily carry Sarah, seated in one of the wooden kitchen chairs that had now been conscripted for that purpose, up and down the staircase; they were descending now. “‘Morning, dear,” Sarah said, the usual quaver in her voice.

“Hi,” he said.

Gunter put the chair down, and helped Sarah to her feet. “Any interesting email?” she asked.

Don quickly turned off the datacom. “No,” he said. “None at all.”

* * * *

Don and Lenore’s first day back together had gone well, right up until the evening.

They were just finishing a meal of take-out Chinese food in her basement apartment on Euclid, after an afternoon of walking around downtown, looking in shops. “Anyway,” Lenore said, continuing an account of what she’d been up to since Don had last seen her, “the university ripped me off. They say I didn’t pay my tuition on time, but I did. I made the electronic transfer just before midnight on the due date. But they charged me a day’s worth of interest.”

Don never ate fortune cookies, but he still liked cracking them open. His said, “Prospects for change are favorable.” “How much?” Don said, referring to the interest.

“Eight dollars,” she replied. “I’m going to go by the registrar’s office tomorrow and complain.”

Don motioned for her to show him her fortune. It said, “An endeavor will be successful.” He nodded, acknowledging that he’d read it. “You could do that,” he said, going back to their conversation, “but you’ll end up spending half your day dealing with it.”

She sounded frustrated with him. “But they shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“It’s not worth it over eight bucks,” said Don. He got up from his chair and started clearing the table. “You’ve got to learn to pick your battles. Take it from me. I know. When I was your age, I—”

“Don’t say that.”

He turned and looked at her. “What?”

She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Don’t say shit like, ‘When I was your age.’ I don’t need to hear that.”

“I’m just trying to save you from going through—”

“From going through what? Going through life? Spare me from having my own experiences, from learning for myself? I want to learn for myself.”

“Yes, but—”

“But what? I don’t want a father, Don. I want a boyfriend. I want a peer, an equal.”

He felt his heart sink. “I can’t just erase my past.”

“No, of course not,” she said, noisily wadding up the paper bag the take-out had come in. “They don’t make erasers that big.”

“Come on, Sarah, I—”

Don froze, realizing his mistake at once. He felt himself turning red. Lenore nodded, as if a vast conspiracy had been confirmed. “You just called me Sarah.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“She’s always there, isn’t she? Hanging between us. And she always will be. Even when she’s—”

Lenore stopped herself, perhaps realizing that she was about to go too far. But Don picked up on the thought. “Yes, she will be, even after ... even after she’s gone. That’s a reality we’ll have to face.” He paused. “Anyway, I can’t help the fact that I’ve been alive longer than—”

“Than ninety-nine percent of all the people in the world,” said Lenore, which stopped him cold for a moment while he thought about whether that was true. He felt his stomach clench as he realized it must be.

“But you can’t ask me to deny that reality, or what I’ve learned,” he said. “You can’t ask me to forget my past.”

“I’m not asking that. I’m just asking that you—”

“What? Keep it to myself?”

“No, no. But just don’t, you know, always bring it up. It’s hard for me. I mean, God, what was the world like when you were born? No home computers, no nanotech, no robots, no television, no—”

“We had television,” Don said. Just not in color.

“Fine. Fine. But, God, you lived through—through the Iraq War. There was a Soviet Union when you were alive. You saw people walk on the moon. You saw Apartheid end, in South Africa and in the US. You lived through the Month of Terror. You were alive when the first extraterrestrial signal was detected.” She shook her head. “Your life is my history book.”

He was about to say, “Then you should listen to me when I tell you what I’ve learned.” But he stopped himself before the words got free. “It’s not my fault that I’m old,” he said.

“I know that!” she snapped. And then, the same words again, but more softly: “I know that. But, well, do you have to rub it in my face?”

Don was leaning against the sink now. “I don’t mean to. But you think stuff like a few bucks in interest is a disaster, and—”

“It’s not a disaster,” Lenore said, sounding exasperated. “But it does make my life hard, and—” She must have seen him move his head a bit. “What?” she demanded.

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

“You don’t know hard,” he said. “Burying a parent, that’s hard. Having a spouse go through cancer is hard. Getting screwed out of a promotion you deserve because of office politics is hard. Suddenly having to spend $20,000 you don’t have on a new roof is hard.”

“Actually,” she said, rather stiffly, “I do know what some of those things are like. My mother died in a car crash when I was eighteen.”

Don felt his jaw dropping. He’d avoided asking her about her parents, doubtless because he felt way too in loco parentis when he was with her.

“I never knew my dad,” she continued, “so it fell to me to look after my brother Cole. He was thirteen then. That’s why I work now, you know. I’ve got enough graduate support to cover my current expenses, but I’m still trying to dig out from the debt I ran up taking care of Cole and me.”

“I’m, um...”

“You’re sorry. Everybody is.”

“Was ... wasn’t there any life insurance?”

“My mom couldn’t afford that.”

“Oh. Um, how did you manage?”

She lifted her shoulders. “Let’s just say there’s a reason I have a soft spot in my heart for food banks.”

He was embarrassed and contrite, and didn’t know what to say. Still, it explained why she seemed so much more mature to him than her contemporaries did. When he had been her age, he was still living cozily with his parents, but Lenore had been out in the world for seven years, and had spent part of that time raising a teenager.

“Where’s Cole now?” he said.

“Back in Vancouver. He moved in with his girlfriend just before I came out here to do my master’s.”

“Ah.”

“I do let most things go,” she said. “You know that. But when it comes to someone taking my money—when you’ve had so little, you...” She shrugged slightly.

Don looked at her. “I—I haven’t been conscious of being condescending because of my age,” he said slowly, “but now that you’ve alerted me to it, I’ll try to be more...” He trailed off; he knew that when he was under emotional stress his vocabulary tended to the highfalutin. But he couldn’t think of a better term just then, and so he said it: “Vigilant.”

“Thanks,” she said, nodding slightly.

“I don’t say I’ll always get it right. But I really will be trying.”

“You certainly will be,” she said, with the sort of long-suffering smile he was more used to seeing from Sarah. Don found himself smiling back at her, and he opened his arms, inviting her to stand up and step into them. She did so, and he squeezed her tight.

* * * *

Chapter 33

Sarah’s broken leg was still bothering her, but Gunter was a godsend, gladly bringing her fresh cups of decaf while she sat at the desk in the room that used to be Carl’s. She was still working with the stack of papers Don had brought from the university—a hardcopy of the reply that had been sent to Sigma Draconis from Arecibo, and the source material it was based on: the one thousand sets of survey answers that had been chosen at random from those collected on the website. The decryption key must be somewhere buried in there, Sarah felt sure.

It had been decades since Sarah had looked at these documents and she only vaguely remembered them. But Gunter had merely to glance at each page to be able to index it, and so when Sarah said, for instance, “I remember a pair of answers that struck me as contradictory—somebody who said ‘yes’ to the question about terminating no-longer-productive old people, and ‘yes’ to the question about not terminating people who were an economic burden,” the robot had replied, “That’s in survey number 785.”

Still, she found herself often angry and sometimes even crying in frustration. She couldn’t think as clearly as she used to. Perhaps that wasn’t obvious in her day-to-day life of cooking and dealing with grandkids, but it was painfully clear when she tried to puzzle things out, tried to do math in her head, tried to concentrate, to think. And she grew fatigued so easily; she found herself often needing to lie down, which just prolonged the work even more.

Of course, many people had already gone back to look at the message sent from Arecibo to see if it contained the decryption key. And, she realized, if those keen young minds hadn’t found it, she likely didn’t have a prayer.

Many had suggested that the key might be one particular set of answers, from one of the thousand surveys: a unique sequence of eighty-four responses, one for each question, something like “yes,” “no,” “much greater than,” “I prefer option three,” “equal to,” “no,” “yes,” “less than,” and so on. There were over 20,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations, Sarah knew. Those who didn’t have access to the full Arecibo transmission might be trying sequences at random, but even with the world’s fastest computers it would take decades to test them all. Others, of course, did have the full reply that had been sent, and had doubtless already tried using each of the thousand answer strings in turn, but had failed to unlock the message. Sarah continued to pore over the original surveys, looking for something—anything—that might stand out. But, damn it all, nothing did. She hated being old, hated what it was doing to her mind. Old professors never die, the joke went. They just lose their faculties. It was so funny, as her friends at public school used to say, that she forgot to laugh.

She tried another sequence, but again the message “Decryption failed” flashed on her monitor. She didn’t slam her hand down on the desktop in anger—she didn’t have the strength for that—but Gunter must have read something in her body language anyway. “You seem frustrated,” he said.

She swiveled her chair and looked at the Mozo, and a thought occurred to her. Gunter was an example of a nonhuman intelligence; maybe he’d have a better idea of what the aliens were looking for. “If it were you, Gunter, what would you have chosen as a decryption key?”

“I am not disposed to secrecy,” he said.

“No, I suppose not.”

“Have you asked Don?” the Mozo said, his tone even.

She felt her eyebrows going up as she looked at the robot. “Why do you say that?”

Gunter’s mouth line twitched, as if he’d started to say something then thought better of it. After a moment, though, he looked away and said, “No special reason.”

Sarah thought about letting it go, but...

But, damn it all, Don had his confidant. “You don’t think I know, do you?”

“Know what?” asked Gunter.

“Puh-lease,” she said. “I can translate messages from the stars. I can certainly pick up signals closer to home.”

You could never tell if a robot was meeting your gaze. “Ah,” said Gunter.

“Do you know who it is?” she asked.

The Mozo shook his blue head, then: “Do you?”

“No. And I don’t want to.”

“If I may be so bold, how do you feel about this?”

Sarah looked out the window—which showed some sky and the red bricks of the house next door. “It would not have been my first choice, but...”

The Mozo was silent, infinitely patient. At last, Sarah went on. “I know he has...” She vacillated between saying “wants” and “needs,” and finally settled on the latter. “And I can’t become a—a gymnast. I can’t turn back the clock.” She realized she’d said the part about the clock as if citing an archetypal impossibility like “I can’t make the sun stand still.” But for Don, the hands—good God, when had she last seen a clock with hands?—had indeed been turned way, way back. She shook her head. “I can’t keep up with him, not anymore.” She was quiet for a time, then looked at the robot. “How do you feel about this?”

“Emotions are not my forte.”

“I suppose.”

“Still, I prefer things to be ... simple.”

Sarah nodded. “Another admirable trait you have.”

“As we have been speaking, I have been accessing the web for information on such things. I freely confess to not understanding it all, but ... are you not angry?”

“Oh, yes. But not, so much, at Don.”

“I do not understand.”

“I’m angry at—at the circumstances.”

“You mean that the rollback did not work for you?”

Sarah looked away again. After a moment, she spoke, softly but clearly. “I wasn’t angry that it didn’t work for me,” she said. “I was angry that it did work for Don.” She turned back to face the Mozo. “Awful, isn’t it, that I should be upset that the person I love most in all the world was going to get another seventy years or more of life?” She shook her head, amazed at what she’d found herself capable of. “But, you know, it was because I knew what was bound to happen. I knew he would leave me.”

Gunter tilted his spherical head. “But he hasn’t.”

“No. And, well, I don’t think he’s going to.”

The robot considered this, then: “I concur.”

Sarah lifted her shoulders slightly. “And that’s why I have to forgive him,” she said, her voice soft and faraway. “Because, you see, I know, in my heart of hearts, if the situation had been reversed, I would have left him.”

* * * *

“How do you feel?” asked Petra Jones, the Rejuvenex doctor, who had come by the house for Don’s latest checkup. Sarah never sat in on these anymore; it was too much for her to bear.

Don knew he suffered from a misplaced stubborn pride. When his mother had been dying, slowly, painfully, all those years ago, he’d toughed it out. When Sarah was fighting her battle with cancer, he’d kept his chin up, hiding his pain and fear as best he could from her and his children. He was his father’s son, he knew; to ask for help was to show weakness. But he needed help now.

“I—I don’t know,” he said softly.

He was sitting on one end of the couch; Petra, clad in an expensive-looking burnt-orange pantsuit, was at the other. “Is something wrong?” she asked, leaning forward, the beads in her dreadlocks making soft clicking sounds.

Don tilted his head. He could just make out Sarah and Gunter talking, upstairs in the study. “I, um, I haven’t really been feeling like myself,” he said.

“In what way?” Petra said, the words lilting a bit thanks to her slight Georgia accent.

He took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing ... uncharacteristic things—things I never thought I would do.”

“Like what?”

He looked away. “I, um...”

Petra nodded. “Your libido is high?”

Don looked at her, said nothing.

She nodded again. “That’s common. A man’s testosterone levels drop as he ages, but a rollback restores them. That can affect behavior.”

Tell me about it, thought Don. “But I don’t remember it being like this the first time around. Of course, back then...” He trailed off.

“What?”

“I was much bigger when I really was twenty-five.”

Petra blinked. “Taller?”

“Fatter. I probably weighed forty pounds more than I do now.”

“Ah, well, yes, that could be a factor, too, in the severity of the hormonal imbalance. But we can make some adjustments. Have you noticed anything else?”

“Well, I’m not just feeling”—there was probably a better, more polite word, but he couldn’t think of it just then—”horny. I’m feeling romantic.”

“Again, hormones,” said Petra. “It’s common as the body adjusts to a rollback. Any other problems?”

“No,” he said. It had been hard enough alluding to what had happened with Lenore; to give voice to this would—

“No depression?” Petra said. “No suicidal thoughts?”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Well, I...”

“Serotonin levels,” Petra said. “They can go out of whack, too, what with all the changes to your biochemistry that happen during a rollback.”

“It’s not just chemical,” Don said. “Bad things have actually happened. I—I’ve been trying to get a job, for instance, but no one wants me.”

Petra lifted a hand slightly. “Just because your depression might be situational doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be treated. Have you ever been prescribed an antidepressant before?”

Don shook his head.

She got up and opened her leather bag. “All right. Let’s take some blood samples; we’ll see exactly where your levels of various hormones are right now. I’m sure we can fix everything up.”

* * * *

Chapter 34

Don was at home, lying in bed next to Sarah, when he was awoken from a dream. He and Sarah were standing on opposite sides of a vast canyon, and the gap between them kept widening, geologic forces working in real time, and—and the phone was ringing. He fumbled for the handset, and Sarah found the switch for the lamp on her nightstand.

“Hello?” said Don.

“Don, is ... is that you?”

He frowned. Nobody quite recognized his voice these days. “Yes.”

“Oh, Don, it’s Pam.” His sister-in-law; Bill’s wife. She sounded hoarse, stressed.

“Pam, are you okay?” Next to him, Sarah struggled to sit up, concerned.

“It’s Bill. He’s—oh, God, Don, Bill is dead.”

Don felt his heart jump. “Christ...”

“What is it?” asked Sarah. “What’s wrong?”

He turned to her, and repeated the words, his own voice full of shock now: “Bill is dead.”

Sarah brought a hand to her mouth. Don spoke into the phone. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. His heart, I guess. He—he...” Pam trailed off.

“Are you at home? Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m at home. I just got back from the hospital. He was pronounced DOA.”

“What about Alex?” Bill’s fifty-five-year-old son.

“He’s on his way.”

“God, Pam, I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” said Pam.

“Let me get dressed and get over there,” he said. Bill and Pam normally wintered in Florida, but hadn’t yet headed south. “Alex and I, we can take care of all the details.”

“My poor Bill,” Pam said.

“I’ll be there soon,” he said.

“Thanks, Don. Bye.”

“Bye.” He tried to put the handset on his nightstand, but it tumbled to the floor.

Sarah reached over and touched his arm. God, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his brother. And then it hit him—

Not since before. He normally only saw Bill a couple of times a year, but they did usually go to a Jays game each summer, although Don had begged off this year. This damned laying low, this foolish embarrassment about seeing people he knew, had cost him his last chance to see his brother.

He left the bedroom, walked to the bathroom, and started getting ready to go. Sarah slowly followed him in. He was about to say she didn’t have to come, that he could get Gunter to drive him. But he wanted her with him; he needed her.

“I’m going to miss him,” Sarah said, standing next to him by the sink.

He glanced briefly at the mirror above the basin, showing his own youthful reflection, and her aged one. “Me, too,” he said, very softly.

* * * *

“Sarah,” said Pam, as they stood at the door to Bill’s condominium apartment, “thank you for coming.” Don’s sister-in-law was a thin woman in her late seventies, short, with high cheekbones. She looked at Don and scowled. She probably recognized the distinctive Halifax features, including the large nose and high forehead, but not the specific face. “I’m sorry...?”

“Pam, it’s me. It’s Don.”

“Oh, right. The rollback. I—I didn’t imagine...” She stopped. “You look good.”

“Thanks. Look, how are you holding up?”

Pam was clearly frazzled, but she said, “I’m okay.”

“Where’s Alex?”

“In the den. We’re trying to find Bill’s lawyer’s name.”

Sarah said, “I’ll go help Alex.” And she made her way further into the apartment.

Don looked at Pam. “Poor Bill,” he said, having nothing better to offer.

“There’s so much to do,” said Pam, sounding overwhelmed. “A notice on the Star’s website. Organizing the ... the funeral.”

“It’ll all get taken care of,” said Don. “Don’t worry.” He gestured toward the living room, and led Pam further into her own home. “Do you need a drink?”

“I’ve already got one going.” She lowered herself into an amorphous fluorescent-green chair with a tubular metal frame; his brother’s taste in furniture had always been more avant-garde than his own. Don found another, matching chair.

Pam’s drink—amber colored, with ice—was on a table by her chair. She took a sip. “God, look at you.”

Don felt uncomfortable, and he shifted his gaze to look out the fifth-floor window, taller, more-expensive condo towers filling most of the view. “I didn’t ask for it,” he said.

“I know. I know. But my Bill—if he’d had a rollback, why...”

He’d still be alive, Don thought. Yes, I know.

“You were ... you were...” Pam was shaking her head back and forth. She stopped speaking with her thought uncompleted.

“What?” asked Don.

She looked away. The living-room walls were lined with bookcases; Pam and Bill even had bookshelves built-in above the door lintels. “Nothing.”

“No, tell me,” he said.

She turned back to him, and the anger and betrayal were apparent on her face. “You’re older than Bill,” she said.

“By fifteen months, yes.”

“But now you’re going to be around for decades!”

He nodded. “Yes?”

“You were the older brother,” she said, as if resenting that it had to be spelled out. “You were supposed to go first.”

* * * *

All Saints’ Kingsway Anglican Church had been the church of Don’s childhood, remembered now more for the Boy Scout meetings he’d attended there than for anything the minister had said. Don hadn’t been in the building for—well, the phrase that came to his mind, no doubt because of his current surroundings, was “for God knows how long,” although he didn’t in fact believe in a God who kept track of such minutiae.

The coffin was closed, which was just as well. People had always said that Don and Bill looked a lot alike, but Don had no desire to have the comparison—and the contrast—highlighted. Indeed, since Bill had never had a weight problem, Don looked more like Bill had at twenty-five than he himself had at that age. He was the only one in the room who had known Bill back then, and—

No. No, wait! Over there, talking to Pam, could that be—?

It was. Mike Braeden. God, Don hadn’t seen him since high school. But there was no mistaking that broad, round face, with the close-together eyes and the one continuous eyebrow; even wrinkled and sagging, it was still obviously him.

Mike had been in Bill’s year, but Don had known him, too. One of only four boys on a block mostly populated by girls, Mike—Mikey, as he’d been known back then, or Mick, as he’d styled himself briefly during his early teens—had been a mainstay of street-hockey games, and had belonged to the same Scout troop that had met here.

“That’s Mike Braeden,” Don said to Sarah, pointing. “An old friend.”

She smiled indulgently. “Go over and say hello.”

He scuttled sideways between two rows of pews. When he got to Mike, Don found he was doing what one does at funerals, sharing a little remembrance of the dearly departed with the next of kin. “Old Bill, he loved his maple syrup,” Mike was saying, and Pam nodded vigorously, as if they’d reached agreement on a nanotech-test-ban treaty. “And none of that fake stuff for him, if you please,” Mike continued. “It had to be the real thing, and—”

And he stopped, frozen, as motionless as Bill himself doubtless was in his silk-lined box. “My ... God,” Mike managed after a few moments. “My God. Sorry, son, you took my breath away. You’re the spitting image of Bill.” He narrowed his beady eyes and drew his one eyebrow, now thundercloud gray, into a knot. “Who ... who are you?”

“Mikey,” Don said, “it’s me. Don Halifax.”

“No, it—” But then he stopped again. “My God, it—you do look like Donny, but...”

“I’ve had a rollback,” Don said.

“How could you—”

“Someone else paid for it.”

“God,” said Mike. “That’s amazing. You—you look fabulous.”

“Thanks. And thanks for coming. It would have meant a lot to Bill to have you here.”

Mike was still staring at him, and Don was feeling very uncomfortable about it. “Little Donny Halifax,” Mike said. “Incredible.”

“Mikey, please. I just wanted to say hi.”

The other man nodded. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve never met anyone who’s had a rollback.”

“Until recently,” said Don, “neither had I. But I don’t want to talk about that. You were saying something about Bill’s fondness for maple syrup...?”

Mike considered for a moment, clearly warring with himself over whether to ask more questions about what had happened to Don, or to accept the invitation to change the subject. He nodded once, his decision made. “Remember when the old Scout troop used to go up north of Highway Seven each winter and tap some trees? Bill was in heaven!” Mike’s face showed that he realized he’d probably chosen not quite the right metaphor under the current circumstances, but that simply gave him an incentive to quickly push on, and soon the topic of Don’s rollback was left far behind.

Pam was listening intently, but Don found his eyes scanning the gathering crowd for other familiar faces. Bill had always been more popular than Don—more outgoing, and better at sports. He wondered how many people would come to his own funeral, and—

And, as he looked around the room, his heart sank. None of these people, that was for sure. Not his wife, not his kids, not any of his childhood friends. They’d all be dead long, long before he would. Oh, his grandchildren might yet outlive him; but they weren’t here right now, nor, he saw, were their parents. Presumably Carl and Angela were off somewhere else in the church, perhaps busily straightening collars and smoothing dresses on youngsters who had rarely, if ever, had to wear such things before.

In a few minutes, he would present the eulogy, and he’d reach back into his brother’s past for anecdotes and revelatory incidents, things that would show what a great guy Bill had been. But at his own eventual funeral, there would be no one who could speak to his childhood or his first adulthood, no one to say anything about the initial eighty or ninety years of his life. Every single thing he’d done to date would be forgotten.

He excused himself from Pam and Mike, who had moved on from Bill’s love of maple syrup to extolling his general prudence. “Whenever we were playing street hockey and a car was coming, it was always Bill who first shouted, ‘Car!’” Mike said. “I’ll always remember him doing that. ‘Car! Car!’ Why, he...”

Don walked down the aisle, to the front of the church. The hardwood floor was dappled with color, thanks to the stained-glass windows. Sarah was now sitting in the second row, at the far right, looking weary and alone, her cane hanging from the rack that held the hymn books on the back of the pew in front of her.

Don came over and crouched next to her in the aisle. “How are you doing?” he asked.

Sarah smiled. “All right. Tired.” She narrowed her eyes, concerned. “How about you?”

“Holding together,” he said.

“It’s nice so many people came.”

He scanned the crowd again, part of him wishing it were fewer. He hated speaking in front of groups. An old joke flitted through his brain. The number-one fear of most people is public speaking; the number-two fear is death—meaning, at a funeral, you should feel sorrier for the person giving the eulogy than for the guy in the coffin.

The minister—a short black man of about forty-five, with hair starting to both gray and recede—entered, and soon enough the service was underway. Don tried to relax as he waited to be called upon. Sarah, next to him, held his hand.

The minister had a surprisingly deep voice given his short stature, and he led the assembled group through a few prayers. Don bowed his head during these, but kept his eyes open and stared at the narrow strips of hardwood flooring between his pew and the one in front.

“...and so,” the minister said, all too soon, “we’ll now hear a few words from Bill’s younger brother, Don.”

Oh, Christ, thought Don. But the mistake had been a natural one, and, as he walked to the front of the church, climbing three stairs to get onto the raised platform, he decided not to correct it.

He gripped the sides of the pulpit and looked out at the people who had come to bid farewell to his brother: family, including Bill’s own son Alex and the grown children of Susan, Don and Bill’s sister who had died back in 2033; a few old friends; some of Bill’s coworkers from the United Way; and many people who were strangers to Don but doubtless meant something to Bill.

“My brother,” he said, trotting out the first of the platitudes he’d jotted down on his datacom, which he’d now fished from his suit pocket, “was a good man. A good father, a good husband, and—”

And he stopped cold, not because of his current failings in the category he’d just enumerated, but because of who had just entered at the back of the room, and was now taking a seat in the last row of pews. It had been thirty years since he’d seen his ex-sister-in-law Doreen, but there she was, dressed in black, having come to quietly say good-bye to the man she’d divorced all those years ago. In death, it seemed, all was forgiven.

He looked down at his notes, found his place, and stumbled on. “Bill Halifax worked hard at his job, and even harder at being a father and a citizen. It’s not often—”

He faltered again, because he saw what the next words he’d written were, and realized he’d either have to skip them, or else force the minister’s error into the light. Screw it, he thought. I never got to say this when Bill was alive. I’ll be damned if I don’t say it now. “It’s not often,” he said, “that an older brother looks up to a younger brother, but I did, all the time.”

There were murmurs, and he could see the perplexed faces. He found himself veering from his prepared comments.

“That’s right,” he said, gripping the pulpit even harder, needing its support. “I’m Bill’s older brother. I was lucky enough to have a rollback.” More murmurs, shared glances. “It was ... it wasn’t something I sought out, or even something I wanted, but...”

He stopped that train of thought. “Anyway, I knew Bill his whole life, longer than anyone else”—he paused, then decided to finish his sentence with, “in this room,” although “in the world” would have been equally true; everyone else who’d known Bill since birth was long gone, and Mike Braeden hadn’t moved onto Windermere until Bill was five.

“Bill didn’t make many mistakes,” Don said. “Oh, there were some, including”—and here he tipped his head at Doreen, who seemed to nod in acknowledgement, understanding that he meant things Bill had done in their marriage, not the fact of the marriage itself—”some doozies that he doubtless regretted right up until the end. But, by and large, he got it right. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was sharp as a whip.” He realized he’d mangled the metaphor as soon as he’d said it, but pressed on. “Indeed, some were surprised that he chose to work in the charitable sector, instead of in business, where he could have made a lot more money.” He refrained from glancing now at Pam, refrained from conveying the point that Bill never could have afforded what Don himself had been given. “He could have gone into law, could have been a corporate big shot. But he wanted to make a difference; he wanted to do good. And he did. My brother did.”

Don looked out at the crowd again, a sea of black clothes. One or two people were softly crying. His eyes lingered on his children, and his grandchildren—whose children’s children he would likely live to see.

“No actuary would say that Bill was shortchanged in quantity, but it’s the quality of his life that really stands out.” He paused, wondering how personal he should get, but, hell, this was all personal, and he wanted Sarah, and his children, and maybe even God to hear it. “It looks like I might get damn near”—he faltered, realizing he’d just sworn during a service, then went on—”double the number of years my brother did.”

He looked at the coffin, its polished wood gleaming.

“But,” Don continued, “if out of all of that, I can do half as much good, and deserve to be loved half as much as Bill was, then maybe I’ll have earned this ... this...” He fell silent, seeking the right word, and, at last, continued: “...this gift that I’ve been given.”

To be concluded. 

Copyright (c) 2006 Robert J. Sawyer