Reiterated: the complete short fiction, page 162
“Look, man,” Makoto said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was your grandmother.”
“Yeah,” said Phyllis. “We’re sorry.”
He couldn’t bring himself to respond in words, so he just nodded.
There was more conversation, although Don didn’t say much, and lots of wings were eaten; the primal tearing of flesh from bone with his teeth actually helped calm him down. Finally, the bill came. After paying his share, Makoto said, “Gotta motor.” He looked at Don. “Nice to meet you.”
Don managed a calm tone. “And you.”
“I should go, too,” said Phyllis. “Got a meeting with my supervisor first thing in the morning. You coming, Halina?”
“Yeah,” said Halina, the only word Don had heard from her all evening.
When they were alone, he looked at Lenore. “I’m sorry,” he said.
But she lifted her rusty eyebrows. “For what? For defending your grandmother who wasn’t here to defend herself? You’re a good man, Donald Halifax.”
“I’m sure I spoiled your fun. I’m sorry your friends don’t like me, and—”
“Oh, they do. Well, maybe except for Makoto. But while you were in the washroom, Phyllis said you were gallant.”
He felt his jaw go slack. “Gallant” wasn’t the sort of word one normally applied to a twenty-five-year-old.
“I guess I should be going, too,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”
They headed out the pub’s doors, Don carrying his two plastic bags full of file folders. To his surprise, it was now dark; he hadn’t realized how long he’d been in the pub. “Well,” he said, “that was fun, thanks, but—”
Lenore seemed surprised that it had grown dark, too. “Walk me home?” she asked. “It’s only a few blocks, but my neighborhood’s a bit rough.”
Don looked at his watch again. “Um, sure. Okay.”
She took one of the bags, and they made their way along, Lenore chatting in her animated way. It was still hot and sticky as they came to Euclid Avenue, a tree-lined downtown street filled with crumbling, ancient houses. Two beefy guys passed them. One, with a shaved head that glistened in the light of the street lamps, had an animated tattoo of the grim reaper on his bulging right biceps. The other had laser scars on his face and arms that could easily have been erased; he was presumably wearing them as badges of honor. Lenore cast her gaze down at the cracked and broken sidewalk, and Don followed her example.
“Well,” she said, a hundred meters or so farther along, “here we are.” They were standing in front of a dilapidated house with dormer windows.
“Nice place,” he said.
She laughed. “It’s scuzbum. But it’s cheap.” She paused, and her face grew concerned. “Look at you! You must be parched in this heat, and it’s a long walk back to the subway. Come on in. I’ll give you a Diet Coke to take with you.”
They walked around to the side of the house, and some animal—a raccoon, maybe—quickly moved out of their way. Lenore opened the side door and led them down the stairs.
He braced himself for the place to be a mess—he remembered his own student days—but her apartment was tidy, although the furniture was a mismatched array, presumably of garage-sale acquisitions.
“Very pleasant,” said Don. “It—”
Her mouth was on his. He felt her tongue pressing against his lips. His mouth opened, and his penis grew instantly hard. Suddenly her hand was on his zipper, and—Oh, my!—she was on her knees, taking him into her mouth . . . but only for a few spectacular seconds. She rose to her feet, took his hands, and, walking backward, facing him, a lascivious smile on her face, she started pulling him toward the bedroom.
He followed her in.
Don was terrified that he’d come too soon. This was, after all, more excitement and stimulation than he’d had in years. But the old boy kept himself in check as he and Lenore rolled around—now him on top, now her on top—until finally he did come. He immediately went back to work until, at last, she had a shuddering orgasm, too.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling at him, as they now lay side by side, each facing the other.
He lightly traced the line of her cheek with his index finger. “For what?”
“For, um, making sure that I . . .”
His eyebrows went up. “Of course.”
“Not every guy, you know, cares . . .” She was totally naked, and the room’s lights were on. He was delighted to see that the freckles were everywhere, and that her pubic hair was the same coppery shade as the hair on her head. She seemed totally at ease with her nudity.
Now that they were done, he wanted to scoot under the sheet. But her body was pinning the sheet in such a way that he couldn’t get under without making a big deal out of it. But as her finger played with the hair in the middle of his chest, he was uncomfortably conscious of her scrutiny.
“No scars,” she said, absently.
The dermal regeneration had gotten rid of all Don’s old ones. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“Well,” said Lenore, whapping him playfully on the arm, “you certainly got lucky tonight.” And she made a big O with her mouth.
He smiled at her. It had been amazing. Tender yet spirited, gentle and vigorous all at once. It wasn’t quite sleeping with a supermodel—but it would do! Oh, yes, it would do!
His hand found her nipple, and he tweaked it lightly between thumb and forefinger. “The pallid bust of Pallas,” he said softly, smiling at her.
Her eyes went wide. “You’re the first guy I’ve met who knows more of that poem than just the ‘nevermore’ part. You don’t know how sick I got of people intoning ‘nevermore, nevermore’ at me.”
He stroked her breast gently, and said:
“And the raven, never flitting
still is sitting, still is sitting
“On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door
“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming
“And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor
“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
“Shall be lifted—nevermore!”
“Wow,” said Lenore, softly. “I’ve never had a guy recite poetry to me.”
“I’ve never had a girl challenge me to Scrabble before.”
“And I want a rematch!” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Now?”
“No, not now, silly.” She pulled herself closer to him. “In the morning.”
“I—I can’t,” he said. He felt her stiffen against him. “I, um, I’ve got a dog.”
She relaxed. “Oh. Oh, okay.”
“Sorry,” he said. He meant “for lying,” but let her take it to mean “for not being able to stay.” He scanned around the room for a clock, saw one, and his heart jumped. “Look,” he said, “I, um, I really do have to get going.”
“Oh, all right,” said Lenore, sounding not at all happy about it. “But call me! I’ll give you my number . . .”
To be continued.
ROLLBACK
Part III of IV
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 grandchildren 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 he 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 Draconis II 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 midtwenties, 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, bid 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 alt, 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 SET! 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.
