“Yeah, yeah,” said Makoto. “But if McGavin would put some of his money behind someone who’s got a chance—”
“You mean you,” Don snapped.
“Why not? Better someone born this century, this millennium, than a dried-up old fossil.”
Don looked down at his half-empty beer bottle, trying to remember if he was on his second or third. “You’re being unfair,” he said, without looking up.
“Look, Dan,” Makoto said, “this isn’t your field. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s Don,” Lenore said, “and maybe he should tell you who—”
“I do know what I’m talking about,” said Don. “I’ve been to Arecibo. I’ve been to the Allen.”
Makoto blinked. “You’re full of shit. You’re not an astronomer.”
Damn. “Forget it.” He got up, his chair making a loud wooden whack as it collided with the table behind them. Lenore looked at him in horror. She clearly thought he was going to take a swing at Makoto, and Makoto had a “just-try-it” scowl on his face. But he simply said, “I’m going to the john,” and he squeezed his way past Halina and Phyllis, and headed for the stairs leading down to the basement.
It took a while to empty his bladder, which was probably just as well; it gave him some time to calm down. Christ’s sake, why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut? And he knew what conversation was going on back in the god-damn snug. “Shit, Lenore, that friend of yours is—” and Makoto would plug in whatever term kids today used for “touchy” or “crazy.”
Kids today. The urinal flushed as he turned around and walked to the sink. He washed his hands, avoiding looking at his reflection, then he climbed back upstairs. When he sat down, Lenore glared expectantly at Makoto.
“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 streetlamps, 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 check 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 lamp-light 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—nev
ermore!
“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…”
–-- 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 gigantic dish, and the 600-ton triangular instrumentation platform mounted above it.
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 naive 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.”