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
[email protected].
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 y
ears, 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 pour 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 is 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, a
ll 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?”