Rollback

  “I’ll be buried here, too,” said Don. “My information will be added on the other side.”

  Sarah’s half said:

  SARAH DONNA ENRIGHT HALIFAX

  BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER

  29 MAY 1960 – 20 NOVEMBER 2048

  SHE TALKED TO THE STARS

  Don looked at the blankness onto which his own dates would someday be written. The death year would likely start with a two and a one, he supposed: nineteen-sixty to twenty-one-something. His poor, darling Sarah would likely lie here alone for the better part of a century.

  He felt a tightness in his chest. He hadn’t cried much at the funeral. The strain of greeting so many people, the rushing to and fro—he’d endured it all in a state of near shock, he supposed, ferried about by Emily.

  But now there was no more rushing around. Now, he was alone except for Gunter, and he was exhausted, emotionally and physically.

  He looked again at the headstone, the letters blurring.

  Beloved wife.

  Beloved mother.

  The tears started coming in force, streaming down his too-smooth cheeks, and, after valiantly trying to stay standing on his own for maybe half a minute, Don collapsed against Gunter. And whether it was a behavior he’d been programmed with, or whether it was something he’d seen on TV, or whether it had just spontaneously emerged didn’t really matter, but Don could feel the flat of Gunter’s hand patting him gently, soothingly, in the center of his back as the robot held him.

  –-- Chapter 43 --–

  DON REMEMBERED WONDERING whether time would pass quickly or slowly for him now that he was young again. One possibility was that years might crawl by the way they had in his actual youth, each one seeming to take forever to run its course.

  But that wasn’t what happened. Before Don knew it, more than a full year had slipped by: the calendar freshly read 2050, and he was twenty-seven and he was also eighty-nine.

  But, even if its passage had seemed rapid, that year did change things, although he did still find himself often just staring into space, thinking about Sarah and—

  And—

  No. Just about Sarah; only about Sarah. He knew she was the only one who should be in his thoughts, although—

  Although Lenore doubtless knew that Sarah had died. For the first few weeks after her passing, Don had assumed he’d hear something from her. In a previous age, she might have sent a consolatory telegram or a paper card, neither of which would have invited dialogue, neither of which would have required a response. But these days Lenore’s only real options would have been to phone, which certainly would have engendered a conversation, or to send an email, which netiquette would have required Don to reply to.

  But as first one month and then another passed, Don realized she wasn’t going to be in touch—which, he supposed, might have been just as well, for what could she have said? That she was sorry that Sarah was dead? And yet, wouldn’t there have been, between the lines, too horrible to acknowledge directly but impossible to dismiss from consciousness, a concomitant thought that she was sorry Sarah hadn’t died sooner? Not out of any animus but simply in recognition of the fact that Sarah’s existence was what had ultimately kept Lenore and Don apart?

  Every few weeks, he searched the web, looking at references to Sarah. There was so much about her, and even though most of it was quite old, it made it seem, in a strange way, like she was still around.

  He never googled himself anymore, though. There was, as Randy Trenholm had said, lots of discussion of the peculiar circumstances of his rollback, and he found reading it made his stomach turn. But every now and then he did put in Lenore’s name, to see what would come up. She had indeed finished her master’s, and, as she’d said she’d hoped to, had now moved to Christchurch, and was working there on her doctorate.

  He looked at whatever his searches found: references to her on the University of Canterbury website, citations of a paper she was junior author on, her occasional postings to political newsgroups, and video of her on a panel discussion at a conference in Tokyo. He watched the clip over and over again.

  He would never get over the loss of Sarah; he knew that. But he did have to get on with life, and soon enough that life would change totally and completely, in ways he couldn’t begin to guess. McGavin said the womb should be ready in a matter of weeks now. Of course, the gestation would take a while—seven months, according to the message the Dracons had sent.

  Lenore had been out of his life for almost a year and a half now. It was too much to hope that she might still be free. And, even if she were free, maybe the whole episode (that was the word she’d use) was something she wanted to put behind her, anyway: the insane time during which she’d fallen for what she’d thought was a contemporary, only to discover to her shock and disgust that he was—that hated term again—an octogenarian.

  And yet…

  And yet, in the end, she seemed to have more or less come to terms with the reality of what he was, accepting his dual ages, his youthful exterior and his less-youthful interior. It would be a miracle to find someone else who could deal with that, and although this was the age of miracle and wonder, Don didn’t believe in that kind of miracle.

  Of course, he thought, a sensible man would contact Lenore by phone or email. A sensible man wouldn’t fly halfway around the planet in the faint hope that he’d be greeted with open arms. But he wasn’t a sensible man; he was a supremely silly one—both the women he’d loved had told him that.

  And so…

  AND SO, HERE he was, on a flight to New Zealand. As he took his seat on the plane, he realized he had a real advantage over the aliens on Sigma Draconis. The Dracons could only broadcast their messages into the darkness, and, unless a reply was sent back, they’d never even know if their signals had been received, and then not for years to come. He at least would see Lenore’s face—and, he expected, that was all he’d need to see: the message it contained when she first laid eyes on him would be unguarded and honest, an unencrypted signal. And yet, what he’d give to know the answer now…

  By that Heaven that bends above us—

  by that God we both adore—

  Tell this soul with sorrow laden if,

  within the distant Aidenn,

  It shall clasp a sainted maiden

  whom the angels named Lenore

  Don had ended up with a window seat. That was perhaps a plum position on a domestic flight, but when one wanted to get up frequently to stretch one’s legs, it meant disturbing, in this case, not one but two fellow passengers, one of whom, the one with the middle seat, adjacent to Don’s, was a man of at least seventy-five. Don all too vividly remembered what it was like to try to haul himself to his feet, especially in a cramped, awkward space, at such an age, and so he mostly endured being trapped, alternating between looking out at the endless vistas of cloud tops and watching a succession of programs on his seat-back monitor.

  About four hours into the flight the old man next to him struck up a conversation. “God eye,” he said—and, after a moment, Don’s brain decoded it as “Good day” filtered through an Australian accent. “Name’s Roger.” He must be heading home, Don presumed; this flight would continue on to Melbourne after its stop in Auckland, where Don himself would change planes for Christchurch.

  “What were you doing in Toronto?” asked Don, after they had confirmed Roger’s pedigree in conversation.

  “Actually, I was in Huntsville,” Roger said. “You know it?”

  “Sure,” said Don. “Cottage country.”

  “Bingo. My daughter lives there. Runs a B-and-B. And she just had a baby girl, so I had to go see.”

  Don smiled. “Grandkids are great.”

  Roger looked at him quizzically, but then nodded and said, “That they are, mate.”

  “Have you been to Canada before?” Don asked.

  “This was my fourth trip, but…” His face, so full of delight when he mentioned his new granddaughter, now looked sad, and Don thou
ght he was perhaps going to say it was likely to be his last time. But what he actually said was “It was my first time going on my own. My wife passed away last year.”

  Don’s heart skipped a beat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. A wonderful woman, my Kelly was.”

  “I’m sure. How long were you married?”

  “Fifty years. Fifty years and one week, actually. It was like she’d been holding on, wanting to make that milestone.”

  Don said nothing.

  “I miss her so much,” Roger said. “I miss her every day.”

  Don just listened as Roger talked about his wife, and the fine times they’d had together, and he resisted the almost overwhelming urge to say, “I know,” or “Same here,” or “That’s just the way it was with Sarah and me.”

  Finally, though, Roger looked at him with an embarrassed expression. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I’ve been rambling. You’ll have to forgive an old geezer.”

  “Not at all,” said Don.

  Roger smiled. He had a roundish head and very little hair, and the rough skin of a man who’d enjoyed being out in the sun much of his life. “You’re a fine young bloke, listening to me go on like that.”

  Don found he had to suppress a grin. “Thanks.”

  “So, mate, what’s your story? Why are you going to Oz?”

  “Actually, I’m not. I’m heading to New Zealand.”

  “North Island or South?”

  “South.”

  “Well, they’re both lovely. Lots of sheep, though.”

  This time Don didn’t suppress his grin. Still, he couldn’t say he’d been there almost sixty years ago, and he didn’t know enough contemporary details to speak convincingly of a more-recent trip, so he simply said, “So I hear.”

  “What’s bringing you to Kiwi-land? Business or pleasure?”

  “Honestly? I’m chasing after a girl.”

  To his surprise, Roger slapped him on the knee. “Good on you, mate! Good on you!”

  “Maybe,” said Don. “Maybe not. We broke up over a year ago. She went to Christchurch to study. But I’ve missed her more than I can say.”

  “She knows you’re coming, though, right?”

  Don shook his head and steeled himself for being told he was being foolish.

  Roger lifted his eyebrows. “Can you stand a spot of advice from an old man?”

  “Best kind I know,” Don said.

  Roger tilted his head; he’d presumably expected an attempt to deflect his input. But then he nodded sagely. “You’re doing the right thing. The only regrets I have are over the mad, impetuous things I didn’t do.”

  Don smiled. “You are a very wise man.”

  Roger chuckled. “Live long enough and you’ll be one, too.”

  –-- Chapter 44 --–

  AFTER CHANGING PLANES, Don finally made it to the airport in Christchurch around 5:00 a.m. local time. He hated having to pay for a night’s hotel when he wasn’t checking in until almost dawn, but the alternative would be trying to rendezvous with Lenore in a disheveled, wild-eyed, sleep-deprived state, and he felt enough like a crazy person doing this already.

  He’d booked the cheapest hotel he could find online, and took a taxi over to it. His room was small by North American standards but it had a little balcony. After he’d washed up a bit, he stepped out onto it. Even though it was summer here, he could see his own breath in the crisp early-morning air.

  Almost all the lights were off in the surrounding buildings. He went back into his room for a moment and killed the lights there, then returned to the balcony and let his tired eyes adjust to the dimness.

  You can’t be married to an astronomer for sixty years without learning some constellations, but Don saw almost nothing familiar in this moonless sky, although there were two stars brighter than all the others. Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri—just about all he could remember from his brief trip here all those years ago, except…

  He scanned about, and—yes, there they were, impossibly large: the Clouds of Magellan, two smudges against the darkness. He stood there for a time, shivering, looking at them.

  By and by, the sun started to come up, the horizon growing pink, and—

  And suddenly there was a cacophony of bird songs: trills and tweets unlike any he ever heard back in Canada. An unfamiliar sky, bizarre background sounds: he might as well be on an alien world.

  He went back inside, set an alarm for five hours hence, lay down, and closed his eyes, wondering what the new day would hold.

  WHEN DON GOT up, he used his datacom to check his email. There was the usual daily progress report from Cody McGavin: all was going well with fabricating the womb. The alien DNA sequences had now been synthesized, too, done in bits and pieces at four separate commercial labs, then reassembled through a version of the whole-genome shotgun technique that had been used half a century earlier to make the first map of the Homo sapiens genome. Soon, McGavin said, everything would be ready to start growing the embryos.

  DON HAD THOUGHT about trying to intercept Lenore as she was leaving from or arriving at her flat; it had been easy enough to find out where she lived. But some might view what he was doing as the ultimate act of stalking; she might be quite disconcerted if he showed up unannounced there. Besides, for all he knew, she was living with someone, and he didn’t want a confrontation with a jealous boyfriend.

  And so he decided to go see her at the university. It took nothing but a few questions asked of his datacom to reveal the astronomy grad-student colloquium schedule. Before leaving the hotel, he got a little money from the cash machine in the lobby; Don remembered all the predictions of a cashless society, but that, too, had failed to pan out, mostly because of concerns over privacy. Although he received crisp new bills, a much younger version of King William appeared on them than Don was used to from the banknotes back home; it was as though His Royal Highness had had a little rollback of his own down here.

  The robot-driven taxi let him off at the entrance to the campus, by a big sign:

  NAU MAI, HAERE MAI KI TE

  WHARE WĀNANGA O WAITAHA

  Strange words, alien text. But a Rosetta stone was provided as a matching sign on the opposite side of the roadway:

  WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

  A river ran through the campus, and he walked along one of its banks toward the building a passerby told him housed the astronomy department, a new-looking red-brick affair half-sunk into a hillside. Once he got inside, he started looking for the right room, although he had trouble figuring out the sequence of room numbers.

  He stumbled upon the astronomy-department office and stuck his head in the door. There was a Maori man of about thirty at a desk, his face covered by intricate tattoos. “Hi,” said Don. “Can you please tell me where room 42-214B is?”

  “Looking for Lenore Darby?” asked the man.

  Moths danced a ballet in Don’s stomach. “Um, yes.”

  The man smiled. “Thought so. You’ve got a Canadian accent. Anyway, go down the hall, turn right at the next corridor, and it’ll be on your left.”

  Don had twenty minutes until the colloquium would be over. He thanked the man then made a pit stop in a washroom, and checked for anything in his teeth, fixed his hair, and straightened his clothes. And then he headed to the classroom. The door was closed, but it had a little window and he chanced a peek through it.

  His heart jumped. There was Lenore, standing at the front of the room; apparently it was her turn to present to the colloquium. As if to underscore that time had passed and many things might be different, he noted that she’d cut her red hair much shorter than he was used to seeing it. And she looked older, although she was still in that range of years during which that meant more grown-up, not more decrepit.

  The room was a small lecture theater, with a steep bank of chairs facing a central stage. There was a podium, but Lenore wasn’t hiding behind it. Instead she stood confidently, in full view, in the middle of the stage. Pe
rhaps a dozen other people were in the room. All he could see of them were the backs of their heads. Some had gray hair; presumably they were faculty members. Lenore was using a laser pointer to indicate things within a complex graphic on the room’s front wall screen. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the squeak was unmistakable.

  Don sat on the floor beside the door, waiting for the session to end. He felt a surge of adrenaline when the door swung open—but it was only some guy wearing an All Blacks T-shirt stepping out to use the washroom.

  Finally other classrooms along the same hallway started opening, but the door to Lenore’s room remained maddeningly shut. Don got up off the floor and dusted off the seat of his pants. He was just about to look through the window when the door swung open again. He stepped to one side, the way people used to with subway doors in Toronto.

  When there was a lull, he looked into the room again. Lenore was down at the front, her back to him, talking with the final remaining person, a slim young man. Don watched until, at last, the man nodded and started walking up the stairs. Lenore, meanwhile, was doing something at the podium.

  Don took a deep breath, hoping it would calm him, and he went through the door. He got only four steps down before Lenore looked up, and—

  —and her eyes went wide, almost fully circular, and her mouth dropped open, forming another circle, and he continued down, feeling shakier than he’d ever felt even before the rollback.

  She clearly couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and she looked as though she was trying to convince herself that this was someone who just happened to bear a strong resemblance to Don. It had been a long time since she’d seen him, after all, and—

  “Don?” she said at last.

  He smiled, but could feel the corners of his mouth quivering. “Hello, Lenore.”

  “Don!” She practically shouted the name, and a giant grin grew across her face.

  He found himself running down the remaining stairs, and she was coming up them, taking two in each stride, and suddenly they were in each other’s arms. He so desperately wanted to kiss her—but just because he was being greeted like an old friend didn’t mean she’d welcome that.