Rollback (33 page)

"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."
 

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:

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

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 42-2146 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. Perhaps 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.

After all too brief a time, he felt her pulling away. She looked at him, her eyes flicking back and forth, staring first at his left eye, then his right. "What
are
you doing here?"

"I—I hope you don't mind."

"Mind?" she said.

"I didn't know whether you'd be happy to see me."

"Of course I'm happy! Are you taking a vacation down here?"

He shook his head. "I came just to see you."

She looked thunderstruck. "My ... God. You should have called."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"No, no. Don't be sorry, but..." She paused. "All this way just to see me?"

He nodded.

"My God," she said again. But then she tilted her chin down a bit. "I was so sorry to hear about Sarah. When was that? Four or five months ago?"

"Over a year," said Don, simply.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I—I'm just so sorry."

"Me, too."

"And now," she said, a shift in her tone indicating that the enormity of the situation had struck her, "you're here."

"Yes." He didn't know how to ask his next question politely, or how to segue to it elegantly, so he just blurted it out. "Are you seeing anyone?"

She looked at him a moment longer, and it was clear that she understood the import of the question, and also understood that she'd been offered an out: she could simply respond in the affirmative and not have to deal further with him. "No," she said, firmly if squeakily. "No one."

He felt air rushing out of him, and he pulled her close again. "Thank God," he said. He hesitated for a second, then gently tilted her face up, and kissed her—and, to his delight, she kissed him back.

Suddenly there was a loud sound, and another, and another. He turned his head and looked up, and—

And there, standing at the top of the stairs, were a handful of students, waiting to come into the room, and one of them had started to applaud, a big grin on his face. The others joined him, and Don felt an even bigger grin splitting his own features, and he looked at Lenore, whose skin had turned bright red.

"If you'll excuse us," Don said, and he took Lenore's hand, and the two of them began walking up the stairs, and the students started coming down, passing them, and one of them slapped Don on the shoulder as he went by.
 

Lenore and Don headed out into the warm midday air, which was a wonderful contrast to the Canadian winter he'd left behind. There was so much he wanted to tell her, and yet he found it impossible to begin. At last, though, he said, "I like your hair that way."

"Thanks," said Lenore, still holding his hand. They were walking along the banks of the little river, which Lenore said was called the Avon; it made a pleasing background sound. On the opposite side of it were campus buildings and a car park. The pathway was paved, and there were trees of types Don couldn't name on its margin. Lenore nodded occasionally to passing students or faculty members.

"So, what are you doing now?" she asked. A couple of birds with black bodies, long curving bills, and orange cheek patches hopped out of their way. "Have—have you found a job?" She said it gently, knowing that the issue was a delicate one.

Don stopped walking, and Lenore stopped, too. He let go of her hand and looked into her eyes. "I want to tell you something," he said, "but I need you to promise to keep it a secret."

"Of course," she said.

He nodded. He trusted her completely. "Sarah decrypted the message."

Lenore's eyes narrowed. "That can't be," she said. "I'd have heard..."

"It was
private
message."

She looked at him, brow knitted.

"I'm serious," he said. "It was private, for the person whose survey answers the Dracons found most to their liking."

"And that was Sarah?"

"That was my Sarah, yes."

"So what did the message say?"

Two students were running toward them, obviously late for class. Don waited until they passed. "They sent their genome, and the instructions for all the supporting hardware needed to create two Dracon children."

"My ... God. Are you serious?"

"Absolutely. Cody McGavin is involved in the project. And so am I. I'm going to be the..." He paused, even now still somewhat amazed at the notion. "...the foster father. But I'll need help raising the Dracon children."

She looked at him blankly.

"And, well, I want you back in my life. I want you in the children's lives."

"Me?"

"Yes, you."

She looked stunned. "I, um, I mean, you and me—that's one thing, and I..."

Don's heart was pounding. "Yes?"

She smiled that radiant smile of hers. "And I
have
missed you so. But ... but this stuff about raising—my God, the very idea!—about raising Dracon children. I—I'm hardly qualified for that."

"No one is. But you're a SETI researcher; that's as good a background as any to start with."