Rollback (35 page)

As they drove along Park Home Avenue, Don was saddened to see that the library he so fondly remembered was gone. Most libraries were, of course. Don was a bit of a Luddite, and still had a pocket datacom, but Lenore and Gillian had web-accessing brainlink implants.

He drove the van into the cemetery—another anachronism—and parked it as close to Sarah's grave as he could. The boys put their filter masks back on and they all walked the rest of the distance, kicking through fallen leaves as they did so.

Don had brought a virtual bouquet with a cold-fusion battery; the hologram of red roses would last almost forever. His kids, normally boisterous, understood he needed a quiet moment, and gave it to him. Sometimes when he came here, he found himself overwhelmed by memories: scenes from when he and Sarah were dating, events from early in their marriage, moments with Carl and Emily as children, the brouhaha when Sarah had decoded the first message. But this time all that came to mind was the celebration, almost twenty years past, of their sixtieth wedding anniversary. He'd gone down on one knee then—as he had just now to place the flowers. He still missed Sarah, every single day of his life.

He stood up and just stared for a time at the headstone, and then he read Sarah's inscription. He turned and contemplated the blank space next to it. His own planned epitaph—"He was never left holding a Q"—wasn't quite as nice as hers, but it would do.

After a few moments, he glanced at Lenore, wondering how she felt knowing he'd end up here, rather than next to her. Lenore, whose freckles had faded over the years, and now had fine lines on her face, must have read his mind, for she patted his arm and said, "It's okay, hon. Nobody from my generation gets buried, anyway. You paid for it; you might as well use it ... eventually."

Eventually.
In the twenty-second century, or maybe the twenty-third, or...

The age of miracle and wonder. He shook his head, and turned to face his children. Sarah, he supposed, was nothing special to Gillian: just his father's first wife, a woman who had died years before she'd been born and none of whose DNA she shared—not that such trivial concerns would have mattered to Sarah. Still, society didn't have a name for such a relationship.

There was no special name for what Sarah was to the boys, either, but they would not exist without her. Amphion was staring thoughtfully at the four names on the headstone—"Sarah Donna Enright Halifax"—and must have been contemplating the same thing, for he said, "What should I call her?"

Don considered this. "Mom" wasn't appropriate—Lenore was their mother. "Professor Halifax" was too formal. "Mrs. Halifax" was still available; Lenore, like most women of her generation, had kept her birth name. "Sarah" conveyed an intimacy, but wasn't quite right, either. He shrugged. "I don't—"

"Aunt Sarah," said Lenore, who had always called her "Professor Halifax" in life. "I think you should refer to her as 'Aunt Sarah.'"

Dracons couldn't nod, so Amphion did the slight bow that he'd adopted to convey the same thing. "Thank you for bringing us to see Aunt Sarah," he said; one of his eyes was looking at Don, while the other three faced the headstone.

"She would have loved to have met you," Don said, and he smiled in turn at each of his three children.

"I wish I could have known her," said Zethus.

Gunter tilted his head and said, very softly, "As do I."

"She was a wonderful woman," Don said.

Gillian turned to face Lenore. "You must have known her, too, Mom—you were in the same field. What was she like?"

Lenore looked at Don, then back at their daughter. She sought an appropriate word, and, after a moment, smiling at her husband, she said, "Skytop."
 

I've had many writing students over the years, but none was more talented than my dear friend Robyn Herrington, to whom this book is dedicated. I first met Robyn at Calgary's science-fiction convention Con-Version in 1996 and published one of her poems in the 1997 anthology
Tesseracts 6
, which my wife Carolyn and I coedited. Robyn workshopped with me at the Banff Centre in 2000 and 2001, and you can find stories by her in, among other places, three of Mike Resnick's DAW anthologies:
Return of the Dinosaurs, Women Writing Science Fiction as Men
, and
New Voices in Science Fiction
. Robyn passed away in May 2004, after a long battle with cancer; at her request, I read the eulogy she herself had written at her funeral in Calgary. The one-sentence high-concept behind part of this novel was Robyn's, and I thank her, and her husband, Bruce Herrington, for letting me pick it up and run with it.

Many thanks to those kind souls who read and commented on an entire draft of this book in manuscript: Asbed G. Bedrossian, Ted Bleaney, Reinhardt Christiansen, David Livingstone Clink, Marcel Gagne, Richard Gotlib, Peter Halasz, Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Joe Mahoney, Terry McGarry, Howard Miller, Kirstin Morrell, Ariel Reich, Sally Tomasevic, Hayden Trenholm, Andrew Weiner, Elizabeth Westbrook-Trenholm, and my brother Alan B. Sawyer.

In addition, I thank the friends and colleagues who let me bounce ideas off them or otherwise provided input, including Paul Bartel, Charissa Bartlett, Dan Evens, Chris Ellis, Terence M. Green, W. Thomas Leroux, Charles Levy, and Irwin Tan.

Special thanks to Dr. Jerome H. Barkow, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University (who gave the keynote address at the symposium "Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition," referred to in this novel); Dr. David DeGraff, Chair, Department of Astronomy and Physics, Alfred University; and Greg Armstrong, Senior Research Technician, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Huge thanks to my lovely wife, Carolyn Clink, and my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and his associates Christopher Lotts, Vince Gerardis, and Eli Kirschner.

Many thanks, too, to my editor David G. Hartwell and his associate Denis Wong; to Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Irene Gallo, Dot Lin, and everyone else at Tor Books; to Harold and Sylvia Fenn, Janis Ackroyd, David Cuthbertson, Marnie Ferguson, Steve St. Amant, Heidi Winter, and everyone else at H. B. Fenn and Company, Tor's Canadian distributor; and to Dr. Stanley Schmidt and Trevor Quachri of
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
.

Thanks also to Danita Maslankowski, who organized the Fall 2005 "Write-Off" retreat weekend for Calgary's Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, at which much work on this manuscript was accomplished, and to my father, John A. Sawyer, who loaned me his vacation home on Canandaigua Lake in Upstate New York, where I squirreled myself away while finishing this book.

Please note that Scrabble Brand Crossword Game is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc., in the United States and Canada. Outside of the United States and Canada, the Scrabble trademark is owned by J. W. Spear & Sons PLC, a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc.

Finally, thanks to the 1,200 members of my online discussion group, who always provide wonderful support and feedback. Feel free to join us at:
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer
 

Robert J. Sawyer is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the world's top awards for best science fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for
Hominids
), the Nebula (which he won for
The Terminal Experiment
), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for
Mindscan
); the other winners of all three are David Brin, Arthur C. Clarke, Joe Haldeman, Frederik Pohl, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Connie Willis.

In total, Rob has won thirty-eight national and international awards for his fiction, including nine Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras") and the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award, one of Canada's most significant literary honors. He's also won
Analog
magazine's
Analytical Laboratory
Award, the
Science Fiction Chronicle
Reader Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award, all for best short story of the year, as well as the Collectors Award for Most Collectable Author of the Year, as selected by the clientele of Barry R. Levin Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, the world's leading SF rare-book dealer.

Rob has won the world's largest cash prize for SF writing, Spain's 6,ooo-euro
Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficcion
, an unprecedented three times, and he's also won a trio of Japanese
Seiun
awards for best foreign novel of the year. In addition, he's received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and the Alumni Award of Distinction from Ryerson University.

Rob's books are top-ten national mainstream bestsellers in Canada and have hit number one on the bestsellers' list published by
Locus
, the American trade journal of the SF field. His nonfiction has appeared in
Archaeology, Maclean's
, and
Sky & Telescope
, and he edits the acclaimed "Robert J. Sawyer Books" SF imprint for Canada's Red Deer Press. He's also a frequent TV guest, with over two hundred appearances to his credit, and has been keynote speaker at many science, technology, and business conferences.

Born in Ottawa in 1960, Rob now lives in Mississauga, a city just west of Toronto, with poet Carolyn Clink, his wife of twenty-two years.

For more information about Rob, and access to his blog, visit his World Wide Web site, which contains more than one million words of material, including a readers' group guide for this novel. You'll find it at sfwriter.com.