Rollback (5 page)

"Twenty-five," said Don, tasting the number, imagining it. "And then you'd age forward again, at the normal rate?"

She nodded. "Which would give us enough time to receive two more replies from..." She lowered her voice, perhaps surprised to find herself adopting McGavin's term. "From my pen pal."

He was about to object that Sarah would be over a hundred and sixty by the time two more replies could be received—but, then again, that would only be her chronological age; she'd be just a hundred physically. He shook his head, feeling woozy, disoriented.
Just
a hundred!

"You seem to know a lot about this," he said.

She tipped her head to one side. "I read a few of the articles when the procedure was announced. Idle curiosity."

He narrowed his eyes. "Was that all?"

"Sure. Of course."

"I've never even
thought
about living to be over a hundred," he said.

"Of course not. Why would you? The idea of being
ancient
, withered, worn out, infirm, for years on end—who would fantasize about that? But
this
is different."

He looked at her, studying her face in a way he hadn't for some time. It
was
an old woman's face, just as his face, he knew, was that of an old man, with wrinkles, creases, and folds.

It came to him, with a start, that their very first date all those years ago had ended in a restaurant with a fireplace, after he'd dragged her to see the premiere of
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
. He recalled how beautiful her smooth features had looked, how her lustrous brown hair had shone in the dancing light, how he'd wanted to stare at her forever. Age had come up then, too, with Sarah asking how old he was. He'd told her he was twenty-six.

"Hey, me, too!" she'd said, sounding pleased. "When's your birthday?"

"October fifteenth."

"Mine was in May."

"Ah," he'd replied, a mischievous tone in his voice, "an older woman."

That had been so very long ago. And to go back to that age! It was madness. "But ... but what would you—would
we
—do with all that time?" he asked.

"Travel," said Sarah at once. "Garden. Read great books. Take courses."

"Hmmmph,"
said Don.

Sarah nodded, apparently conceding that she hadn't enticed him. But then she rummaged in her purse and pulled out her datacom, tapped a couple of keys, and handed him the slim device. The screen was showing a picture of little Cassie, wearing a blue dress, her blond hair in pigtails. "Watch our grandchildren grow up," she said. "Get to play with our great-grandchildren, when they come along."

He blew out air. To get to attend his grandchildren's college graduations, to be at their weddings. That
was
tempting. And to do all that in robust good health, but...

"But do you really want to attend the funerals of your own children?" he said. "Because that's what this would mean, you know. Oh, I'm sure the procedure will come down in price eventually, but not in time for Carl or Emily to afford it." He thought about adding, "We might even end up burying our grandchildren," but found he couldn't even give voice to
that
notion.

"Who knows how fast the cost will come down?" Sarah said. "But the idea of having decades more with my kids and grand-kids is very appealing ... no matter what happens in the end."

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe. I—I'm just..."

She reached across the dark polished wood of the table and touched his hand. "Scared?"

It wasn't an accusation from Sarah; it was loving concern. "Yeah, I suppose. A bit."

"Me, too," she said. "But we'll be going through it together."

He lifted his eyebrows. "Are you sure you could stand to have me around for another few decades?"

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

To be young again.
It was a heady thought, and, yes, it was scary, too. But it was also, he had to admit, intriguing. He'd never liked taking charity, though. If the procedure had been something they could have even remotely afforded, he might have been more enthusiastic. But even if they sold their house, sold every stock and bond they owned, liquidated all their assets, they couldn't begin to pay for the treatment for even one of them, let alone for them both. Hell, even Cody McGavin had had to think twice about spending so much money.

This stuff about Sarah being the one and only person who could communicate with the aliens struck Don as silly. But it wasn't as though the rejuvenation could be taken back; once done, it was done. If it turned out that McGavin was wrong about her being pivotal, they'd still have all those extra decades.

"We'd need money to live on," he said. "I mean, we didn't plan for fifty years of retirement."

"True. I'd ask McGavin to endow a position for me back at U of T, or provide some sort of retainer."

"And what will our kids think? We'll be physically younger than them."

"There is that."

"And we'll be doing them out of their inheritance," he added.

"Which was hardly going to make them rich anyway," replied Sarah, smiling. "I'm sure they'll be delighted for us."

The waiter returned, looking perhaps a bit wary of the possibility that he was going to be rebuffed again. "Have we made up our minds ?"

Don looked over at Sarah. She'd always been beautiful to him. She was beautiful now, she'd been beautiful in her fifties, she'd been beautiful in her twenties. And, as her features shifted in the light of the dancing flames, he could see her face as it had been at those ages—all those stages of life they'd spent together.

"Yes," said Sarah, smiling at her husband. "Yes, I think we have."

Don nodded, and turned to the menu. He'd pick something quickly. He did find it disconcerting, though, to see the item descriptions but no accompanying dollar values.
Everything has a price
, he thought,
even if you can't see it.

Don and Sarah had had another discussion about SETI, a year before the original Sigma Draconis signal had been detected. They'd been in their late forties then, and Sarah, depressed about the failure to detect any message, had been worried that she'd devoted her life to something pointless.

"Maybe they
are
out there," Don had said, while they went for a walk one evening. He'd gotten religious about his weight a few years before, and they now did a half-hour walk every evening during the good weather, and he used a treadmill in the basement in winter. "But maybe they're just keeping quiet. You know, so as not to contaminate our culture. The Prime Directive, and all that."

Sarah had shaken her head. "No, no. The aliens have an
obligation
to let us know they're there."

"Why?"

"Because they'd be an existence proof that it's possible to survive technological adolescence—you know, the period during which you have tools that could destroy your entire species but no mechanism in place yet to prevent them from ever being used. We developed radio in 1895, and we developed nuclear weapons just fifty years later, in 1945. Is it possible for a civilization to survive for centuries, or millennia, once you know how to make nuclear weapons? And if those don't kill you, rampaging AI or nanotech or genetically engineered weapons might—unless you find some way to survive all that. Well, any civilization whose signals we pick up is almost certainly going to be much older than we are; receiving a signal would tell us that it's possible to survive."

"I guess," Don said. They'd come to where Betty Ann Drive crossed Senlac Road, and they turned right. Senlac had sidewalks, but Betty Ann didn't.

"For sure," she replied. "It's the ultimate in Marshall McLuhan: the medium
is
the message. Just detecting it, even if we don't understand it, tells us the most important thing ever."

He considered that. "You know, we should have Peter de Jager over sometime soon. I haven't played go in ages; Peter always likes a game."

She sounded irritated. "What's Peter got to do with anything?"

"Well, what's he best remembered for?"

"Y2K," said Sarah.

"Exactly!" he said. Peter de Jager lived in Brampton, just west of Toronto. He moved in some of the same social circles as the Halifaxes did. Back in 1993, he'd written the seminal article "Doomsday 2000" for
ComputerWorld
magazine, alerting humanity to the possibility of enormous computer problems when the year 2000 rolled around. Peter spent the next seven years sounding the warning call as loudly as he could. Millions of person-hours and billions of dollars were spent correcting the problem, and when the sun rose on Saturday, January 1, 2000, no disasters occurred: airplanes kept flying, money stored electronically in banks didn't suddenly disappear, and so on.

But did Peter de Jager get thanked ? No. Instead, he was excoriated. He was a charlatan, said some, including Canada's
National Post
, in a year-end summation of the events of 2000—and their proof was that nothing had gone wrong.

Don and Sarah were passing Willowdale Middle School now, where Carl was just finishing grade eight. "But what's Y2K got to do with the aliens not signaling their existence?" she asked.

"Maybe they understand how
dangerous
it would be for us to know that some races did manage to survive technological adolescence. We got through Y2K because of lots of really hard work by really dedicated people, but once we
were
through it, we assumed that we would have gotten through it
regardless
. Surviving into the year 2000 was taken as—what was your phrase?—'an existence proof' that such survival had been inevitable. Well, detecting alien races who've survived technological adolescence would be taken the same way. Instead of us thinking it was very difficult to survive the stage we're going through, we'd see it as a Cakewalk.
They
survived it, so surely we will, too." Don paused. "Say some alien, from a planet around—well, what's a nearby sunlike star?"

"Epsilon Indi," said Sarah.

"Fine, okay. Imagine aliens at Epsilon Indi pick up the television broadcasts from some other nearby star, um..."

"Tau Ceti," she offered.

"Great. The people at Epsilon Indi pick up TV from Tau Ceti. Not that Tau Ceti was deliberately signaling Epsilon Indi, you understand; they're just leaking stuff into space. And Epsilon Indi says, hey, these guys have just emerged technologically, and we did that long ago; they must be going through some rough times—maybe the guys on Epsilon Indi can even tell that from the TV signals. And so they say, let's contact them so they'll know it's all going to be okay. And what happens? A few decades later Tau Ceti falls silent. Why?"

"Everybody there got cable?"

"Funny," said Don. "Funny woman. No, they didn't all get cable. They just stopped worrying about somehow surviving having the bomb and all that, and now
they're gone
, because they got careless. You make that mistake once—you tell a race, hey, look, you can survive, 'cause we did—and that race stops trying to solve its problems. I don't think you'd ever make that mistake again."

They'd come to Churchill Avenue, and had turned east, walking by the public school Emily, who was now in grade two, attended. "But they could tell us
how
they survived, show us the answer," said Sarah.

"The answer is obvious," said Don. "You know the least-best-selling diet book of all time?
Losing Weight Slowly by Eating Less and Exercising More
."

"Yes, Mr. Atkins."

He made his tone one of mock umbrage. "Excuse me! Going for a walk here! Besides, I
am
eating less, and more sensibly, way more sensibly than I was before I started cutting back on carbs. But you want to know what the difference is between me and all the others who lost weight quickly on Atkins, then put it back on as soon as they quit? It's been four years now, and I haven't quit—and I'm never going to. That's the other piece of weight-loss advice no one wants to hear. You can't diet temporarily; you have to make a permanent lifestyle change. I have, and I'm going to live longer for it. There are no quick fixes for anything."

He ceased talking as they crossed Claywood, then began speaking again. "No, the answer is obvious. The way to survive is to stop fighting each other, to learn tolerance, and to put an end to the huge disparity between rich and poor, so that some people don't hate the rest of us so much that they'd do anything, including even killing themselves, to hurt us."

"But we
need
a quick fix," said Sarah. "With terrorists having access to biotech and nuclear weapons, we can't just wait for everyone to get enlightened. You have to solve the problem of high-tech terrorism really quickly—just as soon as it becomes a problem—or no one survives. Those alien races who
have
survived must have found a solution."

"Sure," said Don. "But even if they did tell us their answer, we wouldn't like it."

"Why?"

"Because," he said, "the solution is that time-honored sci-fi cliche, the hive mind. On
Star Trek
, the reason the Borg absorb everyone into the Collective, I think, is that it's the only safe path. You don't have to worry about terrorists, or mad scientists, if you all think with one mind. Of course, if you do that, you might even lose any notion that there could be other individuals out there. It might never occur to you to even try to contact somebody else, because the whole notion of 'somebody else' has become foreign to your way of thinking. That could explain the failure of SETI. And then if you did encounter another form of intelligent life, perhaps by chance, you'd do exactly what the Borg did: absorb it, because that's the only way you can be sure it'll never hurt you."

"Gee, that's almost more depressing than thinking there are no aliens at all."

"There's another solution, too," said Don. "Absolute totalitarianism. Everyone's still got free will, but they're constrained from doing anything with it. Because all it takes is one crazy person and a pile of antimatter, and—kablooie!—the whole stinking planet is gone."