Rollback Read online

  “Mr. McGavin,” Don said, “I really don’t think that—”

  “Not without Don,” Sarah said.

  “What?” said McGavin and Don simultaneously.

  “Not without Don,” Sarah repeated. Her voice had a firmness Don hadn’t heard for years. “I won’t even consider this unless you also offer the same thing to my husband.”

  McGavin pushed himself forward until he was standing. He walked behind his desk, turning his back on them, and looked out at his sprawling empire. “This is a very expensive procedure, Sarah.”

  “And you’re a very rich man,” she replied.

  Don looked at McGavin’s back, more or less silhouetted against the bright sky. At last, McGavin spoke. “I envy you, Don.”

  “Why?”

  “To have a wife who loves you so much. I understand the two of you have been married for over fifty years.”

  “Sixty,” said Don, “as of two days ago.”

  “I never…” McGavin began, but then he fell silent.

  Don had vague recollections of McGavin’s high-profile divorce, years ago, and a nasty court case to try to invalidate the pre-nup.

  “Sixty years,” McGavin continued, at last. “Such a long time…”

  “It hasn’t seemed that way,” said Sarah.

  Don could hear McGavin make a noisy intake of breath and then let it out. “All right,” he said, turning around, his head nodding. “All right, I’ll pay for the procedure for both of you.” He walked toward them, but remained standing. “So, do we have a deal?”

  Sarah opened her mouth to say something, but Don spoke before she could. “We have to talk about this,” he said.

  “So let’s talk,” said McGavin.

  “Sarah and I. We have to talk about this alone.”

  McGavin seemed momentarily peeved, as though he felt they were looking a gift horse in the mouth. But then he nodded. “All right, take your time.” He paused, and Don thought he was going to say something stupid like, “But not too much time.” But instead he said, “I’ll have my driver take you over to Pauli’s—finest restaurant in Boston. On me, of course. Talk it over. Let me know what you decide.”

  –-- Chapter 6 --–

  THE ROBOT CHAUFFEUR drove Sarah and Don to the restaurant. Don got out of the car first and carefully made his way over to Sarah’s door, helping her up and out, and holding her arm as they crossed the sidewalk and entered.

  “Hello,” said the young white woman standing at a small podium inside the door. “You must be Dr. and Mr. Halifax, no? Welcome to Pauli’s.”

  She gave them a hand getting out of their parkas. Fur was back in vogue—the pelts lab-grown, without producing the whole animal—but Sarah and Don were of a generation that had come to frown on fur, and neither could bring themselves to wear any. Their nylon-shelled coats from Mark’s Work Wearhouse, his in navy blue, hers beige, looked decidedly out-of-place on the racks in the coat check.

  The woman took Don’s elbow, and Don took Sarah’s, a sideways conga line shuffling slowly to a large booth near a crackling fireplace.

  Pauli’s turned out to be a seafood restaurant, and even though Don loved John Masefield’s poetry, he hated seafood. Ah, well; doubtless the menu would have some chicken or steak.

  There were the usual accoutrements of such places: an aquarium of lobsters, fishing nets hanging on the walls, a brass diver’s helmet sitting on an old wooden barrel. But the effect was much more upscale than Red Lobster; here everything looked like valuable antiques rather than garage-sale kitsch.

  Once they’d managed to get seated, and the young woman had taken their drink order—two decaf coffees—Don settled back against the soft leather upholstery. “So,” he said, looking across at his wife, the crags in her face highlighted by the dancing firelight, “what do you think?”

  “It’s an incredible offer.”

  “That it is,” he said, frowning. “But…”

  He trailed off as the waiter appeared, a tall black man of about fifty, dressed in a tuxedo. He handed a menu printed on parchment-like paper bound in leather covers to Sarah, then gave one to Don. He squinted at it. Although this restaurant doubtless had lots of older patrons—they’d passed several on the way to the table—anyone who dined here regularly probably could afford new eyes, and—

  “Hey,” he said, looking up. “There are no prices.”

  “Of course not, sir,” said the waiter. He had a Haitian accent. “You are Mr. McGavin’s guests. Please order whatever you wish.”

  “Give us a moment,” said Don.

  “Absolutely, sir,” said the waiter, and he disappeared.

  “What McGavin’s offering is…” started Don, then he trailed off. “It’s—I don’t know—it’s crazy.”

  “Crazy,” repeated Sarah, lobbing the word back at him.

  “I mean,” he said, “when I was young, I thought I’d live forever, but…”

  “But you’d made your peace with the idea that…”

  “That I was going to die soon?” he said, lifting his eyebrows. “I’m not afraid of the D-word. And, yes, I guess I had made my peace with that, as much as anyone does. Remember when Ivan Krehmer was in town last fall? My old buddy from back in the day? We had coffee, and, well, we both knew it was the last time we’d ever see or even speak to each other. We talked about our lives, our careers, our kids and grandkids. It was a…” He sought a phrase; found it: “A final accounting.”

  She nodded. “So often, these last few years, I’ve thought, ‘Well, that’s the last time I’ll visit this place.’” She looked out at the other diners. “It’s not even all been sad. There are plenty of times I’ve thought, ‘Thank God I’ll never have to do that again.’ Getting my passport renewed, some of those medical tests they make you have every five years. Stuff like that.”

  He was about to reply when the waiter reappeared. “Have we decided yet?”

  Not by a long shot, Don thought.

  “We need more time,” Sarah said. The waiter dipped his head respectfully and vanished again.

  More time, thought Don. That’s what it was all about, suddenly having more time. “So, so he’s talking about, what, rejuvenating you thirty-eight years, so you’ll still be around when the next reply is received?”

  “Rejuvenating us,” said Sarah, firmly—or, at least, in what he knew was supposed to be a firm tone; the quaver never quite left her voice these days. “And, really, there’s no need to stop at that. That would only take us back to being fifty or so, after all.” She paused, took a moment to gather her thoughts. “I remember reading about this. They say they can regress you to any point after your body stopped growing. You can’t go back before puberty, and you probably shouldn’t go back much earlier than twenty-five, before wisdom teeth have erupted and the bones of the skull have totally fused.”

  “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 h
adn’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.

  –-- Chapter 7 --–

  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 no
t 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.”