Rollback (14 page)

"Pull the lever, of course," he said. Deciding there was nothing else that needed doing tonight, he sat down on the couch.

"That's what almost everyone says," Sarah said, joining him. "Most people feel a moral obligation to intervene in situations where human life is at risk. Oh, but I forgot to tell you one thing. There's a really big guy stuck on that
other
track. If you divert the streetcar, he'll be killed. Now what do you do?"

He put his arm around her. "Well, um, I'd—I guess I'd still pull the lever."

She leaned her head against his shoulder. "That's what most people say. Why?"

"Because only one person dies rather than five."

He could hear in her voice that she was smiling. "A Trekker to the core. 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.' No wonder that's what Mr. Spock believes; it's clearly the product of rational thinking. Now, what about this? Say there's no second track. And say instead of being the one hapless fellow stuck on the left, the big guy isn't stuck at all. Instead he's standing right next to you on the bridge. You know for a fact that if you push him off so that he falls in front of the streetcar, hitting him will be enough to make it stop before it hits the five other people. But you yourself are a little guy. The streetcar wouldn't be stopped by hitting you, so there's no point in jumping yourself, but it'll definitely be stopped by hitting this big fellow. Now what do you do?"

"Nothing."

Don could feel her head nodding. "Again, that's what most people say—they wouldn't do a thing. But why not?"

"Because, um, because it's wrong to ... well, ah..." He frowned, opened his mouth to try again, but then closed it.

"See?" said Sarah. "They're comparable situations. In both scenarios you choose to have one guy die—the same guy, in fact—to save five others. But in the first, you do it by throwing a lever. In the second, you actually push the guy to his death. The rational equation is exactly the same. But the second scenario
feels
different emotionally. For most people, what was judged right in the first scenario is judged wrong in the second." She paused. "The aliens didn't ask that specific question about the streetcar, but there are others for which there's an emotionally ethical response and a logically ethical response. As to which one the Dracons would prefer to see, I'm not sure."

Don frowned again. "But wouldn't advanced beings naturally prefer logic to emotion?"

"Not necessarily. Fairness and a desire for reciprocity seem to be emotional responses: they occur in animals who obviously aren't reasoning in an abstract, symbolic way, and yet those are some of the things we prize most. The aliens might prize them, too, meaning the emotional answers might in fact be what they're looking for. Still, some of my colleagues
do
argue that the logical answers are the better ones, because they denote more sophisticated cognition. And yet giving the purely logical answers wouldn't really portray who we are. I mean, consider this, for instance—the aliens didn't ask about it, but it makes a good point. We've got two kids, a boy and a girl. Suppose when Emily's older, Carl and Emily both went away somewhere for a weekend, and decided to have sex with each other—just once, just to see what it was like."

"Sarah!"

"See, you're immediately disgusted. And, of course, so am I. But
why
are we disgusted? Well, presumably because evolution has bred into us a desire to promote exogamy and avoid the birth defects that often come out of incestuous unions. But say they were practicing birth control—you
know
any daughter of mine will be. That means the concern about birth defects isn't relevant. Plus, say that both were free of venereal disease. Say they only did it that once, and that it caused them no psychological harm at all, and they never told anyone else about it. Is it still disgusting? My gut—and I bet yours, too—says yes, even though we can't articulate a rational reason for the disgust."

"I suppose," he said.

"Right. But for an awfully long time, in a lot of places, homosexual unions were greeted with disgust, too, as were interracial ones. These days, most people don't react negatively to them at all. So, just because something disgusted people once doesn't mean it's universally wrong. Morals change, in part because people can be won over to new positions. It was mostly rational argument, after all, that made the women's rights and civil-rights movements possible. People became convinced that slavery and discrimination were wrong on a principled basis; you educate people about an issue, and their view of what's moral changes. In fact, that's what happens with children. Their behavior gets more moral as their reasoning powers develop. They go from thinking something is wrong simply because they might get caught, to thinking something is wrong in principle. Well, maybe we're grown up enough for the Dracons to want to continue being in contact with us, and maybe we're not, and if we're not there's no way we can guess what the right answers are." Sarah snuggled against him. "No, in the end, I think the only thing we can do is exactly what they asked: send a thousand, independent sets of answers, each done in isolation, each one as honest and truthful as possible."

"And then?"

"And then wait for whatever reply they might eventually send."
 

Another hot August day. Don had headed downtown again, but this time it wasn't for a job interview, and so he was actually wearing clothes appropriate for the weather: cutoff denim shorts and a light-blue T-shirt. He was grateful for them as he effortlessly climbed the stairs from the subway station, and exited out into the muggy, searing heat.

Sarah, along with the rest of the SETI community, was still trying to find the decryption key for the second message from Sigma Draconis, and last night an idea had occurred to her. But to try it she needed some old paper records that were stored down at the University.

It was only a short walk from Queen's Park subway station to the McLennan Physical Laboratories tower, which housed the University of Toronto's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. On its roof were two observatory domes. Don remembered what he used to think when he saw them: that they couldn't possibly do any good, surrounded by the glare of downtown Toronto. But, to his surprise, as he glanced up at them now, he found himself thinking that they looked like a nice, firm pair of breasts.

As he came out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor of the tower, he saw that along one wall of the corridor there was a display about famous people who had been associated with the department. Included were Dr. Helen Sawyer Hogg, dead for fifty-five years now, whose weekly astronomy columns Don remembered reading as a boy in the Saturday
Star
; Ian Shelton, who discovered Supernova 19873 in the Large Magellanic Cloud; and Sarah herself. He paused and read the placard about Sarah, then looked at her photo, which must have been taken at least forty years ago; she hadn't worn her hair that long since.

Ah, well. Timeworn photos were appropriate here. Universities themselves were an anachronism, bucking the long-established trend to do everything online, everything by telecommuting. Hallowed halls, ivory towers—the synonyms his mental thesaurus provided just underscored how quaint and old-fashioned such institutions were. And yet, somehow, they endured.

He looked again at the photo of Sarah and found himself grinding his teeth. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, his wife would be even younger-looking now. This photo would be of what she'd have had to look forward to, when she gracefully entered middle age for a second time ... around 2070, he supposed.

He headed around a bend in the corridor, the walls now lined with framed astronomical photos, until he found the door he was looking for. He knocked lightly on it. Old habits die hard, he realized; he'd long ago given up fervent rapping, since it used to hurt his arthritic knuckles, but now he wondered if anyone could have possibly heard him through the thick wood. He was about to knock again, and more loudly, when he heard a female voice call out, "Come in."

He entered, leaving the door open behind him. A young redhead, seated at a computer workstation, looked up at him expectantly.

"I'm looking for Lenore Darby," Don said.

She raised a hand. "Guilty."

He felt his eyebrows going up. Now that he saw her, he did remember that there'd been a redhead among the grad students at the last Christmas party, but he'd forgotten, or, more likely, had failed to notice then, just how pretty she was.

Lenore looked to be twenty-five—a real twenty-five, no doubt. Her orange hair cascaded down to her shoulders, and she had freckled white skin and bright green eyes. She was wearing green denim shorts and a white T-shirt that said "Onderdonk" on it, which he guessed was the name of a musical group. The shirt's lower half had been tied in a knot around her stomach, revealing a couple of inches of midriff that hadn't bunched at all even though she was sitting down.

"Can I help you?" she asked, smiling a perfect smile. So many of Don's contemporaries had spent their whole adult lives, as Don had until recently, with various dental imperfections—misalignments and gaps, overbites and underbites—but young people today almost always had
perfect
teeth, brightly white, totally straight, and completely free of cavities.

He steeled himself for giving the spiel, then: "I'm Don Halifax," he said. "I know I—"

"Oh, my goodness!" exclaimed Lenore. She looked him up and down, causing him to feel embarrassed and awkward, and probably even to blush. "I'd been expecting—well, he must be your grandfather. Are you named for him?"

She'd met an eighty-seven-year-old man back in December named Don Halifax, and she'd been told someone with that name was coming by to pick up some papers for Sarah, so...

So, yeah, it was a perfectly reasonable guess on her part. "That's right," he said. Indeed, what she'd suggested was in fact true, just not in the way she meant it. His full name was Donald Roscoe Halifax, and Roscoe had been his father's father's name.

So, why not? It was a harmless enough fiction, and he really hated having to explain his current situation; he certainly didn't want to go over the whole sorry mess with everyone he met. Besides, he'd probably never see this girl again.

"Nice to meet you!" said Lenore. "I've met your grandfather a couple of times. What a charming fellow!"

He was pleased by this assessment, and allowed himself a small smile. "That he is."

"And how is—" Don felt himself holding his breath. If she had finished her sentence with "your grandmother," he doubted he could have gone on with the charade, but she said, "And how is Professor Halifax?"

"She's fine."

"That's good," said Lenore, but then she surprised Don by shaking her head. "I sometimes wish I were older." She smiled and got up, tugging at the tied-up part of her T-shirt after she'd done so to get it to sit properly, which had the effect, for a moment, of emphasizing her breasts. "See, I could have had her as my thesis supervisor. Not that Professor Danylak isn't great, but, you know, it's frustrating studying where the most famous person in my chosen field actually worked and having almost no interaction with her."

"Your specialty is SETI, too?"

She nodded. "Yup. So, as you can imagine, Professor Halifax is a bit of a hero of mine."

"Ah," he said. He looked briefly around the room, because—

Because, he realized, he'd probably been looking too intently, too long, at the very attractive young woman. There were the usual fabric-covered room dividers, and one wall was lined by filing cabinets. The paperless office and the flying car had been a few years in the future for his entire life, but maybe, finally, he'd actually now live long enough to eventually see one or the other become a reality.

He opened his mouth to go on, but caught himself in time. He'd been about to say "Sarah asked me to...," but who the hell calls his own grandmother by her first name? And yet he couldn't bring himself to actually say, "My grandmother." After a second, he fell back on the passive voice. "I've been asked to pick up some old files."

"Oh, I know," said Lenore. "I'm the low person on the totem pole here; I'm the one who had to dig around for them down in the basement." She was about five-foot-four, although presumably never thought of herself that way; his generation had been the last Canadian one to be taught imperial measures in school. "Let me get them for you."

She walked across the room, and he found his eyes tracking the movement of her rear end through her shorts. Sitting on top of one of the filing cabinets was a stack almost a foot high of papers stuffed into several manila file folders.

Don was worried that his new looks didn't quite stand up to scrutiny; his own appearance these days was so startling to himself that part of him assumed it should be startling to others, too. But as she handed the great pile of paper to him, she gave no sign if she found anything out of the ordinary about him.

For his part, he found himself noticing the gentle hint of fruit fragrance—how wonderful to have his sense of smell back! It wasn't perfume. More likely, he thought, it was her shampoo or conditioner, and it was quite pleasant.

"My goodness," he said. "I didn't expect there to be so much!"

"Do you need a hand getting it all down to your car?" asked Lenore.

"Actually, I took the subway."

"Oh! I can get you a box to put it in."

"Thanks, but..." She lifted her orange eyebrows, and he went on. "It's just I was going to go to the Art Gallery this afternoon. They've got a special exhibition of Robyn Herrington blown glass that I want to see."

"Heck, the Art Galley is only a couple of blocks south of here. Why don't you leave the papers here, and pick them up when you're done?"

"I don't want to be a bother."

"Oh, it's no bother at all! I'll be here straight through until 5:00."

"Workaholic, eh? You must really like it here."

She leaned her shapely rump against a nearby desk. "Oh, yes. It's terrific."