Rollback (18 page)

As planned, the response contained a thousand completed surveys, chosen at random from the 1 ,206,343 sets of responses that had been uploaded to the website Sarah had helped create. Well, actually, truth be told, 999 of the sets were randomly chosen; the one thousandth was Sarah's own set, shuffled into the middle. Not that she'd snuck it in. Rather, after Don and Carl had put the notion in her head, she'd broached the topic of including her own answers at a meeting, and the PR officer for the SETI Institute had loved the idea. It made for a great human-interest angle, he said.

At the transmission ceremony, commemorative CD-ROMs containing archival copies of the message were distributed to key researchers, but the actual responses people had given weren't being made public. As per the Dracons' request, the answers were still being kept secret, so that the participants wouldn't be influenced by each others' responses when dealing with follow-up questions that might come at some point.

The control room had large floor tiles set on the diagonal, alternating in a checkerboard of beige and brown; it made Don more dizzy to look at them than it did to look out the angled window at the gigantic dish, and the 6oo-ton triangular instrumentation platform mounted above it.

Scientists, press, and a few other spouses were jammed into the control room. Electric fans were sitting on pieces of equipment or clamped to them, but, even though it was still early in the morning, the heat was oppressive. Don looked on as Sarah sat down at the central L-shaped desk and brought up the response on her notebook. He'd suggested she come up with a memorable phrase—her own "one small step" speech—but she'd declined; the important message was what was going to be transmitted, not anything she said. And so, with nothing more than an "All right, here we go!," Sarah clicked the on-screen button, and the word "Transmitting" appeared on the notebook's display.

Shouts went up and champagne appeared. Don stood at the periphery, enjoying seeing Sarah so happy. After a bit, the beefy, silver-haired representative of the International Astronomical Union started tapping on the side of his champagne glass with a Mont Blanc pen until he had everyone's attention.

"Sarah," he said, "we've got a little something for you." He opened one of the metal lockers mounted to the walls. Inside was a trophy, with a marble base, a central column with blue silk inserts, and, on top, winged Athena stretching toward the stars. The man bent down, picked it up, and held it at an angle in front of him, as though he were appraising a large bottle of wine. And then, in a loud, clear voice, he read out the inscription on the plaque for all to hear. " 'For Sarah Halifax,' " he said, " 'who figured it out.
 

Don climbed up the stairs, leaving Lenore's basement apartment. It was past 11:00 p.m., and as Lenore had said, it was a rough neighborhood. But that wasn't why his heart was pounding.

What had he done?

It had all happened so quickly, although he supposed he was naive to not have realized how Lenore had expected the evening to turn out. But it had been sixty years since he'd really been in his twenties, and, even then, he'd missed the sexual revolution by a decade. The free love of the 1960s had been a little too early for him; like Vietnam and Watergate, they were things he had only vague childhood recollections of, and certainly no firsthand experience.

When, at fifteen, he'd started his own fumbling forays into sexuality—at least, with a partner—people had been afraid of disease. And already one girl in his class at Humberside had gotten pregnant, and that had also had a chilling effect on promiscuity. And so, even though the morality of sex had not been at issue back then—everyone of Don's generation wanted to do it, and few, at least in the middle-class Toronto suburb he grew up in, thought there was anything wrong with doing it before getting married—the act itself was still treated as a big deal, although, given what was to come a decade later, the fear of getting gonorrhea or crabs seemed downright quaint.

But how did the saying go?
Everything old is new again.
AIDS had been conquered, thank God—just about everyone Don's age knew someone who had died from that miserable plague. Most other forms of sexually transmitted disease had been wiped out, or were trivial to cure. And safe, virtually infallible, over-the-counter birth-control drugs for men and women were available here in Canada. That, coupled with a general loosening up, had led to a second era of sexual openness not seen since the heyday of Haight-Ashbury, Rochdale College, and, yes, the Beatles.

But, as Don continued along the cracked sidewalk, he knew all of that was rationalization. It didn't matter what the morality of young people today was; that wasn't his world. What mattered was what his generation—his and Sarah's—thought. He'd managed sixty years without ever once straying, and now, suddenly—
boom!

As he rounded off of Euclid onto Bloor, he took out his datacom. "Call Sarah," he said; he needed to hear her voice.

"Hello?"

"Hi, sweetheart," he said. "How—how was the play?"

"It was fine. The guy playing Tevye didn't have a strong enough voice, I thought, but it was still good. How were your wings?"

"Great. Great. I'm just heading to the subway now."

"Oh, okay. Well, I won't wait up."

"No, no. Don't. Just leave my pajamas in the bathroom for me."

"Okay. See you later."

"Right. And..."

"Yes."

"I love you, Sarah."

She sounded surprised when she replied. "I love you, too."

"And I'm on my way home."
 

"But I still don't get it," Don had said, back in 2009, after Sarah had figured out that the first message from Sigma Draconis was a survey. "I don't see why aliens should care what we think about morals and ethics. I mean, why would they give a damn?"

Sarah and Don were out for another one of their nightly walks. "Because," Sarah said, as they passed the Feins' place, "all races
will
face comparable problems as time goes on, and if the race has any individual psychological variation—which it will, unless they've done as you suggest and become a hive mind—they'll be debating those issues."

"Why do you say they must have psychological variation?" he asked.

"Because variation is the
sine qua non
of evolution: without variation, there's nothing for natural selection to act upon, and without natural selection, there's nothing to lift a species up out of the slime. Psychology is no different from any other complex trait: it's going to show variation, everywhere in the universe. And that means there'll be arguments over fundamental issues."

"Okay," he said. There was a cool breeze; he wished he'd worn a long-sleeve shirt. "But the moral issues
they
argue about and the ones
we
argue about aren't going to be the same."

Sarah shook her head. "Actually, I bet they
will
be facing the same sorts of questions we are, because advances in science will always lead to the same basic moral quandaries."

He kicked a pebble. "Like what?"

"Well, consider abortion. It was advancing science that propelled that into being a mainstream issue; the technology to reliably terminate a fetus without killing or maiming the mother is a scientific innovation. We
can
do this now, but
should
we do it?"

"But," he said, "suppose the Dracons really are dragons—you know, suppose they're reptiles. I know they probably aren't; I know the name refers to the constellation they happen to be in from our point of view. But bear with me. If you had a race of intelligent reptiles, then abortion isn't a technological issue. Smashing the egg in the nest doesn't physically harm the mother in any way."

"Yeah, okay, granted," she said. The pebble Don had kicked was now in her path, and she sent it skittering ahead. "But that's not the counterpart of abortion; the counterpart of abortion would be destroying the fertilized egg before it's laid while it's still inside the mother."

"But some fish reproduce by having the female eject unfertilized eggs into the water, and the male eject semen into the water, so that fertilization takes place outside the female's body."

"Okay, all right," said Sarah. "Beings like that wouldn't have the abortion issue in precisely the same way, but, then again, like I said on
As It Happens
, aquatic beings probably don't have radio or other technology."

"But, still,
why
is abortion a moral issue? I mean, it is for people here because we believe at some point a soul enters the body; we just can't all agree on
what
that point is. But the alien message made no mention of souls."

'"Souls' is just a shorthand for discussing the question of when life begins, and that
will
be a universal debate—at least among those races who practice SETI."

"Why?"

"Because SETI is an activity that says life, as opposed to non-life, is important, that finding life is meaningful. If you didn't care about the distinction between life and nonlife, all you'd do would be astronomy, not SETI. And where to draw that distinction will always be of interest to people who value life. I mean, most people would agree it's wrong to kill a dog for no reason, because a dog is clearly alive—but is an embryo alive?
That's
debatable; every race will have to define when life begins."

"Well, it either begins at conception or at birth, no?"

Sarah shook her head. "No. Even here on Earth, there are cultures that don't name kids until they've lived forty days, and I've even heard it argued that babies aren't people until they turn three or so—until they begin to form long-term, permanent memories. And even then, there's still room for moral debate. We know the Dracons reproduce sexually, shuffling their genes while doing so; that was clear from their message. And I rather suspect, by the way, that that sort of reproduction will be common throughout the universe: it provides a huge kick to evolution, getting a new genetic hand dealt with every generation instead of having to wait around for a cosmic ray to induce a random mutation in a being that otherwise just reproduces exact copies of itself. Remember, life first appeared on this planet four billion years ago, and it spent the first three and a half billion of those years basically the same. But when sex was invented half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian explosion—
boom!
—suddenly evolution was proceeding by leaps and bounds. And any race that reproduces sexually might very well still argue about the ethics of destroying a unique combination of genetic material even if they've always held that such a thing wasn't alive until the moment of birth."

Don frowned. "That's like saying it's a moral quandary to worry about destroying snowflakes. Just because something is unique doesn't make it valuable—especially when
everything
in that class of entities is unique."

A chipmunk scampered across the road in front of them. "Besides," continued Don, "speaking of evolution, doesn't the abortion issue ultimately take care of itself, given enough time? I mean, natural selection obviously would favor those people who actually put into practice being pro-life over those who actually choose to personally have abortions, because every fetus you abort is one less set of your genes around. You wait enough generations, and being pro-choice should be bred out of the population."

"Good grief!" Sarah said, shaking her head. "What a revolting thought! But, even so, that's only true if the desire for reproductive choice is merely one of passing convenience, and has nothing to do with whether the kid will make it to reproductive age without too many resources being invested. I mean, look at Barb and Barry—they've essentially devoted their whole lives to raising Freddie." Barb was Sarah's cousin; her son was severely autistic. "I love Freddie, of course, but in effect, he's replaced potential siblings who would have required a fraction of the investment and would have been far more likely to provide Barb and Barry with grandchildren."

"You know as well as I do that a vanishingly small number of abortions are because the fetus is defective," said Don. "Hell, we've had abortion for centuries, and only had prenatal screening for decades. Infanticide, that's another thing, but..."

"Postpartum depression has its evolutionary roots in the mother recognizing that she has insufficient resources to insure that this particular offspring will survive to reproductive age, and so the mother conserves her parental investment by cutting her losses and failing to bond with the infant. No matter how you slice it, evolution
will
conserve mechanisms that don't always lead to simply having the most offspring. Anyway, setting aside abortion, I still think most races
will
face very similar moral issues as they develop technology that expands their powers. I know the aliens didn't mention God—"

"That's right," Don said smugly.

"—but every race that survives long enough will eventually struggle with the ramifications of getting to
play
God."

It was growing dark; the streetlights flickered on. " 'God' is a very loaded term," he said.

"Maybe so, but we don't have a lot of synonyms for the concept: if you define God as the creator of the universe, all races that live long enough eventually become Gods."

"Huh?"

"Think about it. We'll eventually be able to simulate reality so well that it will be indistinguishable from ... well, from reality, right?"

"One of my favorite authors once said, 'Virtual reality is nothing but air guitar writ large.' "

She snorted, then continued: "And a sufficiently complex virtual reality could simulate living beings so well that they themselves will actually think they're alive."

"I suppose," he said.

"For sure. Have you seen that game
The Sims
that Carl likes to play? The simulations of reality we can make today are already amazing, and we've only had digital computers for—what?—sixty-five years now. Imagine what sort of reality you could simulate if you had a thousand or a million or a billion times more computing power at hand—which we, or any technological race that lives long enough, eventually will. Again, where do you draw the line between life and nonlife? What rights do those simulated lifeforms have? Those are moral issues all races will have to face."