Rollback (27 page)

"You sit down," Don said, when they'd finally made it into the kitchen. Although he knew he shouldn't, he found Sarah's slow, methodical movements frustrating to watch. And, besides, he ate three times as much food as she did these days; he
should
do the work. "Gunter," he said—loudly, but certainly not yelling; it wasn't necessary to yell. The Mozo appeared almost at once. "You and I are going to make dinner," he said to the robot.

Sarah slowly lowered herself onto one of the three wooden chairs that encircled the little kitchen table. As Don and Gunter moved about the cramped space, getting down a pot and a frying pan and finding ingredients in the fridge, he felt her eyes upon him.

"What's wrong?" she asked at last.

He hadn't said anything, and he'd taken pains not to bang cookware or utensils together. But Sarah had known him for so long now, and even if the veneer on his body had changed his body language doubtlessly hadn't. Whether it had been the way he'd been hanging his head, or simply the fact that he wasn't speaking except to give Gunter the occasional perfunctory instruction that tipped her off, he couldn't say. But he couldn't hide his moods from her. Still, he tried to deny it, futile though he knew that would be. "Nothing."

"Did something go wrong downtown today?" she asked.

"No. I'm just tired, that's all." He said it while bent over a chopping board, but stole a sideways glance at her, to gauge her reaction.

"Is there anything I can do?" she asked, her brow knitted in concern.

"No," said Don, and he allowed himself one more, final lie—just this one last time. "I'll be fine."
 

-- Chapter 36 --

Sarah woke with a start. Her heart was pounding probably more vigorously than was healthy at her age. She looked over at the digital clock. It was 3:02 a.m. Next to her lay Don, his breathing making a gentle sound with each exhale.

The idea that had roused her was so exciting she thought about waking him, but, no, she wouldn't do that. After all, it
was
a long shot, and he'd been having so much trouble sleeping lately.

Her side of the bed was the one near the window. A million years ago, when they'd chosen who would sleep where, Don had said she should have that side so she could look out at the stars anytime she wished. It was an ordeal getting out of bed. Her joints were stiff, and her back hurt, and her leg was still healing. But she managed it, pushing off her nightstand, forcing herself to her feet as much through an effort of will as through bodily strength.

She took small, shuffling steps toward the door, paused and steadied herself for a moment by holding on to the jamb, then continued out into the corridor and made her way to the study.

The computer's screen was blank, but it came to life the moment she touched the scroller, bringing up a suitably dim image for viewing in the darkened room.

Within moments, Gunter was there. He'd been downstairs, Sarah imagined, but he'd doubtless heard her stir. "Are you all right?" he asked. He had lowered the volume of his voice so much that Sarah could only just make it out.

She nodded. "I'm fine," she whispered. "But there's something I've got to check out."

Sarah loved stories—even apocryphal ones—about
ah hah!
moments: Archimedes jumping out of his bath and running naked down the streets of Athens shouting "Eureka!," Newton watching an apple fall (although she preferred the even-less-likely version about him being hit on the head by a falling apple), August Kekule waking up with the solution to the structure of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake biting its own tail.

In her whole career, Sarah had only ever had one such epiphany: that time, long ago, while playing Scrabble in this very house, when she'd realized how to arrange the text of the first message from Sigma Draconis.

But now, perhaps, she was having another.

Her grandson Percy had asked her about her views on abortion, and she'd told him that she'd gone back and forth on some of the tricky points.

And she had, her whole life.

But what she'd remembered just now was another night, like this one, when she'd woken at 3:00 a.m. That night had been Sunday, February 28, 2010, the day before the response to the initial Dracon message was to be sent from Arecibo. She and Don were in their VSQ cabin at the Arecibo Observatory, the fronds slapping against its wooden walls making a constant background hushing sound.

She'd decided she wasn't happy with her answer to question forty-six. She'd said "yes," the mother's wishes should always trump the father's during a mutually desired pregnancy, but then she'd found herself leaning toward "no." And so Sarah had gotten out of the narrow bed. She fired up her notebook, which contained the master version of the data that would be transmitted the next day, changed her answer to that one question, and recompiled the response file. Her notebook would be interfaced to the big dish tomorrow,
and
this revised version would be the one actually sent.

It didn't matter much, she'd thought at the time, in the grand scheme of things, what one person out of a thousand said in response to any one question, but Carl Sagan's words had echoed in her head. "Who speaks for the Earth? We do."
I do.
And Sarah had wanted to give the Dracons the truest, most honest answer she could.

By that point, copies of the supposedly finalized reply had already been burned to CD-ROM, and the backup hardcopy printout Don had recently retrieved from U of T had already been made. Sarah had forgotten all about that night in Puerto Rico, some thirty-eight years in the past, until moments ago.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Gunter asked.

"Just keep me company," Sarah said.

"Of course."

While Gunter looked over her shoulder, she began to softly dictate instructions to the computer, telling it to bring up a copy of her old set of responses to the Dracon questionnaire.

"Okay," she said to the computer. "Go to my answer to question forty-six."

The highlight on the screen moved.

"Now, change that answer to 'no,'" she said.

The display updated appropriately.

"Now, let's recompile all my answers. First..." and she went on, giving instructions that were dutifully executed.

"Your pulse is elevated," said Gunter. "Are you okay?"

Sarah smiled. "It's called excitement. I'll be fine." She addressed the computer again, fighting to keep her voice steady: "Copy the compiled string into the clipboard. Bring up the reply we received from the Dracons ... Okay, load the decryption algorithm they provided." She paused to take a deep, calming breath. "All right, now paste in the clipboard contents, and run the algorithm."

The screen instantly changed, and—

Eureka!

There it was: long sequences spelled out in the vocabulary established in the first message. Sarah hadn't looked at Dracon ideograms in decades, but she recognized a few at once. That block was the symbol for "equals," that upside-down T meant "good." But, like any language, if you don't use it, you lose it, and she couldn't read the rest. No matter. There were several programs available that could transliterate Dracon symbols, and Sarah told her computer to feed the displayed text into one of those. At once, the screen was filled with a rendering of the alien message in the English notation she had devised all those years ago.

Sarah used the scroller to quickly page through screen after screen of decrypted text; the message was massive. Gunter, of course, could read the screens as fast as they were displayed, and he surprised Sarah at one point by very softly saying, "Wow." After a bit, Sarah jumped back to the beginning, adrenaline surging. Most of the introductory text was displayed as black, but some words and symbols were color-coded, indicating a degree of confidence in the translation—the meanings of some Dracon terms were generally agreed upon; others were still contentious. But the gist was obvious, even if a few subtleties were perhaps being lost, and, as she took it all in, she shook her head slowly in amazement and delight.
 

Don woke up a little before 6:00 a.m., some noise or other having disturbed him. He rolled over and saw that Sarah wasn't there, which was unusual this early in the morning. He rolled the other way, looking into the little
en suite
, but she wasn't there, either. Concerned, he got out of bed, headed out into the corridor, and—

And there she was, and Gunter, too, in the study.

"Sweetheart!" Don said, entering the room. "What are you doing up so early?"

"She has been up for two hours and forty-seven minutes," Gunter said helpfully.

"Doing what?" Don asked

Sarah looked at him, and he could see the wonder on her face. "I did it," she said. "I figured out the decryption key."

Don hurried across the room. He wanted to pull her up out of the chair, hug her, swing her around—but he couldn't do any of those things. Instead, he bent down and kissed her gently on the top of her head. "That's fabulous! How'd you do it?"

"The decryption key was my set of answers," she said.

"But I thought you'd tried that."

She told him about the last-minute change she'd made in Arecibo. While she did so, Gunter knelt next to her, and began scrolling rapidly through pages on the screen.

"Ah," Don said. "But wait—wait! If it's your answers that un-locked it,
that means the message is for you personally
."

Sarah nodded her head very slowly, as if she herself couldn't believe it. "That's right."

"Wow. You really do have a pen pal!"

"So it would seem," she said softly.

"So, what does the message say?"

"It's a—a blueprint, I guess you could call it."

"You mean for a spaceship? Like in
Contact
?"

"No. Not for a spaceship." She looked briefly at Gunter, then back at Don. "For a Dracon."

"What?"

"The bulk of the message is the Dracon genome, and related biochemical information."

He frowned. "Well, um, I guess that'll be fascinating to study."

"We're not supposed to study it," Sarah said. "Or at least, that's
not all
we're supposed to do."

"What then?"

"We're supposed to"—she paused, presumably seeking a word—"to
actualize
it."

"Sorry?"

"The message," she said, "also includes instructions for making an artificial womb and an incubator."

Don felt his eyebrows going up. "You mean they want us to
grow
one of them ?"

"That's right."

"Here? On Earth?"

She nodded. "You've said it yourself. The only thing SETI is good for is the transmission of information. Well, DNA is nothing but that—information! And they've sent us all the info we need to make one of them."

"To make a Dracon baby?"

"Initially. But it'll grow up to be a Dracon adult."

There was only one chair in the room. Don moved so he could perch on the desk, and Sarah swiveled to face him. "But ... but it won't be able to breathe our atmosphere. It won't be able to eat our food."

Sarah motioned at the screen, although Don could no longer see what was on it. "They give the composition of the air it will require: needed gases and their acceptable percentages, a list of gases that are poisonous, the tolerable range of air pressure, and so on. You're right that it won't be able to breathe our air directly; we've got too much CO
₂
in our atmosphere, for one thing. But with a filter mask, it should be fine. And they've given us the chemical formulas for the various foodstuffs it will need. I'm afraid Atkins didn't catch on beyond Earth; it's mostly carbohydrates."

"What about—I don't know, what about gravity?"

"Sigma Draconis II has a surface gravity about one and a third times our own. It should have no trouble with ours."

Don looked at Gunter, appealing to the robot's rationality. "This is crazy. This is nuts."

But Gunter's glass eyes were implacable, and Sarah simply said, "Why?"

"Who would send a baby to another planet?"

"They're not sending a baby. Nothing is traveling."

"All right, fine. But what's the point, then?"

"Did you ever read—oh, what was his name, now?"

Don frowned. "Yes?"

"Damn it," said Sarah, softly. She turned to face Gunter. "Who wrote 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' "

The Mozo, still looking at pages of text, said at once, "Thomas Nagel."

Sarah nodded. "Nagel, exactly! Have you ever read him, Don?"

He shook his head.

"That paper dates back to the 19702, and—"

"October 1974," supplied Gunter. "—it's one of the most famous in all of philosophy. Just like the title says, it asks, 'What's it like to be a bat?' And the answer is, fundamentally, we'll never know. We can't even begin to guess what it's like to have echolocation, to perceive the world in a totally different way. Well, only a flesh-and-blood Dracon, with Dracon senses, can report to the home world what it's really like, from a Dracon's point of view, here on Earth."

"So they want us to make a Dracon who'll grow up to do that?"

She shrugged a bit. "For thousands of years, people on Earth have been born to be kings. Why shouldn't someone be born to be an ambassador?"

"But think of the existence it would have here, all alone."

"It doesn't have to be. If we can make one, we can make several. Of course, they'll be genetically identical, like twins, and—"

"Actually, Sarah," said Gunter, standing back up now, "I've been reading further into the document. It's true that they only sent one master genome, but they've appended a tiny subset of modifications that can be substituted into the master sequence to make a second individual. Apparently, the DNA code provided was taken from two pair-bonded Dracons. Any living expressions of that DNA would be clones of those individuals."

" 'If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy...' " said Don. "At least they'll each know who to ask to the prom." He paused. "But, I mean, how do we even know that they've sent the genome for an actual, intelligent Dracon? It could be the genome for some, y'know, vicious monster, or for a plague germ."