Rollback (32 page)

Silence.

"Damn it, Cody! We can't do this if I can't trust you."

"That robot is
mine
," McGavin said. "He's on loan from my company—so everything in his memories is
my
property."

"There's nothing in his memories now," snapped Don.

"I—I know," said McGavin. "I'm sorry. If I'd thought for one second that he'd—" Silence for a time, then: "No robot has ever done that before."

"You could take a lesson from him," said Don, sharply. "A lesson in loyalty."

McGavin's tone grew stiff; doubtless he was almost never spoken to like this. "Well, since the Mozo was loaned to Sarah, to help her, maybe I should—"

Don felt his pulse racing. "No, please—don't take him back. I..."

McGavin still sounded angry. "What?"

Don shrugged a little, although there was no way McGavin could see it. "He's family."

A long pause, then an audible intake of breath. "All right," said McGavin. "If it'll make things right between us, you can keep him."

Silence.

"Are we okay, Don?"

Don was still furious. If he'd really been twenty-six, he might have continued fighting. But he wasn't; he knew when to back down. "Yeah."

"All right." McGavin's tone slowly regained its warmth. "Because we're making good initial progress on the artificial womb, but, God, it's tough. Every part has to be machined from scratch, and there are technologies involved my engineers have never seen before..."
 

Don looked around the living room. The mantel now had dozens of sympathy cards on it, each one dutifully printed out and folded by Gunter. Don lamented the death of paper mail, but he supposed sending streams of data that could be reconstituted by the recipient was appropriate under the circumstances.

One of the sympathy cards was propped up by the trophy the IAU had given Sarah. Another was leaning against Don and Sarah's wedding photo in a way that covered the image of Don. He walked over to the mantel, moved that card, and looked at Sarah as she had been, and at himself, back when he'd been in his twenties the first time around.

There were flowers, too, both real and virtual. A vase of roses sat on the little table between the couch and the La-Z-Boy; a projection of pink carnations hovered above the coffee table. He remembered how much Sarah had enjoyed planting flowers in her youth, how she still gardened well into her seventies, how she'd once described the Very Large Array as looking like God's flower bed.

As he looked at the cards some more, Don became conscious of movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned and beheld the round blue face of Gunter.

"I'm sorry that your wife is gone," the robot said, and its emoticon line was turned downward at the ends in a way that might have been comical in other circumstances but just now seemed touchingly genuine.

Don regarded the machine. "Me, too," he said softly.

"I hope it was not presumptuous," said the robot, "but I have read what is written in these cards." He tilted his head at the mantel. "She sounds like a remarkable woman."

"That she was," Don said. He didn't enumerate them out loud, but the categories ran through his head: wife, mother, friend, teacher, scientist, and, earlier, daughter and sister. So many roles, and she'd filled them all well.

"If I may ask, what did people say about her at the funeral?"

"I'll show you the footage later."

Footage.
The word echoed in Don's head. No one used the term anymore. It referred to an obsolete technology and a measuring system that had all but passed out of living memory.

"Thank you," said Gunter. "I wish I had known her."

Don looked at the unblinking glass eyes for a time. "I'm going to go to the cemetery tomorrow," he said. "Would—would you like to come with me?"

The Mozo nodded. "Yes. I would like that very much."
 

York Cemetery's northern border was marked by the back fences of the houses on Park Home Avenue, and Park Home was just one block south of Betty Ann Drive, so Don and Gunter simply walked there. Don wondered if any of his neighbors were watching them through their windows, or zooming in on them with their security cameras: the robot and the rollback, two miracles of modern science, marching along, side by side.

After a few minutes, they reached the gated entrance. When Sarah and he had bought their house, its proximity to a cemetery had depressed its value. Now it was seen as a plus, since green spaces of any type were so rare these days. And, fortunately, they'd bought the plot here early on; they'd never have been able to afford the luxury of interment today.

Don and Gunter had to walk along a path for several hundred meters to get to where Sarah was buried. Gunter was looking around with what Don could have sworn were wide eyes. Tested in a factory, and then used exclusively since his memory wipe inside a house, the robot had never seen so many trees and such wide expanses of manicured lawns.

At last they came to the spot. The hole had been filled in, and new sod covered the grave, a scar of dirt outlining it.

Don looked over at the robot, who, in turn was looking toward the headstone. "The inscription is off-center," Gunter said. Don turned to it. Sarah's name and details were confined to the right half of the oblong block of granite.

"I'll be buried here, too," said Don. "My information will be added on the other side."

Sarah's half said:

Don looked at the blankness onto which his own dates would someday be written. The death year would likely start with a two and a one, he supposed: nineteen-sixty to twenty-one-something. His poor, darling Sarah would likely lie here alone for the better part of a century.

He felt a tightness in his chest. He hadn't cried much at the funeral. The strain of greeting so many people, the rushing to and fro—he'd endured it all in a state of near shock, he supposed, ferried about by Emily.

But now there was no more rushing around. Now, he was alone except for Gunter, and he was exhausted, emotionally and physically.

He looked again at the headstone, the letters blurring.

Beloved wife.

Beloved mother.

The tears started coming in force, streaming down his too-smooth cheeks, and, after valiantly trying to stay standing on his own for maybe half a minute, Don collapsed against Gunter. And whether it was a behavior he'd been programmed with, or whether it was something he'd seen on TV, or whether it had just spontaneously emerged didn't really matter, but Don could feel the flat of Gunter's hand patting him gently, soothingly, in the center of his back as the robot held him.
 

Don remembered wondering whether time would pass quickly or slowly for him now that he was young again. One possibility was that years might crawl by the way they had in his actual youth, each one seeming to take forever to run its course.

But that wasn't what happened. Before Don knew it, more than a full year had slipped by: the calendar freshly read 2050, and he was twenty-seven and he was also eighty-nine.

But, even if its passage had seemed rapid, that year did change things, although he did still find himself often just staring into space, thinking about Sarah and—

And—

No. Just about Sarah; only about Sarah. He knew she was the only one who should be in his thoughts, although—

Although Lenore doubtless knew that Sarah had died. For the first few weeks after her passing, Don had assumed he'd hear something from her. In a previous age, she might have sent a consolatory telegram or a paper card, neither of which would have invited dialogue, neither of which would have required a response. But these days Lenore's only real options would have been to phone, which certainly would have engendered a conversation, or to send an email, which netiquette would have required Don to reply to.

But as first one month and then another passed, Don realized she wasn't going to be in touch—which, he supposed, might have been just as well, for what could she have said? That she was sorry that Sarah was dead? And yet, wouldn't there have been, between the lines, too horrible to acknowledge directly but impossible to dismiss from consciousness, a concomitant thought that she was sorry Sarah hadn't died sooner? Not out of any animus but simply in recognition of the fact that Sarah's existence was what had ultimately kept Lenore and Don apart?

Every few weeks, he searched the web, looking at references to Sarah. There was so much about her, and even though most of it was quite old, it made it seem, in a strange way, like she was still around.

He never googled himself anymore, though. There was, as Randy Trenholm had said, lots of discussion of the peculiar circumstances of his rollback, and he found reading it made his stomach turn. But every now and then he did put in Lenore's name, to see what would come up. She had indeed finished her master's, and, as she'd said she'd hoped to, had now moved to Christchurch, and was working there on her doctorate.

He looked at whatever his searches found: references to her on the University of Canterbury website, citations of a paper she was junior author on, her occasional postings to political newsgroups, and video of her on a panel discussion at a conference in Tokyo. He watched the clip over and over again.

He would never get over the loss of Sarah; he knew that. But he
did
have to get on with life, and soon enough that life would change totally and completely, in ways he couldn't begin to guess. McGavin said the womb should be ready in a matter of weeks now. Of course, the gestation would take a while—seven months, according to the message the Dracons had sent.

Lenore had been out of his life for almost a year and a half now. It was too much to hope that she might still be free. And, even if she were free, maybe the whole
episode
(that was the word she'd use) was something she wanted to put behind her, anyway: the insane time during which she'd fallen for what she'd thought was a contemporary, only to discover to her shock and disgust that he was—that hated term again—an octogenarian.

And yet...

And yet, in the end, she seemed to have more or less come to terms with the reality of what he was, accepting his dual ages, his youthful exterior and his less-youthful interior. It would be a miracle to find someone else who could deal with that, and although this
was
the age of miracle and wonder, Don didn't believe in
that
kind of miracle.

Of course, he thought, a sensible man would contact Lenore by phone or email. A sensible man wouldn't fly halfway around the planet in the faint hope that he'd be greeted with open arms. But he wasn't a sensible man; he was a supremely silly one—both the women he'd loved had told him that.

And so...
 

And so, here he was, on a flight to New Zealand. As he took his seat on the plane, he realized he had a real advantage over the aliens on Sigma Draconis. The Dracons could only broadcast their messages into the darkness, and, unless a reply was sent back, they'd never even know if their signals had been received, and then not for years to come. He at least would see Lenore's face—and, he expected, that
was
all he'd need to see: the message it contained when she first laid eyes on him would be unguarded and honest, an unencrypted signal. And yet, what he'd give to know the answer now...

By that Heaven that bends above us—
by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if,
within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden
whom the angels named Lenore

Don had ended up with a window seat. That was perhaps a plum position on a domestic flight, but when one wanted to get up frequently to stretch one's legs, it meant disturbing, in this case, not one but two fellow passengers, one of whom, the one with the middle seat, adjacent to Don's, was a man of at least seventy-five. Don all too vividly remembered what it was like to try to haul himself to his feet, especially in a cramped, awkward space, at such an age, and so he mostly endured being trapped, alternating between looking out at the endless vistas of cloud tops and watching a succession of programs on his seat-back monitor.

About four hours into the flight the old man next to him struck up a conversation. "God eye," he said—and, after a moment, Don's brain decoded it as "Good day" filtered through an Australian accent. "Name's Roger." He must be heading home, Don presumed; this flight would continue on to Melbourne after its stop in Auckland, where Don himself would change planes for Christchurch.

"What were you doing in Toronto?" asked Don, after they had confirmed Roger's pedigree in conversation.

"Actually, I was in Huntsville," Roger said. "You know it?"

"Sure," said Don. "Cottage country."

"Bingo. My daughter lives there. Runs a B-and-B. And she just had a baby girl, so I had to go see."

Don smiled. "Grandkids are great."

Roger looked at him quizzically, but then nodded and said, "That they are, mate."

"Have you been to Canada before?" Don asked.

"This was my fourth trip, but..." His face, so full of delight when he mentioned his new granddaughter, now looked sad, and Don thought he was perhaps going to say it was likely to be his last time. But what he actually said was "It was my first time going on my own. My wife passed away last year."

Don's heart skipped a beat. "I'm sorry."

"Thanks. A wonderful woman, my Kelly was."

"I'm sure. How long were you married?"

"Fifty years. Fifty years and one week, actually. It was like she'd been holding on, wanting to make that milestone."

Don said nothing.

"I miss her so much," Roger said. "I miss her every day."

Don just listened as Roger talked about his wife, and the fine times they'd had together, and he resisted the almost overwhelming urge to say, "I know," or "Same here," or "That's just the way it was with Sarah and me."

Finally, though, Roger looked at him with an embarrassed expression. "Sorry," he said. "I guess I've been rambling. You'll have to forgive an old geezer."