Rollback

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 not signaling their existence?" she asked.