Rollback

"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."

Chapter 25

"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?"