Rollback

He closed his eyes. "Sure," he said. "Sure, why not?"

Don had arrived at the ferry docks at the foot of Bay Street about ten minutes early, and he kept scanning the crowds, looking for—

Ah, there she was: the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore. She came running over to him, in white short-shorts and a loose-fitting white top, clutching a giant sun hat. She stretched up and kissed him quickly on the mouth, and then pulled back, smiling, and—

And he was stunned. In his mind, he’d aged her forward: he’d been picturing her as being in her mid-thirties, which seemed a more appropriate age for someone he might want to talk to, but here she was, freckled and fresh-faced, looking ten years younger than that.

They boarded the Max Haines, a white, double-decker ferry, and took the kilometer-and-a-half journey to Centre Island, with its boardwalks, beaches, amusement park, and gardens.

Lenore had wanted to come down here, she said, because she missed the water. But the result was not proving entirely satisfactory: gulls eating garbage were no substitute for Vancouver’s great blue herons, and, besides, there was no salt tang to the air. Once they’d docked, they jogged for about half an hour. Don found that exhilarating, and he loved to feel his hair — yes, hair! — whipping in the breeze.

After that, they just strolled along a paved walkway, gingerly trying to avoid all the goose droppings. Off to their right was the bay, and across it was Toronto itself, with the skyline that Don had watched grow and spread over the better part of a century. It was still dominated by the CN Tower, once, but certainly no longer, the tallest freestanding structure in the world; as a teenager, he had gone downtown with his friend Ivan to watch a Sikorsky Skycrane assemble its huge components.

Blockish sky-scrapers, like the elements of a bar chart, trailed off left and right from the Tower. He recalled when Toronto’s downtown had been a tiny cluster of tall buildings, but now it went on and on along the lakeshore, west toward Mississauga, and east until the Scarborough Bluffs forced it to stop.

More than just the skyline had changed during Don’s lifetime — and yet some things hadn’t changed nearly as much as he’d expected. He remembered seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey with his dad when it had come out, back in 1968. The nice thing about being born in a year that ends in a zero was that it made math simple. Even as a kid, he knew he’d be forty-one in 2001, and his father, sitting next to him at Toronto’s Glendale Theatre, had been forty-three then, meaning Don would be younger than him when the wonders that film portrayed were supposed to come to pass: Pan Am space planes, giant wheel-shaped space stations with Howard Johnson hotels, cities on the moon, humans traveling out to Jupiter, cryogenic suspended animation, and — Open the pod-bay doors, Hal — true artificial intelligence.

But by the time the actual 2001 had rolled around, none of those things were realities.

So perhaps Don shouldn’t have been too surprised that the extravagant wonders predicted in the science fiction of the first decade of the new millennium likewise hadn’t materialized. The technological singularity had never happened; extreme body modification, either through genetic engineering or with artificial parts, never became popular; the nanotech assembler that could turn anything into anything else was still the stuff of dreams.

Don looked out over the water, back at the city he’d been born in. Nestled at the foot of the CN Tower was the stadium where the Blue Jays played. He pointed at it.

"See? The roof’s open on SkyDome."

Lenore looked at him as though he were speaking a foreign language, and—

Oh, shit. He still referred to it as SkyDome; so did lots of people his age. But that hadn’t been its name for over forty years. Christ, the gap between them was everywhere, in everything. "The Rogers Centre, I mean. The, um, the roof is open."

It was such a trivial observation, he was sorry now he’d made it.

"Well, it is a lovely day," said Lenore. It buoyed him that she made no further comment on what he’d said.

They were holding hands as they walked, skateboarders, hoverpadders, rollerbladers, and joggers passing them in both directions. She was wearing her big, floppy hat; with her pale skin, she doubtless burned easily. For his part, he was enjoying being out in the sun without having to wear a hat. After four decades of baldness, it was wonderful to have his own built-in protection.

They’d talked about this and that: a lively, animated conversation, so unlike — what had one of his friends called it? — the companionable silence of old married people who had, decades ago, run out of points of view to share or jokes to tell or issues to explore.

"Do you play tennis?" Lenore asked, as they passed a couple of people carrying racquets.

"I haven’t since…" Since before you were born.