Rollback

"We should play sometime. I can get you a guest pass to Hart House."

"That’d be great," Don said. And he meant it. He’d been sedentary the first time he’d been this age; now, he was loving the sheer physicality of being alive. "You realize I’m going to beat your pants, off, though. I mean, I’m medically enhanced."

She grinned. "Oh, yeah?"

"Sure. Just call me Bjorn Borg."

She looked at him, totally baffled, and his heart fell a bit. Sarah would have gotten the joke.

"Um," he said, painfully aware of Johnny Carson’s dictum that it isn’t funny if you have to explain it, "Bjorn Borg was a famous tennis player; won Wimbledon five times in a row. And the Borg, well, they’re this alien race on an old TV show called Star Trek. The Borg augment their bodies with technology, so, um…"

"You are a supremely silly man," Lenore said, smiling warmly at him.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and looked — really looked, for the first time — at Lenore.

She was a grad student studying SETI.

She liked to eat in restaurants, to talk about philosophy and politics.

She was confident and funny and a joy to be with.

And now she was even talking like—

But he’d missed putting it together until just now. She reminded him of—

Of course. Of course.

She reminded him of Sarah as she’d been back in her twenties, back when Don had fallen in love with her.

Oh, true, they looked nothing alike physically, and perhaps that’s why he’d failed to notice all the other similarities when they’d been together before. Lenore was shorter than Sarah, or, at least, shorter than Sarah had been in her prime. And Sarah had originally had brown hair, and still had blue-gray eyes, while Lenore was redheaded, freckled, and green-eyed.

But in spirit, in attitude, in the joy they took in life, they were kindred spirits.

Coming toward them was a young couple: an Asian woman and a white man, the man pushing a stroller. Don was wearing sunglasses — as was Lenore — so he felt no compunction about looking at the beautiful young woman, with long black hair, wearing pink shorts and a red tank top.

"Cute kid," said Lenore.

"Um, yeah," said Don. He hadn’t even noticed.

"Do you — do you like kids?" Lenore asked, a tentative note in her voice.

"Sure. Of course."

"Me, too," she said.

There was a park bench on the grass a short distance from the walkway, facing back across the water toward the city. Don pointed at it with his chin, and they went over and sat. He put his arm around her shoulders, and they stared out at the water, watching a ferry coming toward them.

"Do you want to have kids of your own?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah. Definitely."

"How soon?"

She leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair was blowing a bit in the breeze, occasionally gently slapping his cheek. "Oh, I don’t know. By the time I’m thirty, I suppose. I know that’s a long time from now, but…"

She trailed off, but he found himself shaking his head. Five years would go by like that; it seemed only yesterday he’d been in his seventies. Hell, it hardly seemed that long ago that he’d been in his sixties. The years just fly by, and—

And he wondered if that would still be true. He’d certainly experienced the phenomenon of time seeming to pass more quickly as he’d gotten older, and he’d read the pop-psychology explanation for it: that, when you’re a kid of ten, each year is a whopping ten percent of your life to date, and so seems ponderously long, but by the time you’re fifty, each year is just two percent of your life, and so passes in the wink of an eye. He wondered what would happen to his time sense now that he was young again. He’d be one of the first people ever to get to test the validity of the standard explanation.

Lenore said nothing more; she just looked out at the lake. Still, it was ironic, he realized. She was thinking farther into the future than he was. But he’d thought he was done with the future, and, although he knew that poem, too, he hadn’t planned on raging against the dying of the light…

In five years, Lenore would likely have a Ph.D., and be well on her way in her career.

And in five years, Sarah would probably be…

He hated to think about it, but it was all but inevitable. By 2053, Sarah would almost certainly be gone, and he’d—

He’d be alone. Unless—

Unless he…

Unless he found somebody else.

But he’d seen at the grad students’ wing night just how vapid most twenty-five-year-olds were. People who shared his apparent physical age would never appeal to him intellectually, emotionally. Lenore, somehow, was different, and—

And it was way too soon to go further with this conversation, but the reality was clear: his future with Lenore, or, he imagined, with just about any woman who was as young as he looked, would depend on his being willing to be a father again.

But, God, to have more kids! Could he face late-night feedings, and changing diapers, and being a disciplinarian?

And yet…