Rollback

He was about to say, "Then you should listen to me when I tell you what I’ve learned." But he stopped himself before the words got free. "It’s not my fault that I’m old," he said.

"I know that!" she snapped. And then, the same words again, but more softly: "I know that. But, well, do you have to rub it in my face?"

Don was leaning against the sink now. "I don’t mean to. But you think stuff like a few bucks in interest is a disaster, and—"

"It’s not a disaster," Lenore said, sounding exasperated. "But it does make my life hard, and—" She must have seen him move his head a bit. "What?" she demanded.

"Nothing."

"No, tell me."

"You don’t know hard," he said. "Burying a parent, that’s hard. Having a spouse go through cancer is hard. Getting screwed out of a promotion you deserve because of office politics is hard. Suddenly having to spend $20,000 you don’t have on a new roof is hard."

"Actually," she said, rather stiffly, "I do know what some of those things are like.

My mother died in a car crash when I was eighteen."

Don felt his jaw dropping. He’d avoided asking her about her parents, doubtless because he felt way too in loco parentis when he was with her.

"I never knew my dad," she continued, "so it fell to me to look after my brother Cole. He was thirteen then. That’s why I work now, you know. I’ve got enough graduate support to cover my current expenses, but I’m still trying to dig out from the debt I ran up taking care of Cole and me."

"I’m, um…"

"You’re sorry. Everybody is."

"Was… wasn’t there any life insurance?"

"My mom couldn’t afford that."

"Oh. Um, how did you manage?"

She lifted her shoulders. "Let’s just say there’s a reason I have a soft spot in my heart for food banks."

He was embarrassed and contrite, and didn’t know what to say. Still, it explained why she seemed so much more mature to him than her contemporaries did. When he had been her age, he was still living cozily with his parents, but Lenore had been out in the world for seven years, and had spent part of that time raising a teenager.

"Where’s Cole now?" he said.

"Back in Vancouver. He moved in with his girlfriend just before I came out here to do my master’s."

"Ah."

"I do let most things go," she said. "You know that. But when it comes to someone taking my money — when you’ve had so little, you…" She shrugged slightly.

Don looked at her. "I — I haven’t been conscious of being condescending because of my age," he said slowly, "but now that you’ve alerted me to it, I’ll try to be more…" He trailed off, he knew that when he was under emotional stress his vocabulary tended to the highfalutin. But he couldn’t think of a better term just then, and so he said it: "Vigilant."

"Thanks," she said, nodding slightly.

"I don’t say I’ll always get it right. But I really will be trying."

"You certainly will be," she said, with the sort of long-suffering smile he was more used to seeing from Sarah. Don found himself smiling back at her, and he opened his arms, inviting her to stand up and step into them. She did so, and he squeezed her tight.

Chapter 33

Sarah’s broken leg was still bothering her, but Gunter was a godsend, gladly bringing her fresh cups of decaf while she sat at the desk in the room that used to be Carl’s.

She was still working with the stack of papers Don had brought from the university — a hardcopy of the reply that had been sent to Sigma Draconis from Arecibo, and the source material it was based on: the one thousand sets of survey answers that had been chosen at random from those collected on the website. The decryption key must be somewhere buried in there, Sarah felt sure.

It had been decades since Sarah had looked at these documents and she only vaguely remembered them. But Gunter had merely to glance at each page to be able to index it, and so when Sarah said, for instance, "I remember a pair of answers that struck me as contradictory — somebody who said ‘yes’ to the question about terminating no-longer-productive old people, and ‘yes’ to the question about not terminating people who were an economic burden," the robot had replied, "That’s in survey number 785."

Still, she found herself often angry and sometimes even crying in frustration. She couldn’t think as clearly as she used to. Perhaps that wasn’t obvious in her day-to-day life of cooking and dealing with grandkids, but it was painfully clear when she tried to puzzle things out, tried to do math in her head, tried to concentrate, to think. And she grew fatigued so easily; she found herself often needing to lie down, which just prolonged the work even more.

Of course, many people had already gone back to look at the message sent from Arecibo to see if it contained the decryption key. And, she realized, if those keen young minds hadn’t found it, she likely didn’t have a prayer.