Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “So,” she continued, “I've got to find somebody else to do it, if we're going to do it at all."

  He considered this. “You could use that Flaxseed program to see who else of the original respondents had replies close to yours."

  She nodded. “I did that. Of the thousand sets of responses we sent, there were only two that were really close to mine. But God knows who they belonged to."

  “Didn't you keep records?"

  “It was an anonymous survey. Professional pollsters told us we'd get much more honest answers that way. Besides, even if we had asked for names, we wouldn't have been able to keep them. The website was at U of T, remember, and you know what Canadian privacy laws are like."

  “Ah.” He took a sip of coffee.

  “But even if we had the names, it might not have done any good."

  “Why not?"

  “As I said before, McGavin was probably right, back at his office, when he said that most advanced races would likely be very long-lived. Indeed, since the Dracons apparently have ring-shaped chromosomes, they might in fact have always lived a very long time, since they'd have avoided one of our principal causes of aging. Anyway, although it probably never even occurred to them that anyone they were replying to might be dead a mere thirty-eight years later, probably half of those who originally filled out the survey have passed on by now."

  “I suppose that's true,” he said.

  “But,” said Sarah, looking sideways at him, “you and I had very similar answers."

  “So you said."

  “So, maybe, I mean, if you wanted to..."

  “What?"

  “You could do it. You could look after the Dracon children."

  Don felt his eyebrows going up. “Me?"

  “Well, you and Gunter, I suppose.” She smiled. “I mean, he's a Mozo; he's designed to look after the elderly, but taking care of alien children can't be much more difficult than looking after a crazy old bat like me."

  Don's head was swimming. “I—I don't know what to say."

  “Well, think about it,” she said. “Because you're definitely my first choice."

  * * * *

  Months ago, when Sarah and Don were contemplating rolling back, Carl had said they'd have to do more babysitting—but that seemed to have fallen by the wayside when Sarah's rejuvenation had failed. But tonight Carl and Angela had dropped Percy and Cassie off at the house on Betty Ann. The ostensible reason was that the adults were going to see a hockey game, but Don suspected there was also a feeling that the children wouldn't have their grandmother much longer, and so they should spend time with her while they could.

  Percy was thirteen, all loose limbs and long hair. Cassie, at four, was a whirlwind with pigtails. Because of the age difference, it was hard to entertain them both together, so Cassie and Sarah had gone upstairs with Gunter to look at whatever treasures Sarah's closets held, and Don and Percy were on the couch in the living room, half-watching the same hockey game Percy's parents had gone to on the TV above the fireplace, and making their own game of trying to spot Carl and Angela in the crowd.

  “So,” Don said, muting the sound during a commercial break, “how's grade eight treating you?"

  Percy shifted on the couch a bit. “It's okay."

  “When I was a kid, we went all the way to grade thirteen."

  “Really?"

  “Yup. Ontario was the only place in North America that had that."

  “I'm glad we only have to go to grade twelve,” said Percy.

  “Yeah? Well, in grade thirteen we were old enough to write our own notes for missing class."

  “That'd be cool."

  “It was. But I actually had fun in grade thirteen. Lots of interesting courses. I even took Latin. It was practically the last year they taught that in public schools in Toronto."

  “Latin?” said Percy incredulously.

  Don nodded sagely. "Semper ubi sub ubi."

  “What's that mean?"

  “'Always wear underwear.’”

  Percy grinned.

  The game resumed. The Leafs were doing okay, although it was still early in the season. Don didn't really know the players anymore, but Percy did. “And,” Don said, when there was a lull in the play, “our school had a little radio station, Radio Humberside. I was involved with that in grade thirteen, and that's what got me into my career."

  Percy looked at him blankly; Don had retired long before he'd been born. “I used to work at CBC Radio,” Don said.

  “Oh, yeah. Dad listens to that in the car."

  Don smiled. He'd once had a friendly argument with a guy who wrote for the Canadian edition of Reader's Digest. “Better,” Don had said, “to produce something that people only listen to in the car than something they only read on the toilet."

  “So, when did you work there?” asked Percy.

  “I started in 1986 and left in 2022.” Don thought about adding, “And, to save you from asking, Sally Ng was prime minister when I retired,” but he didn't. Still, he remembered being Percy's age and thinking World War II was ancient history; 1986 must have sounded positively Pleistocene to Percy.

  They watched the game some more. The defenseman for Honolulu got three minutes for high-sticking. “So,” Don said, “any thoughts about what you're going to do—” He stopped himself from saying “when you grow up.” Percy doubtless thought he was plenty grown-up already—"when you finish school?"

  “I dunno,” he said, without taking his eyes off the screen. “Maybe go to university."

  “To study...?"

  “Well, except on weekends."

  Don smiled. “No, I meant, ‘To study what?’”

  “Oh. Maybe ornithology."

  Don was impressed. “You like birds?"

  “They're all right.” Another commercial break was upon them, and Don muted the sound. Percy looked at him, and then, maybe feeling that he wasn't holding up his end of the conversation, he said, “What about you?"

  Don blinked. “Me?"

  “Yeah. I mean, now that you're young again. What are you going to do?"

  “I don't know."

  “Have you thought about going back to the CBC?"

  “Actually, yeah."

  “And?"

  Don shrugged. “They don't want me. I've been out of the game too long."

  “That sucks,” Percy said, with a perplexed face, as if unused to the notion that life could be unfair to adults as well.

  “Yeah,” said Don, “it does."

  “So what are you going to do?"

  “I don't know."

  Percy considered for a time, then: “It should be something—you know—something important. I looked up how much a rollback costs. If you're lucky enough to get one of those, you should do something with it, right?"

  Don tilted his head, regarding Percy. “You take after your grandmother."

  The boy frowned, clearly not sure if he liked that notion.

  “I mean,” said Don, turning the sound back on as the action started up again, “you're very insightful."

  * * * *

  After Carl and Angela had picked up their kids, Don decided to go for a walk. He needed to clear his head, to think. There was a convenience store three blocks away; he would head over there to get some cashews. They were his favorite indulgence—reasonably low in carbs, but still decadent.

  It was a cold, crisp night, and some houses had jack-o'-lanterns out in anticipation of Halloween; appropriately, the trees, denuded of leaves, looked like twisted skeletons writhing toward a clear, dark sky. In the distance, a dog was barking.

  His walk took him along the descriptively but prosaically named Diagonal Road, which deposited him near the grounds of Willowdale Middle School. On a whim, he wandered into the school's large back field, where he used to occasionally go to watch Carl play football all those years ago. He got as far away as he could from the streetlamps—not that it made much difference—and pulled out his datacom. “Help me find Sigma Draconis,” he said
to it, holding up the small hinged tablet with the display facing toward him, the way he oriented it when using it as a camera.

  “Turn around,” the datacom said, in its pleasant male voice. “Tilt me higher ... higher. Good. Now move me to the left. More. More. No, too far. Back up. Yes. Sigma Draconis is in the center of the display."

  “That bright one near the top?"

  “No, that is Delta Draconis, also known as Nodus Secundus. And the bright one farther down is Epsilon Draconis, or Tyl. Sigma Draconis is too dim for you to see.” Crosshairs appeared on the display, centered on a blank part of the sky. “But that's where it is."

  Don lowered the datacom and looked directly at the same emptiness, focusing his thoughts on that star, so close by cosmic standards but still unfathomably distant on a human scale.

  Somehow, despite the fact that the Dracons had been part of the background of his life for four decades now, they'd never quite seemed real. Oh, he knew they were there—right there, right now, along his current line of sight. Indeed, perhaps at this very moment, there were Dracons looking this way, regarding Sol—which would be almost as dim in their night sky as Sigma Draconis was in Earth's—and thinking about the strange beings that must be here. Of course, Sarah would say that the concept of a simultaneous “right now” was meaningless in a relativistic universe; even if Don could have spotted Sigma Draconis, the light he'd have seen would have left there 18.8 years ago. That discontinuity added to the unreal quality the aliens had always had for him.

  But if they went ahead with what the Dracons were asking for, the aliens would go from mere abstractions to being here, in the flesh. Granted, the ones born on Earth would know nothing first-hand of their home world, but they would nonetheless be tied to it.

  He closed up his datacom, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and began walking again. Maybe because he'd been thinking about prime ministers earlier, it occurred to him that Pierre Trudeau had held that office when he himself had been in middle school. There were many famous Trudeau moments, he knew: the “just watch me” response when asked how far he'd go to put down the terrorists in the October Crisis of 1970; giving the finger from his rail car to detractors in British Columbia; decriminalizing homosexuality and telling the country that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” But one that had always haunted Don was the famous walk in the snow, when Trudeau had wandered off, alone, to contemplate, weighing his own future against that of his nation. The great man had decided to quit politics that night, to step down as PM.

  Trudeau had been twenty-four years younger than Don was now, but he'd been worn out, exhausted. Don, though, had lots of energy and more years ahead than he could really envision; those future years were also an abstraction, like the aliens around Sigma Draconis. Oh, one by one, the years would become concrete, but for now, they, too, didn't quite seem real.

  He made his way out of the field, moving from behind the vast dark form of the school, and continued his walk. Someone was coming toward him, and Don felt a little surge of adrenaline—an old man's fear about how a late-night encounter might go. But, as the other person got closer, Don saw that it was a bald-headed middle-aged fellow, who looked quite apprehensive; to him, it was the sight of a twenty-something man that was frightening. Sarah was right; everything was relative.

  She would do it in a heartbeat, he knew, if she could: she'd commit to help create, and raise, the Dracon children. And he also knew that he himself wouldn't have all this extra time ahead if it weren't for her. So maybe he owed this to his wife, and to McGavin, too, who, after all, had actually made it possible.

  He continued along, and soon was approaching the convenience store. It was a 7-Eleven, one of countless such stores, all part of a vast chain. Don was old enough to remember when they really had been open only from 7:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M., instead of twenty-four hours a day. Doubtless, if they had it to do over, the chain's management would have picked a less-restrictive name. But if a giant company couldn't have foreseen what the future held, or that the time they had to deal with would hugely expand, how could he? But, even so, they had changed; they'd adapted. And, he thought, as he went through the sliding glass doors, coming out of the darkness into the light, maybe he could, too.

  * * * *

  Chapter 40

  When Don got back home, Sarah was in the en suite bathroom, getting ready for bed. He joined her in there, coming up behind her as she stood at the sink, and oh-so-gently embracing her from behind.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “All right,” he replied. “I'll do it."

  “Do what?"

  “Look after the Dracon children."

  Don's grip was loose enough that Sarah managed to gingerly rotate to face him. “Really?"

  “Why not?"

  “You can't do it just out of a sense of obligation, you know. Are you sure you want to do this?"

  “How can I be sure about anything? I'm going to live to be maybe a hundred and sixty. That's terra incognita for the whole human race. I know as much about what that's going to be like as—as I know about what it's like to be a bat. But I've got to do something, and, as your grandson said to me this evening, it should be something important."

  “Percy said that?"

  Don nodded, and Sarah made an impressed face.

  “Still,” she said, “you have to really want this. Every child has the right to be wanted."

  “I know. And I do want to do it."

  “Yeah?"

  He smiled. “Sure. Besides, at least I won't have to worry about these kids ending up with my nose."

  * * * *

  Don suspected their neighbors couldn't be surprised any further by the happenings at his house, but he wondered if any of them took note of the very-expensive-looking rental car pulling into the driveway. If they did, perhaps they zoomed in on Cody McGavin as he got out, and did a face-scanning search to identify him, doubtless the richest man ever to set foot on Betty Ann Drive.

  Don opened the front door and watched through the screen as McGavin walked toward him, the mesh dividing him into pixels. “Hello, Don,” McGavin said, in his Boston accent. “Great to see you."

  “Hello,” Don replied, swinging the screen door open. “Won't you come in?” He took McGavin's heavy winter coat and watched him remove his fancy shoes, then he ushered him up the stairs to the living room.

  Sarah was seated on the couch. Don saw a look flit over McGavin's face, as if he were startled by how much she'd aged since he'd last seen her. “Hi, Sarah,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. McGavin."

  Gunter entered from the kitchen. “Ah,” McGavin said, “I see you got the Mozo we sent over."

  Sarah nodded. “We call him Gunter."

  McGavin's eyebrows went up. “After the robot on Lost in Space?"

  Don was startled. “That's right."

  “Gunter,” said Sarah, her voice quavering as usual, “I'd like you to meet Cody McGavin. He runs the company that made you."

  Don sat down next to Sarah and watched with interest: the creation meeting the creator. “Hello, Mr. McGavin,” Gunter said, extending a blue mechanical hand. “It's a true pleasure to meet you."

  “And you,” said McGavin, shaking the hand. “I hope you've been working hard at helping Dr. Halifax."

  “He's been a godsend,” said Sarah. “Haven't you, Gunter?"

  “I've tried,” the Mozo said to McGavin. “I was with her when she made the breakthrough. I'm very proud."

  “That's my boy!” said McGavin. He turned to the Halifaxes. “Wonderful machines, aren't they?"

  “Oh, yes,” said Sarah. “Please, have a seat."

  McGavin moved over to the La-Z-Boy. “Nice place you've got here,” he said, as he settled in.

  Don thought about that. McGavin was known for his philanthropy. Don had seen pictures of him visiting hovels in the third world, and it humbled him to think that this place was closer in cost to one of those than it was to McGavin's famed mansion i
n Cambridge. The walls here had scuffs, the plaster was chipped, the carpet was worn and stained. The couch, with its hulking lines, had perhaps been stylish late in the last century, but looked hopelessly dated now, and its wine-colored upholstery was wearing thin in a lot of places.

  “All right,” Sarah said at last, echoing what McGavin had said to them all those months ago, “let's talk turkey. As I said on the phone, I've succeeded in decrypting the Dracon message. Once I tell you what it says, I'm hoping you'll agree with me that we should not make the reply public."

  McGavin leaned forward, a hand on his receding chin. “I'm listening. What's it say?"

  “The aliens have sent us the Dracon genome—"

  “Really?"

  “Yes, and instructions on how to produce an artificial womb to bring a couple of Dracon children to term here on Earth, as well as plans for an incubator."

  “Jesus,” said McGavin softly.

  “Wonderful, isn't it?” said Sarah.

  “It's ... amazing. Will they be able to live here?"

  “Yes, I think so."

  “Wow."

  “But there's a snag,” said Sarah. “The aliens want me to be, essentially, the foster parent. But I'm too old."

  “Well,” McGavin began, “I'm sure an appropriate lab could be set up—"

  “No,” said Sarah, firmly. “No labs, no institutions. These are people, not specimens. It'll happen in a home. As I said, I can't do it myself, but I do get to choose who does it in my place."

  McGavin's voice was gentle, and he looked sideways at Sarah as he spoke. “I'm not quite sure that's your prerogative."

  “Oh, yes it is. Because, you see, the message with the genome was addressed to me."

  “You said that before. But I still don't know what you mean."

  “The decryption key. It's ... personal to me. And I'm not going to tell you what it is."

  “It's not your sequence of survey answers, or any subset of that sequence,” said McGavin. “We already tried that. What else could the aliens possibly know about you?"

  “With all due respect, I decline to answer."

  McGavin drew his eyebrows together but said nothing.

  “Now,” continued Sarah, “as I say, I can't personally do this. But I can pass on the genome to whomever I wish—by handing over the decryption key."