Rollback

You can’t be married to an astronomer for sixty years without learning some constellations, but Don saw almost nothing familiar in this moonless sky, although there were two stars brighter than all the others. Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri — just about all he could remember from his brief trip here all those years ago, except…

He scanned about, and — yes, there they were, impossibly large: the Clouds of Magellan, two smudges against the darkness. He stood there for a time, shivering, looking at them.

By and by, the sun started to come up, the horizon growing pink, and—

And suddenly there was a cacophony of bird songs: trills and tweets unlike any he ever heard back in Canada. An unfamiliar sky, bizarre background sounds: he might as well be on an alien world.

He went back inside, set an alarm for five hours hence, lay down, and closed his eyes, wondering what the new day would hold.

When Don got up, he used his datacom to check his email. There was the usual daily progress report from Cody McGavin: all was going well with fabricating the womb.

The alien DNA sequences had now been synthesized, too, done in bits and pieces at four separate commercial labs, then reassembled through a version of the whole-genome shotgun technique that had been used half a century earlier to make the first map of the Homo sapiens genome. Soon, McGavin said, everything would be ready to start growing the embryos.

Don had thought about trying to intercept Lenore as she was leaving from or arriving at her flat; it had been easy enough to find out where she lived. But some might view what he was doing as the ultimate act of stalking; she might be quite disconcerted if he showed up unannounced there. Besides, for all he knew, she was living with someone, and he didn’t want a confrontation with a jealous boyfriend.

And so he decided to go see her at the university. It took nothing but a few questions asked of his datacom to reveal the astronomy grad-student colloquium schedule. Before leaving the hotel, he got a little money from the cash machine in the lobby; Don remembered all the predictions of a cashless society, but that, too, had failed to pan out, mostly because of concerns over privacy.

Although he received crisp new bills, a much younger version of King William appeared on them than Don was used to from the banknotes back home; it was as though His Royal Highness had had a little rollback of his own down here.

The robot-driven taxi let him off at the entrance to the campus, by a big sign:

NAU MAI, HAERE MAI KI TE

WHARE WANANFA O WAITAHA

Strange words, alien text. But a Rosetta stone was provided as a matching sign on the opposite side of the roadway:

WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY

A river ran through the campus, and he walked along one of its banks toward the building a passerby told him housed the astronomy department, a new-looking red-brick affair half-sunk into a hillside. Once he got inside, he started looking for the right room, although he had trouble figuring out the sequence of room numbers.

He stumbled upon the astronomy-department office and stuck his head in the door.

There was a Maori man of about thirty at a desk, his face covered by intricate tattoos. "Hi," said Don. "Can you please tell me where room 42-2146 is?"

"Looking for Lenore Darby?" asked the man.

Moths danced a ballet in Don’s stomach. "Um, yes."

The man smiled. "Thought so. You’ve got a Canadian accent. Anyway, go down the hall, turn right at the next corridor, and it’ll be on your left."

Don had twenty minutes until the colloquium would be over. He thanked the man then made a pit stop in a washroom, and checked for anything in his teeth, fixed his hair, and straightened his clothes. And then he headed to the classroom. The door was closed, but it had a little window and he chanced a peek through it.

His heart jumped. There was Lenore, standing at the front of the room; apparently it was her turn to present to the colloquium. As if to underscore that time had passed and many things might be different, he noted that she’d cut her red hair much shorter than he was used to seeing it. And she looked older, although she was still in that range of years during which that meant more grown-up, not more decrepit.

The room was a small lecture theater, with a steep bank of chairs facing a central stage. There was a podium, but Lenore wasn’t hiding behind it. Instead she stood confidently, in full view, in the middle of the stage. Perhaps a dozen other people were in the room. All he could see of them were the backs of their heads. Some had gray hair; presumably they were faculty members. Lenore was using a laser pointer to indicate things within a complex graphic on the room’s front wall screen. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the squeak was unmistakable.