Rollback

"Professor Halifax" was too formal. "Mrs. Halifax" was still available; Lenore, like most women of her generation, had kept her birth name. "Sarah" conveyed an intimacy, but wasn’t quite right, either. He shrugged. "I don’t—"

"Aunt Sarah," said Lenore, who had always called her "Professor Halifax" in life. "I think you should refer to her as ‘Aunt Sarah.’"

Dracons couldn’t nod, so Amphion did the slight bow that he’d adopted to convey the same thing. "Thank you for bringing us to see Aunt Sarah," he said; one of his eyes was looking at Don, while the other three faced the headstone.

"She would have loved to have met you," Don said, and he smiled in turn at each of his three children.

"I wish I could have known her," said Zethus.

Gunter tilted his head and said, very softly, "As do I."

"She was a wonderful woman," Don said.

Gillian turned to face Lenore. "You must have known her, too, Mom — you were in the same field. What was she like?"

Lenore looked at Don, then back at their daughter. She sought an appropriate word, and, after a moment, smiling at her husband, she said, "Skytop."

Acknowledements

I’ve had many writing students over the years, but none was more talented than my dear friend Robyn Herrington, to whom this book is dedicated. I first met Robyn at Calgary’s science-fiction convention Con-Version in 1996 and published one of her poems in the 1997 anthology Tesseracts 6, which my wife Carolyn and I coedited.

Robyn workshopped with me at the Banff Centre in 2000 and 2001, and you can find stories by her in, among other places, three of Mike Resnick’s DAW anthologies: Return of the Dinosaurs, Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, and New Voices in Science Fiction. Robyn passed away in May 2004, after a long battle with cancer; at her request, I read the eulogy she herself had written at her funeral in Calgary. The one-sentence high-concept behind part of this novel was Robyn’s, and I thank her, and her husband, Bruce Herrington, for letting me pick it up and run with it.

Many thanks to those kind souls who read and commented on an entire draft of this book in manuscript: Asbed G. Bedrossian, Ted Bleaney, Reinhardt Christiansen, David Livingstone Clink, Marcel Gagne, Richard Gotlib, Peter Halasz, Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Joe Mahoney, Terry McGarry, Howard Miller, Kirstin Morrell, Ariel Reich, Sally Tomasevic, Hayden Trenholm, Andrew Weiner, Elizabeth Westbrook-Trenholm, and my brother Alan B. Sawyer.

In addition, I thank the friends and colleagues who let me bounce ideas off them or otherwise provided input, including Paul Bartel, Charissa Bartlett, Dan Evens, Chris Ellis, Terence M. Green, W. Thomas Leroux, Charles Levy, and Irwin Tan.

Special thanks to Dr. Jerome H. Barkow, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University (who gave the keynote address at the symposium "Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition," referred to in this novel); Dr. David DeGraff, Chair, Department of Astronomy and Physics, Alfred University; and Greg Armstrong, Senior Research Technician, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Huge thanks to my lovely wife, Carolyn Clink, and my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and his associates Christopher Lotts, Vince Gerardis, and Eli Kirschner.

Many thanks, too, to my editor David G. Hartwell and his associate Denis Wong; to Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Irene Gallo, Dot Lin, and everyone else at Tor Books; to Harold and Sylvia Fenn, Janis Ackroyd, David Cuthbertson, Marnie Ferguson, Steve St. Amant, Heidi Winter, and everyone else at H. B. Fenn and Company, Tor’s Canadian distributor; and to Dr. Stanley Schmidt and Trevor Quachri of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Thanks also to Danita Maslankowski, who organized the Fall 2005 "Write-Off" retreat weekend for Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, at which much work on this manuscript was accomplished, and to my father, John A. Sawyer, who loaned me his vacation home on Canandaigua Lake in Upstate New York, where I squirreled myself away while finishing this book.

Please note that Scrabble Brand Crossword Game is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc., in the United States and Canada. Outside of the United States and Canada, the Scrabble trademark is owned by J. W. Spear Sons PLC, a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc.

Finally, thanks to the 1,200 members of my online discussion group, who always provide wonderful support and feedback. Feel free to join us at: www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer

About the Author