Rollback (11 page)

"Dad!" Emily had her little hands planted on her hips.

"—but they'll keep repeating the report, and it'll be picked up all over the world, I'm sure."
 

"We'd been so
wrong
," Sarah told Shelagh Rogers the next morning. Don wasn't the Toronto sound engineer for
Sounds Like Canada
—Joe Mahoney was doing that these days—but Don stood behind Joe as he operated the board, looking over Joe's shoulder at Sarah.

And, while doing so, he reflected on the irony. Sarah was in Toronto, but Shelagh was in Vancouver, where Radio One's signature program originated—two people who couldn't see each other, communicating over vast distances by radio. It was
perfect
.

"Wrong in what way?" Shelagh's voice was rich and velvety, yet full of enthusiasm, an intoxicating combination.

"In
every
way," Sarah said. "In everything we'd assumed about SETI. What a ridiculous notion, that beings would send messages across the light-years to talk about
math
!" She shook her head, her brown hair bouncing as she did so. "Math and physics are the same everywhere in the universe. There's no need to contact an alien race to find out if they agree that one plus three equals four, that seven is a prime number, that the value of
pi
is 3.14159,
et cetera
. None of those things are matters of local circumstance, or of opinion. No, the things worth discussing are moral issues—things that are debatable, things that an alien race might have a radically different perspective on."

"And that's what the message from Sigma Draconis is about?" prodded Shelagh.

"Exactly! Ethics, morality—the big questions. And that's the other thing, the other way in which we were totally wrong about what to expect from SETI. Carl Sagan used to talk about us receiving an
Encyclopaedia Galactica
. But no one would bother sending a message across the light-years to
tell
you things. Rather, they'd send a message to
ask
you things."

"And so this message from the stars is ... what? A questionnaire?"

"Yes, that's right. A series of questions, most of which are multiple choice, laid out like a three-dimensional spreadsheet, with space for a thousand different people to provide their answers to each question. The aliens clearly want a cross section of our views, and they went to great pains to establish a vocabulary for conveying value judgments and dealing with matters of opinion, with sliding scales for precisely quantifying responses."

"How many questions are there?"

"Eighty-four," said Sarah. "And they're all over the map."

"For instance?"

Sarah took a sip from the bottle of water she'd been provided with. " 'Is it acceptable to prevent pregnancy when the population is low?' 'Is it acceptable to terminate pregnancy when the population is high?' 'Is it all right for the state to execute bad people?' "

"Birth control, abortion, capital punishment," said Shelagh, sounding amazed. "I guess those are posers even for extraterrestrials."

"So it seems," said Sarah. "And there are lots more, all in one way or another about ethics and acceptable behavior. 'Should systems be set up to thwart cheaters at all costs?' 'If an identifiable population is disproportionately bad, is it permissible to restrict the entire population?' These are just preliminary translations, of course. I'm sure there'll be a lot of quibbling over the exact meaning of some of them."

"I'm sure there will be," said Shelagh, affably.

"But I wonder if the aliens aren't a bit naive, at least by our standards," said Sarah. "I mean, basically, we're a race of hypocrites. We believe societal norms should be followed by others, and that there are always good reasons for ourselves to be exempt. So, yeah, asking about our morals is interesting, but if they actually expect our espoused beliefs to have any strong relationship to our actual behavior, they could be in for a big surprise. The fact that we even need a platitude 'practice what you preach' underscores just how natural it is for us to do exactly the opposite."

Shelagh made her trademark throaty laugh. "Do as I say, not as I do."

"Exactly," said Sarah. "Still, it's amazing, really, the sociological concepts the aliens were able to get to from talking about math. For instance, building on some discussion of set theory, several of their questions deal with in-groups and out-groups. William Sumner, who coined the term 'ethnocentrism,' noted that what he called 'primitive peoples' had very different ideas about morality for in-group versus out-group members. The aliens seem to want to know if we've risen above that."

"I'd like to think we have," said Shelagh.

"For sure," agreed Sarah. "One might also expect them to wonder whether we'd outgrown religion." She looked through the glass at Don. "The vocabulary the Dracons established certainly would have made it possible to formulate questions about whether we believed an intelligence existed outside the universe—essentially, whether a God exists. They could have also asked if we believed any information persisted after death—in other words, whether souls exist. But they didn't ask those things. My husband and I were arguing about that on the way down here this morning. He said the reason they didn't ask about religious matters is obvious: no advanced race could still be caught up in such superstitious beliefs. But maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe it's so blindingly obvious to the aliens that God exists that it never even occurred to them to ask us if we'd failed to notice him."

"Fascinating," said Shelagh. "But why, do you think, do the aliens want to know all this?"

Sarah took a deep breath, and let it out slowly—causing Don to briefly cringe at the dead air. But, at last, she spoke. "That's a very good question."
 

Like most astronomers, Sarah fondly remembered the movie
Contact
, based on Carl Sagan's novel of the same name. Indeed, she argued it was one of the few cases where the movie was actually better than the overlong book. She hadn't seen it for decades, but a reference to it in one of the news stories about the attempts to decrypt the response from Sigma Draconis had brought it to mind. With pleasant anticipation, she sat down next to Don on the couch to watch it on Wednesday night. Slowly but surely, she was getting used to his newly youthful appearance, but one of the reasons she felt like watching a movie was that she'd be doing something with Don in which they'd be sitting side by side and not really looking at each other.

Jodie Foster did a great job portraying a passionate scientist, but Sarah found herself smiling in amusement when Foster said, "There are four hundred billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone," which was true. But then she went on to say, "If only one out of a million of those had planets, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there." Nope, a million-million-millionth of four hundred billion is so close to zero as to practically
be
zero.

Sarah looked at Don to see if he'd caught it, but he gave no sign. She knew he didn't like being interrupted by asides during movies—you couldn't memorize trivia the way he did if you weren't able to concentrate—and so she let the screenwriter's minor flub pass. And, besides, despite its inaccuracy, what Foster had said rang true, in a way. For decades, people had been plugging numbers made up out of whole cloth into the Drake equation, which purported to estimate how many intelligent civilizations existed in the galaxy. Foster's wildly inaccurate figure, pulled out of the air, was actually quite typical of these debates.

But Sarah's amusement soon turned to downright cringing. Foster went to see a large corporation to get funding for SETI, and, when it initially turned her down, she went ballistic, exclaiming that contacting an extraterrestrial civilization would be the biggest moment in human history, more significant than anything anyone had ever done or could possibly imagine doing, a species-altering moment that would be worth any cost to attain.

Sarah cringed because she remembered giving such patently ridiculous speeches herself. Granted, the detection of the original signal from Sigma Draconis had been page-one news. But until the second message had been received, it had been over thirty years since a mention of aliens had appeared on the front page or main screen of any newspaper that didn't have the words "National" and "Enquirer" in its title.

It wasn't just SETI researchers who had overhyped the impact of such things. Sarah had forgotten that then-president Bill Clinton appeared in
Contact
, but there he was, talking about how this breakthrough was going to change the world. Unlike the cameos by Jay Leno and Larry King, though, which had been specifically staged for the movie, she immediately recognized the Clinton speech as archival footage—not about the detection of alien radio messages, but about the unveiling of ALH84001, the Martian meteorite that supposedly contained microscopic fossils. But despite the presidential hyperbole, that hunk of rock hadn't changed the world, and, indeed, when it was ultimately discredited several years later, there was almost no press coverage, not because the story was being buried, but rather because no one in the public even really cared. The existence of alien life was a curiosity to most people, nothing more. It didn't change the way they treated their spouses and kids; it didn't make stocks rise or fall; it just didn't matter. Earth went on spinning, unperturbed, and its denizens continued to make love, and war, with the same frequency.

As the film continued, Sarah found herself getting increasingly pissed off. The movie had its extraterrestrials beaming blueprints to Earth so humans could build a ship that could tunnel through hyperspace, taking Jodie Foster off to meet the aliens face-to-face. SETI, the movie hinted, wasn't really about radio communication with the stars. Rather, like every other cheapjack Hollywood space opera, it was just a steppingstone to
actually going to other worlds
. From the beginning with Jodie Foster's cockeyed math, through the middle with the stirring speeches about how this would completely transform humanity, to the end with the totally baseless promise that SETI would lead to ways to travel across the galaxy and maybe even reunite us with dead loved ones,
Contact
portrayed the hype, not the reality. If Frank Capra had made a propaganda series called "Why We Listen,"
Contact
could have been the first installment.

As the credits started to roll, Sarah looked at Don. "What did you think?" she asked.

"It's a bit dated," he said. But then he lifted his hands from his lap, as if to forestall an objection. "Not that there's anything wrong with that, but..."

But he was right, she thought. Things are of their times; you can't plug something meant for one era into another. "What ever happened to Jodie Foster, anyway?" she asked. "I mean, is she still alive?"

"She might be, I guess. She's about your..." He trailed off, but it had been obvious what he was going to say: "She's about your age." Not "about
our
age." Although he still saw her as an eighty-seven-year-old, it seemed he was now in full denial about the chronological facts that applied to himself—and that was driving Sarah up the walls.

"I always liked her," she said. When
Contact
had come out, the American press had said that Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster's character, was based on Jill Tarter, and the Canadian papers had tried to spin it that Sarah Halifax had been the inspiration. And although it was true enough that Sarah had known Sagan back then, the comparison was a stretch. Why the press refused to believe that characters were just made up was beyond her. She remembered all the theories about who the paleontologists in
Jurassic Park
were based on; every woman who had taken even one paleo course was reputed to be the model for the Laura Dern character.

"You know what movie Jodie Foster is really good in?" Sarah said.

Don looked at her.

"It's um—oh, you know the one. It was one of my favorites."

"I need another clue," he said, a bit sharply.

"Oh, you know! We bought it on VHS, and then DVD, and then downloaded it in HD. Now, why can't I think of the title? It's on the tip of my tongue..."

"Yes? Yes?"

Sarah winced. Don was becoming more and more impatient with her as time went on. When he'd been slow, too, he hadn't seemed to mind her slowness as much, but now they were out-of-synch, like the twins in that film she used to show her under-grads about relativity. She thought about snapping that she couldn't help being old, but, then again,
he
couldn't help that he was young. Still, his impatience made her nervous, and that made it even harder for her to dredge up the title she was looking for.

"Um," she said, "it had that guy in it, too..."

"
Maverick
?" snapped Don. "
The Silence of the Lambs
?"

"No, no. You know, the one about the—" Why wasn't the term coming to her?—"the, the ... the child prodigy."

"
Little Man Tate
," Don said at once.

"Right," said Sarah, very softly, looking away.
 

Don moved over to the La-Z-Boy after Sarah had gone to bed, and sat glumly in it. He knew he'd made her feel bad earlier, when she'd been trying to remember the title of that movie, and he hated himself for it. Why had he been patient when his days were numbered, but impatient now that he had so much time? He'd tried not to snap at Sarah, he really had. But he just couldn't help himself. She was so
old
, and—

The phone rang. He glanced at the call display, and felt his eyebrows going up: "Trenholm, Randell." It was a name he hadn't thought about for thirty years or more, a guy he'd known at the CBC back in the Twenty-Teens. Ever since the rollback had gone bad for Sarah, Don had been avoiding seeing people he knew—and now he was doubly glad they didn't have picture phones.