Rollback

When it was done, there was no immediate change in either Don or Sarah’s appearance. But it would come, they were told, bit by bit, over the next few months, a strengthening here, a firming there, the erasing of a line, the regrowth of a muscle.

And so Don, Sarah, and Carl returned to Toronto, with Cody McGavin again picking up the tab; the flights to and from Chicago had been the only times in his life that Don had flown Executive Class. Ironically, because of all the little surgeries and petty medical indignities, he felt much more tired and worn-out than he had prior to begi

He and Sarah would take twice-daily hormonal infusions for the next several months, and a Rejuvenex doctor would fly up once a week — all part of the service — to check on how their rollbacks were progressing. Don had vague childhood memories of his family’s doctor making the odd house call in the 1960s, but this was a degree of medical attention that seemed almost sinful to his Canadian sensibilities.

For years, he’d avoided looking at himself in the mirror, except in the most perfunctory way while shaving. He hadn’t liked the way he’d looked back when he was fat, and hadn’t liked the way he’d looked recently, either: wrinkled, liver-spotted, tired, old. But now, each morning, he examined his face minutely in the bathroom mirror, and tugged at his skin, looking for signs of new resiliency. He also examined his bald head, checking for new growth. They’d promised him that his hair would come back, and would be the sandy brown of his youth, not the gray of his fifties or the snow white of the fringe that remained in his eighties.

Don had always had a large nose, and it, and his ears, had grown even larger as he’d gotten older; parts made of cartilage continue to get bigger throughout one’s life.

Once the rollback was complete, Rejuvenex would trim his nose and ears down to the sizes they’d been when he really had been twenty-five.

Don’s sister Susan, dead these fifteen years now, had also been cursed by the Halifax family schnoz, and, when she’d been eighteen, after begging her parents for years, they’d paid for rhinoplasty.

He remembered the big moment at the clinic, the unwrapping of the bandages after weeks of healing, revealing the new, petite, retrousse handiwork of Dr. Jack Carnaby, whom Toronto Life had dubbed the finest noseman in the city the year before.

He wished there had been some magical moment like that for this, some ah hah! revelation, some sudden return to vim and vigor, some unveiling. But there wasn’t; the process would take weeks of incremental changes, cells dividing and renewing at an accelerated pace, hormone levels shifting, tissues regenerating, enzymes — My God, he thought. My God. There was new hair, an all-but-invisible peach fuzz spreading up from the snowy fringe, conquering the dome, reclaiming territory once thought irretrievably lost.

"Sarah!" shouted Don, and, for the first time in ages, he realized he was shouting without it hurting his throat. "Sarah!" He ran — yes, he veritably ran — down the stairs to the living room, where she was seated in the La-Z-Boy, staring at the stone-cold fireplace.

"Sarah!" he said, bending his head low. "Look!"

She came out of whatever reverie she’d been lost in, and although with his head tipped he couldn’t see her, he could hear the puzzlement in her voice. "I don’t see anything."

"All right," he said, disappointed. "But feel it!"

He felt the cool, loose, wrinkly skin of her fingers touching his scalp, the fingertips tracing tiny paths in the new growth. "My goodness," she said.

He tilted his head back to a normal position, and he knew he was gri

"What about you?" he asked, perching now on the wide arm of the couch near the La-Z-Boy. "Any signs yet?"

Sarah shook her head slowly and, he thought, a little sadly. "No," said his wife.

"Nothing yet."

"Ah, well," he said, patting her thin arm reassuringly. "I’m sure you’ll see something soon."

Chapter 9

Sarah would always remember March first, 2009. She had been forty-eight then, a breast-cancer survivor for five years, and a tenured professor at the University of Toronto for ten. She’d been heading down the fourteenth-floor corridor when she heard, just barely, the sound of her office phone ringing. She ran the rest of the way, glad as always to work in a field that never required her to wear heels. Fortunately, she’d already had her key in hand, or she’d never have gotten through the door before the university’s voice-mail system grabbed the call. "Sarah Halifax," she said into the beige handset.

"Sarah, it’s Don. Have you been listening to the news?"

"Hi, honey. No, I haven’t. Why?"

"There’s a message from Sigma Draconis."

"What are you talking about?"

"There’s a message," Don said again, as if Sarah’s difficulty had simply been in hearing the words, "from Sigma Draconis. I’m at work; it’s all over the wire services and the Internet."

"There can’t be," she said, nonetheless turning on her computer. "I’d have been informed before any public a

"There is a message," he repeated. "They want you on As It Happens tonight."

"Um, sure. But it’s got to be a hoax. The Declaration of Principles says—"

"NPR’s got Seth Shostak on right now, talking about it. Apparently they picked it up last night, and somebody leaked it."

Sarah’s computer was still booting. The handful of musical notes that Windows played on starting up issued from the machine’s speakers.

"What does the message say?"

"No one knows. It’s a free-for-all, with everybody, everywhere, scrambling to figure it out."

She found herself tapping her fingers rapidly on the edge of her desk and muttering at the computer’s slowness. Big icons were filling in on her desktop, and smaller ones were popping up in her system tray.

"Anyway," said Don, "I’ve got to go. They need me back in the control room.

They’ll call you for a pre-interview later today. The message is everywhere on the web, including Slashdot. Bye."

"Bye." She put down the phone with her left hand while maneuvering her mouse with her right, and she soon had the message, a vast array of zeros and ones, on screen. Still dubious, she opened three more browser tabs and started searching for information about when and how the message had been received, what was known about it so far, and so on.

There was no mistake. The message was real.

No one was around to hear her speak, but she sagged back in her chair and said the words anyway, words that had been the mantra of SETI researchers since Walter Sullivan had used them as the title of his famous book: "We are not alone…"

"But Proffesor Halifax, isn’t it true that we might never be able to figure out what the aliens are saying?" the host — a woman named Carol Off — had asked back in 2009, during the As It Happens radio interview. "I mean, we share this planet with dolphins, and we can’t tell what they’re saying. How could we possibly understand what someone from another world is trying to say?"

Sarah smiled at Don, who was in the control room on the other side of the window; they’d discussed this before. "First off, there may in fact be no dolphin language, at least not a rich, abstract one like ours. Dolphins have smaller brains relative to their body weight than humans do, and they devote a huge amount of what they do have to echolocation."

"So we might not have figured out their language because there’s nothing to figure out?" said the host.