Rollback

Chapter 4

It was ironic, now that Don thought back on it, how often he and Sarah had talked about SETI’s failure prior to its success. He’d come home one day, around — let’s see; they’d been in their mid-forties, so it must have been something like 2005 — to find her sitting in their just-bought La-Z-Boy, listening to her iPod. Don could tell she wasn’t playing music; she couldn’t resist tap-ping her fingers or toes whenever she was doing that.

"What are you listening to?" he asked.

"It’s a lecture," shouted Sarah.

"Oh, really!" he shouted back, gri

She took out the little white earbuds, looking sheepish. "Sorry," she said, in a normal volume. "It’s a lecture Jill did for the Long Now Foundation."

SETI, Don often thought, was like Hollywood, with its stars. In Tinsel Town, having to use last names marked you as an outsider, and the same was true in Sarah’s circles, where Frank was always Frank Drake, Paul was Paul Shuch, Seth was Seth Shostak, Sarah was indeed Sarah Halifax, and Jill was Jill Tarter.

"The long what?" Don said.

"The Long Now," repeated Sarah. "They’re a group that tries to encourage long-term thinking, thinking about now as an epoch rather than a point in time. They’re building a giant clock — the Clock of The Long Now — that ticks once a year, chimes once a century, and has a cuckoo that comes out every mille

"Good work if you can get it," he said. "Say, where are the kids?" Carl had been twelve then; Emily, six.

"Carl’s downstairs watching TV. And I sent Emily to her room for drawing on the wall again."

He nodded. "So what’s Jill talking about?" He’d never met Jill, although Sarah had.

"Why SETI is, by necessity, a long-term proposition," Sarah said. "Except she’s skirting the issue."

"You and she are practically the only SETI researchers who can do that."

"What? Oh."

"I’m here all week."

"Lucky me. Anyway, she doesn’t seem to be getting to the point, which is that SETI is something that must be a multigenerational activity, like building a great cathedral.

It’s a trust, something we hand down to our children, and they hand down to their children."

"We don’t have a good track record with things like that," he said, perching now on the La-Z-Boy’s broad, padded arm. "I mean, you know, the environment is something we hold in trust and pass on to Carl and Emily’s generation, too. And look at how little our generation has done to combat global warming."

She sighed. "I know. But Kyoto’s a step forward."

"It’ll hardly make a dent."

"Yeah, well."

"But, you know," said Don, "we’re not cut out for this — what did you call it? — this ‘Long Now’ sort of thinking. It’s anti-Darwinian. We’re hardwired against it."

She sounded surprised. "What?"

"We did something about kin selection on Quirks and Quarks last month; I spent forever editing the interview." Don was an audio engineer at CBC Radio. "We had Richard Dawkins on again, by satellite through the Beeb. He said that in a competitive situation, you automatically favor your own son over your brother’s son, right? Of course: your son has half your DNA, and your brother’s son only has a quarter of it. But if things got tough between your brother’s son and your cousin, well, you’d favor your brother’s son — that is, your nephew — because your cousin only has an eighth of your DNA."

"That’s right," Sarah said. She was scratching his back. It felt very nice.

He went on. "And a second cousin only has one-thirty-second of your DNA. And a second cousin once removed has just one-sixty-fourth of your DNA. Well, when was the last time you heard of somebody volunteering a kidney to save a second cousin once removed? Not only do most people have no clue who their second cousins once removed are, but they also, quite bluntly, couldn’t give a crap what happens to them. They just don’t share enough DNA with them to care."

"I love it when you talk math," she teased. Fractions were about as good as Don’s math got.

"And over time," he said, "the DNA share gets cut down, like cheap coke." He gri

"I can name my second cousins once removed. There’s Helena, and Dillon, and—"

"But you’re special. That’s why you are interested in SETI. For the rest of the world, they just don’t have a vested Darwinian interest. Evolution has shaped us so that we don’t care about anything that’s not going to manifest soon, because no close relative of ours will be around then. Jill’s probably tap-dancing around that, because it’s a point she doesn’t want to make: that, for the general public, SETI doesn’t make sense. Hell, didn’t Frank" — whom he’d also never met — "send a signal somewhere thousands of light-years away?"

He looked at Sarah, and saw her nod. "The Arecibo message, sent in 1974. It was aimed at M13, a globular cluster."

"And how far away is M13?"

"Twenty-five thousand light-years," she said.

"So it’ll be fifty thousand years before we could get a reply. Who has the patience for something like that? Hell, I got an email today with a PDF attachment, and I thought, geez, I wonder if this thing is going to be worth reading, ’cause, you know, it’s going to take, like, ten whole seconds for the attachment to download and open.

We want instant gratification; we find any delay intolerable. How can SETI fit into a world with that mind-set? Send a message and wait decades or centuries for a reply?" He shook his head. "Who the hell would want to play that game? Who’s got the time for it?"

Chapter 5

As the luxury jet landed, Don Halifax mentally checked off that to-do-list item. The few remaining ones, including "sleep with a supermodel" and "meet the Dalai Lama," seemed out of the question at this point, not to mention of no current interest.

It was bitterly cold going down the little metal staircase onto the tarmac. The flight attendant helped Don every step of the way, while the pilot helped Sarah. Downside of a private plane: it didn’t use a Jetway. Like so many of the things on Don’s list, this one was turning out to be less wonderful than he’d hoped.

A white limo was waiting for them. The robot driver wore one of those caps that limo drivers are supposed to wear, but nothing else. It did an expert job of getting them to McGavin Robotics, all the while providing a ru

The McGavin Robotics corporate campus consisted of seven sprawling buildings separated by wide snow-covered expanses; the company had lots of ties to the artificial-intelligence lab at nearby MIT. The limo was able to go straight into an underground garage, so Don and Sarah didn’t have to brave the cold again. The robot driver escorted them as they walked slowly over to an immaculate elevator, which brought them up to the lobby. Human beings took over there, taking their coats, making them welcome, and bringing them up another elevator to the fourth floor of the main building.

Cody McGavin’s office was long and narrow, covering one whole side of the building, with windows looking out over the rest of the campus. His desk was made of polished granite, and a matching conference table with a fleet of fancy chairs docked at it was off to the left, while a long, well-stocked bar, with a robot bartender, stretched off in the other direction.

"Sarah Halifax!" said McGavin, rising from his high-backed leather chair.