Rollback (21 page)

"I've dispatched the ambulance," said the operator. "The datacom you're calling from is registered to Donald R. Halifax; is that you?"

"Yes."

"Is your wife conscious, Mr. Halifax?"

"Yes. But her leg is broken. I'm sure of it."

"Don't move her, then. Don't try to move her."

"I won't. I haven't."

"Is the door to your house unlocked?"

He looked up. The door was still wide open. "Yes."

"All right. Don't leave her."

Don took his wife's hand. "No, no, I won't." God, why hadn't he been here? He looked into her pale blue eyes, which were bloodshot and half-closed. "I won't leave her. I swear I won't ever leave her."

He finished with the operator, and put the datacom down on the floor. "I'm sorry," he said to Sarah. "I'm so sorry."

"It's all right," she said, weakly. "I knew you'd be home soon, although..."

She left the thought unspoken, but doubtless she'd been thinking he should have been home earlier than this.

"I'm sorry," Don said again, his gut clenching. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I am so sorry..."

"It's okay," insisted Sarah, and she managed a small smile. "No permanent damage done, I'm sure. After all, this is the age of miracle and wonder." A song lyric, from their youth. Don recognized it, but shook his head slightly, lost. She gestured with her head at him, and, after a moment, he got it: she was referring to his new, younger form. Now
she
was holding
his
hand, comforting him. "It'll be all right," she said. "Everything will be fine."

He couldn't meet her eyes as they waited and waited until, at last, the ambulance's siren drowned out the thoughts that were torturing him, and everything was bathed in strobing red through the open front door.
 

Fortunately it was a clean, simple fracture. Orthopedics had come a long way since Don had broken his own leg in 1977, during a high-school football game. The pieces of Sarah's femur were aligned, some of the excess fluid was drained off, Sarah was given the calcium infusion into her legs that she would have received anyway had the rejuvenation process worked on her, and a small external support was erected around her leg—these days, only dinosaur bones were wrapped in plaster. The doctor said she'd be fine in two months, and, with the support, which had its own little motors, she wouldn't even need crutches while she healed, although a cane was advisable.

Fortunately, too, their provincial health plan covered all this. Most of the crises in Canadian health care had passed. Yes, there'd been a period when biotechnology had been young during which costs had spiraled out of control, but all technologies come down in price with time, even medical ones. Procedures that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in Don's youth now cost a tiny fraction of that. Even sophisticated pharmaceuticals were so inexpensive to develop and produce that governments could give them away in the Third World. Why, someday, even the magic of rejuvenation would be available to all those who wanted it.

Once they got home from the hospital, Don helped Sarah get ready for bed. Within minutes of lying down, she was asleep, helped into the arms of Morpheus, no doubt, by the painkillers the doctor had prescribed.

Don, however, couldn't sleep. He just lay on his back, staring up in the dark at the ceiling, an occasional band of light caused by a passing car sweeping across it.

He loved Sarah. He'd loved her for almost his entire life. And he never, ever wanted to hurt her. But when she'd needed him, he wasn't there for her.

He heard a siren in the distance; someone else with their own crisis, just like the one they'd faced today.

No.
No,
they
hadn't faced it.
Sarah
had faced it—facedown, on the hard wooden floor, waiting hour after hour for him to return while he fucked a woman less than half—Christ, less than a third!—his age.

He rolled onto his side, his back to the sleeping Sarah, his body tucked into a fetal position, hugging himself. His eyes focused on the softly glowing blue numerals of a digital clock on his night-stand, and he watched the minutes crawl by.
 

For the first time in years, Sarah was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with it reclined. It was, she said, easier and more comfortable to have her injured leg stretched out.

Despite hardly sleeping at all the previous night, Don was unable to rest; he kept pacing. She had once quipped that they'd both fallen in love with this house at first sight—her because of the fireplace, him because of the long, narrow living room that just cried out for someone to march back and forth in it.

"What are you going to do today?" Sarah asked him. The foot-high digits on the wall monitor showed 9:22 a.m. The windows on either side of the fireplace had polarized, reducing the August sunshine to a tolerable level.

He halted in his pacing for a moment and looked at his wife. "Do?" he said. "I'm going to stay here, look after you."

But she shook her head. "You can't spend the rest of your life—the rest of
my
life—as a shut-in. I see how much energy you've got. Look at yourself! You can't sit still."

"Yes, but—"

"But what? I'll be fine."

"You weren't fine yesterday," he said, and he resumed walking. "And..."

"And what?" said Sarah.

He said nothing, his back to her. But people who'd been married so long could finish each other's sentences, even when one of them didn't want the other to do so. "And it's only going to get worse, right?" said Sarah.

Don tilted his head, conceding that she'd guessed correctly. He looked out the brown-tinged window. They'd bought this place in 1988, just after getting married, his parents, and Sarah's, too, helping with the down payment. Back then, Betty Ann Drive had had a few skinny trees here and there, plus one or two large blue spruces. Now, those skinny trees, planted for free by the City of North York, a municipality that didn't even exist anymore, had grown to be tall, luxurious maples and oaks.

He continued walking, now approaching her. "You need me here," he said, "to take care of you."

She looked down at her leg encased in the armature. "I need
someone
, yes. Maybe Percy—"

"Percy starts grade eight in two weeks," he said. "He'll be too busy. And Carl and Emily both work during the day. And we can't afford to hire a home-care worker."

"We could if..." she began, and he mentally finished
that
sentence:
if we sold the house.

He looked out one of the windows again. Yes, this house, small though it was, was bigger than they needed, and had been since Emily had moved out more than twenty years ago. Maybe they
should
sell it. As was now painfully obvious, Sarah was having real trouble with the stairs. Moving to an apartment would free up money
and
deal with that problem.

He'd reached the far end of the room and turned around, facing his wife again, and he saw her expression brighten. "You know what we need?" she said. "A Mozo."

"Mozo?" He said it the way she had, with two long-O sounds.

She nodded. "You know what that is?"

"I know it's worth fifteen points."

Sarah frowned. "It means 'male servant,'" she said. "It's from the Spanish. But it's also the brand name for a line of robots designed to help the elderly."

Don narrowed his eyes. "They make such things?"

"See what I mean?" said Sarah. "You have
got
to get out more. Yes, they make such things, if by 'they,' you mean McGavin Robotics."

He stopped pacing. "Even a low-end bot costs a fortune."

"Sure. But Cody thinks I've got some special insight into decrypting the response from Sigma Drac. I'll tell him I need a Mozo. It wouldn't be a lie. I could easily get more done with someone to serve as a research assistant, get me coffee, and so on. And it would mean I'd never be alone. You could go out without worrying about me."

He thought about complaining that the last time they'd taken charity from McGavin, it hadn't worked out so well. But Sarah was right. He'd go nuts if he had to stay home all the time, and, well, a housebot would make a lot of things easier, wouldn't it?
 

It was as though Ikea sold mechanical men. The Mozo arrived disassembled in a cubic crate that measured about a meter on a side. Don found it disconcerting seeing the head in a plastic bag, and it took him a good five minutes to figure out how to connect the legs (which were stored folded in half at the knee). But, at last, it was done. The robot was sky blue trimmed with silver; its body was covered with a soft material like that used to make wet suits. It had a round head about the size of a basketball, with two glassy eyes. And it had a mouth, of sorts. He had seen similar things on some other robots he'd run into: a horizontal black line beneath the eyes that could animate to match speech patterns. Although the market for robots that looked more or less human was small, people did like robots to have some facial expression.

Don couldn't help comparing their new robot to the fictional bots of his youth. He decided that, except for the mouth, it looked most like one of those from the old Gold Key comic
Magnus, Robot Fighter
. And, he had to admit, it
was
way cool having one, and not just because it let him put a check mark beside another of those twenty items on his old high-school list of things to do.

He looked at the Mozo, another modern miracle they couldn't afford. "Well," he said, hands on his hips, "what do you think?"

"It looks nice enough," said Sarah. "Shall we turn it on?"

Don was amused to see that the switch was a recessed button in the middle of the robot's torso; their Mozo had an innie. He pressed the switch, and—

"Hello," said a plain male voice. The mouth outline moved in a cartoonish approximation of the shapes human lips would have made. "Do you speak English?
Hola. Habla Espanol? Bonjour. Parlez-vous francais? Konichi-wa. Nihongo-o hanashimasu-ka?
"

"English," said Don.

"Hello," said the robot again. "This is the first time I've been activated since leaving the factory, so I need to ask you a few questions, please. First, from whom do I take instructions?"

"Me and her," Don said.

The robot nodded its basketball head. "By default, I will call you ma'am and you sir. However, if you prefer, I can address you any way you like."

Don grinned. "I am the Great and All-Powerful Oz."

The robot's mouth outline moved in a way that suggested the machine knew Don was kidding. "A pleasure to meet you, Great and All-Powerful Oz."

Sarah looked at the robot with a "see what I have to put up with" expression. Don smiled sheepishly, and she said, "Call him Don. And you can call me Sarah."

"A pleasure to meet you, Don and Sarah. What you are hearing is my default voice. However, if you prefer me to use a female voice or a different accent, I can. Would you like that?"

Don looked at Sarah. "No, this is fine," she said.

"All right," said the robot. "Have you chosen a name for me yet?"

Sarah lifted her shoulders and looked at Don. "Gunter," he said.

"Is that G-U-N-T-H-E-R?" asked the robot.

"No
H
," said Don. And then, unable to help himself, "Get the
H
out."

"My little boy," Sarah said, smiling at Don. She'd said that often enough over the years, but, just now, it seemed to hit a little too close to home. She must have noticed his quickly suppressed wince, because she immediately said, "Sorry."

Still, he thought, she was right. He
was
a kid at heart, at least when it came to robots. And his absolute favorite when he was growing up, as Sarah well knew, was the robot from
Lost in Space
. He got miffed whenever people called that robot Robby, although Robby, the robot from the movie
Forbidden Planet
, did bear a passing resemblance to the one from
Lost in Space
—not surprising, given that they were both designed by the same person, Robert Kinoshita. The
Jupiter 2
's robot was mostly just referred to as "the Robot" (or the "bubble-headed booby" and a hundred other alliterative insults by Dr. Smith). Still, many hardcore
Lost in Space
fans called it B-9, which was the model number it gave for itself in one episode. But Don had always contended that the barrel-chested automaton with vacuum-cleaner hoses for arms was actually named GUNTER, because another episode contained a flashback, showing the robot in its original packing crate, which was labeled "General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Robot." Despite pointing this out to people for—God, for over seventy years now—Don hadn't won many converts. But at least now there was a robot in the world who indisputably had that name.

Of course, thought Don, Sarah understood all this. She'd grown up watching
Lost in Space
, too, although what she'd loved most about it were the photos of real nebulas and galaxies used in space scenes ("Astronomical Photographs Copyrighted 1959 by the California Institute of Technology," the card on the ending credits said). But, he realized sadly, none of this would mean anything to Lenore or anyone else who was as young as he felt.

They continued responding to Gunter's questions for about half an hour, outlining the sorts of duties he was to perform, whether he should answer the phone or door, advising him not to enter the bathrooms when they were occupied unless he heard a call for help, and so on.

But Gunter's principal job was making sure Sarah was safe and well. And so Don said, "Do you know CPR?"

"Yes."

"What about the Heimlich maneuver?" asked Sarah.

"That, too. I'm fully trained in first aid. I can even perform an emergency tracheotomy, if need be, and my palms have built-in defibrillator pads."

"See!" said Don. "He is like Gunter. The real Gunter could shoot lightning out of his claws."

Sarah looked at Don with an affectionate grin. "The
real
Gunter?"