Some men still looked good at that age: youthful, virile. Others— apparently despite all the medical treatments available in what I realized with a start was now the 22nd century—looked like they had one foot in the grave.
Greg was staring at me, and—God help me—I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Welcome back, Cath,” he said.
Cath. He always called me that; the robot probes always referred to me as Cathy. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the shorter version.
Greg was no idiot. He was aware that he hadn’t aged well, and was looking for a sign from me. But he was still Greg, still putting things front and center, so that we could deal with them however we were going to. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said.
That wasn’t quite true, but, then again, everything is relative.
Einstein had been a man. I remember being a student, trying to wrap my head around his special theory of relativity, which said there was no privileged frame of reference, and so it was equally true to claim that a spaceship was at rest and Earth was moving away from it as it was to hold the more obvious interpretation, that the ship was moving and Earth was stationary.
But for some reason, time always passed more slowly on the ship, not on Earth.
Einstein had surely assumed it would be the men who would go out into space, and the women who would stay at home, that the men would return hale and youthful, while the women had stooped over and wrinkled up.
Had that been the case, the women would have been tossed aside, just as Einstein had divorced his own first wife, Mileva. She’d been vacationing with their kids—an older girl and a younger boy, just like Greg and I had— in Switzerland when World War I broke out, and had been unable to return to Albert in Berlin. After a few months—only months!—of this forced separation, he divorced her.
But now Greg and my separation was over. And my husband—if indeed he still was my husband; he could have gotten a unilateral divorce while I was away—was an old man.
“How are Sarah and Jacob?” I asked.
“They’re fine,” said Greg. His voice had lost much of its strength. “Sarah—God, there’s so much to tell you. She stayed in Canada, and is running a big hypertronics company up there. She’s been married, and divorced, and married again. She’s got four daughters and two grandsons.”
So I was a great-grandmother. I swallowed. “And Jacob?”
“Married. Two kids. One granddaughter, another due in April. A professor at Harvard—astronautics, if you can believe that. He used to say he could either follow his dad, looking down, or his mom, looking up.” Greg shrugged his bony shoulders. “He chose the latter.”
“I wish they were here,” I said.
“I asked them to stay away. I wanted to see you first, alone. They’ll be here tomorrow.” He reached out, as if to take my hand the way he used to, but I didn’t respond at once, and his hand, liver-spotted, with translucent skin, fell by his side again. “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” he said.
“You wanted it all,” Greg said, sitting opposite me in a little cafe near Edwards Air Force Base. “The whole shebang.” He paused, the first syllable of the word perhaps catching his attention as it had mine. “The whole nine yards.”
“So did you,” I said. “You wanted your hominids, and you wanted your family.” I stopped myself before adding, “And more, besides.”
“What do we do now?” Greg asked.
“What did you do while I was gone?” I replied.
Greg looked down, presumably picturing the archeological remains of his own life. “I married again—no one you knew. We were together for fifteen years, and then …” He shrugged. “And then she died. Another one taken away from me.”
It wasn’t just in looks that Greg was older; back before I’d gone away, his self-censorship mechanism had been much better. He would have kept that last comment to himself.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and then, just so there was no possibility of his misconstruing the comment, I added, “About your other wife dying, I mean.”
He nodded a bit, accepting my words. Or maybe he was just old and his head moved of its own accord. “I’m alone now,” he said.
I wanted to ask him about his second wife—about whether she’d been younger than him. If she’d been one of those grad students that went over to South Africa with him, the age difference could have been as great as that which now stretched between us. But I refrained. “We’ll need time,” I said. “Time to figure out what we want to do.”
“Time,” repeated Greg, as if I’d asked for the impossible, asked for something he could no longer give.
So here I am, back on Earth. My ex-husband—he did divorce me, after all—is old enough to be my father. But we’re taking it one day at a time— equal-length days, days that are synchronized, days in lockstep.
My children are older than I am. And I’ve got grandchildren. And great-grandchildren, and all of them are wonderful.
And I’ve been to another world … although I think I prefer this one.
Yes, it seems you can have it all.
Just not all at once.
But, then again, as Einstein would have said, there’s no such thing as “all at once.”
Everything is relative. Old Albert knew that cold. But I know something better.
Relatives are everything.
And I was back home with mine.
Biding Time
After winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year late in 2003 (for my novel Hominids, first volume of my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy), I found myself much in demand for public speaking, teaching, script writing, and so on, plus I was also busy editing my own science-fiction line, the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
I very much enjoyed doing all those things, but the net effect was that by the summer of 2004, I was way behind on my seventeenth novel, which was under contract to Tor Books. And so I made a resolution, after finishing the novella “Identity Theft” on July 14, 2004:1 was going to give up writing short fiction. After all, I find writing short stories enormously hard work; I’m much more at home at novel-length. Also, the sad reality is that short fiction pays an order of magnitude less well per word than do my novels.
I dutifully turned down various commissions for the next four months, but in November 2004, I was Guest of Honor at Windy Con 31, a large science-fiction convention in Chicago. Two things happened there that at least temporarily broke my resolve. First, a limited-edition hardcover collection by me called Relativity was published by WindyCon’s sponsoring organization, ISFiC, and I was enormously pleased with how that book turned out. It contained eight short stories (four of which appeared in my previous collection, Iterations, and four more of which also appear here in Identity Theft), plus almost 60,000 words of my nonfiction: essays, articles, and speeches by me about SF. I decided I liked having collections to put on my brag shelf—but I didn’t quite have enough words yet for a third one.
Second, on the Saturday night of the convention, Carolyn and I had dinner with editor John Heifers, who works for Martin Harry Greenberg’s company Tekno-Books, and John’s wife Kerrie, plus editor Bill Fawcett and writer Jody-Lynn Nye. We had a terrific time, and a fabulous meal, at Harry Caray’s steakhouse, a Chicago institution. I was in a mellow mood, and when John asked me to contribute to an anthology of cross-genre SF stories—tales that combined science fiction and any other category—I found myself saying yes.