Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

And, seriously, as much as I loved Kayla—and I think I really and truly was falling head-over-heels in love with her—could I cut back on my donations just to facilitate our relationship?

No, of course not. And so although those $250 round trips were a bargain, I could only afford them now and again. This time, I was driving on my own to Saskatoon.

I sometimes quip that I have sympathy for moon-landing deniers. After all, no one had walked on the moon since 1972; how could we possibly have done that then but couldn’t do it now, almost half a century later? But after making this drive to Saskatoon a couple of times, I have to say I was also beginning to understand members of the Flat Earth Society. Every Canadian knew the joke, immortalized in the opening credits of the sitcom Corner Gas, about Saskatchewan being the place where you could watch your dog run away… for three days.

It was election night—I’d voted before leaving Winnipeg—but instead of listening to the CBC, which would have hours of pointless speculation before the polls closed, I played an audiobook: Dan Falk talking about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Falk was speculating that one likely reason we’ve never detected alien signals is that shortly after developing radio, any civilization almost certainly also develops the ability to destroy itself. We’d only been a broadcasting species for 125 years now; who was to say we ourselves would be around much longer?

On that somber note, I did finally switch to the radio, just in time to hear a man speaking, a hint of astonishment in his crisp tones: “The CBC is now prepared to call it. It’s by a slim margin, but we will have a majority NDP government; Naheed Nenshi will be Canada’s twenty-fourth prime minister. Our analyst Hayden Trenholm is with me here in Toronto. Hayden, your thoughts?”

“What a close race! It’s not quite a ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ moment, but I do think it’ll take a lot of people by surprise. Still, Nenshi is no stranger to election-night upsets. Six weeks before being elected mayor of Calgary in 2010, polls had his support at just eight percent. He won over his doubters once in office: he was re-elected in 2013 with a staggering seventy-four percent of the vote. He didn’t do that well tonight, but it’s still a historic victory.”

I turned off the radio, smiling, and not just because my party had won; it was also cool to see a hometown Calgary boy make good.

The black sky was a hemispherical bowl stretching from horizon to horizon, and I can’t resist a clear night. I pulled over, wandered out into a field, and looked up. I still didn’t remember anything from that half-year science-fiction course, but the next term I’d taken a poetry class, and a line of Archibald Lampman’s floated into my consciousness from back then: The wide awe and wonder of the night. The sky was cloudless, there was no moon, and the stars shone down in all their profusion. I looked at them, as I always did, in amazement, but Dan Falk had left me thinking, and I found myself feeling profoundly sad as I contemplated the deafening silence, wondering indeed how long our own civilization had left.

Saskatchewan never observes Daylight Saving Time, which means, here in the summer, I arrived an hour earlier than I would in winter. But it was still after 11:00 P.M. when I pulled into Kayla’s driveway. I would have been raring to go, even if I hadn’t put away two liters of Coke during the drive; the lovemaking was affectionate and fun, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

In the morning, Ryan—who’d been long asleep by the time I’d arrived—joined us for breakfast, and she gave me a gift, a beadwork wristband she’d made showing the letters JC. “For Jiminy Cricket!” she squealed. I smiled broadly and slipped it on.

We then took her to the University of Saskatchewan’s Museum of Natural Sciences, not far from the Light Source. Saskatchewan was dinosaur country, and she gawked at the skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus, but I think she liked the indoor waterfall and koi pond the best.

As Kayla took Ryan to the washroom, I checked the news online. The right-wing Toronto Sun was in trouble, it seemed, for having run not an election-night picture of Nenshi, but one from years ago of him in Muslim garb under a giant headline that read, “Minority Government.” But otherwise the news of the election seemed to be going over reasonably well here in Canada.

American newspapers usually completely ignored Canadian news, so I didn’t expect much there, but a number of my Facebook friends had linked to the same clip of President Carroway, apparently talking about the election. I clicked on the story.

Quinton Carroway was his usual slick self, immaculately groomed, not a hair out of place. “Mr. President,” called out a reporter, “does it concern you that Prime Minister Nenshi is Muslim?”

Carroway smiled that smile of his, as if someone was tugging up on fishing line at the corners of his mouth. “I compliment him on being the first Muslim head of state anywhere in the Western World. Quite an achievement, that, quite a significant achievement. And to do so with Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party, to boot! A couple of monumental firsts. Across the border—the longest undefended one in the world—we offer congratulations.”

It’d been a lot colder last night, standing out in that field, looking up at the stars. But it was now, not then, that I felt a chill run down my spine.

Saturday night, Kayla, Ryan, and I drove out to the Saskatoon Airport, which, as Kayla pointed out to me, was named for John Diefenbaker, one of the other prime ministers who’d been kicked from power by a non-confidence motion; maybe Justin Trudeau would be remembered with an airport of his own someday. We weren’t here so I could go home, though; rather, Kayla had agreed to pick up Victoria Chen, who was returning from a symposium at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo. Vic gave Kayla and Ryan hugs when she came out of the gate, and I was pleasantly surprised when she gave me one, too.

“How was the conference?” I asked.

“Amazing,” Vic said. “Everyone was making the same joke: you’d think if anyone could do it, quantum physicists could; there was so much good simultaneous programming, we all wanted to be in multiple places at once.” She shook her head in wonder. “Haroche and Wineland were there, and D-Wave unveiled a new one-kiloqubit model, and…”

And Kayla was clearly following all this; for my part, I took the handle of Vic’s rolly bag and pulled it along while the two women talked quantum mechanics. After a bit—or a qubit—it proved too much for Ryan, though, and she plucked at Victoria’s sleeve. “Aunt Vic, did you bring me anything?”

“Ryan!” admonished Kayla.

“What do you think?” Vic asked Ryan with a sly grin.

“I think you did!” Ryan exclaimed.

“I think you’re right!” Vic exclaimed back. She had a shoulder bag, and we stopped while she reached into it. She pulled out a small plush animal—a zebra, which seemed an odd thing to bring back from Ontario. But then I saw the letters IQC embroidered on its rump; it was swag from the conference, and the stripes, now that I got a good look at them, were in the classic two-slit interference pattern. None of that meant anything to Ryan, but she squeed appropriately at the gift.

“And, since we’re stopped,” said Vic, “I also brought something back for you, Kayla—sort of. It’s really for the Light Source, but I won’t be going in to work again until Monday, so, technically, you wouldn’t be taking it from work if you borrow it between now and then.”