He opened his mouth to go on, but caught himself in time. He’d been about to say "Sarah asked me to…," but who the hell calls his own grandmother by her first name? And yet he couldn’t bring himself to actually say, "My grandmother." After a second, he fell back on the passive voice. "I’ve been asked to pick up some old files."

"Oh, I know," said Lenore. "I’m the low person on the totem pole here; I’m the one who had to dig around for them down in the basement." She was about five-foot-four, although presumably never thought of herself that way; his generation had been the last Canadian one to be taught imperial measures in school. "Let me get them for you."

She walked across the room, and he found his eyes tracking the movement of her rear end through her shorts. Sitting on top of one of the filing cabinets was a stack almost a foot high of papers stuffed into several manila file folders.

Don was worried that his new looks didn’t quite stand up to scrutiny; his own appearance these days was so startling to himself that part of him assumed it should be startling to others, too. But as she handed the great pile of paper to him, she gave no sign if she found anything out of the ordinary about him.

For his part, he found himself noticing the gentle hint of fruit fragrance — how wonderful to have his sense of smell back! It wasn’t perfume. More likely, he thought, it was her shampoo or conditioner, and it was quite pleasant.

"My goodness," he said. "I didn’t expect there to be so much!"

"Do you need a hand getting it all down to your car?" asked Lenore.

"Actually, I took the subway."

"Oh! I can get you a box to put it in."

"Thanks, but…" She lifted her orange eyebrows, and he went on. "It’s just I was going to go to the Art Gallery this afternoon. They’ve got a special exhibition of Robyn Herrington blown glass that I want to see."

"Heck, the Art Galley is only a couple of blocks south of here. Why don’t you leave the papers here, and pick them up when you’re done?"

"I don’t want to be a bother."

"Oh, it’s no bother at all! I’ll be here straight through until 5:00."

"Workaholic, eh? You must really like it here."

She leaned her shapely rump against a nearby desk. "Oh, yes. It’s terrific."

"You’re doing a Ph.D.?"

"Not yet. I’m just finishing my master’s."

"Is this where you did your undergrad?"

"Nah. I went to Simon Fraser."

He nodded. "And is that where home is? Vancouver?"

"Yup. And, no offense, it sure beats this place. I miss the ocean, I miss the mountains, and I can’t stand the climate here."

"But don’t you get tired of all the rain in Vancouver?"

"I don’t even notice it; it’s what I’m used to. But the snow here in winter! And the humidity now. I’d die if it weren’t for air-conditioning."

Don wasn’t much of a fan of Toronto’s climate either. He nodded again. "So, are you going to move back after you finish here?"

"Nah, probably not. I want to go somewhere in the southern hemisphere. Not nearly enough SETI searching has been done of the southern skies."

"Anywhere in particular?" asked Don.

"The University of Canterbury has a great astronomy department."

"Where’s that?"

"New Zealand. Christchurch."

"Ah," said Don. "Mountains and the ocean."

She smiled. "Exactly."

"Have you ever been there?"

"No, no. But someday…"

"It’s great."

"You’ve been?" she asked, letting her eyebrows climb her freckled brow.

"Yup," he said, adopting her style of speech. "Back in—" He stopped himself before he said, Back in 1992. "Ah, a few years ago."

"Ooow," said Lenore, her lips puckering appealingly as she made the sound. "What was it like? Did you love it?"

He thought he should break eye contact with the young woman again, and his gaze landed on a digital wall clock; it was 1:10. He was getting hungry. That was another thing that had come back along with his sense of smell, now that his body had renewed itself. For so long, he’d been eating tiny meals, always having leftovers to take home from restaurants, and during the rollback, while his body had been rebuilding lost muscle mass, he’d eaten like the proverbial pig. Now, though, his appetite had settled into being what it’d been when he really had been twenty-five, which was still pretty prodigious.

"Anyway," said Don, "thanks for letting me come back later to get the papers. I should be heading off."

"To the Art Gallery?"

"Actually, I thought I’d grab a bite first. Is there anywhere good around here?"

"There’s the Duke of York," she said. "It’s good. In fact…"

"Yes?"

"Well, I really am seriously thinking about applying to New Zealand. I’d love to pick your brain a bit. Mind if I join you for lunch?"

Don and Lenore headed outside. The sun was high in the quicksilver sky, the humidity stifling. To the south, the CN Tower shimmered through the haze. The campus had been mostly empty, this being summer, but Bloor Street was packed with what was probably an equal mix of downtown businesspeople and tourists, plus a few robots, all madly hurrying somewhere. Don and Lenore chatted about New Zealand as they walked along.

"It’s a great place," he said, "but I’ll warn you, they’ve got this annoying tendency to put a slice of beet on hamburgers, and — oh, look!" There was a car parked at the curb. He pointed at its white and blue license plate: PQHO-294, with the hyphen, as was normal in Ontario, a stylized crown. "Qoph."

Lenore’s eyebrows leapt up her forehead. "The name of a Hebrew letter!" she exclaimed with relish. "Do you play Scrabble?" Every serious Scrabble player had memorized the handful of acceptable words that had Q but no U in them.

He smiled. "Oh, yes."

"Me, too," said Lenore. "I’m always practicing with license plates. A few weeks ago, I saw two cars side by side, and their plates were anagrams of ‘barf’ and ‘crap.’ I was smiling for days after that."

They continued on, talking some more about New Zealand, and by the time they arrived at the restaurant, they’d exhausted just about everything Don had to say on the topic. The Duke of York turned out to be a two-story-tall pub-style restaurant on a quiet street north of Bloor. The other buildings on the street, all classy renovated houses, seemed to contain the offices of high-priced lawyers and accountants. They were shown to a booth near the back on the pub’s first floor, and settled in. Rock music — or whatever kids today called the stuff they listened to — was playing over the speakers. Mercifully, the place was air-conditioned.

There was a table near theirs, with three men seated at it. A server about Lenore’s age, and almost as pretty, wearing a skin-tight black top scooped low to show a lot of cleavage, was taking that group’s order for a bottle of wine to go with their meals.

"Red or white?" asked one of the men, looking at his friends.

"Red," replied the fellow on his left, and "red," repeated the guy on his right.

The first man tipped his head up to look at the server, and said, "I’m hearing red."

Lenore leaned over the table and whispered to Don, while indicating the guy who’d just spoken with a tilting of her head. "Wow," she said. "He must have synesthesia."

Don barked a delighted laugh.

The same server turned her attention to them. She was tall, and broad-shouldered, with chocolate brown skin and waist-length blue-black hair. "Can I get you — oh, Lennie! I didn’t realize it was you, honey!"

Lenore smiled sheepishly at Don. "I wait tables here two nights a week."

He suddenly had a nice mental picture of Lenore dressed like the server, whose name tag read "Gabby." Gabby put a hand on her rounded hip, appraising him. "So, who’s this?" she said, with mock seriousness, as if Lenore’s companion had to pass muster with her.