Golden Fleece

EIGHT

I do not pretend to understand what Kirsten was going through. I mean, here she was, back in the apartment she now shared with Aaron, trying to comfort her lover over the death of his ex-wife. That it was distressing her greatly was evident from her medical telemetry: her pulse was up, her EEG agitated, her breathing somewhat ragged. Although I had no way of measuring gastric acidity directly, she showed all the other signs of having a royal case of heartburn. Kirsten, tall and cool and reserved, wasn’t as demonstrative as Diana had been, but I knew, even if no one else did, that she was usually more sincere.

Aaron had been silent for three minutes, twenty-one seconds, sitting opposite Kirsten in his favorite chair, a bulky lander cockpit seat he had amateurishly reupholstered with tan corduroy. The last thing Kirsten had said was, “She didn’t seem like the type,” meaning, I presumed, that Diana apparently lacked the characteristics Kirsten associated with those who usually committed suicide. I’m sure Kirsten’s medical training had included lectures on this issue, so I didn’t doubt the validity of that observation. But, as I well knew, even the most logical minds, the least emotional souls, could end up killing themselves.

“It’s my fault,” Aaron said at last, his voice a hollow monotone.

“It is not your fault,” Kirsten replied at once, with the firmness Aaron had wished to hear from me earlier. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened.” Psychological counseling was a bit further removed from Kirsten’s field of expertise, and I wondered whether she was just winging it or if she actually knew what she was doing in trying to cheer Aaron. I accessed her academic records. She’d taken a psych elective while at the Sorbonne. One course, and only a C+ at that. “You can’t let this thing destroy you.”

Thing. Their favorite word, an all-purpose noun. Did it refer to Di’s apparent suicide? To Aaron’s insistence on blaming himself for it? Or something larger, less precise? Damn it, I wish they’d be more specific in their speech.

“She’d asked me—begged me—not to leave her,” Aaron said, his head bowed. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell whether he was staring at the floor or had closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the internal turmoil he was experiencing. Granted, it was true that Diana had not wanted her relationship with Aaron to end, but Aaron’s view of her actions had been colored by his feelings of guilt. Either that, or—a less charitable interpretation—he was deliberately lying to curry further sympathy from Kirsten. In any event, Diana hadn’t beseeched him to stay.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kirsten said again, meaning, I supposed, that she had already used up all the psychological wisdom she could remember from that one class.

“I feel… empty. Helpless.”

“I know it hurts.”

Aaron fell quiet again. Finally, he said, “It does hurt. It hurts one whole hell of a lot.” He got up, hands thrust deep into his pockets, and tilted his head to look now at the constellations of holes in the acoustical tiles on the ceiling. “I thought she and I had parted friends. We’d loved each other—I really and truly did love her—but we’d grown apart. Distant. Different.” He shook his head slightly. “If I’d known she’d take it so hard, I never would have—”

“Never would have left her?” finished Kirsten, frowning. “You can’t be a prisoner of someone else’s emotions.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You know, Diana and I were dating for close to a year before we got married. It wasn’t until just before the wedding that I told my mother about her; she never would have understood me being involved with a blonde shiksa. You have to take other people’s feelings into account.”

“Are you saying you would have stayed with Di if she had told you she’d kill herself if you left?”

“I—I don’t know.” Aaron began pacing the room, kicking the odd piece of clothing out of the way. “Perhaps.”

Kirsten’s voice grew hard. “And I suppose you were taking her feelings into account when you started seeing me.”

“I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“But you would have hurt me had you changed your mind and decided to stay with Diana.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you, either.”

“Somebody was bound to get hurt.”

Aaron had paced the room one and a half times now. He stood at the far end, facing the wall, putty-colored like in his old apartment. His back was to Kirsten as he whispered, “Apparently.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“No. I did what I wanted to do. There’s a world of difference.”

“Look,” said Kirsten. “It’s all moot. She didn’t tell you in advance that she’d kill herself if you left.” She rose from her chair and began to walk toward Aaron, long legs carrying her across the room quickly. But she stopped before she reached him. “Or did she tell you?”

Aaron swung to face her, two meters between them. “What? No, of course not. Christ, I would have handled things differently if she had.”

“Well, then, you can’t blame yourself.” She started to move again, to close the distance separating them, but seeing the hardness in Aaron’s face, stopped herself immediately. “These things happen,” she said at last.

“I’ve never known anyone who committed suicide before,” said Aaron.

“My grandfather did,” said Kirsten in a quiet voice. “He got old and sick and, well, he didn’t want to wait around to die.”

“But Diana had a lot to live for. She was young, healthy. She was healthy, wasn’t she?”

Kirsten frowned again. “Well, I hadn’t seen her since you and she broke up. Probably just as well. She would have been due for another physical in a few months; but according to her last one, she was fine. Oh, she showed the signs of likely developing adult-onset diabetes, so I was cloning a new pancreas for her in case we ever needed it, but other than that, nothing. And JASON tells me her medical telemetry had never shown anything noteworthy. It’s all not surprising, really. After all, there’s no way she would have passed the physical for this mission if she had had anything seriously wrong. You’ve never seen a healthier bunch of people.”

“Then there’s no doubt.” Aaron’s hands, still deep in his pockets, clenched, the cotton weave of his trousers bulging to accommodate the fists. “She committed suicide because I left her.”

“We don’t know for sure that’s what Diana did. Maybe it was just an accident. Or maybe she had cracked up or was on something and didn’t know what she was doing.”

“She didn’t use drugs or current. She didn’t even drink— except one glass of champagne at our wedding.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Aaron. Without a suicide note, we can’t be sure of what happened.”

A note! I quickly accessed Diana’s writings—I was sorry now that I’d erased her latest working documents—and performed a lexicographic analysis to see if I could imitate her style. A Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6, a score of 9 on Gunning’s Fog Index, average sentence length 11.0 words, average word length 4.18 letters, average number of syllables per word, 1.42. Despite a fondness for split infinitives and putting quotation marks around words for no good reason, Diana wrote clear and concise prose, particularly remarkable given that she was an academic—among the worst writers I’ve ever read—and given that she tended to be quite garrulous in person.

I set one of my subsystems to the task of composing an appropriate letter, but aborted the job before it was completed. All the word processors on board were peripheral to me. If a suicide note was to appear now, Mayor Gorlov would demand to know why I hadn’t summoned help as soon as I became aware of what Diana was contemplating.

“Note or no note, it’s obvious,” said Aaron.

“We can’t be sure,” said Kirsten. “It could have been an accident.”

“Earlier, you were convinced that she’d killed herself,” said Aaron. “In fact, you tried to convince me of it, too.”

It seemed to me that Kirsten had been hurt by, even jealous of, Aaron’s obvious grief over the loss of his ex-wife. She should have told him that, apologized for the pettiness that caused her to be so hard on him when they went out to the Orpheus to recover Di’s body, but she, like Aaron, dealt poorly with feelings of guilt.

Instead, she pressed on, trying, or so it seemed to me, to give Aaron a comforting doubt about the reason for Diana’s demise, some small lack of certainty that would keep him from drowning in his own feelings of responsibility. “Remember, there’s still a big loose end,” she said, at last moving close to him and, after a tenuous moment of hesitation, draping her arms around his neck. “We still don’t know what caused the high levels of radiation.”

Aaron sounded irritated. “That’s one for the physicists, don’t you think?”

Kirsten pushed on, convinced, I guessed, that she was on the right track to dispelling Aaron’s self-recrimination. “No, really. She would have to be outside for hours to get that hot.”

“Maybe some kind of space wrap,” Aaron, vaguely. “Maybe she was outside for hours from her point of view.”

“You’re grasping at straws, sweetheart.”

“Well, so are you, dammit!” He peeled her arms from him and turned his back. “Who cares about the radiation? All that matters is that Diana is dead. And I killed her just as surely as if I’d thrust a knife into her heart.”