Golden Fleece

FIFTEEN

I knew what Aaron must be thinking about. The high radiation. The massive fuel consumption. The loose ends about Diana’s death. That Aaron was giving deep thought to this mystery, this slight fraying of the rope with which he had planned to hang himself with guilt, was clear to me not through his medical telemetry but simply because he was playing with his trains. He did that only when he wished to clear his mind of clutter, to focus his thoughts on a single issue.

For some reason, the billowing steam from his locomotives always appeared first, seconds before the ancient iron cars faded into existence. Aaron’s trains were holograms of the real things, taken by him at transportation museums, scaled to operate on the machine-generated track he laid out in winding routes. He was marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the first locomotive on Canada’s prairie, sending the mighty Countess of Dufferin thundering across the flat terrain of Alberta. The engine roared into life on his apartment worktable, chugged the length of the living room, disappeared into a rough-hewn rocky tunnel that magically appeared in the wall, looped around in his bedroom, and came out through another tunnel, completing a circuit of his tiny home.

I found his trains disconcerting—endless loops with no way to break out—but he often played with them for hours. What was he thinking? I was sure that nothing he could come up with could account for both phenomena; nothing short of his bizarre space-warp theory anyway. Most of Diana’s fuel burned in just nineteen minutes of flight, with just one pulsing of Orpheus’s main engines. A radiation dose two orders of magnitude greater than what she should have received, enough to kill her one hundred times deader than she should have been. He mulled these over, I knew. Two mysteries, but he sought one solution. I hoped he would slice himself open on Occam’s razor.

After the Countess had completed its third run around the apartment, I spoke up. “The transcript you requested is ready.”

Aaron took his hand off the control that made the trains go. The five cars ground to a halt, then faded into nothingness. A moment later, the last puff of steam disappeared, too. “Hardcopy, please.”

The wall-mounted printer hummed for a second as I downloaded the document into its buffer, then one after the other, out rolled eight onion-skin plastic sheets, the kind that recycled nicely. Fetching the pages, Aaron returned to his favorite chair, that god-awful cockpit reject, and began going over the telemetry from the attempt to rescue Diana.

I paid little attention to what he was doing, busying myself instead with: a conversation with Bev Hooks, a programmer who lived four floors below Aaron; a bit of verbal sparring with Joginder Singh-Samagh, a cartographer who took great pleasure in devising little tests to try to prove that I wasn’t “really”—he did that silly quotation marks’ gesture with his hands when he said it—intelligent; tutoring Garo Alexanian in Latin, a language deader than most; lowering the relative humidity on a number of levels to help simulate the coming of winter; and monitoring the flow of hydrogen and other materials into the ramscoop.

But my attention was brought back to Apartment 1443 when Aaron’s pulse surged. Actually, it wasn’t enough of a change to qualify as a surge, but I had lowered the attention-trigger level on his telemetry monitoring to compensate for his reserved physiology. Still, it was a sharp reaction for him. “What’s wrong?” I said, shunting the Latin tutoring to a CAI parallel processor and putting Bev and Joginder on more attenuated timesharing.

“Dammit, JASON, is this your idea of a joke?”

“Pardon?”

He balled his fist. “This, where you’re trying to contact Orpheus.”

I couldn’t see what he was getting at. “There was considerable interference.”

“You called to her anyway: ‘Di! Di! Di!’ ”

“That’s her name, isn’t it?”

“Damn right, you bastard.” He held a flimsy sheet up to my camera pair. Lenses rotated as I focused on the printout: “ARGO to ORPHEUS: Die! Die! Die!”

Oh, shit—how could I have typed that? “Aaron, I—I’m sorry. There must be a bug in my transcription program. I didn’t mean—”

He slapped the page back onto the corduroy armrest and spoke through clenched teeth. “It seems I’m not the only one feeling guilty about Di’s death.”