Golden Fleece

NINETEEN

MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

STARCOLOGY DATE: SATURDAY 11 OCTOBER 2177

EARTH DATE: FRIDAY 7 MAY 2179

DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 744 ▲

DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2.224 ▼

It’s hard to believe he’s gone. That thought echoed over and over again through my Aaron Rossman neural net, repeating like the first simple program that each human learns in grade school—a handful of instructions that endlessly listed his or her name to screen. It’s hard to believe he’s gone. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.

But he was gone. Dead. People didn’t die of heart attacks anymore. Cancer was almost always curable if caught early. Routine brain scans detected potential trouble sites long before a stroke could occur. Diabetes. AIDS. Most of the other big killers of the past, cured. But no one—not doctor, not naturopath, not shaman—could do anything about a snapped neck. Benjamin Rossman, forty-eight, had died instantly, under a two hundred-kilogram steel girder that had fallen from a crane.

The phone call had come three nights before. Aaron, at his father’s home in Thunder Bay for the Passover holidays, answered. He’d been surprised to see Peter Oonark’s face fade in on the screen. “Hiya, Petey,” Aaron said, grinning broadly at the smooth, round visage he hadn’t seen for six years.

Petey, wearing a silver hard hat, looked grim. Grease smeared his face, and sweat beaded on his brow. “By, Jesus, Aaron—is that you?” He sounded surprised. “Don’t nearly recognize you with that forest.”

Aaron stroked his chin. The beard had been an experiment—and not a particularly successful one at that. Most everyone agreed that he looked better without it. He did like the reddish hues that it had, though, believing it made a nice contrast with the sandy hair on his head. “Yeah, well, I’m going to shave it off. So, Petey, how’ve you been?”

“Fine. Look, Aaron, is Halina home?”

Halina was his father’s current wife. “No. Should be any minute though.”

Petey didn’t say anything. Aaron peered more closely at the screen, looking at the Native Canadian’s eyes, brown and liquid. The scan lines of the screen segmented them into parallel chords. “What’s wrong, Petey?”

“It’s your dad. There’s been an accident.”

“God. Is he all right?”

“No, Aaron. No, he’s not. His neck got broken.”

“So he’s in hospital, right. Where? Thunder Bay General?”

“He’s dead. I’m sorry, Aaron. I’m so very, very sorry.”

That had been Tuesday. Instead of enjoying the Passover seders, the Rossmans now sat shivah. All mirrors in the house were covered, as were the household god’s reflective eyes. Lapels were out of fashion, but each mourner made a small rip in the front of his jacket, acknowledging the Almighty’s right to claim his servant. Even during the first three days, set aside for weeping, there were surprisingly few tears. Just emptiness, a vacuum in their lives.

Joel and Hannah had flown in and flown out, Joel from Jerusalem, where he was studying engineering at the Hebrew University, Hannah from Vancouver, where she worked in a small advertising agency. But Aaron had stayed to help put his father’s affairs in order. On the eighth day after the funeral, work was permitted to resume.

Aaron’s mother, divorced a dozen years from his father, had tried to muster the sorrow appropriate to the occasion, but it had been too long since Benjamin Rossman had been a part of her life. Halina, though, was devastated, broken, wandering the house aimlessly. Aaron sat on the edge of the bed his father had shared with Halina, the contents of the strongbox strewn across the pale Hudson’s Bay Company six-point blanket. A birth certificate. A few stock certificates. A copy of his father’s will. His father’s high-school diploma, neatly rolled and tied with a ribbon. His marriage contracts, the one with Aaron’s mother expired, the one with Halina never to run its term.

Papers.

The inventory of a life.

The small collection of facts and figures that were still handed over with a flourish, a flare.

True, these were mere echoes of the actual records of Benjamin Rossman’s life, stored in gallium arsenide and holographic interference patterns. But they were the records that mattered most, the things he had cared about above all else.

Aaron opened envelopes, unfolded sheets, read, sorted into piles. Finally, he picked up an unsealed number-ten envelope. In the upper left was printed the stylized trillium logo of the Government of Ontario and the words Ministry of Community and Social Services. Aaron registered a certain dull curiosity at the unusual source of the envelope as he opened it. Out came a single form with ornate border and tightly packed barcodes: Certificate of Adoption. Aaron was surprised. Dad adopted? I didn’t know that. But then he read further down the form—the whole thing had been printed as a single job on a tunnel-diode printer, so the filled-in blanks didn’t stand out at all. The name of the adopted child wasn’t Benjamin Rossman. Oh, that name was there, but next to the title adopting father. No, the name of the adopted child was Aaron David, birth surname confidential, new legal surname Rossman.

His father’s death had left Aaron numb, too numb for this discovery to yet register fully. But he knew in his bones that ultimately he would feel this shock even more than the loss of his father.

Aaron’s mother’s house hadn’t changed much. Oh, it seemed smaller to Aaron than it had when he was a child, and he’d come to realize that his mother had absolutely no taste in furnishings, but he fancied he could still hear the soft echoes of his brother and sister playing, smell the lingering aroma of his father’s hearty if none-too-spectacular cooking. He sat in the big green chair that he still thought of as Dad’s, although his father hadn’t visited this house for years before his death. His mother sat on the couch, her hands in her lap, her eyes not quite meeting his. LAR had fixed coffee and had left it waiting in the dumbwaiter.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

“Yes. It’s very sad.”

“He was a good man.”

A good man. Yes, all dead men are characterized as having been that way. But Benjamin Rossman had been a good man. A hard worker, a good father. And a good husband? No. No, that had never been said. But, on balance, a good man. “I’ll miss him.”

He waited for his mother to say, “Me, too,” but of course she didn’t. She hadn’t seen Benjamin in over a year. For her, not seeing him today was no different from not seeing him any other day. I’ll never let that happen to me, Aaron thought. I could never love somebody one day and turn my back on her the next. When I get married, it will be forever.

“Mother, I’m going to try out to become an Argonaut.” For two centuries, the Argonauts had been the Toronto team in the Canadian Football League. Although Aaron followed the game, he had never expressed an interest in playing. But his mother knew what he meant. The whole world knew about the new Argonauts, the crew for the massive starship being built in orbit high over Kenya.

“That mission will last a long time,” she said. And left unsaid: And I’ll be dead when you return.

“I know,” he said. And left unsaid: I’m already dealing with the loss of my father. Can the loss of the rest of my family be so much worse?

They sat in silence for many minutes. “I went through Dad’s papers,” Aaron said at last. A pause. “Why didn’t you tell me I was adopted?”

His mother’s face grew pale. “We didn’t want you to know that.”

“Why not?”

“Adoption … adoption is so unusual these days. Birth control is so easy. Unwanted children are rare. We didn’t want you to feel bad.”

“Are Hannah and Joel adopted, too?”

“Oh, no. You can see it in their faces. Joel takes after his father—he’s got his eyes. And Hannah looks just like my sister.”

“So you weren’t infertile.”

“What? No. There aren’t many things that can prevent a person from having a child these days. Not much that they can’t correct with drugs or microsurgery, after all. No, there were no problems there.”

“Then why did you adopt?”

“It’s not easy to get a permit for a third child, you know. We were lucky. Here in northern Ontario, population laws are less strict, so—so we had no trouble getting permission, but—”

“But what?”

She sighed. “Your father never made a lot of money, dear. He was a manual laborer. Not many of them left. And I shared a job with another person. Not uncommon for one parent to do that, especially these last few years, since they outlawed day care. But, well, we didn’t have a lot. Take LAR, for instance. He’s one of the cheapest household gods you can buy, and he still was more than we could really afford. Feeding another mouth was going to be difficult.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you adopted me.”

“The Government Family Allowance. You get double benefits for an adopted child.”

“What?”

“Well, there’s so little incurable infertility. It’s hard to find parents willing to adopt.”

“You adopted me instead of having a child of your own because it was cheaper?”

“Yes, but—I mean, we grew to love you as our own, dear. You always were such a good little boy.”

Aaron got up, made his way to the dumbwaiter, lifted a cold cup of coffee to his lips. Frowning, he put it back and asked LAR to zap it in the microwave.

“Who were my birth parents?”

“A man and woman in Toronto.”

“Have you met them?”

“I met the woman once, just after you were born. A sweet young thing. I—I’ve forgotten her name.”

A lie, thought Aaron. Mom’s voice always catches just a tad when she’s lying.

“I’d like to know her name.”

“I can’t help you with that. Wasn’t it on the adoption certificate?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, dear. You know how these things are. They’re kept confidential.”

“But maybe she wants to see me.”

“Maybe she does. There is a way to find out, I think.”

Aaron sat up straight. “Oh?”

“Whatever ministry is responsible, I forget what it’s called—”

“Community and Social Services.”

“That’s it. They operate a—a registry service, I guess you’d call it.”

“Which means?”

“Well, it’s simple, really. If an adopted child and a birth parent both happen to register, saying they want to find each other, then the ministry will arrange the meeting. Perhaps your birth mother registered with the ministry.”

“Great. I’ll try that. But what if she hasn’t?”

“Then I’m afraid the ministry will refuse to set up the meeting.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s a place to start anyway.” He looked at his mother, her simple brown eyes. “But I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me I was adopted. Maybe not when I was a kid, okay. But once I became an adult, why not?”

His mother looked out the window, out at the trees devoid of leaves, ready for the coming of winter. “I’m sorry, dear. We thought it was for the best. We just didn’t see how knowing would make you any happier.”

Beauty, said Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, is in the eye of the beholder. I’d never really understood what that meant until now. To be sure, there are things I find beautiful: the smooth, polished lines of well-designed and well-maintained machinery; the intense aesthetic quality of an intricate, balanced equation; even the raw randomness of some fractal patterns. But, to me, people had always been people, the variations in individual physiognomy and physique of interest only insofar as they aided identification.

Now, though, seeing the world through the eyes of Aaron Rossman, I did perceive what beauty meant, what made one human more attractive than another.

Take Beverly Hooks, for instance. The first time I met her, I noted her race (Caucasian, the skin unusually pale), the color of her eyes (deep green), the color of her hair (naturally dark at the roots, but with the rest of it dyed a black so black that it reflected almost no visible light at all), and a few other specific details to aid me in recognizing her again in the future.

When Aaron Rossman first met her, twenty-two days before our departure from Earth, he began cataloging her features from behind as he approached her. Great caboose, was his first thought—Aaron, with his interest in trains, being one of the few people on Earth left who knew what a caboose was. I, too, now looked at her rear end through his eyes. The flaring of the hips, the gentle rounded curves of the buttocks, the fine synthetic weave of her black pants stretched tightly across them, a fold of it caught between the two cheeks.

“Excuse me,” said Aaron.

Bev had been staring out the great bay window. It overlooked the staging area for the sky elevator that linked the yellow-and-brown Kenya countryside with the orbiting Starcology Argo. A trio of giraffes wandered by its broad base.

She turned and smiled. To Aaron, it seemed a bright—no, a radiant smile, although I doubted that her teeth, large and white though they were, really cast back that much of the ambient light. “Yes?” she said, her voice a bit squeaky. To me, it had always been reminiscent of the sound made by a machine requiring lubrication, but Aaron found even this endearing.

“Hi,” he said. “Uh, I-Shin Chang said you might be able to help me out.”

She smiled again. Her face, to Aaron, was beautiful: high cheekbones, tiny nose. “What did you have in mind?”

“Umm.” Aaron swallowed, and I realized suddenly that he was flustered because he found her beautiful. “You’re Bev Hooks, aren’t you?”

“Guilty.”

“Well, uh, my name is Aaron Rossman, and—”

“Pleased to meet you, Aaron.”

“Likewise. I hear, uh, you’re a cracker.”

“Depends who is asking and why they want to know.”

“I need to see some records.”

“What sort of iron we talking about?”

“Government network. In Ontario—that’s a province in Canada.”

“I know it. I’m from Illinois. Got friends in Sault Sainte Marie.”

“Ah.”

“So why do you want to break into the Ontario government? By the time we get back, the statute of limitations will be up on just about any crime you might have committed.” She smiled that megawatt smile again.

“Oh, no! It’s nothing like that. It’s just that, well, I found out that I’m adopted. I’d like to meet my birth parents before we go. To say hello.” He paused. “And to say good-bye.”

“Adoption records?” She frowned, but even her frown appealed to Aaron. “Easy. Couple of password prompts, maybe a little file cement, a directory barricade if they’ve been real clever. Twenty minutes to get in, tops.”

“Well, could you do it?”

“Of course. What’s in it for me?”

“Uh, well, what would you like?”

“Take me to dinner?”

“I’m engaged.”

“So? I’m married. A woman still has to eat, you know?”

The household god looked down on Aaron from a monocular camera mounted above the mezuzah on the doorjamb. “Yes?” it said, its voice, the product of a cheap Magnavox synthesizer chip, sounding low and dull.

“My name is Aaron. I’d like to see Eve Oppenheim.”

“Ms. Oppenheim has no appointments scheduled for this evening.”

“I realize that. I—I’m only going to be in town this one night.”

“There is no one named Aaron on her list of friends or business contacts.”

“Yes, I know. Please, is she in? Tell her—tell her that I’m an old friend of the family.”

The god sounded dubious. “I will tell her. Please wait.” Aaron shoved his hands into his pockets, this time as much because of the cool night breeze as out of habit. He waited and waited (how strange to not know precisely how long!) until finally the door to the house slid aside. Aaron swung around. In the doorway stood a woman who looked several years shy of forty. Aaron stared at her, her angular face, her strange multicolored eyes, her sandy hair. It was as if he was staring into some gender-bending flesh mirror. There was no doubt in his mind, no doubt at all, of who this woman was. Her youth was the only surprise.

For her part, the woman’s gaze seemed dull. She wasn’t seeing in Aaron’s face what Aaron was seeing in hers, partially, I supposed, because she wasn’t looking for it. “Yes,” she said, her voice, like Aaron’s own, deep and warm. “I’m Eve Oppenheim. What can I do for you?”

Aaron was at a loss for words. An odd sensation: not knowing what to say next—having too much to say, and no algorithm for determining the order of presentation. Finally he blurted, “I just wanted to meet you. To see what you looked like. To say hello.”

Eve peered at him more closely. “Who are you?”

“I’m Aaron. Aaron Rossman.”

“Rossman—” She took a half step backward. “My … God. What are you doing here?”

Aaron became even more flustered because of her reaction. “You’ve heard about the Argo, of course,” he said, the slightest trace of a stammer coming to his words. “I’m going on that mission. I’m leaving Earth, and I won’t be back for a hundred years.” He looked at her expectantly, as if it should be obvious from what he’d just said why he’d come. When she made no reply, he added quickly, “I just wanted to meet you, just once, before I left.”

“You shouldn’t have come here. You should have called first.”

“I was afraid that if I called, you’d refuse to see me.”

All color had gone from her face. “That’s right. I would have.”

Aaron’s heart sank. “Please,” he said at last. “I’m confused by all this. It wasn’t until a short time ago that I found out I was adopted.”

“Did your parents tell you where to find me?”

“No. They didn’t even tell me I was adopted. I stumbled across some papers. I was hoping you’d want to see me. I put my name into the Ministry of Social Services’ Voluntary Disclosure Registry, but they said that you hadn’t applied to find me, so they couldn’t help. I thought maybe you didn’t know about the registry—”

“Of course I knew about the registry.”

“But…”

“But I didn’t want to find you. Period.” She looked closely at Aaron’s face. “Damn you, how could you come here? What right have you got to invade my privacy? If I’d wanted you to know who I was, I would have told you.” She stepped back into the doorway and then barked the word “Close” at the god. The flat gray door panel slid noisily shut.

Aaron stood there, the breeze cool on his face. He pressed the button on the jamb that woke up the god. “Yes,” it said in the same dull tone.

“I’d like to see Ms. Oppenheim.”

“Ms. Oppenheim has no appointments scheduled for this evening.”

“I know that, you piece of junk. I was just speaking to her a moment ago.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

“You are Mr. Rossman, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe Ms. Oppenheim wants to see you.”

“Will you tell her I’m still here?”

The god was silent, apparently mulling this over. “Yes,” it said at last, in its slow and clunky voice. “I will tell her.” There was more silence, marred only by the sound of leaves blowing in the chill wind, while the god presumably relayed the message to his mistress.

“Ms. Oppenheim has instructed me to ask you to leave,” said the god at last.

“I won’t.”

“I will summon the police then.”

“Damn you. This is important. Please, ask her once more.”

“You are a per-sis-tent person, Mr. Rossman.” The voice chip had trouble with the polysyllabic word.

“That I am. Will you ask her, just once more, to come and talk to me.”

Another long pause. Finally: “I will ask her.”

The god fell silent. Aaron’s only hope was that Eve Oppenheim would decide that trying to deal with her bargain-basement god was as frustrating as Aaron was finding it. After many seconds, the door slid open again. “Look,” said Ms. Oppenheim, “I thought I made myself clear. I don’t want to see you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I thought maybe my birth father would like to see me. Your husband, is he home?”

The woman’s face grew hard. “No, he’s not home, and no, my husband isn’t your father.”

“But the adoption database listed Stephen Oppenheim as my father.”

Aaron turned around. There was a flurry of leaves being kicked up on the landing pad a few dozen meters from the house. A private flyer, rusty-looking and somewhat dented, was making a slow descent toward the pad.

The flyer was a hundred meters or so up, hovering as a small robot cleared the day’s accumulation of autumn leaves from the pad. From this angle, Aaron could see that one person, a man, was in the cockpit, but he couldn’t make out his face.

Eve looked nervously up at the flyer. “That’s my husband,” she said. “Look, you have to go before he gets here.”

“No. I want to talk to him.”

Eve’s voice took on a razor edge. “You can’t. Damn you, get out of here.”

The car was descending rapidly. It was perhaps twenty-five meters up. Twenty meters. Fifteen.

“Why?”

Her face was flushed. She looked torn, agonized. Tears were at the corners of her eyes.

The flyer settled onto the pad.

“Look, Stephen Oppenheim isn’t my husband,” she said at last. “Your father was—” She blinked rapidly, the action freeing the heavier drops. “Your father was my father, too.”

Aaron felt his mouth dropping open.

The gull-wing door to the flyer swung up. A large man got out. He went to the rear of the flyer, opened the trunk.

“Don’t you see?” said Eve quickly. “I can’t have a relationship with you. You never should have existed.” She shook her head. “Why did you have to come here?”

“I just wanted to know you. That’s all.”

“Some things are better left unknown.” She looked toward the pad, saw her husband coming toward her. “Now, please leave. He doesn’t know about you.”

“But—”

“Please!”

The tableau held for a moment, then Aaron turned and briskly walked away from the house. Eve Oppenheim’s husband came up to her. “Who was that?” he said.

Aaron, now a dozen meters away, his back to the house, paused for a second and cocked his head to catch Eve’s answer: “Nobody.”

He heard the hiss of the door panel closing and the final, definitive click as it slid into the opposite jamb.