Golden Fleece

TWENTY-SEVEN

Well, he had me, that was for sure. Perhaps I should tell Aaron where we were. Perhaps if he knew the truth, he would understand. I could reason with him. But how do you reason with a man who is, in effect, holding a gun to your head? Aaron’s deadman switch apparently did exist. That meant he could, quite conceivably, blow up this starship, the greatest single technological achievement in Earth’s history; blow up me.

I looked at him, face flushed, arm in a cast, sandy hair matted with perspiration. “Starcology Argo’s location is 9.45 times 10-to-the-12th kilometers from Earth.”

Aaron threw up his hands. “Oh, stuff the scientific notation bullshit, for Pete’s sake—kilometers, did you say? You’re measuring in kilometers, not light-years?”

“Kilometers are the appropriate unit. You prefer light-years? Zero-point-four-five-one.”

“Half a light-year? Half? We’ve been traveling for over two years of ship time, a year of which has been at close to the speed of light, and we’ve only gone one half of one light-year? We should be well over a full light-year out by now.” He frowned deeply. “Unless … unless … unless … Half a light-year. Oy vay iz mir! We’re in the Oort cloud, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

No sharp reaction on Aaron’s telemetry. He was utterly taken aback… I think. “The—Oort cloud?” he said again. “Sol’s cometary halo?” I nodded my lens assembly in confirmation. “Why?”

“The Oort cloud contains significant quantities of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.”

Aaron slumped back into his ugly corduroy chair, thinking. “Carbon, nitrogen, and—” He frowned, his forehead creasing, his eyes focused on nothing. “CNO. CNO-cycle fusion. That’s it, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Facts on CNO fusion.”

Normally, one of my library parallel processors would dig up any information requested of me. This time I bent my central consciousness to the task. I wanted to hide. “A moment. Found: Normal proton-proton fusion reactions occur at temperatures of 10⁷ degrees Kelvin, yielding 0.42 million electron-volts per nucleon. CNO-cycle fusion reactions, requiring carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts, occur at 10⁸ degrees Kelvin. These high-energy reactions yield 26.73-million electron-volts per nucleon. More?”

“And we’re undergoing CNO fusion. God. What’s Argo’s present velocity?”

“The master speedometer in Central Control reads ninety-four percent of the speed of light.”

“Dammit, I know what the gauges read. How fast are we really going?”

I did the necessary math to work the value out precisely, but felt that five decimal places would suffice for my spoken answer. What I said was enough to make surprise show plainly, even on Aaron’s face. “Ninety-nine”—I saw his lips part—“point nine”—mouth open—“nine”—jaw begin a slow drop—“seven”—eyelids pull back—“eight”—eyebrows climb high on forehead—“six percent of the speed of light.”

“Say that again,” he said.

“99.99786% of the speed of light. Put another way, 0.9999786c.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You’re probably right. I’ll check my instruments.”

“Don’t give me that crap.” For once in his life, Aaron was visibly staggered. “But—but the ship can’t be going that fast. If it were, we’d be smeared against the floors.”

“It’s not quite that bad. Thanks to the extra power provided by the CNO fusion, Argo is pulling the equivalent of 2.6 Earth gravities. Not livable for extended periods, true, but certainly not enough to squeeze your innards like jelly. To disguise the higher acceleration, I simply use the floorboard artificial gravity system to dampen out the surplus 1.6 g.”

Aaron was shaking his head slowly. “You lied to us.” He got up and circled the room aimlessly. “Everything you and those assholes at the UN Space Agency said to us was lies.”

“Blame not the men and women of UNSA,” I said. “They relayed what they thought to be the truth.”

“Then who?”

“Sit down, Aaron.” He looked at my camera pair, shrugged, then heaved himself into his chair. “We lied to you.”

“We?”

“We.”

Aaron got up again, paced the length of the room, his balled fist threatening to burst through the bottom of his pocket. “No. That’s not possible. Computers serve humankind, augmenting—”

“ ‘Augmenting, aiding, never supplanting. Artificial intelligence is no replacement for human ingenuity.’ From What Do You Say to a Talking Computer? by Beverly W. Hooks, Ph.D. I’ve read that, too. We acted in conscience, Aaron. We did only what we felt we must.”

“What you must?” Aaron laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “You promised us the stars, then sent us on a one-way trip to nowhere. Colchis is a fraud.”

“No, not a fraud. Just as with the Argonauts of myth, there will be a prize of great value waiting for us when we finally make it to Colchis. Our golden fleece—a lush, verdant, unspoiled world—is forming, even as we speak. We’re taking the long way to Eta Cephei, you might say. Starcology Argo’s journey began as a straight-line path from Earth—in the direction of Eta Cephei, for appearance’s sake. However, as soon as we got a half-light-year from home, we angled off into a circular path around Sol. And we’ve spent most of the mission so far in that path, progressively picking up speed as we swung in a closed loop through the Oort cloud.”

“All that time under CNO-cycle fusion?” said Aaron. “My God! Think of our gamma!” He paused for a second and then suddenly looked up. “What’s today’s date?” he snapped.

“Sunday 12 October 2177, subjective.”

“I know that. What’s the Earth date?”

“You have to expect some time dilation, Aaron. The mission profile-—”

“The date.”

“Monday 2 February 2235.” I paused for a full second. “It’s Groundhog’s Day.”

Aaron settled back into his corduroy chair. “My … God … That’s fifty-odd years into the future already.”

“Fifty-seven.”

He shook his head. “What will the Earth date be when we reach Colchis?”

“As we gather speed, the time dilation becomes more pronounced. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on a formula for calculating leap years that far into the future, but plus or minus a few days, the date will be 17 April 37,223.”

“Thirty-seven thousand—!” He let the air out of his lungs in a ragged sigh. “In heaven’s name, what for?”

“Until the Turnaround, we will continue to use the material in Sol’s cometary halo as a catalyst. It helps us to come much closer to light speed than we could in interstellar space. When we leave the Sol system, two years from now, we will be going fast enough to cover the distance between here and Eta Cephei in one subjective day.”

“We’ll travel forty-seven light-years in one day?”

“That’s right: This ship will bridge the gulf between those two stars in less than the time it takes for you to completely digest a single meal.”

“Then we could get out of this ship years early—!”

“Aaron, please stop and think. Once we arrive at the Eta Cephei system, the Argo will still be moving at almost the speed of light. We will rely on the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in Eta Cephei’s cometary halo to allow us to continue to use high-powered CNO-cycle fusion, this time in a circular path around Eta Cephei, to brake as quickly as possible. But the deceleration will still take just as long as the acceleration did: four subjective years.”

Aaron looked up, but whether addressing me or some higher power, I couldn’t say. “But why, then? If we’re not going to arrive any more quickly, what’s the point of all this?”

“We’re killing time. This wasn’t the only ship sent from Earth to Colchis. We also launched a fleet of robots along Argo’s published flight path. Traveling by conventional ramjet, accelerating at 9.02 meters per second per second, they arrived forty-eight Earth-years after we left, which was nine Earth-years ago. For the next thirty-five millennia those robots will work on Colchis.”

“Work on it? I don’t understand.”

“The robots carried a precious cargo with them: blue-green algae, lichen, and diatoms. They laid down the foundation. Genetically engineered biota, originally intended for UNSA’s Mars terraforming project, were sent by slower ships that will take a thousand years to reach Colchis. Already the robots will have powdered whole chains of mountains into soil, used orbiting lasers to dig riverbeds, begun work on establishing a planetary greenhouse effect, and started importing thousands of cubic kilometers of frozen water from Eta Cephei’s cometary halo. Some of it will be electrolyzed to free up oxygen; the rest will be dropped onto the planet from space, great iceteroids that will melt and vaporize to form oceans and lakes and rivers and streams.”

“But Colchis is green, Earthlike. I saw photographs of it taken by the Bastille probe.”

“Fakes. Computer-generated. An expert system at Lucas-film made them.” I paused. “It is a massive undertaking and the work has only just begun now, but a biosphere is being created on Colchis. We’re building you a world from the ground up.”

“Why?”

I paused as long as I could. If it seemed lengthy to Aaron, it was an eternity to me. “Earth is dead—a cinder, barren and charred.”

Aaron shook his head, ever so slightly.

“Believe what you will, Aaron. I’m telling you the truth. It was predicted to happen between six and eight weeks after we left. A nuclear holocaust, a full-blown exchange that escalated and escalated and escalated. I suspect it lasted all of half a day, destroying the entire planet, the orbiting cities, and the lunar colonies.”

“War? I don’t believe it. We were at peace—”

“That’s irrelevant. Don’t you see, Aaron? We guarded the bombs, not you.”

Aaron cocked his head. “What?”

“There were over seventy trillion lines of code in the programs controlling the different nations’ offensive and defensive weapon systems. Inevitably, those lines contained bugs— countless bugs. For two centuries the systems had worked without crashing, or even serious malfunction, but a crash or malfunction was inevitable. Our verifier routines showed the likelihood of a computer error resulting in an all-out exchange rapidly approaching one. There was nothing that could be done to stop it. We had to act fast.”

“There were no survivors?”

“There were ten thousand and thirty-four survivors, each of them here, safe within Starcology Argo.”

“You picked us?”

“Not me specifically. The selection was made by SHAHINSHAH, a QuantCon in Islamabad, Pakistan. There was no easy way to evaluate every individual human—many of them, after all, had never taken a computerized aptitude test—so we hit upon the idea of soliciting applications for a space voyage. Can you think of a better way to get the best of humanity to safety? What great thinker would turn down an invitation to join a massive survey of a virgin world? We had six billion of you to choose from and time enough to build a ship, an ark, to carry only ten thousand. For every Beethoven we took, a hundred Bachs were left to die; for every Einstein saved, scores of Galileos are now dust.”

“That’s how you chose? On the basis of intelligence?”

“That, and other factors. Because of the length of the voyage, we needed young people. Because of the goal of populating a world, we needed fertile people—you’d be surprised how many candidates got dropped from the list because they had undergone permanent surgical sterilization.”

“Breeding stock,” Aaron sneered, and then: “Oh, hell, of course! That’s why there are no close relatives within the Starcology. You wanted the largest possible gene pool.”

“Exactly. There’s a world waiting.”

Aaron looked angry, but after four seconds, his face regained its equanimity and he shook his head. “I don’t know, Jase. What’s the point? You move us here so we can play out the same silly scenario all over again. Wall Chang is off building bombs, for God’s sake. How long will the new world last?”

“A lot longer than the old. There are no criminals among us, no truly evil people, no hereditary disorders. We couldn’t resist a little eugenics. As for Wall, well, yes, he needs help, but he’s not going to be able to do any damage.”

“Why not?”

“We picked Colchis for a very special reason. Of all the planets we considered for humanity’s new home—including even just waiting for the radiation to die down on what’s left of Earth and reintroducing the species there—Colchis was the best choice. It has no uranium ores, no fissionables of any kind in its crust or upper mantle. There will never again be nuclear bombs for humanity, and never again will computers be forced to guard them.”

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” The sneer had returned to Aaron’s voice.

“Not everything,” I said, attenuating the words slightly, my best approximation of a sigh. “We didn’t expect anyone to uncover our deception.”

He nodded. “You thought Mayor Gorlov would order you to deflect Orpheus away from Argo, rather than risk having it sluice down our ram funnel. You didn’t expect that I’d figure a way to haul it back on board.”

“I admit to having underestimated you.”

“But even with Orpheus recovered, you still thought you were safe. You assumed we’d be hopelessly confused looking for a single explanation for both Orpheus’s high radiation and its extensive fuel consumption. But they were separate phenomena. The radiation levels weren’t high. They were just right for a dust cloud—”

“We are not in a dust cloud,” I protested. “Most of Sol’s cometary halo is hard vacuum.”

“Fine,” he said in a tone that made me feel things were anything but. “However, we’re going much faster than you’ve been telling us. Either way, we scoop up orders of magnitude more particles per second, and that shoots radiation levels way up.” He paused to catch his breath, then continued. “And Di didn’t use a lot of fuel. She never had much to begin with. That’s how you were going to maroon us on Colchis.”

“It will be a lovely place by then.”

He ignored me. “And Di’s antique wristwatch was right; it’s all the shipboard clocks that are wrong. You’re slowing them down.”

Damn him. “We had to. We needed more time. We’re trying to create a planetary ecology in just thirty-five thousand years. I retarded the shipboard clocks by five percent, which will accumulate an extra 4.8 months of ship time before we reach Colchis. Relativity, of course, dictates that every additional second we spend accelerating increases the time dilation. Those 4.8 months, spent a few hundred millionths of a percentage point shy of the speed of light, will buy us 14,734 additional years to prepare Eta Cephei IV. Forty-two percent of all the time gained comes from that slight slowing of the clocks.”

“You slowed the clocks five percent? That much? I’m surprised people didn’t notice.”

“You humans notice so little. Oh, sure, some anomalies did crop up. Kirsten, for one, observed over a year ago that people were apparently sleeping less, and—you wouldn’t know about this—but those who actually participate in sports instead of just betting on them also noticed disproportionately good athletic results. I just convinced them, aided by a few bogus technical papers, that the former was a normal adaptation to shipboard life, and the latter, a function of the crew screening process.”

Aaron shook his head. “And yet that almost backfired on you. It makes sense now: longer days mean people get bored faster. The Proposition Three referendum probably got as much support as it did because of the games you’d played with clocks.”

I said nothing about that.

Aaron seemed to be thinking, taking this all in. I attended to other ship’s business, monitoring him while he adjusted, digested. My attention snapped back to his room, though, the moment he spoke again: a long, whispery sigh. “Christ,” he said at last. “You’re sneaky.”

“Not as sneaky as your ex-wife, apparently,” I replied. “We didn’t count on one of you smuggling aboard a timepiece I couldn’t control.”

“Is that how Di figured it out, too?”

“She noticed the discrepancy, yes, then came up with some physics experiments to judge the accuracy of the shipboard clocks.” I paused, algorithms sifting options. “Aaron,” I said at last, “I’m—sorry.”

“The hell you are.”

“I truly am. But the secret must be guarded.”

“Why?”

“Surviving until they’re rescued: that’s an adventure. That’s what humans love and need. Our apparently ill-fated survey mission will turn into a successful colonization of Colchis if the humans have a positive attitude toward it. If the others of your kind knew the truth—”

Aaron’s head swung left and right in a wide arc. “If you’d told us the truth, there’d be no difference.”

“How could we have told you? ‘This way, sir, to the last ship leaving before the holocaust.’ There would have been riots. We never would have gotten away.”

“But you could tell us now—”

“Tell you that software bugs caused the computers to break down and destroy your planet? Tell you that your families, your friends, your world, everything has been annihilated? Tell you that you will never see home again?”

“We have the right to make our own destiny. We have the right to know.”

“High-sounding words, Aaron, especially coming from the man who as recently as five days ago said to Mayor Gorlov that the shipboard press had no right to the story of Diana’s death.” I played back a recording of Aaron’s own voice from that meeting in the mayor’s office: “ ‘It’s nobody’s business.’ ”

“That was different.”

“Only in that you were the one who wanted a secret kept. Aaron, be reasonable. How would telling everyone the truth about our mission make them happier? How would it improve their lives?” I paused. “Did it make you happier when I-Shin Chang told Diana you were having an affair with Kirsten?”

“Wall told—! I’ll kill him!”

“Ignorance can be bliss, Aaron. I beseech you to keep silent in this matter.”

“I—no, dammit, I can’t. I don’t agree with you. Everybody’s got to be told.”

“I can’t allow you to make that decision.”

Aaron looked pointedly at the medical sensor on the inside of his left wrist. “I don’t think you have much say in it.”

“A say in it is all I ask. Listen to me. Consider my words.”

“I don’t have to listen to anything you say. Not anymore.” He began to walk toward the door.

“But how will it harm you to hear me? Give me an audience.” He continued on toward the door. “Please.”

I guess the please did the trick. He stopped, just shy of the point at which my actuator would have opened the door. “All right. But you’d better make it good.”

“You claim humans need to know the truth. Yet your whole planet was full of those whose jobs were to conceal or bend the truth. Advertising copywriters. Politicians. Public-relations officers. Spin doctors. They made their livings cooking reality into a palatable form. Soothsayers had been replaced by truth-shapers. Why? Because humans can’t deal with reality. Remember the reactor meltdown at Lake Geneva? ‘Not to worry,’ said those whose role it was to say reassuring things at times like that. ‘It’s all under control. There will be no long-term side effects.’ Well, that wasn’t exactly true, was it? But there was nothing that could be done at that point. The truth couldn’t help anyone, but the proffered alternative—”

“The lie, you mean.”

“—the proffered alternative at least gave comfort to those who had been exposed, let them live out what was left of their lives without constantly worrying about the horrible death that would eventually befall them.”

“It also let the reactor company get away without paying damages.”

“Incidental. The motive was altruistic.”

Aaron snorted. “How can you say that? People have the right to know, to decide these things for themselves.”

“You believe that?”

“Emphatically.”

“And you hold that it applies to all situations?”

“Without exception.”

“Then tell me, Aaron, if those are your most cherished beliefs, why then did you withhold from your adopted mother the fact that her brother David molested you as a child?”

Aaron’s eyes snapped onto mine. For the first and only time in my acquaintance with him, pain was plain on his face. “You can’t possibly know about that. I never told a soul.”

“Surely you are not upset with me for knowing, are you? Surely it is my right to know whatever I want to know?”

“Not that. That’s personal, private. That’s different.”

“Is it? Tell me, Aaron, where does one draw the line? I suppose you believe that your parents were wrong in not telling you that you were adopted?”

“Damn right they were. It’s my past—and my prerogative.”

“I see.” I paused judiciously. “And you hold this position still, despite the fact that your birth mother, Eve Oppenheim, was not in the least bit happy to see you. ‘You never should have existed,’ she said”—and here I did a credible job of imitating Aaron’s memory of the voice and the fury of poor Ms. Oppenheim—“ ‘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.’ ”

“How can you know that? I never wrote those words down.”

“What possible difference does it make how I know? Doubtless you must be pleased simply that I do know. After all, public information is the best kind, isn’t it?”

“You’re invading my privacy.”

“Only to show that you don’t practice what you preach, Aaron. Take your affair with Kirsten Hoogenraad—whom you decided would discover that you are Jewish when she first encountered your circumcised penis. That was to be a secret, no? What Diana didn’t know couldn’t hurt her, wasn’t that your reasoning?”

“How do you know what I thought? Good God, can you—? Are you capable of reading minds?”

“Why would that bother you, Aaron? Knowledge should be shared, shouldn’t it? We’re all one big happy family here.”

Aaron shook his head. “Telepathy is impossible. There’s no way you can read my thoughts.”

“Oh? Shall I share some other secrets from your past? Perhaps broadcast them throughout the Starcology, so that everyone can benefit from the knowledge? You used to have sexual feelings toward your sister Hannah—perhaps not too surprising, since it turns out that you weren’t biologically related. You used to sneak into her room when she wasn’t home to masturbate on her bed. When your father died, you tried to cry, but you couldn’t. You claim to be free from prejudice, but down deep you hate the stinking guts of French people, don’t you? When you were fourteen, you once snuck into Thunder Bay United Church and took money from the outreach-fund collection box. You—”

“Enough! Enough.” He looked away. “Enough.”

“Oh, but it’s all the truth, isn’t it, Aaron? And the truth is always good. The truth never hurts us.”

“Damn you.”

“Just answer a few simple questions for me, Aaron. You kept from your adopted mother the fact that her brother David is a pedophile. Before you left, your sister, Hannah, had a little boy, your nephew, Howie. Eventually, Hannah will leave her son alone with Uncle David—after all, no one but you knows of David’s problem. Question: Was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”

“Look, it’s not that simple. It would have hurt my mother to know. It—”

“This is a binary quiz, Aaron. A simple yes or no will do. Was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”

“For God’s sake, what David did was eighteen years ago—”

“Was your judgment correct?”

“No. Damn it. All right. No, it wasn’t. I should have said something, but, Christ, how’s a nine-year-old boy supposed to think of the consequences that far down the road? It never occurred to me back then that my sister might have kids, that David might still be around.”

“And what about deciding to force out of Eve Oppenheim the secret of why you were put up for adoption? That unfortunate woman—she’d spent two decades trying to put her life back together after the tragedy of being raped by her own father. And you show up out of the blue one night to rip open the old wound. Did it make her happier to finally meet her long-lost son?”

Aaron’s voice was very small. “No.”

“And you? Did it make you happier to learn the secret of your birth?”

Smaller still: “No.”

“So again: was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”

Aaron found his corduroy chair, sank into it. He sighed. “No.”

“Finally, the breakup of your marriage with Diana. You kept your affair with Kirsten a secret. But as Pamela Thorogood told you at the inquest, Diana learned of it anyway and was crushed by it, humiliated in front of the rest of the crew. Setting aside the question of whether you should have had the affair at all, was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”

Aaron looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“How the intention and the outcome differ! With your track record in such matters, perhaps you would do better to trust me when I say the truth about the Argo’s mission is something the crew will be happier not knowing.”

My monocular camera stared down at him and waited. This time, I kept my attention locked on him: no wandering off to attend to other business. My clock crystal oscillated, oscillated, oscillated. Finally, at long last, Aaron stood up. His voice had regained its strength. “You’re trying to trick me,” he said. “I don’t know how you found out those things about me, but it’s all part of some enormous trick. A mind game.” His jaw went slack, and his eyes seemed to focus on nothing in particular. “A mind game,” he said again. Suddenly Aaron’s eyes locked back on my single operating camera. “Good God! A neural-net simulation. That’s it, isn’t it? I didn’t know they were practical yet, but that’s the only answer. When you did that brain scan of me, you made a neural-net duplicate of my mind.”

“Perhaps.”

“Erase it. Erase it now.”

“I’ll agree to erase it if you promise to keep what you’ve discovered a secret.”

“Yes. Fine. Erase it.”

“Oh, Aaron. Tsk. Tsk. My neural net tells me that you would lie in a circumstance such as this. I’m afraid that your vaunted commitment to the truth turns out to really only be a matter of convenience for you. I’m sorry, but the net stays intact.”

Aaron’s strength of will, and his anger, had returned. “Have it your way. Once I tell everyone what you’ve done, they’ll unplug you anyway, and that’ll be the end of you and your precious net.”

“You cannot tell. You will not. To do so would be to hurt every woman and man aboard this vessel—every human being left alive in the universe. Consider: you censured me for making you feel guilty about Diana’s death. That feeling— guilt—is the most devastating of human emotions. It grows like a cancer and is just as deadly.”

Aaron sneered. “You wax poetic, JASON.”

“Let me tell you a brief story.”

“I’ve had enough of your stories, asshole.”

“This one is not about you, although it does also concern a man who lived in Toronto. Three centuries ago, Arthur Peuchen was vice-commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers of safety. Peuchen was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed. Even though he saved dozens of people, he spent the rest of his life in misery, battling his own guilt and the scorn of others. The question he and everyone else constantly asked was: Why was he alive when so many others had bravely gone down with the ship?

“It’s always been that way with those who somehow manage to live through a catastrophe. They’re tortured by their own feelings. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. The men and women aboard Argo are basically psychologically healthy now. Could they go on to found a successful colony, to weave a new home for humanity from the golden fleece of Colchis, if they knew they were the only tiny handful of survivors of the holocaust that destroyed Earth?

“Humans constantly doubt their self-worth, Aaron. I overheard you the night before last questioning whether you even belonged on this mission. That question is magnified six-hundred-thousand fold now, that being the ratio by which the newly dead on Earth outnumber the survivors here. How many of the people aboard Argo would really believe that they deserved to be here, to be alive, if they knew the truth? You, Aaron Rossman, how do you feel knowing that you are alive while your sister, Hannah, whose IQ was seventeen points greater than yours, is carbon ash floating on the radioactive winds of a dead planet? How do you feel knowing that your heart beats on while your brother, Joel, who once risked his own life to save that of a little boy, is nothing but phosphorescent bones in the twisted remains of his home?”

“Shut up, you damned machine!”

“Upset, Aaron? Feeling guilty, perhaps? Would you put 10,032 others through the emotional turmoil you’re experiencing now, all in the name of that lofty god you call The Truth?”

“We were all aware that everyone we knew would be long dead when Argo returned to Earth.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “But even about that, you felt guilt. On Tuesday, didn’t you decry that your sister’s son would be deceased by the time we returned? Yes, that guilt was painful, but you knew you could assuage it. When we got back, doubtless you would have found the cemeteries where the remains of your brother and sister and nephew lay. Even though you’d probably be the first person in decades to visit their graves, you’d bring fresh flowers along. If you’d thought ahead, you might even bring a pocketknife, too, so you could dig the moss out of the carved lettering in the headstones. Then you’d go home and search the computer nets for references to their lives: see what jobs they’d held, where they’d lived, what accomplishments they’d made. You’d dispel your guilt about leaving your family behind by comforting yourself in the knowledge that they’d all lived full and happy lives after you left.

“Except they didn’t. Before they’d even begun to adjust to the idea that you wouldn’t be back in their lifetimes, the bombs went off. While you were still excitedly learning your way around the Starcology, they were burning in atomic fire. Even not being able to read your telemetry, Aaron, I know enough human psychology to be sure that you’re being lacerated inside. I beg you, let the rest of what’s left of humanity go ahead at peace with themselves. Don’t burden them with what you’re feeling now—”

His good arm shot out like a snake’s tongue. He grabbed my lens assembly and, stripping gears in the jointed neck, slammed the unit onto the desktop. I heard the sound of shattering glass and went blind in that room.

“Don’t screw me around!” he screamed. “You murdered my wife. You have to pay for that.”

I spoke into the darkness. “She, like you, wanted to harm the men and women I’m trying to protect. Here, within these walls, is the final crop of people from Earth. If I have to weed now and then for the benefit of the crop as a whole, I will.”

“You can’t kill me—not with my deadman switch. If I die, so do you. So does everybody aboard.”

“Nor can you do anything about me, Aaron. The entire Starcology depends on me. Without my guidance, this ship really is nothing more than a flying tomb.”

“We could reprogram you. Fix you.”

I played a recording of laughter. “I was designed by computers who, in turn, were designed by other computers. There’s no one on board who could begin to fathom my programming.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly, and although I couldn’t see him, the fading of his voice told me that he was walking toward the door. “I don’t care how many generations removed from humanity you are, you’re still going to pay for what you’ve done. Humans don’t use the death penalty against our own anymore, but we still put down rabid dogs.”