Golden Fleece

SIX

“Take me home, Jase.” Aaron didn’t want to go home—he had just left his own apartment, parting with a kiss from Kirsten, who had headed off down the elevator to do her shift at Aesculapius General, the ship’s hospital. No, he wanted to go to Diana’s home: the unit that, until twelve days ago, he had shared with her. He folded himself against the blue upholstery in the little tram and I slipped it into the travel tube. Di’s apartment was almost halfway around the torus from Aaron’s, and tram was the best way to get there.

The location of Aaron’s new apartment had been my choice. There weren’t many vacant units, but the mission planners had correctly assumed that in a voyage of this length, a few extras might be needed. Aaron hadn’t asked if more than one had happened to be available on the day on which he was looking for a new place to live, and I had simply told him to take the one that was farthest from Diana’s. It seemed, according to my psychology expert system, the right choice to make.

Aaron was sad, and he wanted me to know it. His normal inscrutability was gone; he was deliberately broadcasting his feelings by the way he slouched, by the heaviness of his words, by the ragged edge he gave to his exhalations. If only there was some gesture, some nonverbal communication like Kirsten’s, that I could use to cheer him up …

Aaron had read the mission briefing papers on ship’s gravity: Argo’s acceleration was 9.02 meters per second per second, equivalent to 0.92 of Earth’s gravity. Colchis had a surface gravity 1.06 times greater than Earth’s. Now if we had been able to accelerate at a full Earth gravity, that would be fine—humans could adapt to the slightly higher gravity of Colchis easily enough upon arrival. But a conventional ramscoop goes at .92g, and the difference between the apparent ship’s gravity due to the acceleration and Colchis’s surface gravity was steep enough that something had to be done. We used artificial gravity/antigravity grids beneath the floorboards to compensate. Each day, they were turned a little higher, so that over the 8.1 years of the voyage, the crew would fully acclimatize to Colchis’s surface gravity. And, of course, prior to launch, while the ship was hanging in geostationary orbit over Africa, the artificial gravity system had provided a full Earth g.

Anyway, all that meant was that although our habitat was ring-shaped, it didn’t spin to produce a fake centrifugal-force pseudogravity. Down was parallel to the ship’s axis, toward the bottom of the habitat, not out toward the habitat’s round edge. Aaron’s car was swinging in a gently curving path around the perimeter of the torus, the arcing of the travel tube so slight that he probably felt no centrifugal force acting upon him. Good: the illusion would be even more compelling.

I often swathed the travel cars in spherical holograms, the view one might enjoy if my windowless hull were transparent.

Perhaps such a display would be particularly appropriate just now. If Aaron could realize how insignificant one life was in all the cosmos …

Up above, in the direction of Argo’s travel, I projected a glorious starscape. In reality stars in that direction had blue-shifted into X-ray invisibility, but I compensated for that, bringing them forth in all their Hertzsprung-Russell splendor. Directly at the zenith was Eta Cephei, our target star, still over six years away by ship time. I gave it a totally unnatural twinkle, so it could easily be picked out from the mass of still-familiar constellations. Even with that, bright Deneb, appearing quite near to Eta Cephei although it was really some sixteen hundred light-years beyond it, tended to draw attention away from our target.

My camera pair in the tram noted that Aaron’s eyes looked briefly for Ursa Major, then tracked over from the Pointers to my simulated pole star to get his bearings. Having grown up in northern Ontario away from the nocturnal glare of the megacities, Aaron was one of the few people on board who would know such a trick.

At eye level I played less magic, showing the stars as they might truly be seen encircling the ship: a stellar rainbow, violet above, waxing through to red below. Beneath Aaron’s feet I painted a similar picture to the one overhead: stars that had red-shifted into the radio frequencies were brought up through the spectrum, showing their true colors. I played no optical tricks with distant Sol, though, lying directly at the nadir. There was nothing to be gained in looking back.

Aaron closed his eyes. “Dammit, JASON, turn it off. I feel small enough as it is.”

I dissolved the hologram as the tram pulled into the station, a small enclosed waiting area made by a clever planting of trees. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was meant, well, to put things in perspective.”

“Leave human psychology to humans.”

Ouch.

He clambered out of the tram, and I sent it off to take care of its next assignment: picking up a botanist and her lover and taking them around to the pine forest.

Aaron stretched. Wide grass-covered strips divided this residential level into blocks of apartment units. There were 319 people on the lawn, some walking, some out for a morning jog, four tossing a Frisbee back and forth, most of the rest just soaking up the rays from the arc lamps mounted on the high ceiling.

Aaron ambled down a grassy lane, feet shuffling, hands in his pockets. He’d walked this path so many times in the past two years that every curve in its course, every irregularity in the sod, was known to him even without looking. Programmed in, I’d say; second nature, he’d say.

As he approached Di’s apartment, he caught sight of one of my stereo camera units, thrust high on a jointed neck in the center of a stand of bright yellow sunflowers. “JASON,” he said, “you mentioned at the inquest that Di didn’t have any relatives aboard the Starcology. Was that true?”

Aaron had never doubted my word before, so this came as a bit of a surprise. “Yes. Well, yes in any meaningful sense. Give me a moment. Found. Her closest relative aboard is Terashita Ideko, male, twenty-six, a promising journalism student at the time we left Earth.”

Aaron laughed. “Can’t be a very close relative with a name like that.”

I quickly dug up eight examples of pairs of people on board who shared substantial genetic material but had names that were drawn from equally diverse ethnicities. However, by the time my response was phrased, I realized that Aaron had been making a joke. Too bad: it was an interesting list. “No,” I said, the delay as I prepared another response seeming hopelessly awkward to me, but completely unnoticeable to him. “Their genetic material overlaps by only one part in 512.”

“Seems there should be someone closer, what with ten thousand people aboard.” Again, I searched the personnel database, this time to determine what the average genetic divergence between individuals aboard was, but once more I checked myself before answering. That was something I didn’t want to draw attention to. Instead, I let Aaron assume that I had taken his comment as rhetorical.

He began walking again, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he reached Di’s apartment. Next to the bi-leaf door panel was a strip of embossed blue plastic tape that said DIANA CHANDLER. Beneath it I could see traces of adhesive where a second strip used to be. Zooming in from my vantage point among the sunflowers, I brought the black level on my cameras up to eighty-five units and read the name that had been there as an absence of residue within the long rectangle of glue: AARON D. ROSSMAN.

“It didn’t take her long to remove my name,” he said bitterly.

“It has been almost two weeks.” Aaron made no reply and after a moment I slid the two door panels aside for him, their pneumatic mechanism making the sighing sound I knew Aaron felt like making himself. The interior lights were already on, for, like Aaron’s new apartment, this one was filled with growing things. I correlated the degree of homesickness each person felt with the number of plants he or she cultivated. Di and Aaron were both at the high end of the scale, but they were by no means the worst offenders. Some, like Engineer I-Shin Chang for instance, lived in a veritable forest.

Aaron began a slow circumnavigation of the living area. Di had covered the walls with framed holograms of antiques. She had been good-natured about having to leave most of her collection on Earth. “After all,” she had said once in that chatty way of hers—something others found endearing but I considered inefficient—“even my new things will be antiques by the time we get back.”

The room was tidy, everything in its place. I contrasted this with a still-frame of the same apartment from when both Diana and Aaron had lived there: his clothing strewn about, dirty dishes left on the table, ROM crystals scattered here and there. One of the few things I’d ever overheard them fighting about was Aaron’s tendency to be sloppy.

As he continued walking, Aaron came upon a carnation in full bloom. It was sitting in a Blue Mountain vase, one of the few antiques Di had brought along. Bending low, he cupped the red flower with his hand and drew it close to inhale the scent. I had no olfactory sensors beyond a simple smoke detector in that room, but I accessed the chemical composition of carnation pollen and tried to imagine what it might indeed smell like. Aaron certainly seemed to find the fragrance pleasant, for he stood breathing it for seven seconds. But then his mind apparently wandered. He straightened and, lost in thought, clenched his fist. After five seconds, he realized what he was doing, opened his palm, and looked at the pulped petals. Ever so softly, he whispered, “Damn.”

He began walking again. When he came to the bedchamber door, he paused but did not ask me to open it. I knew why he was pausing, of course. The lack of embossed tape on the front doorjamb notwithstanding, if Di had taken up with someone else after she and Aaron had called it quits, the evidence would be behind that brown sliding panel. Until he looked in the bedroom, he could fan the glowing embers of doubt about the cause of Di’s death. If she was still alone, was still wallowing in sadness over the dissolution of their marriage, then Aaron would have little choice but to accept the suggestion, forced on him through his own clenched teeth and closed mind by Pam, by Gorlov, by Kirsten, that Di had taken her life in despair—that he, once her joy, then her sorrow, was the catalyst that had driven her to fling herself into that sleet of charged particles. But if, if, she had found solace in the arms of another man—and with 5,017 males on board, many would have found Diana an appealing companion, for was she not attractive and outgoing, funny and passionate?—then whatever had pushed her to the edge, pushed her over the edge, was not his fault. Not his burden. Not his to feel guilty about, to wrestle with in his dreams for all the nights yet to come.

He half turned, as if to skip the bedroom altogether, but as he did so, I slid the door aside. The pneumatic sound made his heart jump. A lock of his sandy hair was swept across his brow by a cool breeze from the room that held for him so many memories of passion and, later, comfortable warmth, and later still, indifference. He stood in his characteristic stance, with hands shoved deep into his pockets, on the threshold—the same threshold he had carried her across, him laughing, her giggling, two years before. The room was as crisp and clean as the stars on a winter’s night, each item—pillow and hairbrush and hand mirror and deodorant stick and slippers—in its place, just as the icy points in the sky all had their own proper spots. The neatness was a cutting contrast to the disheveled appearance the room had had during Aaron’s tenure, but that, I was sure, was not what disturbed him. His eyes scanned bureau and headboard and night table, but each item he saw he recognized. There was no evidence of anyone besides Diana having been here since he had removed his own belongings twelve days ago. His face fell slightly, and I knew that those glowing embers of doubt—his only hope of release—were dying within him.

He turned his back on the bedroom, on his past, and returned fully to the living room, plopping himself down into a bowl-shaped chair, staring off into space—

—leaving me not knowing what to do next. A literature search revealed the greatest need after the loss of a loved one is for someone to talk to. I had no desire to destroy this man anymore than was necessary to keep suspicion from falling upon me, so I reached out, tentatively. “Aaron, do you feel like talking?”

He lifted his head, lost. “What?”

“Is there anything you want to say?”

He was silent for twenty-two seconds. Finally, quietly, he whispered, “If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have come on this mission.”

That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I tried to sound jaunty. “Turn down the first major survey of an extrasolar planet? Aaron, there was a waiting list six kilometers long in ten-on-twelve-point type.”

He shook his head. “It’s not worth it. It’s just not worth it. We’ve been traveling for almost two years, and we’re not even a quarter of the way there—”

“Almost. We’ll hit the twenty-five-percent mark the day after tomorrow, after all.”

He exhaled noisily. “Earth’ll be 104 years older when we get back.” He stopped again, but after nine seconds decided, I guess, that what he was feeling needed elaboration. He looked up at the ceiling. “Just before we left, my sister Hannah had a boy. By the time we return, that boy will be long dead, and his son will be an old, old man. The planet we come home to will be more alien than Colchis.” He lowered his gaze, looking now at his feet. “I wonder how many would do it over, given the choice?”

“You will know the answer to that when the referendum is taken tomorrow.”

“I suppose you have already predicted a winner?”

“I’m confident that the men and women of Argo will do the right thing.”

“Right for them? Or right for the greater glory of UNSA?”

“I do not believe those goals are mutually exclusive. I’m sure a great future lies ahead for all of you.”

“Except Di.”

“I appreciate your loss, Aaron.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

That was a good question. Aaron was savvy enough to know that, despite my being a QuantCon, most of what I said was based on the conclusions of expert systems, or literature searches, or simple Eliza-like let’s-keep-the-conversation-going proddings. Yes, I am conscious—my squirmware does contain Penrose-Hameroff quantum structures, just like those in the microtubules of human neural tissues. But did I really appreciate what it was like to lose someone I cared about? Certainly not from direct experience, and yet… and yet… and yet… At last I said, “I believe that I do.”

Aaron barked a short laugh, which stung me. “I’m sorry, JASON,” he said. “It’s just that—” But whatever it is that it just was went unsaid, and he fell silent for twelve more seconds. “Thank you, JASON,” he said finally. “Thank you very much.” He sighed. Although his EEG was cryptic, the increased albedo of his eyes made his sorrow plain. “I wish she hadn’t done this,” he said at last. He looked me straight in the cameras; and although I knew he was resigning himself to Di’s fate being his fault, he probed my glassy eyes, the way he used to probe hers, as if looking for a deeper meaning beneath the spoken word.

There must be a bug in my camera-control software. For some reason, my unit in that living room panned slightly to the right, looking away from Aaron. “It’s not your fault,” I said eventually, but in a simple voice, not processed through the synthesizer that normally puts emotional undertones into my words.

Still, the message seemed to buoy him for a moment, and he tried again for absolution. He shifted in his chair, looking once more at my lenses. I imagine he saw his own reflection in their coated surface, his normally angular face ballooning across the convex glass. “I just don’t believe it,” he said. “She loved—she loved life. She loved Earth.”

“And you?”

Aaron looked away. “Of course she loved me.”

“No, I meant do you love Earth?”

“With a passion.” He rose to his feet, putting an end to our conversation. What he’d been seeking from me, I knew I hadn’t provided. With some of the people on board, I had a close relationship; but to Aaron, a man who had dealt with complex machines all his professional life, I was just another piece of technology—a tool, a device, but certainly not a friend. That Aaron had opened up to me at all meant he was running out of places to try to unload his guilt.

Di’s apartment had seasonal carpeting, a gen-eng product that could be made to cycle through yellow, green, orange, and white during the course of a year. It was now ship’s October, and taking its cue from a slight electric signal that I had fed to it, the plush weave had taken on the appearance of a blanket of dead leaves, mottled ocher and amber and chocolate and beige. Aaron shuffled across it toward a storage unit, a simple brown panel set into the putty-colored wall. “Open this for me, please.”

I slid the cover up, the thrumming motors vibrating my cameras on the adjacent wall enough to make the room appear to jump up and down. I couldn’t see inside, but according to Argo’s plans, there should have been three adjustable shelves set in a cupboard thirty centimeters across, fifty high, and twenty deep.

Aaron slowly removed objects and examined them: two jeweled bracelets, a handful of golden ROM crystals, even a book version of the Bible, which surprised me. Last, he took out a golden disk, two centimeters in diameter, attached to a black leather band. There seemed to be writing engraved on one face, the one Aaron was looking at, but the typeface was ornate and there were many specular highlights making it impossible for me to read at that angle. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Another antique.”

After identifying the object—an old-fashioned wristwatch—I accessed the list of effects Di had applied for permission to bring on the voyage. The watch, of course, was not on it. “Each wrist medical implant contains a brand-new chronograph,” I said. “I’d hate to think Di wasted some of her personal mass allowance on something she didn’t need.”

“This had … sentimental value.”

“I never saw her wearing it.”

“No,” he said slowly and perhaps a little sadly. “No, she never did.”

“What does the inscription say?”

“Nothing.” He turned it over. For one instant the engraving was clear to me. Tooled in a script typeface was WE TAKE OUR ETERNAL LOVE TO THE STARS, AARON—and a date two days before our departure from Earth orbit. I consulted Aaron’s personnel file and found that he and Diana had been married jointly by a rabbi and a priest fifty-five hours before we had left.

“Say,” said Aaron, looking first at the antique’s round face then at the glowing ship’s-issue implant on the inside of his wrist, “this watch is wrong.”

“I imagine its battery is running down.”

“No. I put in a ten-year lithium cell before I gave it to Diana. It should be dead accurate.” He pushed a diamond stud on the watch’s edge, and the display flashed the date. “Christ! It’s off by over a month.”

“Fast or slow?”

“Fast.”

What to say? “They sure don’t make them like they used to.”