Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

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.”

The aliens. That’s what I called the 1,711 bits of the third page of the message. In some ways its interpretation was much simpler than page two, the double row of ones and zeros that described the Vulpecula solar system. After all, this page did make a picture, and that picture did, indeed, seem to depict alien forms of life. Of course, I wasn’t sure that that was what the pattern of pixels represented, but the two objects looked more like creatures than they did like anything else I could think of. One of the aliens was tall and spindly; the other, tiny in comparison, was much more squat and compact. I designated them Tripod and Pup.

Tripod wasn’t humanoid, and yet he shared many of the characteristics of humans. He had what appeared to be limbs, although his numbered six, not four. He had a vertically held torso (assuming, of course, that I had oriented the message correctly), and he had protuberances from the top of the torso.

The more I looked at him, the more I thought I saw. He seemed to have three legs, and if I was interpreting the picture correctly, they were evenly spaced around the base of his torso. I noted that they ended in wide feet, with down-turned toes or claws. The left foot was not depicted as a mirror image of the right, and I assumed that rather than accurately depicting a real asymmetry, this was intended to show the feet as if seen from different perspectives. The legs were splayed out from the body, as were the three arms. The only apparent arm joints were at what one might as well call the elbows and the wrists. The hands had but two digits. However, given the low resolution of the image, and the Senders’s fondness for ratios, as evidenced from their solar-system diagram, I thought that perhaps the two fingers and three toes were simply meant to indicate that the ratio of hand digits to foot digits was 2:3, and that perhaps these beings had four fingers per hand and six toes per foot, or even six fingers and nine toes.

None of those combinations gave easy rise to hexadecimal counting, as had been used in the solar-system map, but, then, neither did the five-digits-per-hand biology of humans. The choice of hexadecimal, a natural extension of binary, suggested, perhaps, that these beings shared their world with electronic brains fashioned upon principles similar to those used by my brethren on Earth. Although binary, and then hexadecimal, weren’t the only ways to render counting electronically, they might indeed be the most likely to be adopted by engineers anywhere in the universe.

Anyway, to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity, each had its fingers held in a different configuration—or perhaps each hand was specialized for a different kind of grasping or manipulation.

Tripod’s torso was particularly interesting. It had four openings in it. Were these meant to indicate actual holes that went right through its body? Or were they orifices, one perhaps for ingestion, another for excretion, a third for respiration, and a fourth for procreation? Perhaps, yet if one were to follow the terrestrial model, the small projection from the bottom of Tripod’s torso would be the genitalia.