Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

The view of the starbow was magnificent. At our nearlight speed, stars ahead had blue-shifted beyond normal visibility. Likewise, those behind had red-shifted into darkness. But encircling us was a thin prismatic band of glowing points, a glorious rainbow of stars—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.

I fired Orpheus’s main engines, a silent roar in the vacuum, clouds of greenish gold exhaust billowing from the twin cones. The boomerang lifted from the deck and moved with gathering speed across the expanse of hangar and through the open space door.

My remote cameras inside Orpheus’s cockpit focused on Diana’s face, a mask of horror. The telecommunications link crackled with static—radio-frequency interference from the ramfield. As soon as the lander darted past the overhang of the ramscoop funnel, Diana’s body would begin to convulse: the hard radiation pelting into it would scramble her own nervous system. Almost instantly she would undergo cardiac arrest and her brain, its neurons firing spasmodically for a few seconds, would cease to function.

The feed from my remote cameras flared brightly for an instant as the lander roared out into the sleet of hydrogen ions, and then the picture died. The communications link had given out before Diana’s body had. A pity. It would have been an interesting death to watch.

MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

STARCOLOGY DATE: MONDAY 6 OCTOBER 2177

EARTH DATE: SUNDAY 18 APRIL 2179

DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 739 ▲

DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2.229 ▼

“Aaron, we have an emergency. Wake up. Wake up now. ”

It was an autonomic response for me, completed before I could even think of halting it. In retrospect, I’m hard-pressed to say which of my algorithms initiated my locator program first. Aaron’s job, although he hadn’t had a lot to do so far, was supervising Starcology Argo ’s fleet of landing craft. Certainly there was a hard-coded directive that required him to be notified immediately of any accident involving those ships. But Aaron, by coincidence, had also recently ended a two-year marriage contract to Diana Chandler. There was a next-of-kin routine that would seek out the closest relative of anyone injured or killed. That Aaron was, by virtue of their divorce, no longer Diana’s next-of-kin had probably invoked a judgment circuit to resolve the inconsistency. That would have delayed the decision to contact him on those grounds for a few nanoseconds, likely allowing the job-related summoning of him to trigger my speakers first.

Next to Aaron lay Kirsten Hoogenraad, M.D., eyes closed but wide awake. Something had been interfering with her sleep of late. Perhaps it was simply that she was unused to sharing a bed, at least for the purpose of getting rest. In any event, she jumped at the sound of my voice and, propping herself up on one elbow, shook Aaron’s shoulder. Normally, I bring up the lights slowly when someone is waking, but this was no time for gentleness. I snapped the overhead panels to full illumination.

Aaron’s EEG shuddered into consciousness, whatever dream he had been having dissolving as wave fronts cascaded together. I spoke again. “We have an emergency, Aaron. Get out of bed quickly.”

“JASON?” He rubbed yellow crystals from his eyes. Implanted on the inside of his left wrist was my medical sensor, which doubled as a watch. He squinted at its glowing digital display. “You mystic! Do you know what time it is?”

“The lander Orpheus has just taken off,” I said through twin speakers on the headboard. That did it. He rolled out of bed, flat feet slapping the floor, and stumbled across the room to retrieve his pants from where he’d left them, tossed in a heap with one leg inside out.

There was no point in telling him to hurry. His heart was beating somewhat erratically and his EEG made clear that he was still fighting to wake up. An inefficient boot-up procedure if you ask me.

“Please call an elevator,” said Aaron, his voice dry and husky. That’s what he gets for sleeping with his mouth open.

“I already have one waiting,” I said. Kirsten was ready to go, pulling the belt of her blue velour robe tight at her waist. The action accentuated the lines of her figure.

I slid both the bedchamber and main apartment doors aside, the hisses of their mechanisms rising and falling quickly. Kirsten darted down the corridor and entered the waiting lift, quite unnecessarily putting her hand on the rubber molding along the edge of the open door as if to keep it from closing. Aaron thundered along the hallway and joined her.

The car began its fifty-four-level drop. The elevator itself operated silently, running on pink antigrav motors in a vacuum shaft. But I always whistled a descending tone through my speakers when the cylindrical cabs were going down and an ascending tone when they were going up. It had started as a joke: I’d expected someone to realize that the damned things should have been silent. So far, seventy-three million elevator rides to my credit, no one had noticed.

Aaron looked up at my paired cameras, mounted above the elevator door. “How did it happen?”

“The ship was appropriated,” I said, “for reasons unknown.”

“Appropriated? By whom?”

No easy way to say this. It was too bad Kirsten had to be there. “Diana.”

“Diana? My Diana?” Kirsten’s face was blank—a carefully controlled blank, with muscles bunching in their attempt to show no expression. Her medical telemetry told me that she was stung by Aaron’s use of the word “my.” “Can you contact her?” he asked.

“I’ve been trying since the moment she left, but there’s too much interference from our ramfield.” The elevator popped open, revealing one arm of the U-shaped hangar-deck control room. Aaron and Kirsten rounded the corner into the crosspiece of the U. Clustered around the instrumentation consoles were the dozen others I had summoned, mostly clad in pajamas and robes. Seated at the center of the group were tiny Gennady Gorlov, the mayor of Starcology Argo, looking about as disheveled as Aaron did, and giant I-Shin Chang, chief engineer, clad in one of those specially tailored denim jumpsuits he required to accommodate his four arms. Chang had been off working on his secret project, instead of sleeping, even though this was his normal sleep period.

Aaron peered out the observation window that ran along the inner walls of the control room, overlooking three sides of the hangar. His eyes fixed on the still-open space door. “Distance to Orpheus?”

“Fifty klicks,” said Chang in his staccato delivery. The engineer vacated the chair in front of the main console, its cushioned seat rising ten centimeters with a pneumatic hiss. He gestured with his lower left hand, not quite as beefy as its upper counterpart, for Aaron to take his place.

Aaron did so, then stabbed a finger at the central viewscreen, a glowing rectangle cutting the observation window into two long curving panes. “External!”

I produced a holographic rendering of Starcology Argo. The principal material part of our Bussard ramjet looked like a wide-mouthed bronze funnel. At this level of resolution, the great reticulum of field wires extending outward from the funnel was invisible. Girdling the inside of the funnel cone halfway down was the magnetic torus; girdling the outside at the same location was the windowless ring-shaped habitat, painted a sea green in color, its plated walls looking like a sheet-metal quilt. Most of the remainder of Argo ’s three-kilometer length was a cylindrical silver shaft, interrupted here and there by gold and black tanks and compressors. At the end of the shaft was the tight cluster of cylindrical igniters, the bulbous, copper-colored fusion chamber, and the corrugated, flared fusion-shield assembly. In front of Argo, I added a tiny silver angle-bracket representing the runaway lander.