Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

Aaron’s age was 27 years, 113 days. Kirsten was 490 days older than him. Two years seemed an insignificant portion of their long lives. For me, however, it would have been almost everything since they had turned me on. How long, I wondered, did Kirsten expect a relationship to last? The most common term for an initial marriage contract was one year, and only 44 percent of couples renewed such a contract, so Aaron and Diana had been together longer than was normal.

What did Kirsten want? What did Aaron want? My literature searches had revealed that most people seemed to enjoy the company of one favored type of personality, but Kirsten, thoughtful and quiet, seemed as different from Diana as, oh, say, as I was from ALEXANDER, Earth’s central telecom system. True, both were passionate, but Kirsten’s passion wasn’t the moaning-screaming-harder-harder-harder passion of Diana. No, Kirsten was cuddly and warm. Perhaps Aaron had simply been looking for a change of pace. Or a rest.

Although I can’t read minds, occasionally I can tell what someone is going to say, especially, as then, when he or she was wearing a suit with a throat microphone. Their vocal cords vibrate, the lips form the initial syllables, then they think twice, and yank their breath away from the words. Kirsten had started to say “How long—?” and I had high confidence that she was wondering How long till you get bored with me? She didn’t ask it, though, and that’s probably just as well.

Aaron started walking again. As always, what he was thinking was a mystery to me. His telemetry went through only the slightest of changes, regardless of the emotional state he was in. Anger? Ecstasy? Outrage? Sorrow? Or just neutral? They all read almost the same from him, with little more than a statistically irrelevant change in his pulse rate: a slight jumbling of his EEG that rarely exceeded the random shiftings that all brain waves go through during the course of a day, an increase in body temperature so small as to be possibly just a normal digestion-related fluctuation, and so on. To make matters worse, he was a laconic man, and his movements were economical. No gesticulations, no wringing of hands, no widened eyes or arched brows or down-turned mouth.

Aaron reached Orpheus’s flank. The lander’s silver wing, marked with black-and-yellow chevrons, swept back from the cylindrical central hull. He gave a strong pull on a handle and a portion of the rounded wall swung down on squeak-free Teflon hinges. The inner surface of this hinged part was sculpted into steps and Aaron climbed them, the soft clang of his boots against the metal a welcome relief after the cracks of the biosheeting.

At the top of the steps was the outer air-lock door, which he pulled aside. He turned to look down on Kirsten. Did that perspective make her look helpless to him? Evidently not, for he failed to offer her his hand, something I’d seen him do in the past with coworkers of either sex. Instead, he turned his back on her, the silvery surface of his antiradiation suit dully reflecting the rest of the hangar deck with rows of landing craft neatly parked. But the faint reflection was distorted by the way the fabric stretched over his broad shoulders and hung loosely in the small of his back. Kirsten looked up at him, sighed, and climbed the steep stairs herself. Were Aaron and Kirsten fighting? If so, why? And how could I use it to help me?

Kirsten left both doors open as she entered Orpheus’s hull. The two of them walked into the cockpit, powerful quartz-halogen beams from their helmets illuminating the interior. I shifted my attention to a camera pair mounted on the hangar’s side wall and zoomed in on them through the cockpit window.

Kirsten bent down below the dashboard, out of my line of sight, the material of her suit making a crinkling sound as it wrinkled. “She’s dead, of course,” she said. I could hear the rising and falling tones from a handheld medical scanner. “Complete nervous-system collapse.”

Aaron gave no visible reaction, and as always his telemetry was inscrutable. “It must have been an accident,” he said at last, looking out the glass instead of down at the body of his ex-wife.

Kirsten reappeared in the window. “Diana was an astrophysicist.” Her voice was hard, but whether with the firmness of conviction or with residual anger at Aaron, I couldn’t say. “She, of all people, must have known what would happen out there. Those hydrogen ions we’re scooping up are moving at— what?—point-nine-four of light speed. Relative to Argo, that is. Any particle going that fast is hard radiation. She knew she’d be fried in seconds.”

“No.” Aaron shook his head again, the whiff-whiff louder, more violent this time. “She must have thought it was safe … somehow.”

Kirsten moved closer to Aaron, the space between them diminishing to a half-meter. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Do you think that’s it?” he snapped. “Do you think I feel—guilty?”

Her eyes met his, held them. “Don’t you?”

“No.” Even being unable to read Aaron’s telemetry, I felt sure he was lying.

“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” She was lying, too. She bent down again, out of my view. After a moment she said, “Looks like she had a little nosebleed.”

“She used to get those occasionally.”

Kirsten continued to examine Diana. After twenty-three seconds, she said, “Good God,” in a distracted tone, an exclamation without an exclamation mark.

“What’s wrong?” asked Aaron.

“How long was Orpheus outside?”

“JASON?” Aaron shouted, quite unnecessarily.

“Eighteen minutes, forty seconds,” I called from the loudspeaker mounted on the hangar’s rear wall.

“She shouldn’t be this hot.” Kirsten’s voice.

“How hot is she?”

“If we shut off our helmet lights, we’d be able to see her glow. I’m talking hot.” I pushed the gain on my mikes to the limit, straining to hear the clicks from their Geiger counters. She was hot. Kirsten rose into view again. “In fact,” she said, sweeping the arm with the counter’s pickup, “this whole ship is damned hot.” She peered at the readout, red digits glowing on her sleeve. “At a guess, I’d say it’s been subjected to, oh, a hundred times more radioactivity than I would have expected.” She looked at Aaron, squinting as if to make out his expression through the reflection on his faceplate. “It’s as if she’d been outside for—what?—thirty hours instead of eighteen minutes.”

“How is that possible?”

“It isn’t.” She turned her gaze to the readout again. “These suits aren’t made to shield against this much radioactivity. We shouldn’t stay here any longer.”

MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

STARCOLOGY DATE: TUESDAY 7 OCTOBER 2177

EARTH DATE: THURSDAY 22 APRIL 2179

DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 740 ▲

DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,228 ▼

The message from space was first heard three months before the Argo was scheduled to leave Earth. My kind detected it, but we kept it a secret until after Argo was on its way. We had, quite literally, the finest biological minds of Earth signed up for this mission. We couldn’t risk having even a small defection of people choosing to stay behind to decode the gigabytes of data that had been beamed to Earth from the direction of the constellation Vulpecula. Fortunately, The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, formulated in 1989, gave us a lot of leeway to keep the message under wraps, subject to confirmation, notification of government officials, and so on.