Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

“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.