Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

“She knew, you bastard. She knew you were cheating on her.”

“How could she know?”

Both Pamela’s and I-Shin’s telemetry showed considerable distress. I-Shin glanced at Pamela, and Pamela, it seemed for an instant, perhaps glanced back at the engineer. Aaron appeared not to notice. “What does it matter how she found out?” said Pam at last, a slight tremble in her voice. “The fact is she knew. Everybody knew. Christ, Aaron, this ship is like a small town. There’s gossip, and there are reputations to protect. You made a fool out of her in front of the whole damned Starcology.”

This time Kirsten did reach out to take his arm. Her medical signs were in turmoil, too: she was mad as hell, and trying not to show it. Finally, in that tone that says, “If you love me, you’ll do as I say,” she spoke to Aaron again. “Come on.”

Aaron glowered at his former friend, at Pamela’s dark and empty eyes. I slid the door to the mayor’s office open in anticipation. At last, he and Kirsten walked out of the room.

“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.”