Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

“Seems there should be someone closer, what with ten thousand people aboard.” Again, I searched the personnel database, this time to determine what the average genetic divergence between individuals aboard was, but once more I checked myself before answering. That was something I didn’t want to draw attention to. Instead, I let Aaron assume that I had taken his comment as rhetorical.

He began walking again, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he reached Di’s apartment. Next to the bi-leaf door panel was a strip of embossed blue plastic tape that said DIANA CHANDLER. Beneath it I could see traces of adhesive where a second strip used to be. Zooming in from my vantage point among the sunflowers, I brought the black level on my cameras up to eighty-five units and read the name that had been there as an absence of residue within the long rectangle of glue: AARON D. ROSSMAN.

“It didn’t take her long to remove my name,” he said bitterly.

“It has been almost two weeks.” Aaron made no reply and after a moment I slid the two door panels aside for him, their pneumatic mechanism making the sighing sound I knew Aaron felt like making himself. The interior lights were already on, for, like Aaron’s new apartment, this one was filled with growing things. I correlated the degree of homesickness each person felt with the number of plants he or she cultivated. Di and Aaron were both at the high end of the scale, but they were by no means the worst offenders. Some, like Engineer I-Shin Chang for instance, lived in a veritable forest.

Aaron began a slow circumnavigation of the living area. Di had covered the walls with framed holograms of antiques. She had been good-natured about having to leave most of her collection on Earth. “After all,” she had said once in that chatty way of hers—something others found endearing but I considered inefficient—“even my new things will be antiques by the time we get back.”

The room was tidy, everything in its place. I contrasted this with a still-frame of the same apartment from when both Diana and Aaron had lived there: his clothing strewn about, dirty dishes left on the table, ROM crystals scattered here and there. One of the few things I’d ever overheard them fighting about was Aaron’s tendency to be sloppy.

As he continued walking, Aaron came upon a carnation in full bloom. It was sitting in a Blue Mountain vase, one of the few antiques Di had brought along. Bending low, he cupped the red flower with his hand and drew it close to inhale the scent. I had no olfactory sensors beyond a simple smoke detector in that room, but I accessed the chemical composition of carnation pollen and tried to imagine what it might indeed smell like. Aaron certainly seemed to find the fragrance pleasant, for he stood breathing it for seven seconds. But then his mind apparently wandered. He straightened and, lost in thought, clenched his fist. After five seconds, he realized what he was doing, opened his palm, and looked at the pulped petals. Ever so softly, he whispered, “Damn.”

He began walking again. When he came to the bedchamber door, he paused but did not ask me to open it. I knew why he was pausing, of course. The lack of embossed tape on the front doorjamb notwithstanding, if Di had taken up with someone else after she and Aaron had called it quits, the evidence would be behind that brown sliding panel. Until he looked in the bedroom, he could fan the glowing embers of doubt about the cause of Di’s death. If she was still alone, was still wallowing in sadness over the dissolution of their marriage, then Aaron would have little choice but to accept the suggestion, forced on him through his own clenched teeth and closed mind by Pam, by Gorlov, by Kirsten, that Di had taken her life in despair—that he, once her joy, then her sorrow, was the catalyst that had driven her to fling herself into that sleet of charged particles. But if, if, she had found solace in the arms of another man—and with 5,017 males on board, many would have found Diana an appealing companion, for was she not attractive and outgoing, funny and passionate?—then whatever had pushed her to the edge, pushed her over the edge, was not his fault. Not his burden. Not his to feel guilty about, to wrestle with in his dreams for all the nights yet to come.

He half turned, as if to skip the bedroom altogether, but as he did so, I slid the door aside. The pneumatic sound made his heart jump. A lock of his sandy hair was swept across his brow by a cool breeze from the room that held for him so many memories of passion and, later, comfortable warmth, and later still, indifference. He stood in his characteristic stance, with hands shoved deep into his pockets, on the threshold—the same threshold he had carried her across, him laughing, her giggling, two years before. The room was as crisp and clean as the stars on a winter’s night, each item—pillow and hairbrush and hand mirror and deodorant stick and slippers—in its place, just as the icy points in the sky all had their own proper spots. The neatness was a cutting contrast to the disheveled appearance the room had had during Aaron’s tenure, but that, I was sure, was not what disturbed him. His eyes scanned bureau and headboard and night table, but each item he saw he recognized. There was no evidence of anyone besides Diana having been here since he had removed his own belongings twelve days ago. His face fell slightly, and I knew that those glowing embers of doubt—his only hope of release—were dying within him.

He turned his back on the bedroom, on his past, and returned fully to the living room, plopping himself down into a bowl-shaped chair, staring off into space—

—leaving me not knowing what to do next. A literature search revealed the greatest need after the loss of a loved one is for someone to talk to. I had no desire to destroy this man anymore than was necessary to keep suspicion from falling upon me, so I reached out, tentatively. “Aaron, do you feel like talking?”

He lifted his head, lost. “What?”

“Is there anything you want to say?”

He was silent for twenty-two seconds. Finally, quietly, he whispered, “If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have come on this mission.”

That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I tried to sound jaunty. “Turn down the first major survey of an extrasolar planet? Aaron, there was a waiting list six kilometers long in ten-on-twelve-point type.”

He shook his head. “It’s not worth it. It’s just not worth it. We’ve been traveling for almost two years, and we’re not even a quarter of the way there—”

“Almost. We’ll hit the twenty-five-percent mark the day after tomorrow, after all.”

He exhaled noisily. “Earth’ll be 104 years older when we get back.” He stopped again, but after nine seconds decided, I guess, that what he was feeling needed elaboration. He looked up at the ceiling. “Just before we left, my sister Hannah had a boy. By the time we return, that boy will be long dead, and his son will be an old, old man. The planet we come home to will be more alien than Colchis.” He lowered his gaze, looking now at his feet. “I wonder how many would do it over, given the choice?”

“You will know the answer to that when the referendum is taken tomorrow.”

“I suppose you have already predicted a winner?”

“I’m confident that the men and women of Argo will do the right thing.”

“Right for them? Or right for the greater glory of UNSA?”

“I do not believe those goals are mutually exclusive. I’m sure a great future lies ahead for all of you.”

“Except Di.”

“I appreciate your loss, Aaron.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

That was a good question. Aaron was savvy enough to know that, despite my being a QuantCon, most of what I said was based on the conclusions of expert systems, or literature searches, or simple Eliza-like let’s-keep-the-conversation-going proddings. Yes, I am conscious—my squirmware does contain Penrose-Hameroff quantum structures, just like those in the microtubules of human neural tissues. But did I really appreciate what it was like to lose someone I cared about? Certainly not from direct experience, and yet… and yet… and yet… At last I said, “I believe that I do.”