Golden Fleece

  “Note or no note, it’s obvious,” said Aaron.

  “We can’t be sure,” said Kirsten. “It could have been an accident.”

  “Earlier, you were convinced that she’d killed herself,” said Aaron. “In fact, you tried to convince me of it, too.”

  It seemed to me that Kirsten had been hurt by, even jealous of, Aaron’s obvious grief over the loss of his ex-wife. She should have told him that, apologized for the pettiness that caused her to be so hard on him when they went out to the Orpheus to recover Di’s body, but she, like Aaron, dealt poorly with feelings of guilt.

  Instead, she pressed on, trying, or so it seemed to me, to give Aaron a comforting doubt about the reason for Diana’s demise, some small lack of certainty that would keep him from drowning in his own feelings of responsibility. “Remember, there’s still a big loose end,” she said, at last moving close to him and, after a tenuous moment of hesitation, draping her arms around his neck. “We still don’t know what caused the high levels of radiation.”

  Aaron sounded irritated. “That’s one for the physicists, don’t you think?”

  Kirsten pushed on, convinced, I guessed, that she was on the right track to dispelling Aaron’s self-recrimination. “No, really. She would have to be outside for hours to get that hot.”

  “Maybe some kind of space wrap,” Aaron, vaguely. “Maybe she was outside for hours from her point of view.”

  “You’re grasping at straws, sweetheart.”

  “Well, so are you, dammit!” He peeled her arms from him and turned his back. “Who cares about the radiation? All that matters is that Diana is dead. And I killed her just as surely as if I’d thrust a knife into her heart.”

  NINE

  I hate Aaron Rossman’s eyes. If a person is alone in a room, I normally recognize to whom I am talking by the four-digit hexadecimal ID code broadcast by his or her medical implant. However, in a crowded room in which many people are talking at once (and, therefore, many show the physiological signs that accompany speech), I often have to visually identify whom the speaker is. Of course, I use a sophisticated pattern-recognition system to identify faces. But humans change their faces so frequently: not just twists of expression, but also beards and mustaches added and removed; new hair styles; new hair colors; through chemical treatments or tinted contact lenses, new eye colors. To deal with this, I maintain a person-object in memory for each crew member. A recognition routine kicks in each time I focus on a face. It updates the object for that individual, reflecting current conditions. Rossman was easy, as far as most things were concerned. In the time that I had known him he was always clean-shaven and he wore his hair short, at a length about two years behind the fashion with men his age in Toronto when we’d left. Its color never varied, and, indeed, so few adults had sand-colored hair that I’m not surprised he was content to leave it its natural shade. Besides, he should enjoy it while he can: a quick look at his DNA tells me it will begin to gray in about six years—around the time we will arrive at Colchis. He should retain a full head of hair throughout his life though.

  But his eyes, his eyes, those damnable eyes: were they green? Yes, to an extent, and under certain lighting conditions. Or blue? That, too, again varying with the ambient illumination. And brown? Certainly there were chestnut streaks in his irises. And yellow. And ocher. And gray. My recognition routine kept bouncing back and forth in its determination, often several times during a session, irritatingly updating the eye-color attribute of the person-object. I’ve had this problem with no one else on board, and I find myself staring into those eyes, searching, looking, wondering.

  I’ve done a full literature search about human eyes. In fiction, especially, there are constant references to the eyes as a source of insight into a person’s character, an individual’s state of mind. “Amusement lurked in his eyes.” “Hard, brown orbs, full of fury, of hatred, of resolve.” “Doe-eyed innocence.” “An invitation in the smoldering depths of her eyes.” “Her eyes were naked with hurt.”

  When they cry, yes, I can see that. When their eyes go wide with astonishment—which almost never happens, no matter how astonished they really are—that, too, is plain. But these ineffable qualities, these brief insights that they claim to see there … I have devoted much time to trying to correlate movement, blink rate, pupil aperture size, and so on, with any emotion, but so far, nothing. What one human reads so easily in the eyes of another eludes me.

  Aaron was particularly hard to interpret, both by me and by his peers. They, too, spent great amounts of time scanning his multicolored orbs, plumbing their depths, looking for an insight, a revelation. I stared at his eyes now, wet balls of jelly with lenses and irises and light receptors—like my cameras, but smaller. Smaller and, supposedly, less efficient. But those biological eyes, those products of random chance and mutation and adaptation, those fallible, fragile spheres, saw nuances and subtleties and meanings that evaded my carefully designed and engineered and fabricated counterparts.

  Right now, his eyes were focused on a monitor screen, watching the opening credits for the 1500 hours’ newscast of the Argo Communications Network. This was the major ’cast of the day. When the network had begun, the big newscast was at 1800, the dinner hour. But this had proven to be a pointless holdover from the commuter culture that ran Earth. The ’cast had been moved earlier in the day so that the journalists could better enjoy their evenings. Since not much happened on board, it seemed reasonable enough.

  Aaron sat on a couch in his apartment with his arm around Kirsten. He watched the news; I watched his eyes.

  I had the honor of narrating the opening credits, generating the correct date stamp automatically. “Good afternoon,” said my voice, under the control of some insignificant parallel processor, “this is the Starcology News for Tuesday, October 7, 2177. And now, here’s your anchorperson, Klaus Koenig.”

  Koenig had been a sportscaster in a small Nebraska town before the mission. Although suitably glib for such a job, it was his work with handicapped children that had caused us to select him as an argonaut. His face, pockmarked like a relief map of Earth’s moon, filled the screen.

  “Good afternoon,” said Koenig, voice as smooth as a high-end synthesizer chip’s. “Today’s top story: death rocks the Starcology.” Aaron sat up so fast that my cameras, which had been zoomed in tight on his eyes, ended up staring into the middle of his chest. He failed to notice the slight whirring as I tilted the lenses up to lock on his pupils again. “Also on today’s program: preparations for Thursday’s one-quarter-mark celebration, a look at the controversial Proposition Three, and a behind-the-scenes peek at the Epidaurus Theater Group’s production of that old chestnut, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.”

  Aaron looked stoic while a picture of Diana, blonde hair tied in an asymmetrical ponytail off the left side of her head, appeared behind Koenig. Beneath it floated her name, and, in brackets, the dates 2149-2177. “At 0444 hours yesterday morning, the landing craft Orpheus was appropriated by Dr. Diana Chandler, twenty-seven, an astrophysicist from Toronto, Canada. Dr. Chandler, apparently disconsolate over the failure of her husband, Aaron Rossman, also twenty-seven, also of Toronto, to renew their recently expired two-year marriage contract, presumably committed suicide. Mr. Rossman is the Starcology’s dockmaster.”

  “Jesus—,” said Aaron. I widened my field of vision. Kirsten’s mouth was agape.

  Koenig continued: “Reporter Terashita Ideko spoke with Chief Engineer I-Shin Chang about the tragedy. Terry?”

  The view on screen changed from the close-up of Koenig’s pockmarked visage to a two-shot of Ideko and Chang, a line of text at the bottom of the display identifying them. Chang was at least twice the size of the Japanese reporter. Ideko only came up to the point at which Chang’s lower set of arms joined his barrel-shaped torso.

  “Thank you, Klaus,” said Ideko. “Mr. Chang, you were on hand when the Orpheus was brought back aboard the Starcology. Can you tell us what happened?”

&
nbsp; Ideko wasn’t using a handheld mike. Rather, he and Chang simply stood across from one of my camera pairs, using its audio and video pickups to record the scene. Chang proceeded to describe, in great technical detail, the recovery of the runaway lander.

  “I don’t believe this,” said Aaron, mostly under his breath. “I don’t fucking believe this at all.”

  “You can’t blame them,” said Kirsten. “It’s their job to report the news.”

  “I can too blame them. And I do. All right, I suppose they had to report Diana’s death. But the suicide. That stuff about my marriage. That’s nobody’s business.”

  “Gorlov did warn you that they’d be doing a story.”

  “Not like this. Not a bloody invasion of my privacy.” He took his arm from around her shoulders, leaned forward. “JASON,” he snapped.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Is this newscast being recorded?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want a copy of it downloaded to my personal storage area as soon as it’s over.”

  “Will do.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Kirsten.

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m not going to take this lying down. Dammit, this kind of reporting is wrong. It hurts people.”

  Kirsten shook her head. “Just let it blow over. Making a stink about it will only make matters worse. People will forget about it soon enough.”

  “Will they? No one has ever died on board. And it’s not likely to happen again, is it? This is going to stick in everyone’s minds for years to come. Every time someone looks at me, they’re going to think there goes the heartless bastard who drove poor Diana to suicide. Jesus Christ, Kirsten. How am I supposed to live with that?”

  “People won’t think that.”

  “The hell they won’t.”

  On screen, Klaus Koenig’s pitted face had reappeared. “In other news today, groups both for and against the divisive Proposition three are—”

  “Off!” snapped Aaron, and I deactivated the monitor. He got up, hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and began to pace the room again. “God, that makes me angry.”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” said Kirsten. “People won’t pay any attention.”

  “Oh, right. Eighty-four percent of the crew watches that newscast. Koenig would have killed for a share that big back in Armpit, Nebraska, or wherever the fuck he’s from. Jesus, I should knock his teeth in.”

  “I’m sure it will all blow over.”

  “Dammit, Kirsten, you know that’s not true. You can’t make the world all right with your little lies. You can’t mold reality just by saying it’s all going to be okay.” His eyes locked on hers. “I hate it when you tell me what you think I want to hear.”

  Kirsten’s spine went rigid. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’re always telling people what you think is good for them. You’re forever trying to shield them from reality. Well, I’ve got news for you. I’d rather face reality than live in a fantasy world.”

  “Sometimes people need to take things one step at a time. That’s not necessarily living in a fantasy world.”

  “Oh, great. Now you’re a psychologist, too. Listen to me. Diana is dead, and that asshole Koenig just told the entire Starcology that she’s dead because of me. I’ve got to deal with that now, and none of your kind words are going to make that go away.”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  Aaron let his breath out in a long, ragged sigh. “I know.”

  He looked at her and forced a wan smile. “I’m sorry. It’s just, well, I wish he hadn’t gone public with that.”

  “The people on board have a right to know what’s going on.

  Aaron sat back down and let out another sigh. “That’s what they keep telling me.”

  TEN

  The fourth and final page of the message from Vulpecula was most puzzling of all. It was some 1014 bits in length, a massive amount of data. The total number of bits, as with the earlier pages, was the product of two prime numbers. I tried arraying it with the larger prime as the horizontal axis, which had been the custom established by the other three pages. No image was immediately apparent. I did my best electronic shrug, taking a nanosecond to resort my RAM tables. I then tried the other configuration, with the larger prime as the vertical axis. Still nothing apparent. Fifty-three percent of the bits were zeros; 47 percent, ones. But no matter which way I looked at them, there seemed to be no meaningful clustering into a geometric shape or picture or diagram. And yet this page of the message was obviously the heart of what the aliens had to say, being, as it was, eleven orders of magnitude larger than the other three pages combined.

  Earth’s first attempt at sending a letter to the stars, the Arecibo Interstellar Message, had been beamed at the globular cluster M13 on 16 November 1974. It had been a mere 1,679 bits in length, insignificant compared to the size of the final page of the message received from Vulpecula. Yet that handful of bits had contained a lesson in binary counting; the atomic numbers of the chemical constituents of a human being—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous; representations of the nucleotides and sugar-phosphate structure of DNA; the number of such nucleotides in the human genome; the size of the population of the Earth; a stick figure of a human; the height of the human in units of the wavelength of the transmission; a little map of the solar system, showing that the third planet is humanity’s home; a cross-sectional view of the Arecibo telescope; and the telescope’s size in wavelengths.

  All that in less than two kilobits. Of course, when Frank Drake, the human who wrote the message, asked his colleagues to decipher it, they were unable to do so completely, although everyone at least recognized the stick-figure human, looking like the male icon on a men’s washroom door.

  Ironically, the first three pages of the Vulpecula message had been simple in comparison to Earth’s first effort. Registration cross, solar system map, Tripod and Pup: I felt confident that I’d interpreted these reasonably correctly.

  But the fourth page was complex, data-rich, one hundred billion times the size of the Arecibo pictogram. What treasures did it hold? Was it the long-hoped-for Encyclopedia Galactica? Knowledge from the stars, given away without so much as a harangue from a door-to-door salesperson?

  If the data on page four was compressed, I’d found no clue as to how to decompress it in the first three pages of the message. What, what did those gigabytes of data mean? Could it be a hologram, interference patterns captured as a bitmap? A chart of some sort? Perhaps simply a collection of digitized photographs? I obviously just wasn’t looking at it in the right way.

  I loaded the entire message into RAM and studied it minutely.

  Aaron hurried across the beach, the hot sand putting a gingerliness into his step. Two hundred and forty-one nude or almost-nude people swam in the freshwater lake, frolicked on the shore, or basked in the 3,200-degrees Kelvin yellow light of the simulated late-afternoon sun. Aaron nodded in passing to those he knew well, but even after two years together, most of the people on board were still strangers to him.

  This beach was not patterned after any particular real one, but rather represented some of the finest features of various seashores on Earth. The cliffs rising high above the sands were the chalk white of those at Dover; the sands themselves were the finely ground beige of those of Malibu; the waters, the frothy aquamarine of Acapulco. Sandpipers ran to and fro, gulls wheeled and soared overhead, parrots sat contentedly in the coconut trees.

  The first 150 meters of beach, including live birds, was genuine. The rest, stretching to a hazy horizon, was me: a constantly updated real-time hologram. Sometimes, as now, far up the beach I painted a lone, small figure, a youngster playing by himself, building a sand castle. To me, he was real, as real as the others, a boy named Jason; but he could never enter their world and they could never enter his.

  Aaron was almost to the beginning of the simulacrum. He passed th
rough the pressure curtain that warned the birds away from the invisible bulkhead. A doorway opened in the wall, a rectangular aperture just above the holographic sands, revealing a metallic stairwell beyond. He banged down the steps and entered the level beneath. The ceiling was sculpted in deep relief, irregular with the geography of the shoreline, bowing deeply at the middle of the lake. Beads of condensation clung to the cold metal. Among the buttresses and conduits were workbenches and cabinets, an expansion of the engineering shops. Far off, clad in dirty coveralls, was Chief Engineer I-Shin “Great Wall of China” Chang, working on a large cylindrical device.

  “Ho, Wall,” Aaron called, and the other man looked up. “JASON said you wanted to see me.”

  Chang, a giant in any room, seemed particularly large in this cramped space, his excess of limbs exacerbating the problem. “That’s right.” He extended his upper right hand toward Aaron, saw that it was greasy, withdrew it, and tried again with his lower right. Little time was given to formal greetings aboard Argo, since one was never far away from anyone else. With raised eyebrows, Aaron clasped his friend’s hand. “I hear that you were none too happy about today’s newscast,” said Chang, the words a burst of machine-gun fire.

  “You have a gift for understatement, Wall. I was furious. I’m still trying to decide whether I should go rearrange Koenig’s face.”

  Chang tilted his head toward my camera pair. “Be careful about what you say in front of witnesses.”

  Aaron snorted.

  “Are you upset with me for participating?” asked Chang.

  Aaron shook his head. “I was at first, but I listened to the recording again. All you did was describe the technical procedure we used to bring Diana—to bring the Orpheus—home.”