Golden Fleece Read online

  Annotation

  Aboard Argo, a colonization ship bound for Eta Cephei IV, people are very close—there’s no other choice. So when Aaron Rossman’s ex-wife dies in what seems to be a bizarre accident, everyone offers their sympathy, politely keeping their suspicions of suicide to themselves. But Aaron cannot simply accept her death. He must know the truth: Was it an accident, or did she commit suicide? When Aaron discovers the truth behind her death, he is faced with a terrible secret—a secret that could cost him his life.

  Sawyer’s four most recent novels were nominated for the Hugo Award. He has won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, as well as the major Canadian awards for best science fiction and best mystery fiction. Here is the novel that began his career.

  * * *

  Robert J. Sawyer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Golden Fleece

  For my parents, John A. Sawyer and Virginia Sawyer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel would not have taken flight without the help and encouragement of Algis Budrys, Dr. R. W. Bussard, Richard Curtis, Terence M. Green, Patrick Lucien Price, Dr. Ariel Reich, Brian M. Thomsen, and especially Carolyn Clink.

  Many thanks to Ralph Vicinanza, David G. Hartwell, Jim Minz, and Tom Doherty for arranging for the publication of this revised edition.

  Beta testers for Golden Fleece were Ted Bleaney, David Livingstone Clink, Franklin R. Haber, Mark C. Petersen, Alan B. Sawyer, and Andrew Weiner. Any remaining bugs are my own.

  THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO GO INTO SPACE!

  THE UNITED NATIONS SPACE AGENCY REQUIRES PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE FOR FIRST EXTRASOLAR PLANETARY SURVEY

  We require 10,000 people to form the crew of Argo, first in UNSA’s Starcology (space-traveling arcology) series of Bussard-ramjet starships. Starcology Argo will conduct a complete survey of Eta Cephei IV (“Colchis”), a verdant, Earthlike world 47 light-years distant. True to the Starcology community-in-space idea, we will consider workers in all realms of human endeavor. Applicants must be under 30 years of age and in good general health. [R]eply to this posting and an application will be downloaded to your terminal.

  ONE

  I love that they trusted me blindly. So what if it was ship’s night? For centuries, astronomers had labored while others slept, and even if there was no way to see outside during our long voyage, Diana Chandler still hadn’t broken the habit of not starting work until after I had dimmed the lights in the corridors.

  I’d suggested to Diana that she might be able to verify her startling findings by using some of the equipment stowed in the cargo holds. That no one had been down to the lower decks for almost two weeks didn’t seem to bother her. That she was alone in the middle of my artificial night fazed her not in the least. After all, even with 10,034 people on board, I’m sure she felt safe as long as she was under my watchful eyes. Indeed, she seemed perfectly calm as she headed into a service corridor, its walls lined with blue-green algae behind acrylic sheets.

  I’d already wiped the files that contained her calculations and notes, so there was just one more loose end to tie up. I slid the door shut behind her. She was used to that soft pneumatic hiss, but her heart skipped a beat when it was followed by the snick-snick of spring-loaded locking bolts sliding into place.

  Up ahead, a rectangle of red light spilled onto the sod from another open doorway. She walked toward it. Her paces were measured, but signs of nervousness were creeping into her medical telemetry. As soon as she passed through that door, I closed and locked it, too.

  “JASON?” she said at last, her normally sunny voice reduced to a tremulous whisper. I made no reply, and eleven seconds later she spoke again. “Come on, JASON. What gives?” She started walking down the corridor. “Oh, be that way if you must. I don’t want to talk to you, either.” She continued to march forward, but the tappings of her heels concatenated into a rapid rhythm that matched her racing heartbeat. “I realize you’re upset with me, but, well, you’ll just have to trust my judgment on this.” I quietly winked off the lighting panels behind her. She looked back, down the blackened corridor, then continued forward, her voice quavering even more. “I have to tell Gorlov what I’ve discovered.” Wink. “The people on board have a right to know.” Wink. “Besides, you couldn’t have kept something like this secret forever.” Wink. Wink. Wink. “Oh, shit, JASON! Say something!”

  “I’m sorry, Diana,” I said through speakers mounted on the crisscrossing pink metalwork of the ceiling. Those words were enough to tell Di that the crazy fears running through her head were not crazy, that she was very much in trouble.

  Dilating the valve on the pipe made a pleasing reptilian sound. Diana laughed nervously, found the strength for a final attempt at humor. “Don’t hiss at me, you rusty heap of—” She gagged as the chlorine hit her. Covering her mouth with her sleeve, she ran, pounding on door after door. Not that one. No, not yet. Just a few more. On your left, bitch. Ah—swoosh! She burst into the cargo hold and the door slid shut behind her. I snapped on the wall-mounted spotlights. The floor was a simple open grating: the pink metal of the artificial-gravity field generators, bare of any covering. Through the small triangular openings made by the metal intersections she could see level after level of storage compartments, each filled with aluminum crates.

  She scrambled for one of the steel bars used to lever the lids off these crates and—“Damn you, JASON!”—smashed the splayed end into my wall-mounted camera unit. Shards of glass cascaded to the floor, falling on and on through the open gratings. Undaunted, I swiveled an overhead camera pair to look down on her. This angle foreshortened her appearance. From here she didn’t look like an entirely adequate astrophysicist, a shrewd collector of antiques, a recently separated but passionate lover, or—by all accounts—a great cook. No, from here she looked like a little girl. A very frightened little girl.

  Di’s wrist medical implant told me that her heart was pounding loudly enough to thunder in her ears. Still, she must have heard the electric hum of my overhead camera swiveling to track her because she turned and hurled the metal bar at that unit. It fell short, bouncing with a whoomp on the lid of a crate. For a moment, she stared up into my camera eyes, horror and betrayal plain on her face. Such an attractive woman: her yellow hair separated so well from the shadows. Given the lighting in the hold, she could probably see her own reflection, a fun-house parody of her fear, spread wide over the curving surface of my twin lenses.

  She ran on, but stopped again to evaluate her alternatives when she came to a four-way intersection between rows of crates. As she stood, she fingered the tiny pewter cross she wore on a chain around her neck. I knew it was her mannerism when she was nervous. I knew, too, that she wore the cross not for its religious significance—her Catholicism was nothing but a field in a database—but because it was more than three-hundred years old.

  She decided to run down the aisle to her left, which meant she had to squeeze past a squat robot forklift. I set it after her, the antigravity force from its pink metal bas
e lifting it four centimeters off the floor. As it hummed along after her, I let loose a blast from its horn. I looked at her now from the forklift’s point of view, seeing her from behind. Her hair bounced wildly as she ran.

  Suddenly she pitched forward, tumbling onto her face. Her left foot had caught in the open floor grating. I cut power to the forklift’s antigravs, and it immediately dropped back to the floor a few meters behind her. It wouldn’t do to crush her here. She got up, epinephrine surging, and took off down the corridor with two-meter strides.

  Ahead was the hatch I’d been shepherding her toward. Di made it through into the vast hangar deck. She looked up, desperate. Windows into the hangar control room, thick panes of glass, began ten meters above the floor and covered three sides of the bay. They were dark, of course: it would be six subjective years before we would arrive at Colchis, where the ships stored here would be used.

  On either side of the hangar were twenty-four rows of silver boomerang-shaped landing craft, the nose of one ship tucked neatly into the angle of the next. Names mostly associated with the Argonauts of myth were painted on their hulls.

  Ahead was the plated wall that separated the hangar from vacuum. Diana jumped at the sound of groaning metal. The wall jerked loose in its grooves, and air started hissing out.

  Di’s hair whipped in the breeze, a straw-colored storm about her head and shoulders. “No, JASON!” she shouted. “I won’t say anything—I promise!” Foolish woman. Didn’t she know I could tell when she was lying?

  A thin stripe of deadly black appeared at the bottom of the hangar’s outer wall. Di screamed something, but the rising roar drowned her words. I swung a spotlight onto the lander Orpheus, its outer air-lock door open. That’s right, Diana: there’s air inside. The wind fought her as she climbed the stepladder into the tiny, lighted cubicle, the growing vacuum sucking at her back. Her nose had begun to bleed from the sudden drop in pressure. Grabbing the manual wheel in both hands, she forced the lock to cycle. When she was safely within the body of the lander, I slid the hangar wall all the way up.

  The view of the starbow was magnificent. At our nearlight speed, stars ahead had blue-shifted beyond normal visibility. Likewise, those behind had red-shifted into darkness. But encircling us was a thin prismatic band of glowing points, a glorious rainbow of stars—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.

  I fired Orpheus’s main engines, a silent roar in the vacuum, clouds of greenish gold exhaust billowing from the twin cones. The boomerang lifted from the deck and moved with gathering speed across the expanse of hangar and through the open space door.

  My remote cameras inside Orpheus’s cockpit focused on Diana’s face, a mask of horror. The telecommunications link crackled with static—radio-frequency interference from the ramfield. As soon as the lander darted past the overhang of the ramscoop funnel, Diana’s body would begin to convulse: the hard radiation pelting into it would scramble her own nervous system. Almost instantly she would undergo cardiac arrest and her brain, its neurons firing spasmodically for a few seconds, would cease to function.

  The feed from my remote cameras flared brightly for an instant as the lander roared out into the sleet of hydrogen ions, and then the picture died. The communications link had given out before Diana’s body had. A pity. It would have been an interesting death to watch.

  TWO

  MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

  STARCOLOGY DATE: MONDAY 6 OCTOBER 2177

  EARTH DATE: SUNDAY 18 APRIL 2179

  DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 739 ▲

  DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2.229 ▼

  “Aaron, we have an emergency. Wake up. Wake up now.”

  It was an autonomic response for me, completed before I could even think of halting it. In retrospect, I’m hard-pressed to say which of my algorithms initiated my locator program first. Aaron’s job, although he hadn’t had a lot to do so far, was supervising Starcology Argo’s fleet of landing craft. Certainly there was a hard-coded directive that required him to be notified immediately of any accident involving those ships. But Aaron, by coincidence, had also recently ended a two-year marriage contract to Diana Chandler. There was a next-of-kin routine that would seek out the closest relative of anyone injured or killed. That Aaron was, by virtue of their divorce, no longer Diana’s next-of-kin had probably invoked a judgment circuit to resolve the inconsistency. That would have delayed the decision to contact him on those grounds for a few nanoseconds, likely allowing the job-related summoning of him to trigger my speakers first.

  Next to Aaron lay Kirsten Hoogenraad, M.D., eyes closed but wide awake. Something had been interfering with her sleep of late. Perhaps it was simply that she was unused to sharing a bed, at least for the purpose of getting rest. In any event, she jumped at the sound of my voice and, propping herself up on one elbow, shook Aaron’s shoulder. Normally, I bring up the lights slowly when someone is waking, but this was no time for gentleness. I snapped the overhead panels to full illumination.

  Aaron’s EEG shuddered into consciousness, whatever dream he had been having dissolving as wave fronts cascaded together. I spoke again. “We have an emergency, Aaron. Get out of bed quickly.”

  “JASON?” He rubbed yellow crystals from his eyes. Implanted on the inside of his left wrist was my medical sensor, which doubled as a watch. He squinted at its glowing digital display. “You mystic! Do you know what time it is?”

  “The lander Orpheus has just taken off,” I said through twin speakers on the headboard. That did it. He rolled out of bed, flat feet slapping the floor, and stumbled across the room to retrieve his pants from where he’d left them, tossed in a heap with one leg inside out.

  There was no point in telling him to hurry. His heart was beating somewhat erratically and his EEG made clear that he was still fighting to wake up. An inefficient boot-up procedure if you ask me.

  “Please call an elevator,” said Aaron, his voice dry and husky. That’s what he gets for sleeping with his mouth open.

  “I already have one waiting,” I said. Kirsten was ready to go, pulling the belt of her blue velour robe tight at her waist. The action accentuated the lines of her figure.

  I slid both the bedchamber and main apartment doors aside, the hisses of their mechanisms rising and falling quickly. Kirsten darted down the corridor and entered the waiting lift, quite unnecessarily putting her hand on the rubber molding along the edge of the open door as if to keep it from closing. Aaron thundered along the hallway and joined her.

  The car began its fifty-four-level drop. The elevator itself operated silently, running on pink antigrav motors in a vacuum shaft. But I always whistled a descending tone through my speakers when the cylindrical cabs were going down and an ascending tone when they were going up. It had started as a joke: I’d expected someone to realize that the damned things should have been silent. So far, seventy-three million elevator rides to my credit, no one had noticed.

  Aaron looked up at my paired cameras, mounted above the elevator door. “How did it happen?”

  “The ship was appropriated,” I said, “for reasons unknown.”

  “Appropriated? By whom?”

  No easy way to say this. It was too bad Kirsten had to be there. “Diana.”

  “Diana? My Diana?” Kirsten’s face was blank—a carefully controlled blank, with muscles bunching in their attempt to show no expression. Her medical telemetry told me that she was stung by Aaron’s use of the word “my.” “Can you contact her?” he asked.

  “I’ve been trying since the moment she left, but there’s too much interference from our ramfield.” The elevator popped open, revealing one arm of the U-shaped hangar-deck control room. Aaron and Kirsten rounded the corner into the crosspiece of the U. Clustered around the instrumentation consoles were the dozen others I had summoned, mostly clad in pajamas and robes. Seated at the center of the group were tiny Gennady Gorlov, the mayor of Starcology Argo, looking about as disheveled as Aaron did, and giant I-Shin Chang, chief en
gineer, clad in one of those specially tailored denim jumpsuits he required to accommodate his four arms. Chang had been off working on his secret project, instead of sleeping, even though this was his normal sleep period.

  Aaron peered out the observation window that ran along the inner walls of the control room, overlooking three sides of the hangar. His eyes fixed on the still-open space door. “Distance to Orpheus?”

  “Fifty klicks,” said Chang in his staccato delivery. The engineer vacated the chair in front of the main console, its cushioned seat rising ten centimeters with a pneumatic hiss. He gestured with his lower left hand, not quite as beefy as its upper counterpart, for Aaron to take his place.

  Aaron did so, then stabbed a finger at the central viewscreen, a glowing rectangle cutting the observation window into two long curving panes. “External!”

  I produced a holographic rendering of Starcology Argo. The principal material part of our Bussard ramjet looked like a wide-mouthed bronze funnel. At this level of resolution, the great reticulum of field wires extending outward from the funnel was invisible. Girdling the inside of the funnel cone halfway down was the magnetic torus; girdling the outside at the same location was the windowless ring-shaped habitat, painted a sea green in color, its plated walls looking like a sheet-metal quilt. Most of the remainder of Argo’s three-kilometer length was a cylindrical silver shaft, interrupted here and there by gold and black tanks and compressors. At the end of the shaft was the tight cluster of cylindrical igniters, the bulbous, copper-colored fusion chamber, and the corrugated, flared fusion-shield assembly. In front of Argo, I added a tiny silver angle-bracket representing the runaway lander.

  “Orpheus’s velocity?” asked Aaron.

  “Sixty-three meters per second and slowing,” I said through the speaker on the console before him.