Golden Fleece Read online

  It was eight seconds before Aaron replied, and as each of those seconds ticked by, Kirsten’s medical telemetry became more agitated as she awaited whatever response Aaron might make. At last he spoke: “I’m sorry, too.”

  Kirsten let her breath slip from her lungs as she relaxed, and she waited, now without apprehension, for Aaron to continue.

  “You know,” he said, “when my parents divorced, they told us—my brother Joel, my sister, Hannah, and me—that they were going to remain friends. Hannah, she was always a cynic, she never believed it, but Joel and I thought they would, that we’d get together as a family still, at least on special occasions. Well, that never happened. Mom and Dad grew further and further apart. It used to be that they would talk when Dad would drop us off at Mom’s. She’d kept the old house; he’d moved out into an apartment. Originally, he’d come up to the door and Mom would invite him in for a coffee. But that didn’t last long. Soon Dad was just dropping us off on the landing pad.” He brought his right hand up to his chest, placing it over Kirsten’s. “Despite that, I thought—I really and truly thought—that Diana and I would remain friends after we split up. I mean, hell, we couldn’t very well avoid each other in this tin can.” He shook his head, and I suspect Kirsten’s eyes had adjusted enough now that she could see the gesture. If not, she certainly could hear his hair rubbing against his pillow.

  Aaron fell silent. Kirsten waited, perhaps expecting more, but then said herself, “I’m surprised that she passed the psychological exams for this mission. I mean, if she was predisposed to—you know—to killing herself, I’m surprised they didn’t detect that.”

  “Their testing left a lot to be desired. They let Wall Chang come, after all.”

  “What’s wrong with Wall?”

  “He’s building bombs down in his workshop.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m serious. He’s gone off the deep end. Two years of being—trapped—here seems to have been too much for him.”

  “God.”

  Our testing had, of course, been rigorous. But people are so unpredictable, and those cooped up in a space vessel for extended periods have always had a tendency to go loony. As far back as the late 1980s, there is an intriguing reference to a suicide attempt by a Soviet cosmonaut aboard the Mir space station. No details of the attempt are in any of the records I possess; I always wondered whether he failed because he tried to hang himself in zero gravity.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” continued Aaron. “I’m surprised that they let me come on this mission, too.”

  “What?” Kirsten stared at his dark form. “Why?”

  “Well, look at me. I’m not a Ph.D., or a promising grad student. I don’t even have a bachelor’s degree. I was just a maintenance tech for Spar Aerospace in Toronto, and everybody knew I got that job because of my dad’s connections through the Thunder Bay Spaceport. Hardly the kind of guy I’d expect them to chose, let alone to put in charge of the landing fleet.”

  “All of your superiors were probably too old for this mission. As is, you’ll be forty-nine when we get back.”

  “Nope. Just forty-eight. You will be forty-nine.”

  “A gentleman never reminds a lady of her age, Aaron.”

  “Sorry. But what you say is right, I guess. Hell, my supervisor, Brock, was thirty-nine. He’d be—well, with the way he looked after himself, he’d probably be dead by the time the mission got back.”

  “Exactly,” said Kirsten. “Besides, in some fields practical knowledge is a hell of a lot more valuable than theoretical training. I mean, I was a first-year resident when they chose me for this mission. There are times down on the hospital level that I’d kill for another five years of experience, for having, just once, set a real broken leg, or performed real surgery, or even counseled somebody who was dying, not that I’ve had to deal with that yet. I feel so, so ill prepared for most of what I have to do. I guess I’m in over my head.”

  Aaron’s reply was soft. “Maybe we all are.” They were both silent for two minutes, then Aaron turned on his side and pulled her to him. His hands touched her shoulder, her breast, her thigh—familiar movements, gestures tried and true. This wasn’t a time for exploration or heady passion. No, it was a time for closeness, togetherness, comfort. Their bodies intertwined, their vital signs danced. They joined, released, but continued to hold on to each other for almost an hour afterward.

  Humans spend close to a third of their lives asleep. It seems a pity that such time should be wasted. I had tried to make the most of it for Diana Chandler when she first started to get obsessive about what her research seemed to indicate. Initially it had seemed to work—she practically gave up on her calculations at one point, dismissing her findings as insignificant or attributing them to problems with her equipment. But eventually she came back to them and I was left with no choice.

  It seemed again worth trying. I truly did only want to use violence as a last resort, and maybe, just maybe, this would be enough to save the situation. Besides, I wouldn’t be attempting to alter Aaron’s thoughts. Rather, I’d just be reinforcing what he was already feeling.

  Kirsten and Aaron had nodded off within five minutes of each other. The fact that Kirsten was there made the timing more difficult—I had to monitor two EEGs and work only during the periods in which both were deep in REM sleep. Still, enough opportunities presented themselves during the course of the night. Aaron slept on the right side of the bed, sprawled on his stomach like a lizard lying on a rock. Kirsten, taking what remained of the left side, lay in a semifetal position, her knees tucked toward her chest. At 02:07:33, I began to talk through the headboard speakers, my voice low. Not quite a whisper—I lacked the ability to communicate essentially with breath alone and no vibration of my speaker cords—but in a minimal volume, hardly discernible above the gentle sighing of the air conditioner. I changed my vocal characteristics to resemble Aaron’s nasal asperity and spoke slowly, quietly, right at the threshold of perception: “Diana committed suicide. She took her own life in despair. Di was crushed by the breakup of the marriage. It’s your fault—your fault—your fault. Diana committed suicide. She took—” Over and over again, quietly, attenuated, a chant.

  Aaron tossed in his sleep as I spoke. Kirsten drew her knees more tightly to her chest. “Diana committed suicide …”

  Kirsten’s pulse rate increased; Aaron’s breathing grew more ragged. Eyes rolled rapidly beneath clenched lids. “She took her own life in despair …”

  He flailed an arm; her brow beaded with sweat. “Di was crushed by the breakup of the marriage …”

  From deep in Aaron’s throat, a single syllable, the word “No,” dry and raw and faint, broke out from his dream world.

  “It’s your fault—your fault—your fault…”

  Suddenly Kirsten’s EEG did a flip-flop: she was moving out of REM sleep into a state of only shallow unconsciousness. I stopped speaking at once.

  But I would be back.

  NINETEEN

  MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

  STARCOLOGY DATE: SATURDAY 11 OCTOBER 2177

  EARTH DATE: FRIDAY 7 MAY 2179

  DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 744 ▲

  DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2.224 ▼

  It’s hard to believe he’s gone. That thought echoed over and over again through my Aaron Rossman neural net, repeating like the first simple program that each human learns in grade school—a handful of instructions that endlessly listed his or her name to screen. It’s hard to believe he’s gone. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.

  But he was gone. Dead. People didn’t die of heart attacks anymore. Cancer was almost always curable if caught early. Routine brain scans detected potential trouble sites long before a stroke could occur. Diabetes. AIDS. Most of the other big killers of the past, cured. But no one—not doctor, not naturopath, not shaman—could do anything about a snapped neck. Benjamin Rossman, forty-eight, had died instantly, under a two hundred-kilogram steel girder tha
t had fallen from a crane.

  The phone call had come three nights before. Aaron, at his father’s home in Thunder Bay for the Passover holidays, answered. He’d been surprised to see Peter Oonark’s face fade in on the screen. “Hiya, Petey,” Aaron said, grinning broadly at the smooth, round visage he hadn’t seen for six years.

  Petey, wearing a silver hard hat, looked grim. Grease smeared his face, and sweat beaded on his brow. “By, Jesus, Aaron—is that you?” He sounded surprised. “Don’t nearly recognize you with that forest.”

  Aaron stroked his chin. The beard had been an experiment—and not a particularly successful one at that. Most everyone agreed that he looked better without it. He did like the reddish hues that it had, though, believing it made a nice contrast with the sandy hair on his head. “Yeah, well, I’m going to shave it off. So, Petey, how’ve you been?”

  “Fine. Look, Aaron, is Halina home?”

  Halina was his father’s current wife. “No. Should be any minute though.”

  Petey didn’t say anything. Aaron peered more closely at the screen, looking at the Native Canadian’s eyes, brown and liquid. The scan lines of the screen segmented them into parallel chords. “What’s wrong, Petey?”

  “It’s your dad. There’s been an accident.”

  “God. Is he all right?”

  “No, Aaron. No, he’s not. His neck got broken.”

  “So he’s in hospital, right. Where? Thunder Bay General?”

  “He’s dead. I’m sorry, Aaron. I’m so very, very sorry.”

  That had been Tuesday. Instead of enjoying the Passover seders, the Rossmans now sat shivah. All mirrors in the house were covered, as were the household god’s reflective eyes. Lapels were out of fashion, but each mourner made a small rip in the front of his jacket, acknowledging the Almighty’s right to claim his servant. Even during the first three days, set aside for weeping, there were surprisingly few tears. Just emptiness, a vacuum in their lives.

  Joel and Hannah had flown in and flown out, Joel from Jerusalem, where he was studying engineering at the Hebrew University, Hannah from Vancouver, where she worked in a small advertising agency. But Aaron had stayed to help put his father’s affairs in order. On the eighth day after the funeral, work was permitted to resume.

  Aaron’s mother, divorced a dozen years from his father, had tried to muster the sorrow appropriate to the occasion, but it had been too long since Benjamin Rossman had been a part of her life. Halina, though, was devastated, broken, wandering the house aimlessly. Aaron sat on the edge of the bed his father had shared with Halina, the contents of the strongbox strewn across the pale Hudson’s Bay Company six-point blanket. A birth certificate. A few stock certificates. A copy of his father’s will. His father’s high-school diploma, neatly rolled and tied with a ribbon. His marriage contracts, the one with Aaron’s mother expired, the one with Halina never to run its term.

  Papers.

  The inventory of a life.

  The small collection of facts and figures that were still handed over with a flourish, a flare.

  True, these were mere echoes of the actual records of Benjamin Rossman’s life, stored in gallium arsenide and holographic interference patterns. But they were the records that mattered most, the things he had cared about above all else.

  Aaron opened envelopes, unfolded sheets, read, sorted into piles. Finally, he picked up an unsealed number-ten envelope. In the upper left was printed the stylized trillium logo of the Government of Ontario and the words Ministry of Community and Social Services. Aaron registered a certain dull curiosity at the unusual source of the envelope as he opened it. Out came a single form with ornate border and tightly packed barcodes: Certificate of Adoption. Aaron was surprised. Dad adopted? I didn’t know that. But then he read further down the form—the whole thing had been printed as a single job on a tunnel-diode printer, so the filled-in blanks didn’t stand out at all. The name of the adopted child wasn’t Benjamin Rossman. Oh, that name was there, but next to the title adopting father. No, the name of the adopted child was Aaron David, birth surname confidential, new legal surname Rossman.

  His father’s death had left Aaron numb, too numb for this discovery to yet register fully. But he knew in his bones that ultimately he would feel this shock even more than the loss of his father.

  Aaron’s mother’s house hadn’t changed much. Oh, it seemed smaller to Aaron than it had when he was a child, and he’d come to realize that his mother had absolutely no taste in furnishings, but he fancied he could still hear the soft echoes of his brother and sister playing, smell the lingering aroma of his father’s hearty if none-too-spectacular cooking. He sat in the big green chair that he still thought of as Dad’s, although his father hadn’t visited this house for years before his death. His mother sat on the couch, her hands in her lap, her eyes not quite meeting his. LAR had fixed coffee and had left it waiting in the dumbwaiter.

  “I was sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

  “Yes. It’s very sad.”

  “He was a good man.”

  A good man. Yes, all dead men are characterized as having been that way. But Benjamin Rossman had been a good man. A hard worker, a good father. And a good husband? No. No, that had never been said. But, on balance, a good man. “I’ll miss him.”

  He waited for his mother to say, “Me, too,” but of course she didn’t. She hadn’t seen Benjamin in over a year. For her, not seeing him today was no different from not seeing him any other day. I’ll never let that happen to me, Aaron thought.

  I could never love somebody one day and turn my back on her the next. When I get married, it will be forever.

  “Mother, I’m going to try out to become an Argonaut.” For two centuries, the Argonauts had been the Toronto team in the Canadian Football League. Although Aaron followed the game, he had never expressed an interest in playing. But his mother knew what he meant. The whole world knew about the new Argonauts, the crew for the massive starship being built in orbit high over Kenya.

  “That mission will last a long time,” she said. And left unsaid: And I’ll be dead when you return.

  “I know,” he said. And left unsaid: I’m already dealing with the loss of my father. Can the loss of the rest of my family be so much worse?

  They sat in silence for many minutes. “I went through Dad’s papers,” Aaron said at last. A pause. “Why didn’t you tell me I was adopted?”

  His mother’s face grew pale. “We didn’t want you to know that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Adoption … adoption is so unusual these days. Birth control is so easy. Unwanted children are rare. We didn’t want you to feel bad.”

  “Are Hannah and Joel adopted, too?”

  “Oh, no. You can see it in their faces. Joel takes after his father—he’s got his eyes. And Hannah looks just like my sister.”

  “So you weren’t infertile.”

  “What? No. There aren’t many things that can prevent a person from having a child these days. Not much that they can’t correct with drugs or microsurgery, after all. No, there were no problems there.”

  “Then why did you adopt?”

  “It’s not easy to get a permit for a third child, you know. We were lucky. Here in northern Ontario, population laws are less strict, so—so we had no trouble getting permission, but—”

  “But what?”

  She sighed. “Your father never made a lot of money, dear. He was a manual laborer. Not many of them left. And I shared a job with another person. Not uncommon for one parent to do that, especially these last few years, since they outlawed day care. But, well, we didn’t have a lot. Take LAR, for instance. He’s one of the cheapest household gods you can buy, and he still was more than we could really afford. Feeding another mouth was going to be difficult.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you adopted me.”

  “The Government Family Allowance. You get double benefits for an adopted child.”

  “What?”

>   “Well, there’s so little incurable infertility. It’s hard to find parents willing to adopt.”

  “You adopted me instead of having a child of your own because it was cheaper?”

  “Yes, but—I mean, we grew to love you as our own, dear. You always were such a good little boy.”

  Aaron got up, made his way to the dumbwaiter, lifted a cold cup of coffee to his lips. Frowning, he put it back and asked LAR to zap it in the microwave.

  “Who were my birth parents?”

  “A man and woman in Toronto.”

  “Have you met them?”

  “I met the woman once, just after you were born. A sweet young thing. I—I’ve forgotten her name.”

  A lie, thought Aaron. Mom’s voice always catches just a tad when she’s lying.

  “I’d like to know her name.”

  “I can’t help you with that. Wasn’t it on the adoption certificate?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, dear. You know how these things are. They’re kept confidential.”

  “But maybe she wants to see me.”

  “Maybe she does. There is a way to find out, I think.” Aaron sat up straight. “Oh?”

  “Whatever ministry is responsible, I forget what it’s called—”

  “Community and Social Services.”

  “That’s it. They operate a—a registry service, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Which means?”

  “Well, it’s simple, really. If an adopted child and a birth parent both happen to register, saying they want to find each other, then the ministry will arrange the meeting. Perhaps your birth mother registered with the ministry.”

  “Great. I’ll try that. But what if she hasn’t?”

  “Then I’m afraid the ministry will refuse to set up the meeting.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry.”