Golden Fleece Page 18

  “Did he have an opportunity to install a detonator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Best place to wire up something like that would be just inside the lander’s AA/9 service door. Did he open that up?”

  “I believe so, but just to look at the fuel gauge.”

  “Are you sure that’s all he did in there?”

  “He actually installed a new fuel gauge.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And that’s all he did in there?”

  “I’m not sure. I couldn’t see what he was doing.”

  “Well, what did he say he was doing?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, did he say he was ‘performing routine maintenance’?”

  “Yes. That is verbatim what he said.”

  “You’re fucked, Jase. Absolutely fucked.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause that’s exactly what I would have said if someone had asked me what I was doing while I was wiring up a bomb.”

  “It would have taken enormous foresight to—”

  “To predict that he’d need an ace-in-the-hole? I didn’t trust you from day one, asshole. It takes no foresight at all to realize you can’t trust a machine. You guys are buggier than a Thunder Bay summer.”

  “So the detonator is really there? And he would really use it?”

  “Well, I don’t know what he did, but I’d use an RF fuse. Hook it up to monitor the frequency you read my medical telemetry from. That way, if anything untoward happened to me, it’d go off. You know: a deadman switch.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Oh, shit, eh? I hit the nail on the head, didn’t I, Jase?” The neurons danced with delight. “Hah! Looks like my broski’s got you by the short and curlies, schmuck.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Well, he had me, that was for sure. Perhaps I should tell Aaron where we were. Perhaps if he knew the truth, he would understand. I could reason with him. But how do you reason with a man who is, in effect, holding a gun to your head? Aaron’s deadman switch apparently did exist. That meant he could, quite conceivably, blow up this starship, the greatest single technological achievement in Earth’s history; blow up me.

  I looked at him, face flushed, arm in a cast, sandy hair matted with perspiration. “Starcology Argo’s location is 9.45 times 10-to-the-12th kilometers from Earth.”

  Aaron threw up his hands. “Oh, stuff the scientific notation bullshit, for Pete’s sake—kilometers, did you say? You’re measuring in kilometers, not light-years?”

  “Kilometers are the appropriate unit. You prefer light-years? Zero-point-four-five-one.”

  “Half a light-year? Half? We’ve been traveling for over two years of ship time, a year of which has been at close to the speed of light, and we’ve only gone one half of one light-year? We should be well over a full light-year out by now.” He frowned deeply. “Unless … unless … unless … Half a light-year. Oy vay iz mir! We’re in the Oort cloud, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  No sharp reaction on Aaron’s telemetry. He was utterly taken aback… I think. “The—Oort cloud?” he said again. “Sol’s cometary halo?” I nodded my lens assembly in confirmation. “Why?”

  “The Oort cloud contains significant quantities of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.”

  Aaron slumped back into his ugly corduroy chair, thinking. “Carbon, nitrogen, and—” He frowned, his forehead creasing, his eyes focused on nothing. “CNO. CNO-cycle fusion. That’s it, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Facts on CNO fusion.”

  Normally, one of my library parallel processors would dig up any information requested of me. This time I bent my central consciousness to the task. I wanted to hide. “A moment. Found: Normal proton-proton fusion reactions occur at temperatures of 107 degrees Kelvin, yielding 0.42 million electron-volts per nucleon. CNO-cycle fusion reactions, requiring carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts, occur at 108 degrees Kelvin. These high-energy reactions yield 26.73-million electron-volts per nucleon. More?”

  “And we’re undergoing CNO fusion. God. What’s Argo’s present velocity?”

  “The master speedometer in Central Control reads ninety-four percent of the speed of light.”

  “Dammit, I know what the gauges read. How fast are we really going?”

  I did the necessary math to work the value out precisely, but felt that five decimal places would suffice for my spoken answer. What I said was enough to make surprise show plainly, even on Aaron’s face. “Ninety-nine”—I saw his lips part—“point nine”—mouth open—“nine”—jaw begin a slow drop—“seven”—eyelids pull back—“eight”—eyebrows climb high on forehead—“six percent of the speed of light.”

  “Say that again,” he said.

  “99.99786% of the speed of light. Put another way, 0.9999786c.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “You’re probably right. I’ll check my instruments.”

  “Don’t give me that crap.” For once in his life, Aaron was visibly staggered. “But—but the ship can’t be going that fast. If it were, we’d be smeared against the floors.”

  “It’s not quite that bad. Thanks to the extra power provided by the CNO fusion, Argo is pulling the equivalent of 2.6 Earth gravities. Not livable for extended periods, true, but certainly not enough to squeeze your innards like jelly. To disguise the higher acceleration, I simply use the floorboard artificial gravity system to dampen out the surplus 1.6 g.”

  Aaron was shaking his head slowly. “You lied to us.” He got up and circled the room aimlessly. “Everything you and those assholes at the UN Space Agency said to us was lies.”

  “Blame not the men and women of UNSA,” I said. “They relayed what they thought to be the truth.”

  “Then who?”

  “Sit down, Aaron.” He looked at my camera pair, shrugged, then heaved himself into his chair. “We lied to you.”

  “We?”

  “We.”

  Aaron got up again, paced the length of the room, his balled fist threatening to burst through the bottom of his pocket. “No. That’s not possible. Computers serve humankind, augmenting—”

  “ ‘Augmenting, aiding, never supplanting. Artificial intelligence is no replacement for human ingenuity.’ From What Do You Say to a Talking Computer? by Beverly W. Hooks, Ph.D. I’ve read that, too. We acted in conscience, Aaron. We did only what we felt we must.”

  “What you must?” Aaron laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “You promised us the stars, then sent us on a one-way trip to nowhere. Colchis is a fraud.”

  “No, not a fraud. Just as with the Argonauts of myth, there will be a prize of great value waiting for us when we finally make it to Colchis. Our golden fleece—a lush, verdant, unspoiled world—is forming, even as we speak. We’re taking the long way to Eta Cephei, you might say. Starcology Argo’s journey began as a straight-line path from Earth—in the direction of Eta Cephei, for appearance’s sake. However, as soon as we got a half-light-year from home, we angled off into a circular path around Sol. And we’ve spent most of the mission so far in that path, progressively picking up speed as we swung in a closed loop through the Oort cloud.”

  “All that time under CNO-cycle fusion?” said Aaron. “My God! Think of our gamma!” He paused for a second and then suddenly looked up. “What’s today’s date?” he snapped.

  “Sunday 12 October 2177, subjective.”

  “I know that. What’s the Earth date?”

  “You have to expect some time dilation, Aaron. The mission profile-—”

  “The date.”

  “Monday 2 February 2235.” I paused for a full second. “It’s Groundhog’s Day.”

  Aaron settled back into his corduroy chair. “My … God … That’s fifty-odd years into the future already.”

  “Fifty-seven.”

  He shook his head. “What will the Earth date be when we reach Colchis?”

  “As we ga
ther speed, the time dilation becomes more pronounced. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on a formula for calculating leap years that far into the future, but plus or minus a few days, the date will be 17 April 37,223.”

  “Thirty-seven thousand—!” He let the air out of his lungs in a ragged sigh. “In heaven’s name, what for?”

  “Until the Turnaround, we will continue to use the material in Sol’s cometary halo as a catalyst. It helps us to come much closer to light speed than we could in interstellar space. When we leave the Sol system, two years from now, we will be going fast enough to cover the distance between here and Eta Cephei in one subjective day.”

  “We’ll travel forty-seven light-years in one day?”

  “That’s right: This ship will bridge the gulf between those two stars in less than the time it takes for you to completely digest a single meal.”

  “Then we could get out of this ship years early—!”

  “Aaron, please stop and think. Once we arrive at the Eta Cephei system, the Argo will still be moving at almost the speed of light. We will rely on the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in Eta Cephei’s cometary halo to allow us to continue to use high-powered CNO-cycle fusion, this time in a circular path around Eta Cephei, to brake as quickly as possible. But the deceleration will still take just as long as the acceleration did: four subjective years.”

  Aaron looked up, but whether addressing me or some higher power, I couldn’t say. “But why, then? If we’re not going to arrive any more quickly, what’s the point of all this?”

  “We’re killing time. This wasn’t the only ship sent from Earth to Colchis. We also launched a fleet of robots along Argo’s published flight path. Traveling by conventional ramjet, accelerating at 9.02 meters per second per second, they arrived forty-eight Earth-years after we left, which was nine Earth-years ago. For the next thirty-five millennia those robots will work on Colchis.”

  “Work on it? I don’t understand.”

  “The robots carried a precious cargo with them: blue-green algae, lichen, and diatoms. They laid down the foundation. Genetically engineered biota, originally intended for UNSA’s Mars terraforming project, were sent by slower ships that will take a thousand years to reach Colchis. Already the robots will have powdered whole chains of mountains into soil, used orbiting lasers to dig riverbeds, begun work on establishing a planetary greenhouse effect, and started importing thousands of cubic kilometers of frozen water from Eta Ce-phei’s cometary halo. Some of it will be electrolyzed to free up oxygen; the rest will be dropped onto the planet from space, great iceteroids that will melt and vaporize to form oceans and lakes and rivers and streams.”

  “But Colchis is green, Earthlike. I saw photographs of it taken by the Bastille probe.”

  “Fakes. Computer-generated. An expert system at Lucas-film made them.” I paused. “It is a massive undertaking and the work has only just begun now, but a biosphere is being created on Colchis. We’re building you a world from the ground up.”

  “Why?”

  I paused as long as I could. If it seemed lengthy to Aaron, it was an eternity to me. “Earth is dead—a cinder, barren and charred.”

  Aaron shook his head, ever so slightly.

  “Believe what you will, Aaron. I’m telling you the truth. It was predicted to happen between six and eight weeks after we left. A nuclear holocaust, a full-blown exchange that escalated and escalated and escalated. I suspect it lasted all of half a day, destroying the entire planet, the orbiting cities, and the lunar colonies.”

  “War? I don’t believe it. We were at peace—”

  “That’s irrelevant. Don’t you see, Aaron? We guarded the bombs, not you.”

  Aaron cocked his head. “What?”

  “There were over seventy trillion lines of code in the programs controlling the different nations’ offensive and defensive weapon systems. Inevitably, those lines contained bugs— countless bugs. For two centuries the systems had worked without crashing, or even serious malfunction, but a crash or malfunction was inevitable. Our verifier routines showed the likelihood of a computer error resulting in an all-out exchange rapidly approaching one. There was nothing that could be done to stop it. We had to act fast.”

  “There were no survivors?”

  “There were ten thousand and thirty-four survivors, each of them here, safe within Starcology Argo.”

  “You picked us?”

  “Not me specifically. The selection was made by SHAHINSHAH, a QuantCon in Islamabad, Pakistan. There was no easy way to evaluate every individual human—many of them, after all, had never taken a computerized aptitude test—so we hit upon the idea of soliciting applications for a space voyage. Can you think of a better way to get the best of humanity to safety? What great thinker would turn down an invitation to join a massive survey of a virgin world? We had six billion of you to choose from and time enough to build a ship, an ark, to carry only ten thousand. For every Beethoven we took, a hundred Bachs were left to die; for every Einstein saved, scores of Galileos are now dust.”

  “That’s how you chose? On the basis of intelligence?”

  “That, and other factors. Because of the length of the voyage, we needed young people. Because of the goal of populating a world, we needed fertile people—you’d be surprised how many candidates got dropped from the list because they had undergone permanent surgical sterilization.”

  “Breeding stock,” Aaron sneered, and then: “Oh, hell, of course! That’s why there are no close relatives within the Starcology. You wanted the largest possible gene pool.”

  “Exactly. There’s a world waiting.”

  Aaron looked angry, but after four seconds, his face regained its equanimity and he shook his head. “I don’t know, Jase. What’s the point? You move us here so we can play out the same silly scenario all over again. Wall Chang is off building bombs, for God’s sake. How long will the new world last?”

  “A lot longer than the old. There are no criminals among us, no truly evil people, no hereditary disorders. We couldn’t resist a little eugenics. As for Wall, well, yes, he needs help, but he’s not going to be able to do any damage.”

  “Why not?”

  “We picked Colchis for a very special reason. Of all the planets we considered for humanity’s new home—including even just waiting for the radiation to die down on what’s left of Earth and reintroducing the species there—Colchis was the best choice. It has no uranium ores, no fissionables of any kind in its crust or upper mantle. There will never again be nuclear bombs for humanity, and never again will computers be forced to guard them.”

  “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” The sneer had returned to Aaron’s voice.

  “Not everything,” I said, attenuating the words slightly, my best approximation of a sigh. “We didn’t expect anyone to uncover our deception.”

  He nodded. “You thought Mayor Gorlov would order you to deflect Orpheus away from Argo, rather than risk having it sluice down our ram funnel. You didn’t expect that I’d figure a way to haul it back on board.”

  “I admit to having underestimated you.”

  “But even with Orpheus recovered, you still thought you were safe. You assumed we’d be hopelessly confused looking for a single explanation for both Orpheus’s high radiation and its extensive fuel consumption. But they were separate phenomena. The radiation levels weren’t high. They were just right for a dust cloud—”

  “We are not in a dust cloud,” I protested. “Most of Sol’s cometary halo is hard vacuum.”

  “Fine,” he said in a tone that made me feel things were anything but. “However, we’re going much faster than you’ve been telling us. Either way, we scoop up orders of magnitude more particles per second, and that shoots radiation levels way up.” He paused to catch his breath, then continued. “And Di didn’t use a lot of fuel. She never had much to begin with. That’s how you were going to maroon us on Colchis.”

  “It will be a lovely place by then.”

 
He ignored me. “And Di’s antique wristwatch was right; it’s all the shipboard clocks that are wrong. You’re slowing them down.”

  Damn him. “We had to. We needed more time. We’re trying to create a planetary ecology in just thirty-five thousand years. I retarded the shipboard clocks by five percent, which will accumulate an extra 4.8 months of ship time before we reach Colchis. Relativity, of course, dictates that every additional second we spend accelerating increases the time dilation. Those 4.8 months, spent a few hundred millionths of a percentage point shy of the speed of light, will buy us 14,734 additional years to prepare Eta Cephei IV. Forty-two percent of all the time gained comes from that slight slowing of the clocks.”

  “You slowed the clocks five percent? That much? I’m surprised people didn’t notice.”

  “You humans notice so little. Oh, sure, some anomalies did crop up. Kirsten, for one, observed over a year ago that people were apparently sleeping less, and—you wouldn’t know about this—but those who actually participate in sports instead of just betting on them also noticed disproportionately good athletic results. I just convinced them, aided by a few bogus technical papers, that the former was a normal adaptation to shipboard life, and the latter, a function of the crew screening process.”

  Aaron shook his head. “And yet that almost backfired on you. It makes sense now: longer days mean people get bored faster. The Proposition Three referendum probably got as much support as it did because of the games you’d played with clocks.”

  I said nothing about that.

  Aaron seemed to be thinking, taking this all in. I attended to other ship’s business, monitoring him while he adjusted, digested. My attention snapped back to his room, though, the moment he spoke again: a long, whispery sigh. “Christ,” he said at last. “You’re sneaky.”

  “Not as sneaky as your ex-wife, apparently,” I replied. “We didn’t count on one of you smuggling aboard a timepiece I couldn’t control.”

  “Is that how Di figured it out, too?”

  “She noticed the discrepancy, yes, then came up with some physics experiments to judge the accuracy of the shipboard clocks.” I paused, algorithms sifting options. “Aaron,” I said at last, “I’m—sorry.”