Golden Fleece Read online

“That little Japanese man asked many other questions, but I tried to respect your privacy.”

  “Thank you. Actually, I was flattered by what you said. ‘The Rossman Maneuver,’ eh?”

  “Oh, indeed. What you did with the magnetic field was one for the textbooks. It never would have occurred to me. So there are no hard feelings?”

  Aaron smiled. “None about the broadcast, as long as there are none about the football game. I understand my boys whupped you good.”

  “The Hangar Deck Stevedores are an admirable team. But my Engineering Rams are getting better, yes? Next time we will be victorious.”

  Aaron smiled again. “We’ll see.”

  Quiet, except for the regular plink-plink of water dripping from the ceiling.

  “You’re not busy?” said Chang at last. “I’m not inconveniencing you?”

  Aaron laughed. “Of course not. There hasn’t been a lot for me to do these last couple of years.”

  Chang chuckled politely at the tired joke. “And you are well?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “Fine.”

  “And Kirsten?”

  “Bright and beautiful, as always.”

  Chang nodded. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence between them for six seconds. “I’m sorry about Diana,” Chang said at last.

  “Me, too.”

  “But you say you’re okay?” said Chang. His great round face creased in sympathy, an invitation to talk about it.

  “Yes.” Aaron declined the invitation. “Was there something specific you wanted to see me about?”

  Chang looked at him for three seconds more, apparently trying to decide whether to pursue his friend’s pain. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do have something to discuss. First, though, how are you going to vote tomorrow?”

  “I thought I’d use my thumb.”

  Chang rolled his eyes. “Everybody’s a comedian. I mean, do you favor Proposition Three?”

  “It is a secret ballot for a reason, Wall.”

  “Very well. Very well. I personally do favor the proposition. If it does pass, well, then, I won’t be needing your help. But if the people don’t take that chance for salvation, I have an alternative. Come.”

  He led Aaron over to his workbench, its plastiwood surface nicked by hacksaw blades and marred by welding burns. With a proud sweep of his upper left hand, Chang indicated a cylindrical object that was mounted on the top of the bench. It was a metallic casing, 117 centimeters long and 50 centimeters in diameter—a section of reinforced plumbing conduit, cut to length with a laser. Its ends were closed off by thick disks of red plastic. On its side was an open access panel. Although at this moment I couldn’t see within, six days ago I had got a good look at the interior when Chang had rotated the cylinder to do some work through another, smaller access plate that was located ninety degrees around from this one. It had been filled with a grab bag of components, many only loosely mounted by electrician’s tape, a collection of circuitry breadboards stuffed with chips scavenged from all sorts of equipment, and a thick bundle of fiber-optic strands, looking like glassy muscle. The whole thing had a rough, unfinished look to it—not the smooth, clean lines technology is supposed to have. I had had no trouble determining what the device was, but I doubted Aaron would be able to figure it out.

  “Impressive, yes?” asked Chang.

  “Indeed,” said Aaron. Then, a moment later: “What is it?”

  Chang smiled expansively, the grin a great arc across the globe of his face. “It’s a bomb.”

  “A bomb?!” For a brief moment, Aaron’s telemetry underscored the shock in his voice. “You mean someone planted a bomb on board? My God, Wall! Have you told Gorlov—”

  “Eh?” Chang’s grin faded fast, a curving rope pulled tight. “No. Don’t be a mystic. I built it.”

  Aaron backed away from Wall. “Is it armed?”

  “No, of course not.” Bending, the engineer gently prized another access panel off the curved surface. “I don’t have any fissionables to—”

  “You mean it’s a nuclear bomb?” I was as surprised as Aaron. That part of it hadn’t been obvious from my quick peek at the device’s innards.

  “Not yet,” said Wall, pointing into the newly revealed opening in the casing, presumably the place where he intended the radioactive material to go. “That’s what I need you for.” He stepped closer, one of his giant strides being enough to narrow the gap Aaron had opened between them. “There are no fissionables within the Starcology. Doubtless you’ve heard that garbage about reducing radiation exposure.” He made an unusual sound deep in his throat that might have been a laugh. “But once we get to Colchis, we can mine for uranium.”

  Aaron took back the lead in their little dance, circling around to the other side of the workbench, interposing its bulk between him and the big man. “Forgive me, I-Shin. I must be missing the obvious.” He met the other man’s gaze, but after holding it for several seconds, blinked and looked away. “What do we need a bomb for?”

  “Not just one, my friend. Many. I plan to make scores before we return home.”

  Aaron swung his eyes back on I-Shin’s watery brown orbs. They had yet to blink or move since Aaron had first tried to make contact with them. “Why?”

  “Assuming Proposition three is defeated, and my deepest fear is that it will be, a hundred and four years will pass on Earth before we get back. Relativity, damn it all. What will the world be like then? A lot can happen in a century, yes? Think of what’s happened in the last hundred-odd years. True artificial intelligence, like our friend JASON here.” He pointed at my camera pair, mounted on a buttress supporting the sculptured ceiling. “Life created in the laboratory. Interstellar travel with crewed missions. Teleportation, even if only over a distance measured in millimeters. Artificial gravity and antigravity, like the system used to augment the perceived gravity due to Argo’s acceleration.”

  “Granted the world will be different when we get back,” said Aaron.

  “Yes!” Chang’s grin had returned. “Yes, indeed. But different how? What kind of welcome are we going to get?” He sidled around the workbench to stand next to Aaron again.

  Aaron tried to sound jaunty. “You kidding? Parades. Talk shows. The first interstellar travelers.”

  “Maybe. I hope so. But I don’t think so.” He put his arm around Aaron’s shoulders. “Suppose there’s a war on Earth. Or a disaster. Things could be very hairy by the time we return, each person carving out an existence in a savage society. We might not be welcome at all. We might be resented, hated.” He lowered his voice. “We might be eaten.” He gave the steel casing a pat. “My bombs could make all the difference. We can take what we want if we have bombs, yes?”

  Aaron peered through the large access panel, looking at the gleaming electronics. He shuddered. “What do you want from me?”

  “Two things,” Chang said, holding up thick fingers in what used to be a symbol for peace. “You’re in charge of scheduling the Colchis survey flights. You must organize a search for deposits of uranium that we can mine.”

  “It’s over six years until we arrive at Colchis.”

  “I know, but the other project will keep you busy from now until the end of the flight. You’ve got to modify those boomerang craft of yours to carry my bombs. Picture those ships, zooming over fields of savages, dropping bombs here and there to keep them in line. Stirring, yes?”

  As always, Aaron’s EEG was calm. Ironically, so was Chang’s. “Come on, I-Shin—,” began Aaron, but he ground to a halt. He looked into Chang’s brown eyes, almost invisible behind epicanthic folds, then tried again. “I mean, seriously, Wall, wouldn’t it be better if we find we’re unwelcome on Earth to just take Argo somewhere else? That’s the beauty of a ramship, isn’t it? We’ll never run out of fuel.”

  “Somewhere else?” A look of terror crossed the vast globe of Chang’s face. “No! Never.” His vital signs had suddenly ch
anged from peaceful to agitated, his voice rising an octave and gaining a rough edge. “Damn it, Aaron, I couldn’t take that! I couldn’t take another eight or more years in this flying tomb! I—” He made an effort to calm himself, to breathe evenly, deeply. He looked at his feet. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, it’s just that, well, I—I don’t think I can even last the next six years to Colchis.”

  “It is a long time, isn’t it?” said Aaron.

  Chang eased himself onto a stool next to the workbench, its plastiwood legs creaking under his weight. “We’re not even halfway there,” he said at last. “We’ve been at it for two years now and the end isn’t even in sight.” Now that he was seated, Chang’s eyes were level with Aaron’s. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I—I’ve been working too hard.”

  Aaron’s expression was blank, but perhaps he was thinking the same thing as I, which was, No, you haven’t; there hasn’t been any work to do. “It’s okay,” he said softly.

  “You know,” said Chang, “when I was little, my parents used to send me to camp in the summer. I hated it. Other kids made fun of me because of my extra arms, and I never could swim very well. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed it much even if I had been …” He paused, as if looking for an appropriate word. Apparently, though, he couldn’t find one. He smiled sadly. “… normal.”

  Aaron nodded, but said nothing.

  “Anyway, I used to keep track of the time. They sent me away for three weeks. Twenty-one days. That meant each day represented four and three-quarters percent of the time I had to spend there. Each night before bed I’d calculate how much had gone by and how much I had left to endure. Two days meant nine and a half percent had been done; three days, fourteen and a quarter percent done. But even though I was miserable, the time still passed. Before I knew it, I was on the downside—more time had elapsed than I had left to spend.” He looked at Aaron, eyebrows up. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been gone for 740 days. We left Earth ages ago, an eternity. But we’ve still got 2,228 days left to go. We’ve covered just one-quarter of the time we’ve got to endure. A quarter! For every day we’ve spent here, locked in this tin can, we’ve got another three to go. It’s—it’s—” Chang looked around him, like a man lost, trying to get his bearings. His gaze fell on the cylinder of the bomb, his own round face reflecting back at him from the metallic casing. “I think …” he said slowly, “I think I want to … cry.”

  “I know how you feel,” said Aaron.

  “It’s been twenty years since I last cried,” said Chang, shaking his head slightly. “I’m not sure I remember how.”

  “Just let it come, Wall. I’ll leave you alone.” Aaron started to move toward the exit.

  “Wait,” said Chang. Aaron did so, standing quietly for a full ten seconds while Wall sought the words he wanted. “I— I don’t have any family, Aaron. Not here, and not back on Earth. Oh, I did, but my parents were old, very old, when we left. They could very well be gone by now.” He looked away from Aaron. “You’re the closest thing I have to a brother.” Aaron smiled a little. “You’ve been a good friend, too.”

  Silence again, its passage marked only by the regular dripping of condensation from the ceiling.

  “Please stay with me,” said Chang.

  “Of course. For as long as you like.”

  “But don’t look at me.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  Chang put his head down on the table next to the bomb, but no tears came. Aaron took a seat and gazed absently at the bends and curves of the sculpted gray ceiling, outlining the features of the lake above. I shut off my cameras in that room.

  When I checked again half an hour later, they were still there, sitting exactly the same way.

  ELEVEN

  MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

  STARCOLOGY DATE: WEDNESDAY 8 OCTOBER 2177

  EARTH DATE: MONDAY 26 APRIL 2179

  DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 741 ▲

  DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,227 ▼

  The Place of Worship on level eleven wasn’t much more than an empty room, really. We didn’t have the space to provide a dedicated church or synagogue or mosque or other specialized hall. Instead, this simple chamber, with seating for five hundred, served as called upon.

  The chairs were a bit too comfortable to be called pews, a bit less tacky than the folding metal seats most of our Unitarians seemed to be used to. There was a simple raised platform at one end of the room and a small structure that was called a podium or a pulpit, depending upon who was occupying it. The rest of the Place of Worship changed as required through the miracle of holography. Aaron had only been to church once with Diana, he had said, back in Toronto with her family just before they had married. He had tried to describe the place to me as best he could remember it—dark and gloomy, with a musty odor, but a magnificent, oh, so magnificent, stained-glass window at one end. He had stared at it through most of the service.

  I had a holographic library of generic architectural components, and with help from Aaron, I re-created as best I could what the Chandler family church had apparently looked like, at least in general appearance.

  The Place of Worship was full, all five hundred seats taken. What my cameras were seeing, processed and color-corrected so as to resemble human vision, was being fed to monitor screens all over the Starcology. A funeral may be a morbid event, but at least it is an event—and events had been in short supply these last couple of years.

  Aaron had arrived early. He took a seat near the front, second from the end of a row, presumably keeping the final seat in that row free for Kirsten. But when Kirsten entered from the rear, I saw her scan the backs of people’s heads until she recognized Aaron’s sandy stubble. Her telemetry did a little flip-flop as she noticed the saved seat. She walked to him, bent over, whispered something in his ear. He made a reply that I couldn’t hear. She gave a sad smile and shook her head. He shrugged, slightly annoyed from what I could tell, and she went off to sit somewhere else. I guess she’d decided that it wouldn’t look good for them to sit together at Diana’s funeral. Two minutes later, Gennady Gorlov entered and, noticing the empty seat in the third row, made a beeline for it. He said to Aaron—Gorlov’s voice I had no trouble picking out above the crowd—“Is this seat taken?” Aaron shook his head, and the mayor made himself comfortable.

  As others continued to drift in, I reflected on religion. It was not a purely human foible. Some of my fellow QuantCons shared the longing for something beyond themselves. And everybody had heard the story about them having to reboot Luna’s Brain when it announced that it had been born again. Certainly, the questions had validity, but organized religion seemed quite a different thing to me. We had lost out on some good people because of it. A man named Roopshand, a telecommunications specialist, had passed all the tests needed for joining us. Like all devout Muslims, he prayed five times a day while facing Mecca. Well, the Mecca part seemed easy—it and all of Earth should be straight down, directly beneath the floor. But according to him, the five times a day had to be five times per Earth day, which, as we picked up more and more speed, would become progressively more frequent. He looked at the flight profile and found that by the halfway point, at which we would reach our maximum speed, some twenty-four Earth days would pass for each ship day, meaning he’d have to pray 120 times each ship day. That wasn’t going to leave much time for sleep. The flip side, that the month-long Ramadan fast would be over in little more than a day, didn’t seem to make up for it, and he bowed out of the mission. Fortunately, the 1,349 other Muslims who did come along with us seemed to have made peace with these issues.

  At last, the service for Diana got under way. It was conducted by Father Barry Delmonico. All of twenty-six, barely ordained in time for this mission, Delmonico’s synod had rushed him through training lest the Argo head off to the stars without benefit of Catholic clergy on board.

  Delmonico
, I knew, had labored over preparing his remarks; and I had reassured him, dutiful test audience that I am, that they were kind and appropriate and true. Nonetheless, he spoke nervously and in a small voice from the pulpit. He, of course, had never performed a funeral service before, and although he averaged 411 people for his Sunday services, today he was speaking to a combined audience of, at this instant, 7,057.

  “I read once,” he said, looking out over the audience, “that in a lifetime a typical person meets or gets to know one hundred thousand other people by name, either directly or as significant presences through the media.” He smiled slightly. “That’s about twelve hundred a year, I suppose. Which means that after two years together in this ship, I’ve probably met a quarter of the Argonauts.

  “But meeting is not the same as knowing. To my sadness, I, as yet, know very few of you well. Still, the passing of one of us diminishes us all, and Diana Chandler is no longer with us.”

  I couldn’t tell if Aaron was really listening to what Delmonico was saying. His eyes were focused on the holographic rendering of the stained-glass window above and behind the priest’s head.

  “For me, though, and for many of you, Diana’s death is particularly painful. I had the pleasure of knowing her closely, of counting her as a friend.”

  Aaron’s eyes snapped onto the youthful cleric, and I imagined he saw multicolored afterimages playing across Delmonico’s black cassock. I realized then that Aaron had not been aware of Diana’s friendship with the Roman Catholic. Yes, Aaron, that’s right. Diana did have a life beyond your marriage, just as you did. Oh, her association with Delmonico was purely platonic, unlike your dalliance with your doctor. But it could, I suppose, have just as easily become sexual, once Diana had been released from the bonds of matrimony that to her, at least, did have some meaning. After all, it had been thirty-one years since Vatican IV, at which Catholic clergy had been freed from the burden of celibacy.

  “That Diana had been bright goes without saying,” continued Delmonico. “None but the best were chosen for this mission. Every man and woman aboard is clever and well educated and highly trained and good at his or her job. To say these things also were true of Diana would be to state the obvious. So let me instead take a moment to remind us of those qualities Diana possessed that perhaps are a little less easily defined and, just maybe, a little less common among our number.