Golden Fleece

Pam sounded defiant, but she had the advantage of not having to hold his gaze. “Yes.”

“I didn’t want to hurt her. We had a marriage contract. It expired. Nothing more.”

“You didn’t exactly wait till the contract was up before you took up with her.” She made a gesture with her head in Kirsten’s direction, but there was no play of light across her ebony eyeballs to indicate that she had actually deigned to look the other woman in the face.

Aaron was silent for six seconds. “True,” he said at last. “But she didn’t know about that. It was only in the final months of the contract that Kirsten and I became involved. Diana was unaware of it.”

“Don’t be thick, Aaron,” Pamela said. “Of course she knew about it.”

This did surprise Aaron. For once, even his rock-solid vital signs showed inner turmoil. “What?”

“She knew, you bastard. She knew you were cheating on her.”

“How could she know?”

Both Pamela’s and I-Shin’s telemetry showed considerable distress. I-Shin glanced at Pamela, and Pamela, it seemed for an instant, perhaps glanced back at the engineer. Aaron appeared not to notice. “What does it matter how she found out?” said Pam at last, a slight tremble in her voice. “The fact is she knew. Everybody knew. Christ, Aaron, this ship is like a small town. There’s gossip, and there are reputations to protect. You made a fool out of her in front of the whole damned Starcology.”

This time Kirsten did reach out to take his arm. Her medical signs were in turmoil, too: she was mad as hell, and trying not to show it. Finally, in that tone that says, “If you love me, you’ll do as I say,” she spoke to Aaron again. “Come on.”

Aaron glowered at his former friend, at Pamela’s dark and empty eyes. I slid the door to the mayor’s office open in anticipation. At last, he and Kirsten walked out of the room.

SIX

“Take me home, Jase.” Aaron didn’t want to go home—he had just left his own apartment, parting with a kiss from Kirsten, who had headed off down the elevator to do her shift at Aesculapius General, the ship’s hospital. No, he wanted to go to Diana’s home: the unit that, until twelve days ago, he had shared with her. He folded himself against the blue upholstery in the little tram and I slipped it into the travel tube. Di’s apartment was almost halfway around the torus from Aaron’s, and tram was the best way to get there.

The location of Aaron’s new apartment had been my choice. There weren’t many vacant units, but the mission planners had correctly assumed that in a voyage of this length, a few extras might be needed. Aaron hadn’t asked if more than one had happened to be available on the day on which he was looking for a new place to live, and I had simply told him to take the one that was farthest from Diana’s. It seemed, according to my psychology expert system, the right choice to make.

Aaron was sad, and he wanted me to know it. His normal inscrutability was gone; he was deliberately broadcasting his feelings by the way he slouched, by the heaviness of his words, by the ragged edge he gave to his exhalations. If only there was some gesture, some nonverbal communication like Kirsten’s, that I could use to cheer him up …

Aaron had read the mission briefing papers on ship’s gravity: Argo’s acceleration was 9.02 meters per second per second, equivalent to 0.92 of Earth’s gravity. Colchis had a surface gravity 1.06 times greater than Earth’s. Now if we had been able to accelerate at a full Earth gravity, that would be fine—humans could adapt to the slightly higher gravity of Colchis easily enough upon arrival. But a conventional ramscoop goes at .92g, and the difference between the apparent ship’s gravity due to the acceleration and Colchis’s surface gravity was steep enough that something had to be done. We used artificial gravity/antigravity grids beneath the floorboards to compensate. Each day, they were turned a little higher, so that over the 8.1 years of the voyage, the crew would fully acclimatize to Colchis’s surface gravity. And, of course, prior to launch, while the ship was hanging in geostationary orbit over Africa, the artificial gravity system had provided a full Earth g.

Anyway, all that meant was that although our habitat was ring-shaped, it didn’t spin to produce a fake centrifugal-force pseudogravity. Down was parallel to the ship’s axis, toward the bottom of the habitat, not out toward the habitat’s round edge. Aaron’s car was swinging in a gently curving path around the perimeter of the torus, the arcing of the travel tube so slight that he probably felt no centrifugal force acting upon him. Good: the illusion would be even more compelling.

I often swathed the travel cars in spherical holograms, the view one might enjoy if my windowless hull were transparent.

Perhaps such a display would be particularly appropriate just now. If Aaron could realize how insignificant one life was in all the cosmos …