Golden Fleece

Up above, in the direction of Argo’s travel, I projected a glorious starscape. In reality stars in that direction had blue-shifted into X-ray invisibility, but I compensated for that, bringing them forth in all their Hertzsprung-Russell splendor. Directly at the zenith was Eta Cephei, our target star, still over six years away by ship time. I gave it a totally unnatural twinkle, so it could easily be picked out from the mass of still-familiar constellations. Even with that, bright Deneb, appearing quite near to Eta Cephei although it was really some sixteen hundred light-years beyond it, tended to draw attention away from our target.

My camera pair in the tram noted that Aaron’s eyes looked briefly for Ursa Major, then tracked over from the Pointers to my simulated pole star to get his bearings. Having grown up in northern Ontario away from the nocturnal glare of the megacities, Aaron was one of the few people on board who would know such a trick.

At eye level I played less magic, showing the stars as they might truly be seen encircling the ship: a stellar rainbow, violet above, waxing through to red below. Beneath Aaron’s feet I painted a similar picture to the one overhead: stars that had red-shifted into the radio frequencies were brought up through the spectrum, showing their true colors. I played no optical tricks with distant Sol, though, lying directly at the nadir. There was nothing to be gained in looking back.

Aaron closed his eyes. “Dammit, JASON, turn it off. I feel small enough as it is.”

I dissolved the hologram as the tram pulled into the station, a small enclosed waiting area made by a clever planting of trees. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was meant, well, to put things in perspective.”

“Leave human psychology to humans.”

Ouch.

He clambered out of the tram, and I sent it off to take care of its next assignment: picking up a botanist and her lover and taking them around to the pine forest.

Aaron stretched. Wide grass-covered strips divided this residential level into blocks of apartment units. There were 319 people on the lawn, some walking, some out for a morning jog, four tossing a Frisbee back and forth, most of the rest just soaking up the rays from the arc lamps mounted on the high ceiling.

Aaron ambled down a grassy lane, feet shuffling, hands in his pockets. He’d walked this path so many times in the past two years that every curve in its course, every irregularity in the sod, was known to him even without looking. Programmed in, I’d say; second nature, he’d say.

As he approached Di’s apartment, he caught sight of one of my stereo camera units, thrust high on a jointed neck in the center of a stand of bright yellow sunflowers. “JASON,” he said, “you mentioned at the inquest that Di didn’t have any relatives aboard the Starcology. Was that true?”

Aaron had never doubted my word before, so this came as a bit of a surprise. “Yes. Well, yes in any meaningful sense. Give me a moment. Found. Her closest relative aboard is Ter-ashita Ideko, male, twenty-six, a promising journalism student at the time we left Earth.”

Aaron laughed. “Can’t be a very close relative with a name like that.”

I quickly dug up eight examples of pairs of people on board who shared substantial genetic material but had names that were drawn from equally diverse ethnicities. However, by the time my response was phrased, I realized that Aaron had been making a joke. Too bad: it was an interesting list. “No,” I said, the delay as I prepared another response seeming hopelessly awkward to me, but completely unnoticeable to him. “Their genetic material overlaps by only one part in 512.”

“Seems there should be someone closer, what with ten thousand people aboard.” Again, I searched the personnel database, this time to determine what the average genetic divergence between individuals aboard was, but once more I checked myself before answering. That was something I didn’t want to draw attention to. Instead, I let Aaron assume that I had taken his comment as rhetorical.

He began walking again, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he reached Di’s apartment. Next to the bi-leaf door panel was a strip of embossed blue plastic tape that said diana chandler. Beneath it I could see traces of adhesive where a second strip used to be. Zooming in from my vantage point among the sunflowers, I brought the black level on my cameras up to eighty-five units and read the name that had been there as an absence of residue within the long rectangle of glue: AARON D. ROSSMAN.

“It didn’t take her long to remove my name,” he said bitterly.