Golden Fleece

—leaving me not knowing what to do next. A literature search revealed the greatest need after the loss of a loved one is for someone to talk to. I had no desire to destroy this man anymore than was necessary to keep suspicion from falling upon me, so I reached out, tentatively. “Aaron, do you feel like talking?”

He lifted his head, lost. “What?”

“Is there anything you want to say?”

He was silent for twenty-two seconds. Finally, quietly, he whispered, “If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have come on this mission.”

That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I tried to sound jaunty. “Turn down the first major survey of an extrasolar planet? Aaron, there was a waiting list six kilometers long in ten-on-twelve-point type.”

He shook his head. “It’s not worth it. It’s just not worth it. We’ve been traveling for almost two years, and we’re not even a quarter of the way there—”

“Almost. We’ll hit the twenty-five-percent mark the day after tomorrow, after all.”

He exhaled noisily. “Earth’ll be 104 years older when we get back.” He stopped again, but after nine seconds decided, I guess, that what he was feeling needed elaboration. He looked up at the ceiling. “Just before we left, my sister Hannah had a boy. By the time we return, that boy will be long dead, and his son will be an old, old man. The planet we come home to will be more alien than Colchis.” He lowered his gaze, looking now at his feet. “I wonder how many would do it over, given the choice?”

“You will know the answer to that when the referendum is taken tomorrow.”

“I suppose you have already predicted a winner?”

“I’m confident that the men and women of Argo will do the right thing.”

“Right for them? Or right for the greater glory of UNSA?”

“I do not believe those goals are mutually exclusive. I’m sure a great future lies ahead for all of you.”

“Except Di.”

“I appreciate your loss, Aaron.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

That was a good question. Aaron was savvy enough to know that, despite my being a QuantCon, most of what I said was based on the conclusions of expert systems, or literature searches, or simple Eliza-like let’s-keep-the-conversation-going proddings. Yes, I am conscious—my squirmware does contain Penrose-Hameroff quantum structures, just like those in the microtubules of human neural tissues. But did I really appreciate what it was like to lose someone I cared about? Certainly not from direct experience, and yet… and yet… and yet… At last I said, “I believe that I do.”

Aaron barked a short laugh, which stung me. “I’m sorry, JASON,” he said. “It’s just that—” But whatever it is that it just was went unsaid, and he fell silent for twelve more seconds. “Thank you, JASON,” he said finally. “Thank you very much.” He sighed. Although his EEG was cryptic, the increased albedo of his eyes made his sorrow plain. “I wish she hadn’t done this,” he said at last. He looked me straight in the cameras; and although I knew he was resigning himself to Di’s fate being his fault, he probed my glassy eyes, the way he used to probe hers, as if looking for a deeper meaning beneath the spoken word.

There must be a bug in my camera-control software. For some reason, my unit in that living room panned slightly to the right, looking away from Aaron. “It’s not your fault,” I said eventually, but in a simple voice, not processed through the synthesizer that normally puts emotional undertones into my words.

Still, the message seemed to buoy him for a moment, and he tried again for absolution. He shifted in his chair, looking once more at my lenses. I imagine he saw his own reflection in their coated surface, his normally angular face ballooning across the convex glass. “I just don’t believe it,” he said. “She loved—she loved life. She loved Earth.”

“And you?”

Aaron looked away. “Of course she loved me.”

“No, I meant do you love Earth?”

“With a passion.” He rose to his feet, putting an end to our conversation. What he’d been seeking from me, I knew I hadn’t provided. With some of the people on board, I had a close relationship; but to Aaron, a man who had dealt with complex machines all his professional life, I was just another piece of technology—a tool, a device, but certainly not a friend. That Aaron had opened up to me at all meant he was running out of places to try to unload his guilt.

Di’s apartment had seasonal carpeting, a gen-eng product that could be made to cycle through yellow, green, orange, and white during the course of a year. It was now ship’s October, and taking its cue from a slight electric signal that I had fed to it, the plush weave had taken on the appearance of a blanket of dead leaves, mottled ocher and amber and chocolate and beige. Aaron shuffled across it toward a storage unit, a simple brown panel set into the putty-colored wall. “Open this for me, please.”