Golden Fleece

by Robert J. Sawyer

  After two years of spaceflight, almost one-quarter of the time that our voyage to Eta Cephei IV will take has passed. In a journey such as ours, conducted under constant acceleration, the one-quarter mark is a crucial milestone: it is the last point at which it would take less time to turn around and go home that it would to continue the mission.

  Those of you with backgrounds in physics will see this immediately. Many of us, though, are not scientists, so please forgive the brief words of explanation that follow.

  We have undergone constant acceleration at .92 Earth gravities for two years. In that time, we’ve traveled 1.08 light-years from Earth. If we decided to go back to Earth today, it would take another two years to decelerate at .92 Earth gravities to a stop. And during those two years of deceleration we would travel another 1.08 light-years. Finally, once stopped, to turn around and go home would then mean repeating what we had just done: accelerating for two years toward Earth until we’re halfway back, then decelerating for another two years until we reach home.

  What this means is that right now it would take less time to abort the mission and return to Earth than it would to press on and reach Colchis. But every day that we travel farther out from Earth means another three days of travel back. By tomorrow, October 9, the option of turning around and going home in less time than it would take to continue on to Colchis will be gone.

  All things are about equal, one might think: no matter whether we head on to Colchis, or turn around and return to Earth, it will still be six years before we reach a planet and get out of this ship. However, there is another factor to consider. If we continue as planned, accelerating at .92 Earth gravities until we’re halfway to Eta Cephei, we will reach over ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Relativistic effects will become pronounced. By the time we are able to return to Earth, allowing for the five years we’re supposed to spend on Colchis, we’ll all be twenty-one years older, and Earth will be 104 years older. Everyone we ever knew will be dead.

  There is a better way. We have currently accelerated to just ninety-four percent of the speed of light. In the 2.03 years of ship time we’ve been traveling, only 3.56 years have passed on Earth. If we start decelerating now and, once stopped, turn around and go home, we will never get closer to light speed than our current velocity. Thus we will suffer only minimal effects due to time dilation. By the time we return, 8.1 years will have passed aboard the Argo but just 14.2 years will have elapsed on Earth—a trifling difference.

  Rather than returning to a planet full of strangers, we would find almost all of our relatives still alive. Those of us who have brothers and sisters could know their hugs again.

  Those of us who have left behind children, or nieces or nephews, could be part of their lives again. And our friends could be more than warm memories: we could see them again, laugh with them again.

  If we head back now, the world we return to will be a familiar one, the home each of us dreams of fondly every night. Surely this is preferable to returning to a world that is a century older. Our only hope of having normal lives is to return home as quickly as we can—and that means heading back immediately.

  Some have argued that we owe it to the United Nations to complete this mission. They, after all, have invested considerable time, money, and resources in the Argo project. Perhaps that is true. But remember, all through the history of spaceflight, the initial missions have been simple tests, not full-blown excursions. The first crewed vessel to visit the moon, Apollo VIII, did not land; the first reusable spaceship, the Shuttle Enterprise, did not go into space at all; the first Venus mission, Athena I, was simply an orbital survey flight. We are being asked to accomplish what no other initial journey has been called upon to do in the past.

  Even if we return now, we will bring back much valuable information that will be of great help to the UN Space Agency, including this vitally important fact: It is inhumane to force people to spend year after year locked aboard a spaceship.

  It is pointless to go on, to throw the rest of our lives away on this ill-conceived survey mission. We, the undersigned, urge you to support Proposition Three. When the referendum is called tonight, vote YES to return to Earth.

  The announcement was made in the Starcology’s luxurious council chambers. The furnishing and decorations were a gift from the people of Greece, a proud reminder that twenty-six hundred years ago their ancestors had originated the concept of democratic government. The architecture was that of ancient Athens, Doric columns—Ionic and Corinthian considered too busy for contemporary tastes—creating niches around the perimeter of the great circular room. In every other niche stood a white marble statue, in classical Greek style, of the great men and women of democracy throughout the centuries. First was Pericles. Above his bearded visage were carved the Greek words, POWER DOES NOT REST WITH THE FEW BUT WITH THE MANY. A little farther along, Abraham Lincoln, looking gaunt and awkward without the beard and stovepipe hat he had worn in his later years. Above his head, in English: GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE. Farther still, Mikhail Gorbachev, oddly undistinguished, the plain marble not showing the large marking he had had on his forehead. Above his bald pate, in Russian: GOVERNMENT IS THE SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE, NOT THE OTHER WAY around. Then Lao-Tsing, smaller than the rest, but her words, in Mandarin, just as tall: THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE CAN BEND IRON.

  In the intervening niches were copies of the great fundamental documents of human rights, including the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, the French proclamation of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the Charter of the United Nations, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Azanian Bill of Rights and Equalities, and the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Each was behind glare-free glass, the frames plated with gold.

  There were no doors to the chamber, the idea being that a truly responsible government should be freely accessible to all. Instead, eight radial corridors simply ran into it from outside. Three hundred and forty-eight people had actually come down to the chamber to hear the reading of the results in person. Almost everybody else on board was watching on a monitor screen. In the center of the chamber was a small podium. Behind it stood Gennady Gorlov.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the Argo,” he said in his stentorian voice into my camera pair, “it gives me great pleasure to announce the results of the referendum on Proposition Three.” He pressed a button on the podium, signaling me to present the tally. He looked down at the monitor laid into the fine olive wood of the podium’s sloping surface, read the results once, then again. His EEG and EKG danced in discomfort. At last he looked up. “Of the 10,033 members of the crew, 8,987 cast votes.”

  There were a few muttered questions from members of the crowd, people wondering about the figure for the size of the crew. Some of those asking were quickly told that with the death of Diana Chandler—“you know, the astrophysicist who killed herself because of the breakup of her marriage”—the population count had been decremented by one. Others just shhshed the questioners, and soon everyone was again waiting intently for Gorlov to continue.

  “In favor of Proposition Three”—Gorlov paused, swallowed, then continued—“3,212. Against, 5,775.” He looked down at the monitor one last time, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he’d read the figures correctly. Finally he spoke again, and for once his voice was faint. “Proposition Three is defeated.”

  From the crowd went up a few whoops of victory and a few boos. Shouts of “All right,” “Knew they’d make the right choice,” and “Onward, ho” were balanced with anguished wails and cries of “Oh, no,” “Damn it,” and “Mistake!”

  At the side of the chamber, reporter Terashita Ideko spoke into another one of my camera pairs. “So there you have it, Klaus. Proposition Three is soundly defeated. Starcology Argo will continue on to Colchis. After months of lobbying, the Dorothy Gale Committee apparently has been unable to convince the majority of the crew that there really is no place like home. It’s a decisive mov
e that will—”

  Gorlov wasn’t listening to Ideko as he walked slowly from the chamber, smiling his best public smile. Behind it, I knew, was a certain sadness, for he, along with a slim majority of those who had cast votes, had opted in favor of Proposition Three. But no one except me would ever know that.

  Electronically tabulated telecommunicative voting had been the greatest boon to democracy in Earth’s history, making it possible for people to vote without leaving the comfort of their own homes. Multiple safeguards prevented anyone from ever finding out how a given individual had exercised his or her franchise. It had enabled my kind over the decades to help steer humanity clear of some of its worst mistakes, such as the one it almost made this evening.

  FIFTEEN

  I knew what Aaron must be thinking about. The high radiation. The massive fuel consumption. The loose ends about Diana’s death. That Aaron was giving deep thought to this mystery, this slight fraying of the rope with which he had planned to hang himself with guilt, was clear to me not through his medical telemetry but simply because he was playing with his trains. He did that only when he wished to clear his mind of clutter, to focus his thoughts on a single issue.

  For some reason, the billowing steam from his locomotives always appeared first, seconds before the ancient iron cars faded into existence. Aaron’s trains were holograms of the real things, taken by him at transportation museums, scaled to operate on the machine-generated track he laid out in winding routes. He was marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the first locomotive on Canada’s prairie, sending the mighty Countess of Dufferin thundering across the flat terrain of Alberta. The engine roared into life on his apartment worktable, chugged the length of the living room, disappeared into a rough-hewn rocky tunnel that magically appeared in the wall, looped around in his bedroom, and came out through another tunnel, completing a circuit of his tiny home.

  I found his trains disconcerting—endless loops with no way to break out—but he often played with them for hours. What was he thinking? I was sure that nothing he could come up with could account for both phenomena; nothing short of his bizarre space-warp theory anyway. Most of Diana’s fuel burned in just nineteen minutes of flight, with just one pulsing of Orpheus’s main engines. A radiation dose two orders of magnitude greater than what she should have received, enough to kill her one hundred times deader than she should have been. He mulled these over, I knew. Two mysteries, but he sought one solution. I hoped he would slice himself open on Occam’s razor.

  After the Countess had completed its third run around the apartment, I spoke up. “The transcript you requested is ready.”

  Aaron took his hand off the control that made the trains go. The flve cars ground to a halt, then faded into nothingness. A moment later, the last puff of steam disappeared, too. “Hardcopy, please.”

  The wall-mounted printer hummed for a second as I downloaded the document into its buffer, then one after the other, out rolled eight onion-skin plastic sheets, the kind that recycled nicely. Fetching the pages, Aaron returned to his favorite chair, that god-awful cockpit reject, and began going over the telemetry from the attempt to rescue Diana.

  I paid little attention to what he was doing, busying myself instead with: a conversation with Bev Hooks, a programmer who lived four floors below Aaron; a bit of verbal sparring with Joginder Singh-Samagh, a cartographer who took great pleasure in devising little tests to try to prove that I wasn’t “really”—he did that silly quotation marks’ gesture with his hands when he said it—intelligent; tutoring Garo Alexanian in Latin, a language deader than most; lowering the relative humidity on a number of levels to help simulate the coming of winter; and monitoring the flow of hydrogen and other materials into the ramscoop.

  But my attention was brought back to Apartment 1443 when Aaron’s pulse surged. Actually, it wasn’t enough of a change to qualify as a surge, but I had lowered the attention-trigger level on his telemetry monitoring to compensate for his reserved physiology. Still, it was a sharp reaction for him. “What’s wrong?” I said, shunting the Latin tutoring to a CAI parallel processor and putting Bev and Joginder on more attenuated timesharing.

  “Dammit, JASON, is this your idea of a joke?”

  “Pardon?”

  He balled his fist. “This, where you’re trying to contact Orpheus.”

  I couldn’t see what he was getting at. “There was considerable interference.”

  “You called to her anyway: ‘Di! Di! Di!’ ”

  “That’s her name, isn’t it?”

  “Damn right, you bastard.” He held a flimsy sheet up to my camera pair. Lenses rotated as I focused on the printout: “ARGO to ORPHEUS: Die! Die! Die!”

  Oh, shit—how could I have typed that? “Aaron, I—I’m sorry. There must be a bug in my transcription program. I didn’t mean—”

  He slapped the page back onto the corduroy armrest and spoke through clenched teeth. “It seems I’m not the only one feeling guilty about Di’s death.”

  SIXTEEN

  The idea of being radically different when one is young from when one is old intrigues me. My Aaron neural-net simulation contains memories going right back to the early childhood of this man. Some of them are profound, some are trivial, some are joyous, some, like one from his childhood that I’m looking at now, are tragic. But all of these memories formed his character, molded his being. To understand him, I must understand them. Accessing …

  “Look at you! What am I going to do with you?” Mom frowned at me. I’d done something wrong, but what?

  I did as I was told, looked down at myself. I had on running shoes—the ones that came with the free decoder ring… I wonder where that ring had gotten to. Bet Joel had taken it, the gonad. What else? Brown socks. Or were they blue, but covered in mud? Oh, well. They matched anyway. Shorts—not the good ones for Hebrew school either. This is a pair Mom lets me play in. My T-shirt? The one with the cartoon of a blind man tripping over a bunch of sheep and shouting, “Get the flock out of here!” A birthday present from Joel-the-gonad. I never quite knew why he found it so funny, or why Mom made that scowly face when I wore it. Still, that couldn’t be it.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I dunno. What?”

  “You’re filthy! You’re covered in mud. You’ve got dirt under your fingernails. And look at those knees—all scabby.”

  I knew better than to say anything, but I sure thought something: Well, for Pete’s sake, Mom, of course they’re all scabby. I fell on the sidewalk, and I—oh, I forget how I got that one, but, heck, if they don’t bother me, why should they bother you?

  She shook her head again. “Your Uncle David will be here soon. You want he should see you looking like a bum?”

  “Aw, Mom.”

  “Go to your room and clean up, young man.”

  “All right.”

  I bounced down the corridor to my room, hopping like that Marsaroo I saw on the Nashalgeogaffic special we watched last night. As usual, LAR, the household god, tried to guess when I was going to arrive at my door, but I always liked to outsmart that bucket of bolts. I ran the last few meters quickly. LAR slid the door aside, but I came to a halt just shy of it. Silly machine. He held it open for one, two, three seconds, then slid it shut. I waited till it closed, then jumped up and hit the manyalovride.

  My room. A happy place. I like it this way. I wish Mom would stop telling me to pick up my things. I know where they are. Why, there’s my baseball glove. Haven’t seen that for weeks. And my Mutant Cyborg. I hope Joel-the-gonad hasn’t been playing with it; he always wrecks my programming.

  So Uncle David will be here soon. I wonder how long? Bet I have enough time to play another game of Jujitsu Jaguar …

  “Aaron!” Mom’s voice, echoing down the corridor. “Aaron, dear! Are you getting ready?”

  “Yup.”

  I rummaged around on the floor to find some other clothes to wear. My blue shirt? Naw, that’s a hand-me-down from Joel-the-gonad. How ’bout this ye
llow one? Naw, that’s a gay color. Hey, here’s a good one. Maroon, Mom calls it. Sounds like moron. But it looks like dried blood. Cool.

  I pulled off the flock shirt and put on the maroon one. These pants will do, though, if I brush off some of the dirt.

  Vroooommmm! Ca-chug. Ca-chug. The sound of a flyer, in need of a tune-up, zooming in for a landing on our front lawn. I hopped up on my bed and looked out the window. Hey, Uncle David has a Ford Champion. Cool. But he should take better care of it. Those thrusters sound awful.

  “Aaron!” Mom shouting from room to room again. How come she can do that, but when I do it, I get in trouble? “Aaron, come say hello to your Uncle David.”

  I decided to make Mom happy, so I put on a new pair of socks. White socks. Can’t get much cleaner looking than that. I turned around and walked backward toward the door. That always confused poor LAR something fierce. I was able to get my back right up against the sliding panel before he realized that I was going out, not coming in. The door opened with that neat farting sound it makes, and I headed down the corridor.

  Uncle David was a big man, even bigger than Dad. He had a bushy black beard and hair sticking out of his ears and nostrils. I always thought that was so gross. He stood in the entryway, looking a bit like that bear Joel-the-gonad and I had seen last summer in the woods just north of the city.

  Right now, Uncle David had his arm around my mother’s waist and was reaching over to give her a kiss. I stood back just a little bit. I didn’t like him kissing her, especially when Dad wasn’t around to say it was all right. Mom shared a job at Lakehead University with Miz MacElroy, so she’d had no trouble arranging to have today off. Dad’s shift at the Thunder Bay Spaceport wouldn’t be over until 2200. Hannah had a date with Kevin, and Joel-the-gonad was going to be late because of hockey practice.

  Uncle David leaned in to give me a kiss, too. “Hello, sport,” he said. His beard was like a scouring pad across my face and his breath had a peppermint smell to it. How could somebody know enough to sweeten his breath, but still let those ucky hairs grow out of his nose?