Golden Fleece

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.

“Diana Lee Chandler had been warm and friendly, outgoing in a way that we don’t see much anymore. The cities of Earth are rough places. We’re brought up street-proofed, told never to talk to strangers, never to get involved, to hurry, heads down, avoiding eye contact, from one safe haven to the next. We watch centuries-old movies, black and white and grainy and two-dimensional, of people greeting strangers on the street and lending a helping hand, and we wonder how they possibly made it back to their homes or offices alive.

“Well, Diana refused to be toughened. She wouldn’t allow society to turn her into a cold and unfeeling machine. She had been a Catholic, but she never attended my services. Had she lost faith in the Almighty? I don’t think so, but I do know that she still had faith in her fellow human beings, something most of us have lost. She was a joy and a treasure, and I will miss her with all my heart.”

A couple of prayers were read. More kind words were said. A few people cried—including some who hadn’t really known Di at all.

After the ceremony, people made their way out of the Place of Worship. Some said a few words to Aaron, and he accepted them with slight nods of his head. Finally, after the crowd had thinned, Father Delmonico came over to where Aaron was standing, hands in pockets. “I’m Barry Delmonico,” he said, offering his hand. “I think perhaps we met once or twice before.”

Aaron dug his right hand out of his pocket and greeted Delmonico. “Yes,” he said vaguely, sounding as though he didn’t remember the meetings. But his voice quickly took on a warmth I seldom heard from him. “I want to thank you, Father, for what you’ve said and done. I hadn’t realized you and Diana were so close.”

“Just friends,” said Delmonico. “But I will miss her.”

Aaron was still clasping the man’s hand. After eight seconds, he nodded. “So will I.”

TWELVE

And that was it. Diana’s body was cremated, the ashes put in storage for our return to Earth. Had her death taken place on Earth, Aaron and his family would have sat shivah for his lost wife, waiting a week before returning to work.

But Diana was no longer his wife, and she had no family here to mark her passing. Besides, some work could not wait, and Aaron wasn’t about to let one of his underlings do what had to be done down on the hangar deck.

Wearing shirtsleeves beneath a heavy-duty radiation suit, Aaron worked at removing an access panel on Orpheus’s port side. His movements were less restrained than usual, more distracted, almost careless. He was upset, that was for sure, but he had a job to do. In an effort to cheer him, I asked, “Do you wish to place a wager on this evening’s football game?”

“What time is kickoff?” he asked absently.

“Eighteen hundred hours.”

The access panel came free, and he set about connecting his test bench to Orpheus’s guts via a bundle of fiber optics. Finally, as though from light-years away, he said, “Put me down for two thousand on the Engineering Rams.”

“You favor the underdog,” I noted.

“Always.”

The test bench was something he’d tinkered together thirteen months ago in the electronics shop with help from I-Shin Chang, Ram quarterback for today’s game. Unlike the units contracted for the project, this one was not peripheral to me. Oh, at the time they were designing it, I had suggested various ways they could interface it with my sensors; but they hadn’t seen any point in doing so, and back then there had seemed no need to press the issue. Now, though—well, I’ll cross that decision tree when I come to it.