Golden Fleece

half-meter off the hangar floor; the distended belly hung even lower.

“Damn you, JASON!” Judging by the pattern of clicks from the metal fasteners, Aaron had rolled into a ball, scrunching into the opening he’d made in the hull by removing the AA/9 access plate. A ricochet crack of breaking bone echoed through the hangar. Lower, lower, lo—Action interrupted, error level one. The legs stopped retracting. Aaron had managed to cut the hydraulic line with his shears. But I had him trapped, his chest constricted, his respiration ragged.

“Aaron!” Kirsten Hoogenraad’s voice sang out into the hangar. Dammit, when I’d pulled her telemetry five minutes ago, she’d been over four hundred meters from here! I should have checked more frequently.

Aaron banged something against the inside of Pollux. Kirsten rushed to the source of the clanking sound. She stopped, mouth agape, looking at the spectacle of a boomerang lander flopped on its belly at the end of the row of such craft standing erect. “Aaron?”

A muffled voice: “Kirs-ten—”

“Oh, Dr. Hoogenraad,” I said, quickly, smoothly, tones of concern in my voice. “He was monkeying around with Pollux’s fuel lines. He must have accidentally served the hydraulic lead to the landing gear.”

The voice again, wan and raspy: “No, it’s—”

Clang! The safeties on the outer hangar-deck wall kicked aside. Kirsten wouldn’t know the sound, but it was obvious from his EEG that Aaron recognized it. He fell silent.

“I need forklifts, stat,” Kirsten snapped.

The portals to the cargo holds dilated and four orange vehicles rolled out, floating above the floor, thanks to their pink antigravity underbellies. One of the forklifts was the same one I had used to chase Diana into the hangar six days before. I positioned the forklifts’ pink gravity-control prongs beneath the wings of Pollux and began to raise the lander. I had them lift it well above its normal resting position, so that I could clearly see Aaron. He was stuck in a fetal position, and there was blood on his face and right arm. Kirsten scuttled under to him. “Get me out from here,” he said.

“I should call for a stretcher—”

“Now! Get me out now!”

She gently grabbed his ankles and pulled. Aaron let out a yowl of pain as his right arm hit the floor.

“Your arm—”

“Later. We’ve got to get out of the hangar.”

“I hope Aaron will be okay,” I said.

“I’m going to talk to you, computer!” he called as Kirsten helped him to his feet. “We’re going to talk!”

TWENTY-FOUR

It’s funny to see the world as a human sees it. For one thing, it’s so information-poor. The colors are muted and limited to the narrow span they arrogantly refer to as visible light. Heat radiation can’t be seen at all, apparently, and sounds are dull. I look at Aaron’s old apartment aboard the Argo and I see garish patterns in ultraviolet on the petals of the flowers, see the dull glow of the hot-water pipes behind the walls, hear the gentle hum of the air conditioner, the throbbing of the engines, the rustling of the springtime-yellow fibers of the seasonal carpeting as Aaron walks across them.

Aaron, apparently, senses none of those things. To him, the petals are simply white; the walls, uniform beige. And the noises? He has the required biological equipment to detect most of them, but he seems to use some sort of input mask to keep them from registering on his consciousness. Fascinating.

Of course, I’m not seeing through his eyes. Rather, I’m looking in on his memories, on the patterns of recollection stored in the interlinkings of his neurons. It’s disorienting enough trying to deal with Aaron’s different sensory perceptions. But what’s even more difficult to work with is his tendency not to remember clearly. He recalls some things in great detail, but other parts are generalized beyond recognizability.

Take his apartment for instance. When I look at it through my cameras, I see it precisely. It measures sixteen meters, ninety-seven centimeters by twelve meters, zero centimeters, by two meters, fifty centimeters, and is divided into four rooms. But Aaron doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even know that the ratio of the apartment’s length to its width is one to the square root of two, and that’s probably the most aesthetic thing about his home, given what a slob he is.

Further, it’s obvious to me that the living room is half the size of the whole apartment; the bedroom is half the size of the living room; and the remaining quarter is split evenly between the bathroom and tiny office.

But Aaron doesn’t see those proportions. He thinks, for instance, that the bedroom he shared with his wife Diana is tiny, claustrophobic, a trap. He sees it as only about two-thirds of its actual dimensions.

“You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson. Aaron certainly doesn’t observe. Oh, he recalls that there are some framed holographic prints on the walls of the apartment, but he doesn’t even remember how many there are over the couch. He has five fuzzy rectangular dabs of color in his memory, when in fact there are six such pictures hanging. And as for what the pictures represent—a chalice, a pewter tea service, an intricate mechanical clock, two different Louis XIV chairs, and an astrolabe, all from Diana’s collection of antiques left back on Earth—he recalls nothing, at least not in this set of memories.

Most revelatory of all is the way he sees himself. I’m surprised to find that many of his memories contain visions of him as if seen from a short distance away. I never record anything except from my camera’s point-of- view, and I only ever see part of myself in my memories if one camera’s field of vision happens to overlap another, so that I can look myself in the eyes. But Aaron does see himself, does visualize his face, his body.

Does that mean these are memories of memories? Scenes he has replayed in his mind over and over again, each repetition, like an analog recording, adding new errors, new fuzziness, but also new conjecture? Intriguing, this wetware memory. Fallible, yet editable.

Subjective.

The way he sees himself has only a passing connection with reality. For one thing, he has himself backward, flipped along his axis of symmetry, short, sandy hair parted the wrong way. I wonder why—of course: he usually only sees himself as a reflection in a mirror.

He also sees his nose as disproportionately big. Now it is a bit of a honker by statistical overall averages, but it’s hardly the monstrous appendage he thinks it is. Interesting. If it bothers him so much, I wonder why he hasn’t had it surgically altered? Ah, there’s the answer, hidden in a complex webbing of neurons: plastic surgery is vain, he thinks, only for movie stars, perverts, and—oh, yes—reconstruction after an accident.

He sees his head as larger than it really is compared to his body, and his face as a disproportionately significant part of his head. He’s also not aware of just how crummy his posture is.

What’s just as fascinating is how he views Diana. He sees her as she was two years ago. He’s unaware of the tiny reticulum of lines that has begun to appear at the corners of her eyes. He also tends to see her hair as breaking over her shoulders, even though for over a year she has kept it trimmed so that it barely touches them. Does that mean he’d stopped looking at her, stopped really seeing her? Incredible: to see without seeing. What does he feel as he gazes at her from across the room? What is he thinking? Accessing …

Nothing lasts forever. Is that a rationalization? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the truth. My parents—my adopted parents, that is—broke up when I was eleven. Two-thirds of all marriages don’t last. Hell, even a quarter of limited-duration marriage contracts end up being breached.

I look at Diana and I see everything I should want. She’s beautiful and intelligent. No, she’s intelligent first, and then beautiful. Put it in that order, you pig. Christ, is that what this is all about? Hormones run amuck? If it is just about sex, then … then I’m not the man I thought I was. Diana is pretty—is beautiful, damn it. But Kirsten, Kirsten is gorgeous. Stacked. And her hair. It’s like a chocolate waterfall, cascading over her shoulders, down her back. Every time I see her, I want to reach out and touch it, stroke it, wrap it around my penis, make love to it, to her. Flowing tresses. I finally understand what that phrase means. It means Kirsten Hoogenraad.