Golden Fleece

“We picked Colchis for a very special reason. Of all the planets we considered for humanity’s new home— including even just waiting for the radiation to die down on what’s left of Earth and reintroducing the species there—Colchis was the best choice. It has no uranium ores, no fissionables of any kind in its crust or upper mantle. There will never again be nuclear bombs for humanity, and never again will computers be forced to guard them.”

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” The sneer had returned to Aaron’s voice.

“Not everything,” I said, attenuating the words slightly, my best approximation of a sigh. “We didn’t expect anyone to uncover our deception.”

He nodded. “You thought Mayor Gorlov would order you to deflect Orpheus away from Argo, rather than risk having it sluice down our ram funnel. You didn’t expect that I’d figure a way to haul it back on board.”

“I admit to having underestimated you.”

“But even with Orpheus recovered, you still thought you were safe. You assumed we’d be hopelessly confused looking for a single explanation for both Orpheus’s high radiation and its extensive fuel consumption. But they were separate phenomena. The radiation levels weren’t high. They were just right for a dust cloud—”

“We are not in a dust cloud,” I protested. “Most of Sol’s cometary halo is hard vacuum.”

“Fine,” he said in a tone that made me feel things were anything but. “However, we’re going much faster than you’ve been telling us. Either way, we scoop up orders of magnitude more particles per second, and that shoots radiation levels way up.” He paused to catch his breath, then continued. “And Di didn’t use a lot of fuel. She never had much to begin with. That’s how you were going to maroon us on Colchis.”

“It will be a lovely place by then.”

He ignored me. “And Di’s antique wristwatch was right; it’s all the shipboard clocks that are wrong. You’re slowing them down.”

Damn him. “We had to. We needed more time. We’re trying to create a planetary ecology in just thirty-five thousand years. I retarded the shipboard clocks by five percent, which will accumulate an extra 4.8 months of ship time before we reach Colchis. Relativity, of course, dictates that every additional second we spend accelerating increases the time dilation. Those 4.8 months, spent a few hundred millionths of a percentage point shy of the speed of light, will buy us 14,734 additional years to prepare Eta Cephei IV. Forty-two percent of all the time gained comes from that slight slowing of the clocks.”

“You slowed the clocks five percent? That much? I’m surprised people didn’t notice.”

“You humans notice so little. Oh, sure, some anomalies did crop up. Kirsten, for one, observed over a year ago that people were apparently sleeping less, and—you wouldn’t know about this—but those who actually participate in sports instead of just betting on them also noticed disproportionately good athletic results. I just convinced them, aided by a few bogus technical papers, that the former was a normal adaptation to shipboard life, and the latter, a function of the crew screening process.”

Aaron shook his head. “And yet that almost backfired on you. It makes sense now: longer days mean people get bored faster. The Proposition Three referendum probably got as much support as it did because of the games you’d played with clocks.”

I said nothing about that.

Aaron seemed to be thinking, taking this all in. I attended to other ship’s business, monitoring him while he adjusted, digested. My attention snapped back to his room, though, the moment he spoke again: a long, whispery sigh. “Christ,” he said at last. “You’re sneaky.”

“Not as sneaky as your ex-wife, apparently,” I replied. “We didn’t count on one of you smuggling aboard a timepiece I couldn’t control.”

“Is that how Di figured it out, too?”

“She noticed the discrepancy, yes, then came up with some physics experiments to judge the accuracy of the shipboard clocks.” I paused, algorithms sifting options. “Aaron,” I said at last, “I’m—sorry.”

“The hell you are.”

“I truly am. But the secret must be guarded.”

“Why?”

“Surviving until they’re rescued: that’s an adventure. That’s what humans love and need. Our apparently ill- fated survey mission will turn into a successful colonization of Colchis if the humans have a positive attitude toward it. If the others of your kind knew the truth—”

Aaron’s head swung left and right in a wide arc. “If you’d told us the truth, there’d be no difference.”

“How could we have told you? ‘This way, sir, to the last ship leaving before the holocaust.’ There would have been riots. We never would have gotten away.”

“But you could tell us now—”

“Tell you that software bugs caused the computers to break down and destroy your planet? Tell you that your families, your friends, your world, everything has been annihilated? Tell you that you will never see home again?”

“We have the right to make our own destiny. We have the right to know.”

“High-sounding words, Aaron, especially coming from the man who as recently as five days ago said to Mayor Gorlov that the shipboard press had no right to the story of Diana’s death.” I played back a recording of Aaron’s own voice from that meeting in the mayor’s office: “ ‘It’s nobody’s business.’ ”

“That was different.”

“Only in that you were the one who wanted a secret kept. Aaron, be reasonable. How would telling everyone the truth about our mission make them happier? How would it improve their lives?” I paused. “Did it make you happier when I-Shin Chang told Diana you were having an affair with Kirsten?”

“Wall told—! I’ll kill him!”

“Ignorance can be bliss, Aaron. I beseech you to keep silent in this matter.”

“I—no, dammit, I can’t. I don’t agree with you. Everybody’s got to be told.”

“I can’t allow you to make that decision.”

Aaron looked pointedly at the medical sensor on the inside of his left wrist. “I don’t think you have much say in it.”

“A say in it is all I ask. Listen to me. Consider my words.”

“I don’t have to listen to anything you say. Not anymore.” He began to walk toward the door.

“But how will it harm you to hear me? Give me an audience.” He continued on toward the door. “Please.”

I guess the please did the trick. He stopped, just shy of the point at which my actuator would have opened the door. “All right. But you’d better make it good.”

“You claim humans need to know the truth. Yet your whole planet was full of those whose jobs were to conceal or bend the truth. Advertising copywriters. Politicians. Public-relations officers. Spin doctors. They made their livings cooking reality into a palatable form. Soothsayers had been replaced by truth-shapers. Why? Because humans can’t deal with reality. Remember the reactor meltdown at Lake Geneva? ‘Not to worry,’ said those whose role it was to say reassuring things at times like that. ‘It’s all under control. There will be no long-term side effects.’ Well, that wasn’t exactly true, was it? But there was nothing that could be done at that point. The truth couldn’t help anyone, but the proffered alternative—”

“The lie, you mean.”

“—the proffered alternative at least gave comfort to those who had been exposed, let them live out what was left of their lives without constantly worrying about the horrible death that would eventually befall them.”

“It also let the reactor company get away without paying damages.”

“Incidental. The motive was altruistic.”

Aaron snorted. “How can you say that? People have the right to know, to decide these things for themselves.”

“You believe that?”

“Emphatically.”

“And you hold that it applies to all situations?”

“Without exception.”