seemed for an instant, perhaps glanced back at the engineer. Aaron appeared not to notice. “What does it matter how she found out?” said Pam at last, a slight tremble in her voice. “The fact is she knew. Everybody knew. Christ, Aaron, this ship is like a small town. There’s gossip, and there are reputations to protect. You made a fool out of her in front of the whole damned Starcology.”
This time Kirsten did reach out to take his arm. Her medical signs were in turmoil, too: she was mad as hell, and trying not to show it. Finally, in that tone that says, “If you love me, you’ll do as I say,” she spoke to Aaron again. “Come on.”
Aaron glowered at his former friend, at Pamela’s dark and empty eyes. I slid the door to the mayor’s office open in anticipation. At last, he and Kirsten walked out of the room.
SIX
“Take me home, Jase.” Aaron didn’t want to go home—he had just left his own apartment, parting with a kiss from Kirsten, who had headed off down the elevator to do her shift at Aesculapius General, the ship’s hospital. No, he wanted to go to Diana’s home: the unit that, until twelve days ago, he had shared with her. He folded himself against the blue upholstery in the little tram and I slipped it into the travel tube. Di’s apartment was almost halfway around the torus from Aaron’s, and tram was the best way to get there.
The location of Aaron’s new apartment had been my choice. There weren’t many vacant units, but the mission planners had correctly assumed that in a voyage of this length, a few extras might be needed. Aaron hadn’t asked if more than one had happened to be available on the day on which he was looking for a new place to live, and I had simply told him to take the one that was farthest from Diana’s. It seemed, according to my psychology expert system, the right choice to make.
Aaron was sad, and he wanted me to know it. His normal inscrutability was gone; he was deliberately broadcasting his feelings by the way he slouched, by the heaviness of his words, by the ragged edge he gave to his exhalations. If only there was some gesture, some nonverbal communication like Kirsten’s, that I could use to cheer him up …
Aaron had read the mission briefing papers on ship’s gravity:
Anyway, all that meant was that although our habitat was ring-shaped, it didn’t spin to produce a fake centrifugal-force pseudogravity. Down was parallel to the ship’s axis, toward the bottom of the habitat, not out toward the habitat’s round edge. Aaron’s car was swinging in a gently curving path around the perimeter of the torus, the arcing of the travel tube so slight that he probably felt no centrifugal force acting upon him. Good: the illusion would be even more compelling.
I often swathed the travel cars in spherical holograms, the view one might enjoy if my windowless hull were transparent.
Perhaps such a display would be particularly appropriate just now. If Aaron could realize how insignificant one life was in all the cosmos …
Up above, in the direction of
My camera pair in the tram noted that Aaron’s eyes looked briefly for Ursa Major, then tracked over from the Pointers to my simulated pole star to get his bearings. Having grown up in northern Ontario away from the nocturnal glare of the megacities, Aaron was one of the few people on board who would know such a trick.
At eye level I played less magic, showing the stars as they might truly be seen encircling the ship: a stellar rainbow, violet above, waxing through to red below. Beneath Aaron’s feet I painted a similar picture to the one overhead: stars that had red-shifted into the radio frequencies were brought up through the spectrum, showing their true colors. I played no optical tricks with distant Sol, though, lying directly at the nadir. There was nothing to be gained in looking back.
Aaron closed his eyes. “Dammit, JASON, turn it off. I feel small enough as it is.”
I dissolved the hologram as the tram pulled into the station, a small enclosed waiting area made by a clever planting of trees. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was meant, well, to put things in perspective.”
“Leave human psychology to humans.”
Ouch.
He clambered out of the tram, and I sent it off to take care of its next assignment: picking up a botanist and her lover and taking them around to the pine forest.
Aaron stretched. Wide grass-covered strips divided this residential level into blocks of apartment units. There were 319 people on the lawn, some walking, some out for a morning jog, four tossing a Frisbee back and forth, most of the rest just soaking up the rays from the arc lamps mounted on the high ceiling.
Aaron ambled down a grassy lane, feet shuffling, hands in his pockets. He’d walked this path so many times in the past two years that every curve in its course, every irregularity in the sod, was known to him even without looking. Programmed in, I’d say; second nature, he’d say.
As he approached Di’s apartment, he caught sight of one of my stereo camera units, thrust high on a jointed neck in the center of a stand of bright yellow sunflowers. “JASON,” he said, “you mentioned at the inquest that Di didn’t have any relatives aboard the Starcology. Was that true?”
Aaron had never doubted my word before, so this came as a bit of a surprise. “Yes. Well, yes in any meaningful sense. Give me a moment. Found. Her closest relative aboard is Ter-ashita Ideko, male, twenty-six, a promising journalism student at the time we left Earth.”
Aaron laughed. “Can’t be a very close relative with a name like that.”
I quickly dug up eight examples of pairs of people on board who shared substantial genetic material but had names that were drawn from equally diverse ethnicities. However, by the time my response was phrased, I realized that Aaron had been making a joke. Too bad: it was an interesting list. “No,” I said, the delay as I prepared another response seeming hopelessly awkward to me, but completely unnoticeable to him. “Their genetic material overlaps by only one part in 512.”
“Seems there should be someone closer, what with ten thousand people aboard.” Again, I searched the personnel database, this time to determine what the average genetic divergence between individuals aboard was, but once more I checked myself before answering.
He began walking again, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he reached Di’s apartment. Next to the bi- leaf door panel was a strip of embossed blue plastic tape that said diana chandler. Beneath it I could see traces of adhesive where a second strip used to be. Zooming in from my vantage point among the sunflowers, I brought the black level on my cameras up to eighty-five units and read the name that had been there as an absence of residue within the long rectangle of glue: AARON D. ROSSMAN.
“It didn’t take her long to remove my name,” he said bitterly.
“It has been almost two weeks.” Aaron made no reply and after a moment I slid the two door panels aside for him, their pneumatic mechanism making the sighing sound I knew Aaron felt like making himself. The interior lights were already on, for, like Aaron’s new apartment, this one was filled with growing things. I correlated the degree of homesickness each person felt with the number of plants he or she cultivated. Di and Aaron were both at
