Golden Fleece

“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 the high end of the scale, but they were by no means the worst offenders. Some, like Engineer I-Shin Chang for instance, lived in a veritable forest.

Aaron began a slow circumnavigation of the living area. Di had covered the walls with framed holograms of antiques. She had been good-natured about having to leave most of her collection on Earth. “After all,” she had said once in that chatty way of hers—something others found endearing but I considered inefficient—“even my new things will be antiques by the time we get back.”

The room was tidy, everything in its place. I contrasted this with a still-frame of the same apartment from when both Diana and Aaron had lived there: his clothing strewn about, dirty dishes left on the table, ROM crystals scattered here and there. One of the few things I’d ever overheard them fighting about was Aaron’s tendency to be sloppy.

As he continued walking, Aaron came upon a carnation in full bloom. It was sitting in a Blue Mountain vase, one of the few antiques Di had brought along. Bending low, he cupped the red flower with his hand and drew it close to inhale the scent. I had no olfactory sensors beyond a simple smoke detector in that room, but I accessed the chemical composition of carnation pollen and tried to imagine what it might indeed smell like. Aaron certainly seemed to find the fragrance pleasant, for he stood breathing it for seven seconds. But then his mind apparently wandered. He straightened and, lost in thought, clenched his fist. After five seconds, he realized what he was doing, opened his palm, and looked at the pulped petals. Ever so softly, he whispered, “Damn.”

He began walking again. When he came to the bedchamber door, he paused but did not ask me to open it. I knew why he was pausing, of course. The lack of embossed tape on the front doorjamb notwithstanding, if Di had taken up with someone else after she and Aaron had called it quits, the evidence would be behind that brown sliding panel. Until he looked in the bedroom, he could fan the glowing embers of doubt about the cause of Di’s death. If she was still alone, was still wallowing in sadness over the dissolution of their marriage, then Aaron would have little choice but to accept the suggestion, forced on him through his own clenched teeth and closed mind by Pam, by Gorlov, by Kirsten, that Di had taken her life in despair—that he, once her joy, then her sorrow, was the catalyst that had driven her to fling herself into that sleet of charged particles. But if, if, she had found solace in the arms of another man—and with 5,017 males on board, many would have found Diana an appealing companion, for was she not attractive and outgoing, funny and passionate?—then whatever had pushed her to the edge, pushed her over the edge, was not his fault. Not his burden. Not his to feel guilty about, to wrestle with in his dreams for all the nights yet to come.

He half turned, as if to skip the bedroom altogether, but as he did so, I slid the door aside. The pneumatic sound made his heart jump. A lock of his sandy hair was swept across his brow by a cool breeze from the room that held for him so many memories of passion and, later, comfortable warmth, and later still, indifference. He stood in his characteristic stance, with hands shoved deep into his pockets, on the threshold—the same threshold he had carried her across, him laughing, her giggling, two years before. The room was as crisp and clean as the stars on a winter’s night, each item—pillow and hairbrush and hand mirror and deodorant stick and slippers—in its place, just as the icy points in the sky all had their own proper spots. The neatness was a cutting contrast to the disheveled appearance the room had had during Aaron’s tenure, but that, I was sure, was not what disturbed him. His eyes scanned bureau and headboard and night table, but each item he saw he recognized. There was no evidence of anyone besides Diana having been here since he had removed his own belongings twelve days ago. His face fell slightly, and I knew that those glowing embers of doubt—his only hope of release—were dying within him.

He turned his back on the bedroom, on his past, and returned fully to the living room, plopping himself down into a bowl-shaped chair, staring off into space—