Golden Fleece

Aaron swung to face her, two meters between them. “What? No, of course not. Christ, I would have handled things differently if she had.”

“Well, then, you can’t blame yourself.” She started to move again, to close the distance separating them, but seeing the hardness in Aaron’s face, stopped herself immediately. “These things happen,” she said at last.

“I’ve never known anyone who committed suicide before,” said Aaron.

“My grandfather did,” said Kirsten in a quiet voice. “He got old and sick and, well, he didn’t want to wait around to die.”

“But Diana had a lot to live for. She was young, healthy. She was healthy, wasn’t she?”

Kirsten frowned again. “Well, I hadn’t seen her since you and she broke up. Probably just as well. She would have been due for another physical in a few months; but according to her last one, she was fine. Oh, she showed the signs of likely developing adult-onset diabetes, so I was cloning a new pancreas for her in case we ever needed it, but other than that, nothing. And JASON tells me her medical telemetry had never shown anything noteworthy. It’s all not surprising, really. After all, there’s no way she would have passed the physical for this mission if she had had anything seriously wrong. You’ve never seen a healthier bunch of people.”

“Then there’s no doubt.” Aaron’s hands, still deep in his pockets, clenched, the cotton weave of his trousers bulging to accommodate the fists. “She committed suicide because I left her.”

“We don’t know for sure that’s what Diana did. Maybe it was just an accident. Or maybe she had cracked up or was on something and didn’t know what she was doing.”

“She didn’t use drugs or current. She didn’t even drink— except one glass of champagne at our wedding.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Aaron. Without a suicide note, we can’t be sure of what happened.”

A note! I quickly accessed Diana’s writings—I was sorry now that I’d erased her latest working documents—and performed a lexicographic analysis to see if I could imitate her style. A Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6, a score of 9 on Gunning’s Fog Index, average sentence length 11.0 words, average word length 4.18 letters, average number of syllables per word, 1.42. Despite a fondness for split infinitives and putting quotation marks around words for no good reason, Diana wrote clear and concise prose, particularly remarkable given that she was an academic—among the worst writers I’ve ever read—and given that she tended to be quite garrulous in person.

I set one of my subsystems to the task of composing an appropriate letter, but aborted the job before it was completed. All the word processors on board were peripheral to me. If a suicide note was to appear now, Mayor Gorlov would demand to know why I hadn’t summoned help as soon as I became aware of what Diana was contemplating.

“Note or no note, it’s obvious,” said Aaron.

“We can’t be sure,” said Kirsten. “It could have been an accident.”

“Earlier, you were convinced that she’d killed herself,” said Aaron. “In fact, you tried to convince me of it, too.”

It seemed to me that Kirsten had been hurt by, even jealous of, Aaron’s obvious grief over the loss of his ex-wife. She should have told him that, apologized for the pettiness that caused her to be so hard on him when they went out to the Orpheus to recover Di’s body, but she, like Aaron, dealt poorly with feelings of guilt.

Instead, she pressed on, trying, or so it seemed to me, to give Aaron a comforting doubt about the reason for Diana’s demise, some small lack of certainty that would keep him from drowning in his own feelings of responsibility. “Remember, there’s still a big loose end,” she said, at last moving close to him and, after a tenuous moment of hesitation, draping her arms around his neck. “We still don’t know what caused the high levels of radiation.”

Aaron sounded irritated. “That’s one for the physicists, don’t you think?”

Kirsten pushed on, convinced, I guessed, that she was on the right track to dispelling Aaron’s self-recrimination. “No, really. She would have to be outside for hours to get that hot.”

“Maybe some kind of space wrap,” Aaron, vaguely. “Maybe she was outside for hours from her point of view.”

“You’re grasping at straws, sweetheart.”

“Well, so are you, dammit!” He peeled her arms from him and turned his back. “Who cares about the radiation? All that matters is that Diana is dead. And I killed her just as surely as if I’d thrust a knife into her heart.”

NINE