Golden Fleece

The Place of Worship was full, all five hundred seats taken. What my cameras were seeing, processed and color-corrected so as to resemble human vision, was being fed to monitor screens all over the Starcology. A funeral may be a morbid event, but at least it is an event—and events had been in short supply these last couple of years.

Aaron had arrived early. He took a seat near the front, second from the end of a row, presumably keeping the final seat in that row free for Kirsten. But when Kirsten entered from the rear, I saw her scan the backs of people’s heads until she recognized Aaron’s sandy stubble. Her telemetry did a little flip-flop as she noticed the saved seat. She walked to him, bent over, whispered something in his ear. He made a reply that I couldn’t hear. She gave a sad smile and shook her head. He shrugged, slightly annoyed from what I could tell, and she went off to sit somewhere else. I guess she’d decided that it wouldn’t look good for them to sit together at Diana’s funeral. Two minutes later, Gennady Gorlov entered and, noticing the empty seat in the third row, made a beeline for it. He said to Aaron—Gorlov’s voice I had no trouble picking out above the crowd—“Is this seat taken?” Aaron shook his head, and the mayor made himself comfortable.

As others continued to drift in, I reflected on religion. It was not a purely human foible. Some of my fellow QuantCons shared the longing for something beyond themselves. And everybody had heard the story about them having to reboot Luna’s Brain when it announced that it had been born again. Certainly, the questions had validity, but organized religion seemed quite a different thing to me. We had lost out on some good people because of it. A man named Roopshand, a telecommunications specialist, had passed all the tests needed for joining us. Like all devout Muslims, he prayed five times a day while facing Mecca. Well, the Mecca part seemed easy—it and all of Earth should be straight down, directly beneath the floor. But according to him, the five times a day had to be five times per Earth day, which, as we picked up more and more speed, would become progressively more frequent. He looked at the flight profile and found that by the halfway point, at which we would reach our maximum speed, some twenty-four Earth days would pass for each ship day, meaning he’d have to pray 120 times each ship day. That wasn’t going to leave much time for sleep. The flip side, that the month-long Ramadan fast would be over in little more than a day, didn’t seem to make up for it, and he bowed out of the mission. Fortunately, the 1,349 other Muslims who did come along with us seemed to have made peace with these issues.

At last, the service for Diana got under way. It was conducted by Father Barry Delmonico. All of twenty-six, barely ordained in time for this mission, Delmonico’s synod had rushed him through training lest the Argo head off to the stars without benefit of Catholic clergy on board.

Delmonico, I knew, had labored over preparing his remarks; and I had reassured him, dutiful test audience that I am, that they were kind and appropriate and true. Nonetheless, he spoke nervously and in a small voice from the pulpit. He, of course, had never performed a funeral service before, and although he averaged 411 people for his Sunday services, today he was speaking to a combined audience of, at this instant, 7,057.

“I read once,” he said, looking out over the audience, “that in a lifetime a typical person meets or gets to know one hundred thousand other people by name, either directly or as significant presences through the media.” He smiled slightly. “That’s about twelve hundred a year, I suppose. Which means that after two years together in this ship, I’ve probably met a quarter of the Argonauts.

“But meeting is not the same as knowing. To my sadness, I, as yet, know very few of you well. Still, the passing of one of us diminishes us all, and Diana Chandler is no longer with us.”

I couldn’t tell if Aaron was really listening to what Delmonico was saying. His eyes were focused on the holographic rendering of the stained-glass window above and behind the priest’s head.

“For me, though, and for many of you, Diana’s death is particularly painful. I had the pleasure of knowing her closely, of counting her as a friend.”