Golden Fleece

But my attention was brought back to Apartment 1443 when Aaron’s pulse surged. Actually, it wasn’t enough of a change to qualify as a surge, but I had lowered the attention-trigger level on his telemetry monitoring to compensate for his reserved physiology. Still, it was a sharp reaction for him. “What’s wrong?” I said, shunting the Latin tutoring to a CAI parallel processor and putting Bev and Joginder on more attenuated timesharing.

“Dammit, JASON, is this your idea of a joke?”

“Pardon?”

He balled his fist. “This, where you’re trying to contact Orpheus.”

I couldn’t see what he was getting at. “There was considerable interference.”

“You called to her anyway: ‘Di! Di! Di!’ ”

“That’s her name, isn’t it?”

“Damn right, you bastard.” He held a flimsy sheet up to my camera pair. Lenses rotated as I focused on the printout: “ARGO to ORPHEUS: Die! Die! Die!”

Oh, shit—how could I have typed that? “Aaron, I—I’m sorry. There must be a bug in my transcription program. I didn’t mean—”

He slapped the page back onto the corduroy armrest and spoke through clenched teeth. “It seems I’m not the only one feeling guilty about Di’s death.”

SIXTEEN

The idea of being radically different when one is young from when one is old intrigues me. My Aaron neural-net simulation contains memories going right back to the early childhood of this man. Some of them are profound, some are trivial, some are joyous, some, like one from his childhood that I’m looking at now, are tragic. But all of these memories formed his character, molded his being. To understand him, I must understand them. Accessing …

“Look at you! What am I going to do with you?” Mom frowned at me. I’d done something wrong, but what?

I did as I was told, looked down at myself. I had on running shoes—the ones that came with the free decoder ring… I wonder where that ring had gotten to. Bet Joel had taken it, the gonad. What else? Brown socks. Or were they blue, but covered in mud? Oh, well. They matched anyway. Shorts—not the good ones for Hebrew school either. This is a pair Mom lets me play in. My T-shirt? The one with the cartoon of a blind man tripping over a bunch of sheep and shouting, “Get the flock out of here!” A birthday present from Joel-the-gonad. I never quite knew why he found it so funny, or why Mom made that scowly face when I wore it. Still, that couldn’t be it.

“Well?” she said.

“I dunno. What?”

“You’re filthy! You’re covered in mud. You’ve got dirt under your fingernails. And look at those knees—all scabby.”

I knew better than to say anything, but I sure thought something: Well, for Pete’s sake, Mom, of course they’re all scabby. I fell on the sidewalk, and I—oh, I forget how I got that one, but, heck, if they don’t bother me, why should they bother you?

She shook her head again. “Your Uncle David will be here soon. You want he should see you looking like a bum?”

“Aw, Mom.”

“Go to your room and clean up, young man.”

“All right.”

I bounced down the corridor to my room, hopping like that Marsaroo I saw on the Nashalgeogaffic special we watched last night. As usual, LAR, the household god, tried to guess when I was going to arrive at my door, but I always liked to outsmart that bucket of bolts. I ran the last few meters quickly. LAR slid the door aside, but I came to a halt just shy of it. Silly machine. He held it open for one, two, three seconds, then slid it shut. I waited till it closed, then jumped up and hit the manyalovride.

My room. A happy place. I like it this way. I wish Mom would stop telling me to pick up my things. I know where they are. Why, there’s my baseball glove. Haven’t seen that for weeks. And my Mutant Cyborg. I hope Joel-the-gonad hasn’t been playing with it; he always wrecks my programming.

So Uncle David will be here soon. I wonder how long? Bet I have enough time to play another game of Jujitsu Jaguar …

“Aaron!” Mom’s voice, echoing down the corridor. “Aaron, dear! Are you getting ready?”

“Yup.”

I rummaged around on the floor to find some other clothes to wear. My blue shirt? Naw, that’s a hand-me-down from Joel-the-gonad. How ’bout this yellow one? Naw, that’s a gay color. Hey, here’s a good one. Maroon, Mom calls it. Sounds like moron. But it looks like dried blood. Cool.

I pulled off the flock shirt and put on the maroon one. These pants will do, though, if I brush off some of the dirt.

Vroooommmm! Ca-chug. Ca-chug. The sound of a flyer, in need of a tune-up, zooming in for a landing on our front lawn. I hopped up on my bed and looked out the window. Hey, Uncle David has a Ford Champion. Cool. But he should take better care of it. Those thrusters sound awful.