Golden Fleece

The gull-wing door to the flyer swung up. A large man got out. He went to the rear of the flyer, opened the trunk.

“Don’t you see?” said Eve quickly. “I can’t have a relationship with you. You never should have existed.” She shook her head. “Why did you have to come here?”

“I just wanted to know you. That’s all.”

“Some things are better left unknown.” She looked toward the pad, saw her husband coming toward her. “Now, please leave. He doesn’t know about you.”

“But—”

“Please!”

The tableau held for a moment, then Aaron turned and briskly walked away from the house. Eve Oppenheim’s husband came up to her. “Who was that?” he said.

Aaron, now a dozen meters away, his back to the house, paused for a second and cocked his head to catch Eve’s answer: “Nobody.”

He heard the hiss of the door panel closing and the final, definitive click as it slid into the opposite jamb.

TWENTY

Kirsten Hoogenraad sat on the beach with her legs spread wide, bending from the waist to try to touch her toes. She alternated stretching toward her left foot and her right. Her toenails and fingernails were painted the same pale blue as her eyes. She wore no clothes—most of the beach was nudist, although a section was set aside, hidden by fiberglass boulders, for those whose cultures forbade public nudity. However, she did have on a sweatband to keep her long brown hair out of her face.

Aaron lay on his stomach next to her, reading. Kirsten looked over at his textpad. I doubted she could make out the actual words. Orthokeratology had restored her vision to 6:6, but even so, the type was quite small, and although the pad’s screen was polarized, the glare from the sunlamp high overhead would have made it hard to read from her vantage point. Still, I’m sure she could see that the document was laid out in three snaking columns. Continuing her warm-up, Kirsten spoke to Aaron, the words pumping out with a staccato rhythm in time with her stretches. “What are you reading?”

“The Toronto Star,” said Aaron.

“A newspaper?” She stopped stretching. “From Earth? How in heaven did you manage to get that?”

Aaron smiled. “It’s not today’s paper, silly.” He glanced at the document-identification string, glowing in soft amber letters across the top of the pad. “It’s from ’74. May eighteenth.”

“Why would you want to read a two-and-a-half-year-old newspaper?”

He shrugged. “JASON’s got most of the major ones on file. The New York Times, Glasnost, Le Monde. He’s probably even got one from Amsterdam. Hey, Jase, do you?”

There were few convenient places to put my camera units on the vast expanse of beach, so I used little remotes, sculpted to look like crabs. I always kept one near each group of sunbathers, and the one nearest Aaron scuttled closer. “Yes,” I said through its tinny speaker. “De Telegraas, complete back to January 1992. Would you like me to download an issue to your textpad, Doctor?”

“What?” said Kirsten. “Oh, no thank you, JASON. I still can’t see the point in it.” She went back to stretching toward her left foot.

“It’s interesting, that’s all,” said Aaron. “That year we spent in training in Nairobi, I lost touch with what was happening back home. I’m just catching up. Every once in a while, I have JASON dig up an old issue for me.”

Kirsten shook her head, but she was smiling despite the physical exertion. “Old weather forecasts? Old sports scores? Who cares? Besides, with time dilation, that paper is almost four years out-of-date for what’s happening on Earth now.”

“It’s better than nothing. Look. Says here the Blue Jays fired their manager. Now, I didn’t know about that. They’d been on a losing streak for weeks. First game with the new manager, Manuel Borges hits a grand slam. Great stuff.”

“So? What difference will it make by the time we get back?”

“I used to play in a trivia league, did I ever tell you that? Pubs in Toronto. The Canadian Inquisition, it was called. Two divisions, the Torquemada and the Leon Jaworski.”

“The who and the who?” Kirsten grunted, getting her blue fingertips the closest she had so far to her blue toes.

Aaron exhaled noisily. “Well, if you don’t know who they were, you probably wouldn’t have been up to the league. To-m£s de Torquemada was the guy who came up with the cruel methods used by the Spanish Inquisition.”

“ ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ ” I said, with great relish, although the crab’s speaker didn’t do justice to my attempt at an English accent.

“See, Jase would have been perfect. That’s what every true trivia buff says when you mention the Spanish Inquisition.”

“I hesitate to ask why,” said Kirsten.

“Monty Python,’’ replied Aaron.

“Ah,” she said sagely, but I knew she didn’t have the foggiest idea what the term meant. She moved over to be closer to him. Aaron took that as encouragement to go on. “And Leon Jaworski, he was the special Justice Department prosecutor in the Watergate hearings that brought down Richard Nixon. Nixon was—”