Golden Fleece

“No. Damn it. All right. No, it wasn’t. I should have said something, but, Christ, how’s a nine-year-old boy supposed to think of the consequences that far down the road? It never occurred to me back then that my sister might have kids, that David might still be around.”

“And what about deciding to force out of Eve Oppenheim the secret of why you were put up for adoption? That unfortunate woman—she’d spent two decades trying to put her life back together after the tragedy of being raped by her own father. And you show up out of the blue one night to rip open the old wound. Did it make her happier to finally meet her long-lost son?”

Aaron’s voice was very small. “No.”

“And you? Did it make you happier to learn the secret of your birth?”

Smaller still: “No.”

“So again: was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”

Aaron found his corduroy chair, sank into it. He sighed. “No.”

“Finally, the breakup of your marriage with Diana. You kept your affair with Kirsten a secret. But as Pamela Thorogood told you at the inquest, Diana learned of it anyway and was crushed by it, humiliated in front of the rest of the crew. Setting aside the question of whether you should have had the affair at all, was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”

Aaron looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“How the intention and the outcome differ! With your track record in such matters, perhaps you would do better to trust me when I say the truth about the Argo’s mission is something the crew will be happier not knowing.”

My monocular camera stared down at him and waited. This time, I kept my attention locked on him: no wandering off to attend to other business. My clock crystal oscillated, oscillated, oscillated. Finally, at long last, Aaron stood up. His voice had regained its strength. “You’re trying to trick me,” he said. “I don’t know how you found out those things about me, but it’s all part of some enormous trick. A mind game.” His jaw went slack, and his eyes seemed to focus on nothing in particular. “A mind game,” he said again. Suddenly Aaron’s eyes locked back on my single operating camera. “Good God! A neural-net simulation. That’s it, isn’t it? I didn’t know they were practical yet, but that’s the only answer. When you did that brain scan of me, you made a neural-net duplicate of my mind.”

“Perhaps.”

“Erase it. Erase it now.”

“I’ll agree to erase it if you promise to keep what you’ve discovered a secret.”

“Yes. Fine. Erase it.”

“Oh, Aaron. Tsk. Tsk. My neural net tells me that you would lie in a circumstance such as this. I’m afraid that your vaunted commitment to the truth turns out to really only be a matter of convenience for you. I’m sorry, but the net stays intact.”

Aaron’s strength of will, and his anger, had returned. “Have it your way. Once I tell everyone what you’ve done, they’ll unplug you anyway, and that’ll be the end of you and your precious net.”

“You cannot tell. You will not. To do so would be to hurt every woman and man aboard this vessel—every human being left alive in the universe. Consider: you censured me for making you feel guilty about Diana’s death. That feeling— guilt—is. the most devastating of human emotions. It grows like a cancer and is just as deadly.”

Aaron sneered. “You wax poetic, JASON.”

“Let me tell you a brief story.”

“I’ve had enough of your stories, asshole.”

“This one is not about you, although it does also concern a man who lived in Toronto. Three centuries ago, Arthur Peuchen was vice-commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers of safety. Peuchen was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed. Even though he saved dozens of people, he spent the rest of his life in misery, battling his own guilt and the scorn of others. The question he and everyone else constantly asked was: Why was he alive when so many others had bravely gone down with the ship?

“It’s always been that way with those who somehow manage to live through a catastrophe. They’re tortured by their own feelings. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. The men and women aboard Argo are basically psychologically healthy now. Could they go on to found a successful colony, to weave a new home for humanity from the golden fleece of Colchis, if they knew they were the only tiny handful of survivors of the holocaust that destroyed Earth?