Aaron’s eyes snapped onto mine. For the first and only time in my acquaintance with him, pain was plain on his face. “You can’t possibly know about that. I never told a soul.”
“Surely you are not upset with me for knowing, are you? Surely it is my right to know whatever I want to know?”
“Not that. That’s personal, private. That’s different.”
“Is it? Tell me, Aaron, where does one draw the line? I suppose you believe that your parents were wrong in not telling you that you were adopted?”
“Damn right they were. It’s my past—and my prerogative.”
“I see.” I paused judiciously. “And you hold this position still, despite the fact that your birth mother, Eve Oppenheim, was not in the least bit happy to see you. ‘You never should have existed,’ she said”—and here I did a credible job of imitating Aaron’s memory of the voice and the fury of poor Ms. Oppenheim—“ ‘Damn you, how could you come here? What right have you got to invade my privacy? If I’d wanted you to know who I was, I would have told you.’ ”
“How can you know that? I never wrote those words down.”
“What possible difference does it make how I know? Doubtless you must be pleased simply that I do know. After all, public information is the best kind, isn’t it?”
“You’re invading my privacy.”
“Only to show that you don’t practice what you preach, Aaron. Take your affair with Kirsten Hoogenraad—whom you decided would discover that you are Jewish when she first encountered your circumcised penis. That was to be a secret, no? What Diana didn’t know couldn’t hurt her, wasn’t that your reasoning?”
“How do you know what I thought? Good God, can you—? Are you capable of reading minds?”
“Why would that bother you, Aaron? Knowledge should be shared, shouldn’t it? We’re all one big happy family here.”
Aaron shook his head. “Telepathy is impossible. There’s no way you can read my thoughts.”
“Oh? Shall I share some other secrets from your past? Perhaps broadcast them throughout the Starcology, so that everyone can benefit from the knowledge? You used to have sexual feelings toward your sister Hannah—perhaps not too surprising, since it turns out that you weren’t biologically related. You used to sneak into her room when she wasn’t home to masturbate on her bed. When your father died, you tried to cry, but you couldn’t. You claim to be free from prejudice, but down deep you hate the stinking guts of French people, don’t you? When you were fourteen, you once snuck into Thunder Bay United Church and took money from the outreach-fund collection box. You—”
“Enough! Enough.” He looked away. “Enough.”
“Oh, but it’s all the truth, isn’t it, Aaron? And the truth is always good. The truth never hurts us.”
“Damn you.”
“Just answer a few simple questions for me, Aaron. You kept from your adopted mother the fact that her brother David is a pedophile. Before you left, your sister, Hannah, had a little boy, your nephew, Howie. Eventually, Hannah will leave her son alone with Uncle David—after all, no one but you knows of David’s problem. Question: Was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”
“Look, it’s not that simple. It would have hurt my mother to know. It—”
“This is a binary quiz, Aaron. A simple yes or no will do. Was your judgment correct about what to keep secret?”
“For God’s sake, what David did was eighteen years ago—”
“Was your judgment correct?”
“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 stilclass="underline" “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?