The Golden Fleece

by Brian Stableford

  “I can sympathize with that,” Adrian said.

  She thought about it for a minute, and then nodded her head. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.” Then she looked at her husband, who had obviously set up the challenge, perhaps as if to say: You’d better be right...or perhaps not.

  Adrian could see that the two of them didn’t hate one another, even if they had had to agree to disagree more often than they would have liked. They probably wanted to love one another, he thought, but didn’t quite trust one another, or themselves, enough to believe that they weren’t being bullshitted by the other’s affectations of affection.

  “That was good,” Jarndyke said, nodding toward the panel, when his wife had left the room. “Clever, too. I like you, Son—I really do.”

  “Thanks,” said Adrian, not knowing what else to say. Spotting the anomalous panel had been child’s play, though. He knew that the acid test was coming up, and that even though Jarndyke liked him, and had been prepared to hire him on the basis of what his spies had told him, he wasn’t yet prepared to believe that Adrian had a superpower. On the other hand, Adrian could now see quite clearly—and cursed himself for not having seen it before—that Jarndyke’s peculiar strategy of interrogation at the Savoy had been guided by a hidden motive.

  Angelica came back carrying an easel in her right hand and a cloth-swathed canvas tucked under her left arm. Moving with meticulous order, she set up the easel, and placed the canvas on it, still concealed. Then she removed the cloth.

  Adrian had been expecting something akin to a Rothko, or maybe a Jackson Pollock: an exercise in abstract impressionism, playing deftly with the subtleties of color, perhaps even the utmost subtleties of color. He had not been expecting what he actually saw. He had been warned, but he had not been expecting witchcraft. He felt his jaw drop, and was uncomfortably aware that he was speechless. These, he knew, were untested waters.

  He had seen a lot of paintings in his time, including a lot by people whose color discrimination was unusually subtle, but he had never seen a painting by anyone who used color discrimination in the way that Angelica Jarndyke did, to hide images from ordinary eyes that extraordinary eyes would be able to see, if not exactly clearly and distinctly, then at least in such a way as to make out what they were.

  Angelica Jarndyke was no great draughtsman—her figures were a trifle cartoonish—but she knew what it was that she was trying to represent, and she had skill enough to carry off the representation. She was no genius, by any stretch of the imagination—no Monet, no Rossetti, no Jackson Pollock—but what she had tried to do was real, and ambitious, and, in Adrian’s experience, unique.

  “Now that, to me,” said Jason Jarndyke, “is just a big splodge of red with a little dash of orange here and there. Maybe it’s a sunset seen in ultra-close-up, or the middle of a rose petal—and a Lancashire rose at that—but I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Do you?” The question was addressed to Adrian.

  “Yes,” Adrian said, faintly. “I get it.”

  “And what do you think of it?” Jarndyke persisted. “Honestly, what do you think of it?”

  “It’s very strange,” Adrian said, unable to think, for the moment, of a better adjective. “Technically, perhaps not brilliant, but in terms of coloration, in its way, it’s magnificent. Magnificent, but....”

  “But what?” It was still the husband doing the probing, but Angelica Jarndyke was looking at Adrian again, very intently indeed, search for the slightest sign of bullshit.

  “...Unsettling,” Adrian admitted.

  Jarndyke made a noise with his tongue, like a bullshit-detector going off. “Unsettling! It’s a big splodge of red, damn it!”

  “It’s Dante’s Inferno,” Adrian said, weakly. “It’s a depiction of Hellfire—complete with the souls of the damned, in torment. Maybe I can’t fully appreciate the religious context, as an atheist, but you don’t need to believe in God to have a notion of Hell and retribution. The damned, I can believe in.”

  While he was speaking, Angelica Jarndyke’s expression changed. In a trice, she lost all of her artificiality, all of her polish. Amazement broke through, and with it...Adrian couldn’t tell. Not delight, not gratitude...something more akin to outrage. Her gaze abruptly shifted to her husband, who met her stare with a bizarre expression of his own.

  Adrian realized, a trifle belatedly, that Angelica Jarndyke thought he’d been tipped off. She thought that her husband had somehow found out what the painting represented, even though she’d probably never told him, and that he had formed some schoolboyish conspiracy with Adrian to give her a slap the eye. And ironically, Jason Jarndyke thought exactly the same thing. He thought that his wife had somehow formed a conspiracy with Adrian, so that he could come up with an interpretation of the picture that she would endorse, so that the two of them could give him a slap in the eye.

  Mercifully, they knew one another well enough, and understood one another’s gaze well enough, to know, after five seconds of mutual staring, that they were both mistaken. Then they both turned to look at Adrian.

  Adrian had thought, briefly, that if he passed the test that Jarndyke and his wife had faced him with, his employer would be delighted. He had passed, he knew: he had proved himself, and his uncanny sight. But his self-satisfaction was undermined by the consciousness that his boast to Jarndyke a few weeks before, though perfectly sincere, had been overstated. He wasn’t the only person Jason Jarndyke knew who had near-perfect color vision. He wasn’t even the best.

  Not only could Angelica Jarndyke see better than he could, she could paint better than he could, albeit in an amateurish sort of way—and not, for the first time in his life, Adrian regretted bitterly that he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination to wield a brush with as much efficacy as his sight demanded. Suddenly, being a reverse engineer of genus didn’t seem like such a perfect complement to his full-spectrum sight as it had seemed twenty minutes before. His ingenious argument about the emperor’s new clothes and the plight of the one man in the crowd who could see the beautiful suit had ceased to be a neat philosophical argument intended for intellectual persuasion, and had take on its full weight as a sketch of an actual, and potentially horrific, existential predicament: his own, and Angelica Jarndyke’s.

  Angelica Jarndyke was a painter, perhaps not of genius but at the very least of unusual talent, but no one had ever been able to see the results of her particular talent, except very vaguely— until now...and that had shaped her decisions as to what to paint, in a fashion that seemed, to say the least, ominous.

  In all his esthetic excursions, Adrian had never encountered her like. He had seen the work of a hundred painters who had real genius, and he had always thought himself better equipped to appreciate their genius than most people—better than anyone else, truth be told—but he had never seen anything painted by someone who had elected to exploit full-spectrum sensitivity in quite that way, and enough skill to complement it...and a subject-matter that somehow seemed altogether appropriate.

  Adrian knew, now, that if he did manage to produce some kind of authentic Golden Fleece for Jason Jarndyke, that at least one person would be able to see it, consciously, in all its glory— but somehow, that idea didn’t immediately fill him with delight. In fact, it frightened him.

  Even so, he forced himself to say: “I’d really like to see your other work some time, Mrs. Jarndyke,” because he knew that he couldn’t not say it, whether it eventually turned out to be a bad idea or not.

  Jason Jarndyke was ready for that challenge, too, and showed every sign of wanting to watch. Angelica Jarndyke wasn’t, and showed every sign of wanting her husband to be a million miles away if ever she condescended to let Adrian into her barn.

  The true measure of Jason Jarndyke, Adrian thought, was that he really didn’t seem to be jealous. He really did seem genuinely pleased, once he’d got over the initial shock, to know that his wife really hadn’t been bullshitting him throughout their married life—and genu
inely pleased, too, that she had now found someone who could see what she was doing, someone who could understand, and prove to her that she wasn’t alone, and wasn’t mad.

  Adrian’s eyes drifted back to the painting, though. It was amateurish. It was cartoonish. But it was good. In its own way, it was brilliant.

  It was also a vision of Hellfire, full of wrath, complete with the souls of the damned, in agonizing torment.

  All in all, Adrian, thought, what he’d just learned would have been far less intimidating if the image had been flowers or puppies: something that one could put on the lid of a biscuit tin; the sort of thing that trophy wives, within the scope of his admittedly limited imagination, might be expected to paint.

  He knew, for sure, that he was not only out of his social depth now, but out of his psychological depth—which troubled him far more.

  ~ * ~

  It wasn’t late when Adrian got back home. That was one advantage, he supposed, to eating “dinner” at lunch-time, Yorkshire-fashion. The evening was still young. He could do some work. He could relax for a while.

  Or, as things turned out, he couldn’t. His head was spinning inside. He couldn’t settle to work or relax. He had too much on his mind, too much to work through.

  He kept going back to the analogies that he had cited while trying to persuade Angelica Jarndyke to put him to the test. He had, of course, been putting himself in the shoes of the man who could see the beautiful suit, or the Wellsian sighted man in the country of the blind. Like Wells’s sighted man, he had always been aware that he was sighted, not mad—not because he came from a country of the sighted, but because he had always been a scientist, at heart and in method. He had been able to subject his unusual sight to experiment and analysis, had been able to prove it to himself, and to explain it to himself. He had never doubted himself, and he had always understood himself.

  Now, though, the glimpse he had caught of Angelica Jarndyke—and the sight he had had of her fabulous painting— made him see that it could have be otherwise. All the decisions he had made, with regard to handling his own predicament, seemed logical, even in retrospect. He had known when making them that there had been alternatives, but he had simply made the decisions and concentrated on managing their consequences. He had never wasted time trying to calculate the possible consequences of the decisions he had not taken. Now, he felt compelled to think about that a little more deeply, and to extend his analysis. He didn’t suppose that he could work out how Angelica Jarndyke had seen her situation, and how she had tried to cope with it, but at least he could ask himself what might have happened to him if he had tried to go in a different direction.

  Suppose that he had doubted himself. Suppose that the fact that other people couldn’t see what he saw had made him doubt that he saw it, rather than providing the stimulus to prove it. Suppose that he had been able to reproduce what he saw, with the aid of artificial pigments, at least to the extent that available artificial pigments would allow—but that people still couldn’t see what he saw, or even that there’re was anything there to see? Might he have actually stopped seeing it? Might he have adapted and amended his consciousness to what other people could see, psychosomatically rendering himself partially blind?

  Yes, he decided, he might. And perhaps some people did. Perhaps it wasn’t simply an accident of fate or physiology that so many people who were affected by color weren’t conscious of the effects or discriminations they were making. Perhaps it was a psychosomatic compulsion, driven by the need that so many people had to fit in, to be normal...a need by which Adrian had never been unduly afflicted, having always thought it better to be a scientist, a man of logic rather than emotion, and having long ago given up on the possibility of ever fitting in.

  On the other hand, might he have been able to cling to the conviction that he really could see, and really could reproduce what he saw, even though other people couldn’t see the reality or the reproduction—but without the scientific understanding that would inform him as to how it came about?

  Yes, he decided, he might. And perhaps people had, long before Angelica Jarndyke. Maybe only a few, maybe more than a few. And might they not, given the conviction without the scientific understanding, have construed what they possessed and could do in consequence as a kind of magic, a kind of witchcraft? Might they not have come to believe that their difference from other people really a kind of superpower: something in defiance of normality, a boon and a curse?

  Watch out for Medea, Adrian thought. Okay. I watched out. I met her. But what now? What now?

  What he meant by that, of course, was what might Angelica Jarndyke want of him, now that she had found him? And what might Jason Jarndyke want of him now, not as a reverse engineer charged with the job of coloring his fabrics, but as a “member of the family” who shared his wife’s peculiar vision? But even those two questions, difficult as they were, were only half the problem.

  The other half was the question of what he might want himself, given the sudden change in his circumstances, and whether it would undermine all the sterling work he had put into shaping his attitude, planning his career and delineating his goals.

  What if Angelica Jarndyke’s paintings really did work magic on him, and show him something new, something disturbing? What if his extraordinary sight, which had already given him a privileged glimpse of hell, were to show him something even more unsettling, which he would be better of not seeing?

  The possibilities seemed too confusing for there to be any hope of formulating a strategy in advance.

  Of one thing, however, he was certain. He would not be able to resist the temptation to look. Whatever Angelica Jarndyke had to show him, if she consented to show him anything at all, he would have to look....and see.

  ~ * ~

  The immediate answer to the question of “what now?” seemed to be nothing. A good night’s sleep restored Adrian’s ability to work, and routine did the rest. He didn’t forget what had happened at Bleak House, but he was able to compartmentalize it. He did put “Jason” and “Medea” into a search engine, and was glad to find that their mythological relationship didn’t seem to lend any other analogies to his situation. He also fed in Bleak House, and was grateful to find a similar lack of analogy in Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, with cs instead of ks—which meant, he concluded, that he need have no fear of ironic fate, and would be free to work things out for himself, on strictly scientific principles. All in good time. For the time being, he shelved the issue. He had work to do.

  Jason Jarndyke seemed to respect that. It was Thursday before he dropped by, casually, to tell Adrian what a pleasure it had been to see him on Sunday, even though things had gone “a bit wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Adrian queried.

  “Well, yes. To tell you the truth, I didn’t really believe that you would see anything in Angie’s picture, and I wasn’t immediately convinced that what you thought you saw was what she thought she had put into it. But I had expected that if you did see something, which she thought was there, that she’d be pleased. I thought she’d be over the moon at being able to prove to me—or at least put up a good argument to the effect—that she really hadn’t been bullshitting me all these years. I thought she’d be grateful.”

  “But she’s not?” Adrian inferred.

  “Well, yes and no. Underneath, I think she is—but on top, she’s confused. She hadn’t expected it, you see—she thought at first that I’d somehow found out what she thought and tipped you off. She knows now, I think, that you really could see it— and I think she’s convinced that you’d be able to see what’s in her other pictures too, both the ones I’ve seen and the ones she won’t let me see. But I think that scares her, a little. She’d got used to it, you see—people not being able to see, only praising her work, if and when they did, purely for bullshitting reasons. Now, the thought that someone can see...will see...has taken her aback a bit, given her pause for thought. I’m sure she’ll come round, though.”

  “
I don’t want to cause any difficulty.”

  “Difficulty? No, Son, there’s no difficulty. In my book, you’re a godsend. You have no idea how much she needs you...needs an audience, who can see what she’s doing. It’ll complete her.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Adrian, warily.

  “Neither does she, at present—but she’ll come round. It’s what she needs—what she’s always needed. You must understand that.”

  Must I? Adrian thought. What he said was: “I’ll be glad to help, if I can.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, mind,” said Jason Jarndyke, putting on his humorous expression again. “You’re a nice looking lad and she’s beautiful, but she’s damn near old enough to be your mother. You might think she’s only with me for my money, but even if you were right...oh, don’t blush like that. I’m not entirely color blind, and I know what some red splodges mean. What I’m trying to say is that she’s only ever going to be interested in your eyes, and you need to understand that, and not get confused, the way youngsters sometimes do. Because I want this to work, Son—I really do. I adore Angie, and I want her to have what I’ve never been able to give her: your eyes. That’s worth more to me than the Golden Fleece itself. In fact, if we’re being metaphorical, that is my authentic Golden Fleece. If you can give me genes to produce colors that can live up to your promises, that might well complete my material fortune...but if you can give Angie faith in her work, and faith in herself, and set her free from the disappointment and anguish that’s been dogging her for years....well, Son, you’ll have worked a real miracle.”