The Golden Fleece

by Brian Stableford

  Adrian thought that he could feel his heart sinking. He had thought, a week before, that he could justify all the hopes that Jason Jarndyke had invested in him—but the game had changed now. Now, the Yorkshireman was expecting miracles. Adrian was a scientist; he didn’t do miracles. He couldn’t even bring himself to say that he would do his best. He would, but he knew that it wouldn’t be enough.

  “You’re still blushing, you silly sod,” Jarndyke observed. “But you see what I’m getting at, don’t you? She hasn’t got used to the idea yet, but she will. Bound to. I can’t ask you to dinner again Sunday—I’ll have to wait for her to ask me to invite you. She will. Sooner or later, she’ll want to show you more of her work...and eventually, even if it takes months, she’ll want to take you into the barn to see her latest work. Just your eyes, mind, and your consciousness behind them. No daft ideas—but she’ll want you to see...and I want you to see. Need to be clear about that.” He hesitated, apparently wondering whether he might have gone too far—but self-doubt wasn’t in his emotional repertoire. “Not saying that you can work a miracle, mind,” the industrialist added, cautiously, “and I won’t hold it against you if you can’t—but the mere possibility justifies the price of your hire...metaphorically speaking, of course. You up to date now?”

  Adrian blinked several times, then nodded.

  “We’re on the same page?” Jarndyke added, wanting to be sure.

  Adrian nodded again.

  “Good—now get on with making me trillions. Concentrate on your own colors, until you get the call. Okay.”

  “Okay,” said Adrian, feeing that the nodding was becoming too repetitive, and not wanting to be mistaken for an automaton.

  “Champion “ said Jarndyke, and passed on.

  Word that the conversation in question had taken place went round the labs and offices like wildfire, although no one knew exactly what had been said or why. Rumor inevitably took wing.

  “Made quite an impression on Mrs. Jarndyke, I hear,” Chester Hu said to him, when an opportunity arose. “I told you to be careful, didn’t I? Don’t be fooled by Jayjay’s easygoing manner. If he gets jealous, he won’t settle for firing you. He’s a Yorkshireman. Next worst thing to a Singaporean, when it comes to matters of the heart.”

  The Koreans, Taiwanese, and even the Scots, made similar comparisons, causing Adrian to realize that every nation on Earth thought that it had a privileged relationship with jealousy and pride. He brushed it all off—which didn’t fan the rumors, but didn’t extinguish them either. He now felt that it wasn’t just Jayjay’s beady eyes that were on him, but those of the entire organization.

  Mercifully, he had his routines, and a heroic capacity to absorb himself in his work. That was what he did, accelerating the progress of his gene-designing, gene-manufacturing and gene-implanting experiments, looking forward to the day when he could actually begin field-testing. For the moment, he was working almost entirely in cyberspace and headspace, where the hitches rarely showed up, but he did contrive to get half a dozen new pigment genes—all patent-protected—into organic form, and to incorporate them into cultures of both wool and silk. Within a further ten days, he saw the first flecks of color born in his Petri-dishes, and knew that the foundations had been laid for a great ideative and industrial enterprise.

  He allowed himself to feel a small thrill of triumph, but not to celebrate. The time for celebration was still a long way off.

  For the moment, it looked as if his greens and blues were ahead of his golds, but he wasn’t upset by that. The golds would come through, in time; so would the blacks...and the reds too. Only splodges in dishes to begin with, but in time...maybe he could even produce Hellfire, if there turned out to a market for it. His progress was frustratingly slow, because his ambitions were so large, but he knew that Jason Jarndyke was right. Rome hadn’t been built in a day, and the Romans hadn’t made as great a job of it as they might have done, although the Goths and Vandals certainly hadn’t helped with its preservation. He had to be patient.

  He was. He worked with relentless efficiency, by no means tirelessly but always effectively. He ate well. He cycled up and down the moors, enjoying the sun light and the subtle shades of coloration that the mosses and the heather presented, as the season slowly wore on. Everything went like clockwork, uninterrupted by superfluous cuckoos. He had plenty to think about without philosophizing, and he made the most of his opportunities. His head was full of molecules.

  Eventually, though, the summons came. Jarndyke dropped round to his computer-station as if for a routine check-in, but added, before turning away: “Can you come to dinner Sunday? Angie has a few things she’d like to show you. Value your opinion.” He didn’t bother to remind him not even to think about saying no.

  “Two o’clock?” Adrian queried.

  “Two o’clock,” Jayjay confirmed. “Walk or bring your bike— all the same to us.”

  Adrian decided to walk.

  ~ * ~

  Dinner went reasonably smoothly. Angelica Jarndyke didn’t avoid looking at her guest, and played a much fuller role in the conversation, although she seemed to be avoiding the subject of art.

  Jayjay was obviously aware of that, and it eventually offended his rule about not beating around the bush—although, when he eventually steered the conversation in that direction, even he took the scenic route.

  “I noticed on your CV that you once went to a GRE conference in Oslo,’’ he remarked to Adrian. “Did you take in Gustav Vigeland’s sculpture park? The Vita?”

  “Of course,” Adrian said. “Not really my cup of tea, though. A bit austere. Colorless. Impressive, but...just not my sort of thing.”

  “I liked it,” Jarndyke said, blithely. “What about the other brother? Did you visit his Vita?”

  That was the point, Adrian knew. Jason Jarndyke was fishing. Gustav Vigeland’s little brother Emanuel hadn’t been given a park in which to show off. He had been an official recorder, painting portraits of local dignitaries to hang in civic buildings, condemned to a humdrum existence of conspicuous underachievement, living in an ordinary house on an ordinary estate—until he’d ripped out all the floors in his ordinary house and made the entire interior into a single coherent space, on whose black-dyed walls he’d painted his own all-encompassing vision of human life, in all its aspects, which was designed to be looked at in dim light, so that visitors had to be in there for a good half hour before their eyes adjusted sufficiently to see it as it was meant to be seen.

  A blind man could have spotted the hidden agenda. Jason Jarndyke had his own theory about what was going on in Angelica’s “barn.” Doubtless she had “dragged” him to see Emanuel’s house, which was only open to the public for a couple of hours a week, perhaps because the local authorities suspected his Vita of being pornographic.

  “Yes,” Adrian said. “I saw it.”

  “And what did you think?” was the inevitable next question.

  “Original. Ingenious. Very effective. A masterpiece, in its way.”

  “Not brilliant? Not a work of genius?”

  “Maybe not entirely my cup of tea,” Adrian hedged. “More so than Gustav’s Vita, certainly, but still...in sum, less than the eye could have desired to see.”

  “Angie liked it,” Jarndyke said, laying down the hook along with the lure.

  She bit, but almost dutifully, because it was expected of her— or so Adrian thought. “Mr. Stamford’s right,” she said. “It’s a masterpiece, in its way. Original, ingenious and effective...but it used semi-darkness as a cloak, to shield its weaknesses. I can sympathize with that, I suppose, but...well, I did like it, but not as much as the Rothko chapel. Rothko could use near-black in a way that Vigeland junior couldn’t. Rothko understood its subtleties better.”

  It wasn’t really a lead-in, but Jarndyke used it anyway.

  “Angie has some pictures set up in the library that she’s like to show you,” he said to Adrian. “To demonstrate that she does understand near
-black...as well as red and blue...and maybe even gold.”

  “If only I were a reverse engineer instead of a mere dauber,” his wife retorted, a trifle sharply “what sweet music we might make...not to mention money. I fear that my paintings are never going to find much of a market.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Jarndyke said. “What matters is that you know what they’re worth.”

  “I’m sure that Mrs. Jarndyke has always known that,” Adrian put in, trying to be gallant. “I’ll be very interested to see them. I’ve been looking forward to it immensely.”

  “It’s only a small sample though,” Jarndyke put in. “Old stuff, I believe. All her recent work is in the barn. I haven’t seen any of it—she gave up asking for my opinion years ago. Can’t blame her.”

  All that Angelica said in reply to that was: “It’s not a barn, Jayjay. It’s just an outbuilding. No livestock, no tractor, no bales of hay. Just amateurish dabbling—not worth seeing, really. I wish you wouldn’t go on about it so.”

  “Sorry, Angie,” Jarndyke said, contritely.

  “And it’s not a rip-off of Emanuel Vigeland either,” she said. “It’s not a collective vision of human life, pornographic or otherwise, to be seen in quiet light as if in a church.”

  “Can’t blame a fellow for guessing,” Jarndyke said. “Are we going to the library, or what?”

  “No,” said Angelica, suddenly stern. “We aren’t. Mr. Stamford and I are going to the library. You are going to stay here, Jason. This doesn’t concern you.”

  That didn’t seem entirely fair to his employer, and Adrian felt slightly intimidated about the thought of being alone with Angelica, but he was too scared to say anything.

  Jarndyke only shrugged, and said: “You can call him Adrian.”

  That seemed a bit thick to Adrian, too, especially as Jason Jarndyke had never addressed him as anything but “Son,” but he raised no objection, and meekly allowed Angelica Jarndyke to escort him out of the room and along the wood-paneled corridor that presumably led to the library.

  It was the kind of library that looked as if it had been put together with books bought by the yard, more to show off their old bindings than to provide reading material. Some were in Latin, others were standard sets of classic authors—but Adrian didn’t waste much time examining the bookshelves. He was infinitely more interested in the paintings.

  There were seven, each set up on its own easel, the array carefully spaced, as if the intervals had been measured with a ruler.

  Like the vision of Hellfire he had already seen, they would probably have looked like “splodges” to the everyday eye, Adrian thought. Like the vision of Hellfire, though, they weren’t essays in abstract impressionism. They were representative pictures— very subtle pictures, using extremely subtle gradations of color, but representative nevertheless. Some of them needed careful study, but there wasn’t one of them that left Adrian confused as to its subject.

  He started with the yellow—or, to be strictly accurate, the gold. It was, as might have been guessed, a picture of the mythical Golden Fleece, with a triumphant Jason displaying it to an invisible crowd. Medea wasn’t present—unless she was invisible, although that would probably have been taking subtlety too far. The Jason in the picture wasn’t exactly a portrait, but it was obvious to Adrian that he was based on a real individual. A pity, he thought, that the image in question was invisible to the Jason in question—except, perhaps, subliminally.

  The painting reassured him somewhat, after the anxieties he’d built up in consequence of the Dantean image of the inferno. It was a pleasant picture, which seemed to have been painted with a degree of affection. Angelica must have known that her husband wouldn’t be able to see the image suggestive of himself, but she hadn’t been tempted to be satirical in the depiction, let alone cruel. There was no mockery in it.

  The blue was a mermaid, or perhaps a siren. It wasn’t a Hans Christian Andersen mermaid: the meek self-sacrificing innocent who had consented walk on daggers for a lifetime in exchange for the privilege of being able to keep a fisherman company; it was a temptress, willing and able to lead men to their doom with a seductive song. The limitations of Angelica’s draughtsmanship showed up more obviously in the top half of the central figure than the bottom. The fishy part was quite well-done, elegantly curled and beautifully colored in the scales, which were silver behind all the myriad blue reflections of water-modified sky. The human half, by contrast, was vague, the rippling blonde hair seeming in need of the attentions of a good hairdresser, and the features rather flat

  Was this a sort-of-portrait too? Adrian wondered. Was the siren a means by which Angelica was trying to represent herself, metaphorically as well as literally? If so, what did her apparent failure—which might, of course be deliberate—signify? Loneliness, no doubt...a sense of difference, obviously...but what else?

  Adrian had always felt more comfortable with pure exercises in color and form, like Rothko’s or Pollock’s. Monet’s gardens, too, he felt that he understood very well, and Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers. But Dante Gabriel Rossetti...he had appreciated the pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, but not the siren quality of his women’s faces, the extreme subtleties of his attitude to the models with which he had had such tortured and convoluted personal relationships....

  All in all, Adrian found the blue siren less unsettling than the red inferno, but there was still a hint of damnation about it that seemed menacing as well as uncanny.

  The green was forest foliage, with hidden faces peeping through it: nymphs and fauns, Adrian assumed, or maybe mere fairy folk. Again, the faces were too vague to be identifiable, by species let alone as individuals. Some tended to the ugly, some to the beautiful, but none to the meek and sanitized. On the other hand, they were not exactly malevolent either—merely slightly unhuman, weirdly hybridized.

  The composition of the picture, and the manner in which the foliage and the faces were intermingled, was very ambitious— perhaps a trifle too ambitious, although it showed off the artist’s technique to better effect than the simpler and more straightforward images. Complication helped to offset the slight individual faults of curvature. It was easier to see in this picture that Angelica had had some professional training, and had benefited from it, in spite of being handicapped by insufficient natural ability in her brushwork. Adrian had looked up her biography with the aid of a search engine, and knew that she had done two years at the Courtauld before dropping out—or, more accurately as well as more kindly, moving on. It must have become obvious to her over those two years that she would never be able to create a work of art as wonderful as the one she constituted in herself, even with the aid of full-spectrum color vision.

  She had not given up, though. She had carried on painting, in private, concentrating increasingly on work that only she could see.

  The pale brown was sand: Egyptian sand, to judge by the ruins and statuary projecting through it at intervals. Some of the half-buried statues had faces, but they weren’t human faces; they were the faces of sphinxes. Inevitably, Shelley’s immortal line—”Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”—sprang to mind, but that wasn’t really the tenor of the picture. It wasn’t celebrating or regretting the decay that had all but erased the residue of a once-great civilization, but using its extreme subtlety of color to imply a near-identity between the stones and the sand, the shaped and the shapeless. It was an austere picture, but there was nothing sinister about it, and Adrian couldn’t get any implication of the supernatural from its peeping sphinxes, which seemed like mere human artifacts, fading into dust in the wake of their makers.

  The dark brown, on the other hand, was a calculated exercise in the sinister and the supernatural, which seemed to be aiming to create a sense of unease by concealing its effects just out of the range of ordinary human sight. This one might not have seemed like a mere splodge even to Jason Jarndyke, although he would probably have been hard-pressed to identify anything in it other than trees-trunks
and branches. It was another forest, but not leafy forest—there were only a few hints of dark green in the mix. This was a dense forest seen from within, all gnarled tree-trunks and decaying humus. This forest was inhabited, as the other had been, but not by conventional mythological creatures. There were strange squirrels and squatting toads, whose air of menace was not contained in anything as obvious as fangs and claws, but in a peculiar implication of disease.

  It was an ugly painting, and Adrian wondered whether Angelica had simply found it easier to paint the ugly than the beautiful, given her technical limitations, and had simply decided, in this instance, to play to her strengths. He was reluctant to conclude, now, that there might be any deep psychological significance in it, let alone any attempted magic. He was conscious of the fact that it was supposed to seem scary, but for that very reason, he found it slightly amusing, like a schlock-horror movie striving too hard for effect