The Golden Fleece (2 page)

“Well,” said Professor Clark, sighing again. “I suppose the only advice I can give you is to watch out for Medea.”

“Who’s Medea?” Adrian asked.

Professor Clark raised his eyes to the heavens. All serious scientists cultivated some area of humanistic interest in order to deflect of suspicion of terminal dullness. Clark was fond of mythological references. “Jason’s wife.“ he said, wearily.

Even Adrian could get the gist of that, although he knew that he would have to use a search engine to find out exactly what crimes the mythical Medea was supposed to have committed, if he could ever be bothered—but he couldn’t help putting on an ingenuous expression and replying: “I believe that Mrs. Jarndyke’s name is Angelica.” He had no definite knowledge, but presumed that she must be an effete southerner too. Even in this day and age, no one in Yorkshire would ever name a girl “Angelica.”

The professor sighed again, and muttered something that might or might not have been a reference to “lamb to the slaughter”—which, in turn, might or might not have been an attempt at a witty play on words based on the fact that Jason Jarndyke’s most profitable mills produced sheepskin by the mile, without the necessity of employing actual sheep.

~ * ~

In fact, Jason Jarndyke didn’t seem quite as bad as the scurrilous newsfeeds painted him—but that shouldn’t really have been surprising, even to an
ingénu,
and Adrian scolded himself for having fallen victim to web-spun prejudice in spite of knowing better.

Jarndyke was a big man, to be sure, with rather coarse features, and he spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent—which had become rare, except as deliberate affectation, since exposure to TV had begun smoothing all regional dialects into subtlety. Once he’d been in the man’s company for half an hour, though, Adrian no longer believed that Jarndyke’s accent was an affectation, any more than his renowned bluntness was mere rudeness with a tacit apology in tow. Jarndyke gave every sign of being honest, sincere and intelligent.

The textile-manufacturer didn’t get down to business right away. For a while, they ate and drank and chatted. Adrian knew that he was being subtly pumped and weighed up all the while, but he didn’t mind. He had secrets, of a sort, but he didn’t think that they were the kind of secrets that would compromise his usefulness to Jarndyke Industries, and he knew that it was in his interests to be accurately measured for his true worth in purely scientific terms, or even terms of vulgar gold, so he answered all the subtle queries honestly.

Jarndyke was in informal mode, so he wasn’t calling Adrian “Mr. Stamford,” in the same way that Adrian was addressing him as “Mr. Jarndyke, but he wasn’t calling him “Adrian” either. He had settled for the patronizing device of calling him “Son,” which Adrian was trying not to mind too much—and succeeding, because he rather liked the old sod, all things considered.

When Jarndyke eventually decided to get to the point, he headed straight for it. “Okay, Son,” he said, “you’re a bright lad, so you know exactly why I’m interested in you. I’ve helped to bring about a revolution in the textile industry by growing fabrics from tissue cultures: first wools, then silks. In terms of texture, my products are first-rate, but thus far, I’ve remained reliant on the traditional dyeing industry for coloring my fabrics. Even if it hadn’t been for the provocation of all the stupid media jokes about my supposed quest for the sodding Golden Fleece, genetically-determined pigmentation would be the natural next step in the process.”

He tapped Adrian’s CV, which was on the table in front of him, with the knuckle of his right forefinger. “I won’t try to bullshit you, Son: according to this, and what my spies tell me, you’re the best man in England right now to pick up that particular torch and run with it. For that reason, I’d like to hire you, but first, tell me why a bright young reverse engineer like you—a genius of sorts—chose to specialize in a field like pigmentation instead of joining the great crusade to rid the world of disease and make us all immortal.”

“You can
see
the results of coloration genes,” Adrian said baldly, as he always did when asked that question. “There’s no waiting around while the DNA strings you’ve designed and the proteins they produce go through elaborate testing schemes administered by bureaucrats. Then again, the delicate sculpting of the relevant proteins, not merely to duplicate but also to enhance the extraordinarily elaborate palette of nature’s colors, is a technical process that poses fundamental challenges of method and understanding. The fact that you can see the results immediately when working with pigmentation genes, and connect up cause and effect directly, helps to provide a useful insight into the mysterious workings of amino-acid destiny, which is transferable to other areas where the evidence is far less obvious. Mendel started off the entire science of genetics by studying the heredity of manifest characteristics like color, because it was the most practical starting-point. It’s still an important gateway to understanding.”

“Gateway to understanding,” Jarndyke echoed, pensively. “Very neat. Cut the bullshit, Son, and tell me the truth. You’re too bright to know that I wouldn’t look behind this thing”— he tapped the CV again—”because you know as well as I do that what’s really important is always what’s left out. The job offer stands, so you don’t have anything to worry about on that score. I just want to know what you’re about before you join the crew of the Airedale
Argo
—and I want to hear it from you, as straight as you can.”

Adrian gulped—not because he hadn’t expected to have to come clean eventually, and not because there was any reason why he shouldn’t do so right away, but simply because he wasn’t used to being hustled like that. He was used to doing things at his own pace, and he had learned to be wary of letting his secret out too soon in potentially-hostile environments. Jarndyke obviously knew the gist of it, so the sensible thing to do was, indeed, to give his future employer his own account of the truth, and to try to make him understand.

“I do have my own personal reasons for being interested in the genetics of pigmentation,” he admitted.

“Well, don’t beat around the bush, Son—we don’t do that up north. What are they?”

Adrian didn’t beat around the bush. “Sight,” he said, launching forth into a familiar argument, “is a three-phase process. People differ in all three respects. Phase one is what the retina can register; all eyes are different. You doubtless remember the old schoolboy question about whether what you see as red is the same as what I see as red, even though we’ve both learned to
call
it red. Physiology tells us that it’s a good question. Different people’s retinas really do differ in their sensitivity to particular wavelengths and the neuronal signals they transmit in response.”

“So?” Jarndyke prompted.

Adrian didn’t want to be hurried; if he was going to give Jarndyke the explanation, he wanted to do it his way. “The second phase,” he said, “is the other end of the neuronal chain: what the cells of the brain pick up from the signal and how they process it. Everybody’s brain is slightly different; identical signals, if there were any, don’t always produce the identical results in making raw information available to consciousness.”

“Which is phase three,” Jarndyke put in, to demonstrate that he was keeping up. “Different minds, different interpretations again. Some people are color blind. Some people have no taste—I’m one of them, according to my wife. This I know. So what? Not in terms of philosophical paradoxes, but in terms of material difference.”

“People differ in their perception of color and sensitivity to its nuances,” Adrian said, refusing to be hurried, but now deliberately slanting the argument in a direction that might seem relevant to the industrialist, “but the number of people whose physiology makes them objectively incapable of discriminations—as in color blindness—is relatively small. Most insensitivity occurs at the level of consciousness. The individual’s brain can discriminate, and does—but the mind takes no notice. Lots of people are unaware of color clashes when they dress, or when they look at other people’s costumes—but the fact that they’re consciously unaware doesn’t mean that they’re immune to the subtle effects of color that they’re registering physiologically. It really does make a psychological difference what colors you put on your bedroom walls, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. You really can be driven mad by creepy wallpaper. And you might not know, when you look at someone else’s outfit, what message it’s sending to your brain—but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t making a difference to your perception of them, and hence to your attitudes and your treatment of them. Power-dressing works, especially if it’s cleverly color-coordinated. Color matters, Mr. Jarndyke, in textiles as in everything else. Esthetics matter. Some people might not know exactly how or why they matter, and they might sneer at the people who can bring those things to the level of consciousness, but what we see and what we wear makes far more difference than insensitive people are able to see.”

Jarndyke seemed to be busy thinking about that, and thinking hard. Not wanting to let silence fall, Adrian added: “Your business sense and the inventive acumen of your reverse engineers have made you the most successful textile manufacturer in the world, Mr. Jarndyke. As you just said, in terms of efficiency of production and texture, your wools, silks and hybrids are near-perfect. In terms of the sense of touch, they’re practically unbeatable, but in terms of the sense of sight—especially color—they have a long way to go.”

“We’re supposed to be talking about you, Son, not me,” Jarndyke pointed out. “Personal reasons?”

“That’s right,” Adrian replied, gathering his courage. “Some people have perfect pitch—they can hear the music more clearly and more subtly than their fellows, because they can discriminate the notes more precisely. I have perfect color sensation— or, at least, far better color sensation than the vast majority of people. My retinas are first-rate in that respect, my brain too, but most importantly, I’m fully conscious of what they’re registering. I don’t say that there aren’t people in the world even more sensitive than I am, but I’m plenty good enough to do anything you need me to do.”

Jarndyke frowned at that. “I’ve told you, Son,” he said, “that you don’t need the sales pitch. I know you can make me money, with or without being able to see twice as many colors as the man in the street. I gather that you’ve had difficulty in the past convincing people that you really can see things they can’t?”

Adrian nodded. “Some people,” he admitted, “think I’m... well, bullshitting. Seeing is believing, they reckon, and if they can’t see something, they can’t believe in it.”

Jarndyke nodded slowly. “But you’ve met other people who can make the same discriminations?” he said.

“After a fashion,” Adrian admitted. “I’ve run into others who are better than average, but I’ve never actually met anyone with my degree of sensitivity—not in the flesh. I know they exist, though, because I can see it in their works. Claude Monet. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Caravaggio.”

“Painters.”

“That’s right. They’re probably not the only people who can reflect their perception in their work—some fashion designers can surely do it too—but painters are the most obvious.”

“Why didn’t you become a painter?”

The bluntness of the question surprised Adrian slightly, but he met it with his customary wry smile. “Because I can’t paint,” he said. “I can see, but I don’t have the hand-eye coordination that would allow me to reproduce what I see. I can visualize shapes very well, even in three dimensions, but I can’t reproduce them with my incompetent fingers and a pencil or a brush. I don’t even have the kind of design-control that would allow me to be an adept abstract expressionist, like Jackson Pollock. Sometimes, I think that I’m only half the person I might have been, with only half a talent, but I’m not entirely certain that the painters were that much luckier. After all, the number of people who can measure their true achievement—consciously, at any rate—is very small. Can I talk about textiles again now? I know I don’t need the sales pitch, but I really would like you to understand where I might fit in with your enterprise.”

Jarndyke frowned, and his mouth twisted into what might have been an expression of annoyance, but he nodded his shaggy head. “Go on,” he said.

“In the beginning,” Adrian said, “what I can do for you is help to produce a basic color range for your various fabrics. I’m a geneticist; I don’t expect to be involved in the tailoring end of your operation. I really am interested in the psychology of color as well as its genetics, though, and the way that the two intersect and interact. I’d like to do pure research in that area, for my own esthetic satisfaction—but I’d like it, too, if the results of that research had some practical application for you, and I think they might.