Golden Fleece

I hate Aaron Rossman’s eyes. If a person is alone in a room, I normally recognize to whom I am talking by the four-digit hexadecimal ID code broadcast by his or her medical implant. However, in a crowded room in which many people are talking at once (and, therefore, many show the physiological signs that accompany speech), I often have to visually identify whom the speaker is. Of course, I use a sophisticated pattern-recognition system to identify faces. But humans change their faces so frequently: not just twists of expression, but also beards and mustaches added and removed; new hair styles; new hair colors; through chemical treatments or tinted contact lenses, new eye colors. To deal with this, I maintain a person-object in memory for each crew member. A recognition routine kicks in each time I focus on a face. It updates the object for that individual, reflecting current conditions. Rossman was easy, as far as most things were concerned. In the time that I had known him he was always clean-shaven and he wore his hair short, at a length about two years behind the fashion with men his age in Toronto when we’d left. Its color never varied, and, indeed, so few adults had sand-colored hair that I’m not surprised he was content to leave it its natural shade. Besides, he should enjoy it while he can: a quick look at his DNA tells me it will begin to gray in about six years—around the time we will arrive at Colchis. He should retain a full head of hair throughout his life though.

But his eyes, his eyes, those damnable eyes: were they green? Yes, to an extent, and under certain lighting conditions. Or blue? That, too, again varying with the ambient illumination. And brown? Certainly there were chestnut streaks in his irises. And yellow. And ocher. And gray. My recognition routine kept bouncing back and forth in its determination, often several times during a session, irritatingly updating the eye-color attribute of the person-object. I’ve had this problem with no one else on board, and I find myself staring into those eyes, searching, looking, wondering.

I’ve done a full literature search about human eyes. In fiction, especially, there are constant references to the eyes as a source of insight into a person’s character, an individual’s state of mind. “Amusement lurked in his eyes.” “Hard, brown orbs, full of fury, of hatred, of resolve.” “Doe-eyed innocence.” “An invitation in the smoldering depths of her eyes.” “Her eyes were naked with hurt.”

When they cry, yes, I can see that. When their eyes go wide with astonishment—which almost never happens, no matter how astonished they really are—that, too, is plain. But these ineffable qualities, these brief insights that they claim to see there … I have devoted much time to trying to correlate movement, blink rate, pupil aperture size, and so on, with any emotion, but so far, nothing. What one human reads so easily in the eyes of another eludes me.

Aaron was particularly hard to interpret, both by me and by his peers. They, too, spent great amounts of time scanning his multicolored orbs, plumbing their depths, looking for an insight, a revelation. I stared at his eyes now, wet balls of jelly with lenses and irises and light receptors—like my cameras, but smaller. Smaller and, supposedly, less efficient. But those biological eyes, those products of random chance and mutation and adaptation, those fallible, fragile spheres, saw nuances and subtleties and meanings that evaded my carefully designed and engineered and fabricated counterparts.

Right now, his eyes were focused on a monitor screen, watching the opening credits for the 1500 hours’ newscast of the Argo Communications Network. This was the major ’cast of the day. When the network had begun, the big newscast was at 1800, the dinner hour. But this had proven to be a pointless holdover from the commuter culture that ran Earth. The ’cast had been moved earlier in the day so that the journalists could better enjoy their evenings. Since not much happened on board, it seemed reasonable enough.

Aaron sat on a couch in his apartment with his arm around Kirsten. He watched the news; I watched his eyes.

I had the honor of narrating the opening credits, generating the correct date stamp automatically. “Good afternoon,” said my voice, under the control of some insignificant parallel processor, “this is the Starcology News for Tuesday, October 7, 2177. And now, here’s your anchorperson, Klaus Koenig.”

Koenig had been a sportscaster in a small Nebraska town before the mission. Although suitably glib for such a job, it was his work with handicapped children that had caused us to select him as an argonaut. His face, pockmarked like a relief map of Earth’s moon, filled the screen.