Shades of Grey

Around the Village

Once lunch was over I ambled off toward our house, hoping I might bump into the Colorman when he came home. I’d never met anyone from National Color who had deigned to speak to me before, and I wanted to try to milk the association for all it was worth.

“Master Edward?”

It was Stafford the porter, and he was holding a small envelope. It was a telegram from Constance, and it wasn’t good news.

TO EDWARD RUSSETT RG6 7GD ++ EAST CARMINE RSW ++ FROM CONSTANCE OXBLOOD SW3 6ZH ++ JADE UNDER LIME GSW ++ MSGE BEGINS ++ ONLY FAIR TO SAY MUMMY AND I BOTH THOUGHT YOUR POEM UTTER RUBBISH ++ ROGER HAS COMPOSED MUCH BETTER VIZ OPEN QUOTES GLEEFUL DARTING OF THE HOUSE MARTINS SPREADING JOY IN THE HEADY RITES OF SPRING CLOSE QUOTES ++ DO TRY HARDER ANGEL DONT WORRY ABOUT ME ROGER TAKING ME BOATING ++ YRS CONSTANCE ++ MSGE ENDS

I cursed and scrunched it up.

“Problems?” asked Stafford.

“You could say that. Roger can barely spell his own name, much less write poetry. That ‘gleeful darting of the house martins’ stuff sounds suspiciously like the work of Jade-under-Lime’s resident verse mercenary, Gerald Henna-Rose.”

Roger Maroon had decided to up the ante in my absence, so I would have to do likewise. I asked Stafford if there was anyone in the village who could write romantic poetry.

“But,” I added, “it’s got to be really good, and not too racy—Constance isn’t one for overtly rude metaphors, worse luck.”

“I think I know someone who might be able to help,” returned Stafford, “but it won’t come cheap. There are risks involved. You know how the prefects take a dim view of irresponsible levels of creative expression.”

“Five percent finder’s fee?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I pushed open our front door and checked the hall table to see if there were any messages. There was one from the persistent Dorian G-7 of the Mercury inviting me to give my account of the trip to Rusty Hill, several from Reds suggesting we become friends, and one from “the desk of Violet deMauve” reminding me of my obligations to the orchestra. There were several for my father, too, and Imogen Fandango’s spousal information pack. The scrapbook contained a studio photograph of Fandango’s daughter, who was, I had to admit, not unattractive in an upmarket perky-nose Purplish sort of way. Written testimonials were followed by a long list of her virtues, which numbered seventy-five. They began with a well-worded implication of her potentially high Ishihara rating, and ended with her wish to one day help represent East Carmine in the Jollity Fair unicycle relay. I put the details aside, and decided to wire Bertie Magenta first thing tomorrow morning. Fandango had been asking six thousand for Imogen, and a 2 percent finder’s fee would be one hundred and fifty—a useful addition to my dowry, in order to sway Constance from Roger and his perfidious use of proxy poets.

I walked upstairs to add Constance’s telegram to my collection. It was, in truth, a pretty feeble collection—less one of letters professing undying love than of letters requesting favors for one thing or another, or telling me how I should be more like Roger Maroon. I did actually consider burning it, but I was nothing if not dutiful with my filing, as Our Munsell had once noted that life is an anagram of file, and the relevance was pretty clear.

As I passed the door of the bathroom I noticed that it was swinging shut. It seemed odd, since there wasn’t a breath of wind either within the house or without. I paused in my stride, and the door stopped swinging. I was the only one in the house; I had even seen the Apocryphal man shouting at a drainpipe in the corner of the town square as I came in.

“Hello?”

There was no answer to my call, and I very gently pushed the door. It opened easily for six inches or so, then stopped. But it wasn’t as if it were pushing against a chair—it was the soft, yielding sensation of a hand. There was someone behind the door. I briefly thought it might be Jane, who had decided to perhaps kill me after all, but on reflection I decided that hiding behind the bathroom door with a hatchet or something was decidedly not her style.

“Who’s there?”

There was no answer, and then it struck me: It might be the Apocryphal man’s roommate, the one I had heard overhead.

“Do you live upstairs?” I asked, and whoever-it-was knocked once, for yes. I asked, “Can I see you?”

and heard two urgent raps, for no. I was just about to frame a more complex question when I heard someone trot up the stairs below. I thought it might be the Colorman or the Apocryphal man, but it wasn’t. It was Mr. Turquoise—the Blue prefect.

“Mr. Turquoise!” I said. “How do you do?”

I felt the bathroom door close slowly behind me.

“Good afternoon, Master Russett,” he said in a businesslike tone. “The front door was open, so I came straight in. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Good lad. How’s the chair census going?”

“I’ve yet to start.”

“Plenty of time. May I use the bathroom?”

He moved forward, but I stepped into his path. “No!”

“What?”

I had to think fast. Whatever the truth about our unseen lodger, it was something that would be best learned without any prefects getting involved.

“It’s . . . broken. Something to do with the cistern.”

He smiled. “I only want to wash my hands.”

“That’s broken, too.”

“Both broken?”

“Yes, sir. Must be the cold water supply.”

“Then I’ll use the hot.”

“Are wheelbarrows made of bronze?”

“What?”

“I was just wondering.”

He shook his head and pushed past me. The door opened easily, and Turquoise strode to the sink. I looked around the bathroom. The shower curtain, usually open, was drawn all around the bath, and I could see the faint outline of a figure within. Turquoise, however, didn’t.

“The cold is working, Russett.”

“Must have been a blockage.”

“Must have,” he said, drying his hands. “Now, then, I’m responsible for career advice, organized glee, employment rosters and allocation of Useful Work. Can we walk and talk? I’ve got to check the inertia racer for Leapback Compliance. Fandango wants to run it at the Red Sector Jollity Fair next month at Vermillion, and it reflects badly on the village if he turns up with something that gets busted by the scrutineers.”

I readily agreed, and we walked downstairs, out the front door and across the square.

“Here,” said Turquoise, showing me my carefully prepared timetable.

“Sally Gamboge has raised the Grey retirement age to the maximum allowable, and is currently running sixteen-hour days, but we’re still short a thousand person-hours a week, so the demands on Chromatic time are perhaps a little more than you might be used to. I daresay, in fact, that you might have to give up tennis or croquet, as there won’t be time enough to do both.”

“I quite understand the need for sacrifices, sir.”

“Good fellow. I’ve got you down for Boundary Patrol first thing tomorrow, lightning watch on Saturday, anti-drowning supervision Mondays and Wednesdays and a turn teaching the juniors—this afternoon, in fact. Can you do that?”

“I’ve not much experience of teaching, sir.”

“I shouldn’t worry—there isn’t much left to teach. Talk to them about the different sorts of chairs or something. By the way,” he added, “top marks on the Rusty Hill expedition. If you enjoyed laughing in the face of death, you might like to have a crack at High Saffron. One hundred merits, and all you have to do is take a look.”

“I understand there’s a one hundred percent fatality rate?”

“True. But up until the moment of death there was a one hundrerd percent survival rate. Really, I shouldn’t let anything as meaningless as statistics put you off.”

“I think I may have to pass.”

“Well,” he replied, mildly irked, “if you’re going to insist on being so negative, I suppose we could raise the consideration to two hundred.”

“No, thank you.”

“I’ll put you down as a ‘maybe.’ ” We had reached the racetrack, which was a large oval of perhaps a mile in length. Because horses were too valuable to risk on the track, the Collective had found alternatives to race at Jollity Fair race day.

Ostriches had been briefly fashionable, as had kudu and large dogs ridden by infants. Bicycles had been popular until the single-gearing Leapback had made the races considerably less than exciting. To circumvent this, some bright spark had resurrected the notion of the pre-Epiphanic “Penny Farthing,” no doubt named after its inventor. The direct pedal drive on the outsize front wheel gave the cycles a healthy top speed but also made them dangerously top-heavy. With Mildew the most prevalent cause of death by a long shot, someone dying on the racetrack was of considerable novelty, and much applauded.

One sport, however, had dominated the Jollity Fair race day for more years than anyone could remember, and despite prefectural disapproval and a series of Leapbacks that required a great deal of ingenuity to circumvent, the sport had yet to be banned entirely. It was Stored Energy Racing, and East Carmine’s entry was called the Redstone Flyer.

Like most inertia racers, it was configured with two wheels, similar to a bicycle only sturdier. Because it was driven by gyros and they were all powered up, the Flyer was balancing on its own two wheels, much like a train. The gyrobike had been elegantly streamlined within tightly faired bodywork that put me in mind of a salmon, and as I stared at the machine, it gave out a shudder that started small, escalated, then rattled the bike quite violently before calming down again.

“The gyros are going in and out of phase,” Carlos explained when Turquoise asked him what was wrong, “and when they do, they tussle with one another. Hello, Eddie. Did you get Imogen’s information pack?”

I told him I had, and he nodded agreeably, then placed a tuning fork on top of the gyro housings, presumably to gauge which one was out of kilter.

“So listen,” said Turquoise, squatting down to have a closer look at the machinery, but from his look of utter bewilderment he might as well have been staring at the entrails of a goat. “Just confirm for me that this whole thing is compliant, will you?”

“Absolutely,” said Fandango. “All the Everspins do is charge up the gyros—they’re disconnected when it’s racing. The farthest it’s ever gone on a single charge is four miles.”

“Didn’t understand a word,” he replied, “but if you say so, I’ll sign it off.”

And he did, appending his signature to a form that Fandango handed him.

“Right,” said Turquoise, walking off in the direction of the glasshouse, with me trailing behind as I suspected our conversation was not yet over. “Since you’ll be with us for your Ishihara, I have to open your employment file. Any particular leaning you have in mind?”

I said the first thing that came into my head.

“Violin making.”

“That’s for us Blues only, old chap.”

“Then how about string?”

“You’d have to marry into the Oxbloods for that,” he laughed. “Be serious now. Any other ideas?”

It wasn’t worth explaining about Constance, so I thought about the Colorman.

“I’d like to work for National Color, sir.”

“Hmm,” muttered Turquoise, ignoring me entirely and looking down the list of approved Red-related professions, “how about plumbing? The Collective always need plumbers. I’m sure you’ll find the water supply business a dynamic and stimulating environment in which to work.”

“With respect, I’d far prefer to have a shot at the National Color entrance exam.”

I told him about my shade of mustard winning “best runner-up,” but he wasn’t listening.

“Heating or water?” said Turquoise, scribbling a note and handing me a pamphlet. “I’ll speak to the village plumber for you to have an intro.”

By now we had reached the glasshouse, which was situated a little way outside the village. Turquoise pushed the heavy door open and we stepped inside. Outside it had been hot, but inside it was even hotter, and the air was damp and tasted of lily ponds. Like most glasshouses the building was huge—almost twice as big as the town hall and with a gently curved ceiling shaped like a half melon that was about a hundred feet at its highest point. When built, it had been made of glass panels fully ten feet by four, but natural wastage and the inability to build replacements meant the roof was now filled with repaired sections of leaded glass of varying densities and quality. It was quite pretty in a patchwork sort of way, and I suspect multicolored, as I could see a few red panels and I suspected that ours was not the only color used.

“How are the pineapples, Mr. Lime?”

The head gardener was working without his shirt but with a tie and collar, as befits the letter of the Rules.

He was stained with earth and had his spot affixed to a large floppy hat that was dark with sweat.

“Doing mighty fine, Mr. Turquoise,” replied the gardener affably. “The surplus will be colorized and shipped to Blue Sector North—you know how they go bananas over pineapples.”

Turquoise was taken on a brief tour of inspection, and I tagged along behind as we walked past rows and rows of fresh fruit and veg, all being attended by Greys, shiny with sweat in the heat. There had been an outbreak of clutching brambles that required prefectural approval to destroy, as any prehensile plants were classified as “partly animal” and thus subject to the Biodiversity Continuance Directive of the Munsell Bestiary.

“Absolute pests, they are,” said the head gardener. “I know they can be taught simple tricks, but cleaning glass or weeding has always evaded them.”

Turquoise filled out the extermination order and gave it to Mr. Lime, who thanked him and said he needed to show him something else.

We walked down the central aisle toward the unused fallow section of the glasshouse, which had turned into a jungle of date palms and a small grove of bamboo, from which several marmosets stared at us cheekily, munching on fruit.

“We’ve had a bit of a problem with these recently,” said the gardener, opening a jam jar and showing us a large white centipede about five inches long and thicker than a man’s thumb, “and we have no idea what they are.”

I glanced at the Taxa bar code on its back.

“Phylum: Arthropoda. Class: Chilopoda,” I murmured, and they both stared at me.

“I can read bar codes,” I explained. “I can tell you it’s a centipede, female, and about six thousand generations from being Taxa tagged—but nothing more than that.”

“A useful skill,” said Mr. Lime, who was impressed. “Then you concur it is unknown?”

“I do.”

The gardener wiped his brow with a filthy handkerchief.

“Yewberry says the same. But if it’s not listed in the Munsell Bestiary, it should officially be Apocrypha—but we can’t ignore it as it’s eating through everything. Any suggestions, Mr. Turquoise?”

The Blue prefect stared at the pest minutely, which squirmed in Mr. Lime’s hand and gave out a series of high-pitched squeaks in the key of F.

“Can you eat them?”

“We haven’t tried.”

“Get a Grey to volunteer. If they’re not palatable I can still define them as ‘farmed comestibles’ under Rule 2.3.23.12.220. We can then simply trap them, fry them and dump them. Or, if they are palatable, feed them to the Greys. It might make them leave some bacon for us.”

Mr. Lime nodded agreeably at this fine display of loopholery, upon which we said our farewells and passed out of the south side of the glasshouse to walk in the direction of the Waste Farm.

“Now,” said Turquoise, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, “activities. Sport and dancing are compulsory, of course—do you favor cricket or soccer?”

I told him I preferred cricket but denied my skill with the bat. Being able to actually see the naturally red ball gave an Alpha Red an edge. If you wanted to hide your bestowal, it was good practice to miss a few.

“And your favorite hoof?”

“We used to dance the lambada quite a lot in Jade-under-Lime.”

Turquoise looked shocked, even though it was a leg-pull. I’d never danced the lambada—not even by myself, in secret.

“Quite inappropriate, Master Russett. We are fox-trot and rhumba people in East Carmine. Tango is permitted on occasion, but only for approved couples and well out of sight of the juniors. How about pastimes? Beekeeping? Photography? Reenactment societies? Slug racing?”

“You can race slugs?”

“It’s quite popular out here in the Redstones. Since slugs are hardwired for strict territorial limitations accurate enough to keep them out of gardens, all you need do is log the bar code on a local slug and then release it outside Vermillion. First one back wins the pot.”

“That must take a while.”

“Decades, sometimes. A champion my father released eighteen years ago should be hitting the home stretch in about two years.”

“I had no idea slugs were so long-lived.”

“It’s not the original slug,” he explained. “The command string for territoriality descends through the offspring, so all we need do is read the Taxa numbers on the slugs as they come in—their heredity can be quickly established. It takes about four generations per mile, Mrs. Lapis Lazuli tells me. It could be done faster, but slugs are easily distracted. So, what shall I put you down for?”

“None of them hugely appeal, sir.”

“Listen here, Russett, I have to put you down for something.”

“The Photography Society, then. But under Rule 1.1.01.23.555 I’d like to form my own association for the social advancement of the Collective.”

“I see,” Turquoise said suspiciously. He knew 1.1.01.23.555 well enough. It was one of the loopholes that had been serially abused over the years. “And just what would this association do?”

I thought of Jane wanting me to remain curious as a smokescreen for her own activities. “A Question Club.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “Horses? No problem. Everyone likes horses. Especially horses. Horses like horses most of all.”

“No, no, not Equestrian Club—a Question Club.”

“There’s already a Question Club,” he said. “It’s called the Debating Society. There’s a meeting this evening, isn’t there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Frightful waste of time. An hour spent on the jigsaw puzzle would be an hour much better spent. If we don’t get a move on, we’ll not see the puzzle finished in our lifetime, and I must confess I’d rather like to know what the puzzle actually depicts before they wheel me into the Green Room.”

We had arrived at the Waste Farm, which for drainage purposes was always lower than the rest of the village. We found the chief-of-works next to one of the off-rotation settling tanks that was being scraped clean. He was a middle-aged man who was short, had a weather-worn face and whistled when he spoke, owing to a missing tooth that for some reason had failed to grow back. Like most of those versed in the arcane recycling arts, he was highly eccentric. He wore a bowler hat and insisted on a three-piece suit with a gardenia in his buttonhole. He wore no spot or gave any hint of Chromatic Hierarchy, which didn’t help me know whether I should talk up or down to him.

“Hullo!” said the chief-of-works, who gave his name only as Nigel. “I heard you had a spot of bother with a tree this morning.”

“You could say that.”

“Don’t feel bad by being outsmarted by a vegetable. You’re not anyone until you’ve been wandering in the forest whistling a merry tune, only to find yourself suddenly hauled in the air by your ankle and dumped in ninety gallons of partially digested kudu. I know I have.”

I looked around.

“The farm doesn’t smell half as bad as I thought it would.”

“The very idea!” exclaimed Nigel. “All the pits are sealed. If you can smell something it means we’re not doing our jobs properly. But listen, if you want to know how bad it can smell, come and poke your nose in the rendering sheds.”

Turquoise stayed in the office to check that the 87.2 percent recycling target was being met, and Nigel escorted me past the methane solidifiers to a brick building where the hot air was heavy with the pungent smell of heated offal. Despite the rudimentary exterior of the shed, the interior was scrubbed and tidy, the steel equipment all polished to a high shine. The concrete floor looked as though it was frequently hosed, and two of the plant’s workers were feeding chunks of animal waste into a shredder that was driven by an Everspin. The combined kettle and press were to one side, and a gloopy substance—yellow, apparently—was slowly dripping into a bucket as the machine heated and folded the waste to remove the fat.

I covered my mouth and nose with my handkerchief.

“It’s actually more skilled than you think,” said Nigel with a smile. “The renderers get paid extra when they have to deal with a villager—which is stupid, really, since it’s only something we walk around in.

Mind you, I’m not entirely without feeling. I excuse them rendering duty if it was a friend or family member.”

I almost gagged at the foul smell and staggered outside.

“Not for the squeamish, eh?” said Nigel as he followed me out. “We’ve got a backlog at present—we’ve been working our way through an elephant that dropped dead fortuitously just inside the Outer Markers.”

“An elephant? I heard they weren’t worth troubling with—low-quality tallow and whatnot.”

Nigel leaned closer.

“It’s the targets,” he said with a grin. “An elephant really boosts the figures.”

Once Turquoise had signed off on the pachyderm-assisted target and calculated the monthly bonuses, we struck out from the Waste Farm and into the open fields, where expansive fields of wheat were gently rolling in the breeze.

“What were we talking about?” asked Turquoise.

“I was requesting a Question Club, sir.”

“Oh, yes. And I was telling you we already have one—the Debating Society.”

“The debating society is restricted to the Chromogentsia,” I pointed out. “I want a club where anyone can ask questions.”

He stared at me suspiciously.

“What sort of questions?”

“Unanswered questions.”

“Edward, Edward,” he said with a patronizing smile, “there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can’t find the correct answer, then you are obviously asking the wrong question.”

This was an interesting approach, and initially I could think of no good answer. We were walking along a track that was in a slight dip, and all that could be seen of the village was the flak tower with the lightning lure on top of it. It seemed a good point to raise.

“What were flak towers used for?”

“It’s a nonquestion. The intractable ways of the Previous are best forgotten. Their ways are not our ways. Before, there was material imbalance and a wholly destructive level of self. Now there is only the simple purity of Chromatic Hierarchy.”

“And why does that forbid anyone from making any more spoons?”

Turquoise’s face fell. It was a thorny question that had been hotly debated for years. It seemed that spoons had been omitted from the list of approved manufactured goods as proscribed in Annex VI of the Rules, and the more daring debaters had suggested it might be an error in the Word of Munsell—proof of fallibility.

“You pseudo-rationalists always drag up the spoon issue, don’t you? Our Munsell works in mysterious ways. Top Chromatologians have thought long and hard over the spoon question, and have come to the conclusion that, since the Word of Munsell is infallible, there must be some greater plan to which we are not yet privy.”

“What plan could there be for not having enough spoons?”

“This is precisely why the Debating Society is open only to the Chromogentsia,” he said in an exasperated tone. “Open discussion leads to the mistaken belief that curiosity is somehow desirable.

Munsell tells us over and over again that inquisitiveness is simply the first step on a rocky road that leads to disharmony and ruin. Besides,” he added, “asking a poor question gives it undeserved relevance, and attempting to answer a bad question is a waste of spirit. The question you should be asking yourself is: How can I discharge my Civil Obligation most efficiently to improve the smooth running of the Collective? And the answer to that is: Not wasting a prefect’s valuable time with spurious suggestions for associations.”

He stared at me, but not in a bad way—I think he was secretly enjoying the discussion as much as I was.

We had arrived at the circular head of a tosh pit, brick built and protruding three feet from the ground.

The wooden cover was off, and two Greys were on duty—one with a polished bronze mirror on a stand to reflect the sun’s rays down the mine to the workers below, and another who held a rope, presumably to haul dirt and scrap color to the surface. Beside them was a cart, half-filled with damp black soil, while laid out on trestle tables close by was low-quality rubbish, ready for sorting.

“Good morning, Terry,” said Turquoise.

“Sir.”

“Anything to report?”

“Not much this morning, sir. Jimmy found what he thought was a car at vector 65-32-420, but it was only a front wing.”

“That’s annoying,” said Turquoise, running an eye over the tosh. I could see that little of it was red, and by the look of the prefect’s demeanor, not much blue, either.

“Better get it down to the Pavilion as soon as you can—the Colorman wants to have an inspection tomorrow.”

The Grey nodded and we walked away.

“We had a tosh-pit collapse last week that almost cost us a first-class miner,” said Turquoise. “We’re all about colored out. Another good reason for you to go to High Saffron for a look-see. What about two hundred and fifty merits?”

“I’ll consider it,” I said, actually meaning I’d do no such thing. “And my Question Club?”

“Very well,” replied Turquoise through gritted teeth, since, according to the Rules, he couldn’t refuse.

“Consider your association formed. We will allocate you a slot within the prescribed time frame.”

He stared at me for a moment.

“Just because you can pull wool, Russett, it doesn’t follow that you should. With the leadership of an association comes responsibility, something I trust we will not see abused.”

I told him I would do no such thing, and asked to be excused if he was done with me, which he was. I’d just noticed a figure a few fields off with a camera on a tripod, and this could only be Dorian—he had requested an interview from me for the Mercury.