Shades of Grey

Arguments over Dinner

We walked through to the dining room, but the Apocryphal man had beaten us to the table and upset Mrs. Ochre’s carefully thought-out place settings. After a few moments of consternation, she announced that the Apocryphal man’s place was “to be left empty as a token of respect for lost friends,” and pretty soon everyone was rejiggered to Mrs. Ochre’s satisfaction.

Naturally enough, Lucy and I were expected to wait table and did not have place settings. Interestingly, I noted, Sally Gamboge had been put next to my father.

“The Rusty Hill expedition was a huge success,” she said in a strained manner, “and I believe the sniffles is clearing up. Congratulations.”

Dad returned the compliment graciously.

“So!” said Mrs. Ochre. “Before we start our meal, I should first offer a toast to absent friends who are unable to attend this meeting. By this I mean our recently departed father and husband, Robin Ochre, who is missed”—she stopped here as her voice cracked, and I felt Lucy tense—“most terribly. We should also not forget Travis Canary, a member of the Collective lost last night, who will no more enjoy the simple pleasures of relentless toil, nor the buzz of comradeship that makes the Collective so special.

On the positive side, I would like to welcome the new swatchman, Mr. Russett, and his son, Edward.

We hope and trust they will enjoy their stay here.”

She held her glass up, and everyone murmured “Apart We Are Together” before Lucy gave a small reading from Munsell’s Harmony. Once that was done, she and I laid out the first course, which was colorized mock-prawn cocktail.

By the time the food was served and Mrs. Ochre suggested that everyone start, the Apocryphal man had already finished and had made a start on his neighbor’s.

“Well,” said Mrs. Ochre, once everyone had tried the starter and exclaimed not only how wonderfully average it was, but how delightfully pink, “last month we discussed a possible reason why metal corrosion was such a huge problem to the Previous, and a possible theory that might have explained ball lightning, but didn’t. For our first talk this evening, Mrs. Crimson will give one entitled—what’s the title again, dear?”

Mrs. Crimson stood up. “I call this talk ‘Forgotten Eponyms and the Etymology of Capitalized Nouns.’ ” Everyone’s eyes swiveled to Mrs. Gamboge to gauge her reaction. Discussion was meant to be unfettered, but it was generally best to have prefectural approval. Gamboge, however, said nothing, and simply made a note in what must have been light yellow ink in her notebook—to us, it didn’t appear as though she had written anything at all.

“How many of you,” began Mrs. Crimson, “have ever wondered why the following words are capitalized: Morse code, eggs Benedict, Ottoman, Faraday cage and fettuccine Alfredo?”

They all shook their heads. They hadn’t really thought about it. In fact, I hadn’t really thought about it.

“I will argue,” she continued, “that their origin may be in the person who coined them, or were involved in their discovery.”

“How can you discover eggs Benedict?” said Mrs. Gamboge with a snort. “Next you’ll be telling me Battenberg was discovered by someone named Battenberg.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Crimson, giving her a baleful stare, “that’s exactly what I contend.”

Mrs. Crimson gave a spirited talk that, while skirting controversy by the avoidance of proof, did offer a tantalizing glimpse of life before the deFacting: a rich world full of interest, and what’s more, meaning.

The conversation turned to the subject of High Saffron after that, and how the town was wholly untouched since the Something That Happened and would have a rich seam of colored waste just ready to be teased out of the soil. Mrs. Lapis Lazuli contended that there was a library there, too, of great antiquity, stocked with books long since confined to the Leapback list. Mrs. Gamboge replied that this was just the sort of “fanciful nonsense” that librarians are apt to speak, and professed her opinion that if it weren’t for the Rules, she would long ago have relocated Lapis Lazuli’s band of librarians to “somewhere they might benefit the community,” an opinion that caused Mrs. Lapis Lazuli to go so red with anger that I think even the Ochres noticed. Mr. Crimson defused the situation by telling us about the picked-clean village of Great Auburn and how, in order to flush the color from the soil, high-pressure water hoses had been used; although damaging to the ground, the hoses were by far the most time-efficient method of extraction. He was just getting to the difficulties of transportation when the night bell sounded. And with a fizz and a flicker, Fandango struck the arc outside. A fresh white light shone through the large windows, and the Luxfer panels above the sash projected their angular-patterned light upon the ceiling.

Lucy and I cleared the table and returned with the main course. After a discussion regarding the intractability of finding a way around the Spoon Question and a discourse on the unhelpfully random nature of pre-Epiphanic family names, Mrs. Ochre asked if anyone had come across anything “odd” in the past month that they wished to bring to the society’s attention.

“May I speak?” I asked, and when no one objected, I produced Dorian’s picture of the village taken at night. I passed it to my father, who studied it closely before he passed it on.

“This picture was taken a few weeks ago,” I explained. “Dorian G-7 accidentally left the camera shutter open all night and photographed these strange concentric light rings in the sky. Does anyone have any idea what they are?”

Dad passed the photograph to the Widow deMauve, who passed it to Mrs. Gamboge, who made another invisible yellow-ink note before handing it on. Mrs. Lapis Lazuli stared at it for some time and even traced the path of one of the lines with her finger. “They are not full rings,” she observed. “They are simply a series of interlocking arcs, all moving around a central point.”

She gave the photograph to Mrs. Lemon-Skye. “I would suspect that it is either a hoax,” she said, passing it on, “or a fault in manufacturing.”

“I don’t think so,” said her husband. “You can clearly see the lines falling behind the silhouette of the crackletrap.” He looked closer. “There are other lines, too—wispy ones, crisscrossing the circles.”

“Not circles,” corrected Mrs. Lapis Lazuli, “arcs.”

“Arcs, then—but for what purpose?”

“Circles in the sky we cannot see?” remarked Sally Gamboge, whose eagerness to believe nonsense about Riffraff did not leave much space in her head for objectivity. “I have never heard of anything more ridiculous.”

“Cats and Nocturnal Biting Animals can see on a moonless night,” observed Lucy, “so there must be some light, and from some where.”

“You are all mistaken,” said the Apocryphal man. “They are distant suns.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. We all wanted to know what he meant, but no one dared even acknowledge him.

“It’s of . . . distant suns,” said Granny Crimson, who was now staring at the picture intently. Everyone looked at one another, but no one challenged her on the impiety. Not even Sally Gamboge. We were all too curious.

“And could you tell us more?” asked my father.

“I’m not sure,” said Mrs. Crimson doubtfully, looking surreptitiously at the Apocryphal man.

“Distant suns,” repeated the Apocryphal man, “very like our own, but at such an immeasurable distance from the earth that they appear only as points of light, too dim for the Homo coloribus eye to see.”

“Suns,” repeated Granny Crimson, so all could legally reflect upon the Apocryphal man’s words, “too far away to be seen . . . points of light.”

“Stars?” murmured Lucy. The obsolete word sounded ancient to our ears. But we all murmured our understanding. We’d heard about them but hadn’t considered that we would ever be able to observe them in any meaningful way. Like the Pyramids, the Great Sweat, Chuck Naurice, Tariq Al-Simpson, M’Donna and the Rainbowsians, we all knew they had once existed, but there was no record, or proof—they were now just labels on lost memories, cascading down the years from resident to resident, echoes of lost knowledge.

“But these are not points of light,” observed Aubrey. “They’re circles.”

“Arcs,” repeated Mrs. Lapis Lazuli. “Let’s just stick to the facts, eh?”

“They move,” said the Apocryphal man, “and describe a circular motion in the night sky. What you see is not a moment in time, but seven hours of time, seen as one.”

Granny Crimson repeated what he had said, word for word.

There was another silence as we all took this in, and I felt a thrill of discovery, of gained intelligence. But there was something else, too: an overwhelming sense of inconsolable loss. Progressive Leapbacks had stripped so much knowledge from the Collective that we were now not only ignorant, but had no idea how ignorant. The moving stars in the night sky were only one small part of a greater understanding that had gone for good. And as I stood there frowning to myself, I had a sense that everything about the Collective was utterly and completely wrong. We should be dedicating our lives to gaining knowledge, not to losing it.

“But why do the stars move?” asked Mrs. Crimson.

“They don’t.”

“They don’t,” repeated Granny Crimson.

“But you said—”

“We move,” remarked Lucy with a flash of understanding. “The earth rotates about its axis once a day. If you think about it, our own sun also describes a circle about us.”

I saw the Apocryphal man nod his head agreeably, and everyone went silent, pondering the notion carefully.

“I must say I find this extremely far-fetched,” said Mrs. Gamboge, who was doubtless miffed that we were debating anything at all. “It is well known that mental incapacity places Granny Crimson not a week from Variant-G. Besides, what you are saying cannot be true, for there is a single point, right in the middle of the rings, which does not move at all.”

“Arcs,” said Mrs. Lapis Lazuli.

“I suggest,” replied Granny Crimson, once the Apocryphal man had spoken, “that it is a distant star perfectly aligned with the rotating axis of the earth.”

We all fell into a hushed silence. The Apocryphal man spoke self-evident truths with such clarity that we all felt humbled. But my father put it best. He looked straight at Granny Crimson and said, “I have been to Debating Society meetings for over twenty years. In all that time I have listened to nothing but poorly reasoned theories and weakly argued supposition. Tonight, we have listened to true knowledge.”

“I’ll get the rice pudding,” said Mrs. Ochre, and hurried from the room.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Lemon-Skye, addressing the Apocryphal man but looking at Granny Crimson, “you might bring your keen intellect to bear on another intractable puzzle that has confounded our weekly gathering for some years?”

The Apocryphal man made no sound, but Aubrey didn’t get to ask his question, for Lucy interrupted to pose one of her own. “What is the music of the spheres?”

The Apocryphal man stared at her for a long time, then, with great deliberation, said, “Once, music was everything. It answered all problems, fulfilled all needs. It powered industry, transport, entertainment. It delivered comfort and light, information, books, communications and death. It could even bring . . . music.”

He then yawned as though tired of the proceedings. He took out a pocket handkerchief, filled it with food and walked out of the room.

Before Granny Crimson had even finished repeating his answer, Aubrey Lemon-Skye let his feelings be known. “Well, thank you very much,” he said sarcastically to Lucy. “There I am, about to ask the timeless riddle about why apples float and pears sink, and you go and annoy him—sorry, her, with your silly harmonic pathways, which, might I say, are of questionable relevance. Music bringing music?

Ridiculous!”

There was a sharp intake of breath at Aubrey’s rudeness. He had almost—but not quite—raised his voice.

Lucy stared back at him, hot with indignation. “Their relevance might be in doubt, sir,” she replied with a thin veneer of cordiality, “but compared to your question, they are raised to a level of unprecedented profundity.” She was talking heavily out of hue—Crimson was higher and redder than she—but we were all guests in the Ochre house, so her conduct, while unacceptable, was not technically actionable.

“And I say it is all poppycock and fiddle-faddle,” announced Mrs. Gamboge, who obviously felt she didn’t have to guard her language at all, an opinion embraced by Granny Crimson, who declared that Lucy’s interest in the supernatural was “the milk shake of the indolent.” She probably wouldn’t have said it if Mrs. Ochre was in the room, and I could sense that Lucy and her talk of harmonic pathways had gotten up everyone’s noses several times in the past.

Lucy said nothing but quietly stood up, took a lead ball and a length of thin steel wire from her pocket and, after fetching a thumbtack from the bureau, attached the pendulum to the top of the door frame, set it swinging and then returned to her seat.

“And what is that supposed to prove?” asked Aubrey, just as Mrs. Ochre brought in the rice pudding I had made, plus her own treacle sponge and custard “just in case.”

“Have I missed something?” asked Mrs. Ochre, since Aubrey’s rudeness toward Lucy had caused something of a silence to descend on the room, and we were all staring at the pendulum with mild embarrassment, for it would reflect badly on Lucy when it did what pendulums do, which was to stop.

“Your daughter is demonstrating her theory of harmonics,” said my father, and after Mrs. Ochre had said, “Fancy that!” we concentrated on the dessert, and the conversation turned to approximating the migration cruising altitude of the species Cygnus giganticus, and a reason why they seemed to constantly fly in large figure-eight patterns.

“Sometimes they are so high they barely look like swans at all,” remarked Mrs. Crimson.

The talk didn’t stay on swans for long, however, as everyone’s attention turned back to the lead ball, which had not slowed and stopped, as one would expect from a pendulum of less than a foot in length, but seemed to be increasing.

“How curious!” remarked Mr. Crimson, echoing our thoughts perfectly.

As we watched, the pendulum increased its swing until the lead ball came into contact with the underneath of the door frame with a sharp snock, swiftly followed by another as the ball struck the other side. From then on the swing increased ever more dramatically, and within a minute the wire was invisible, the lead ball a semicircular blur and the noise a sharp staccato of sound that increased in volume until it was a continuous howl and several of the diners leaned back in alarm.

As the wood on the door frame began to splinter with the constant hammering, the wire suddenly broke and the lead ball shot off, bounced on the sideboard, shattered a tumbler in front of Mrs. Lapis Lazuli and then vanished out the window, leaving an almost perfect hole in the glass.

Lucy said nothing, for there was little to be said. Aubrey gamely said that he would pay for the damage, which was about as good an apology as one might expect from someone born a Yellow.

“Before you ask,” said Lucy, “I have no idea why it works. But it does.”

“It’s the motive power behind the Everspins,” I mused, building on the Apocryphal man’s contention that to the Previous, music was everything, “and probably runs the lightglobes, too.”

“How does it do it?” asked Mrs. Crimson, which was a question no one even attempted to answer.

“I think maybe there’s a huge tuning fork somewhere,” suggested Lucy, “or a network of them, and they resonate together in harmony, each feeding off the other, sending vibrations through the air around us.”

“And still humming after five centuries?” observed my father. “It must be a very large tuning fork indeed.”

“Enormous,” remarked Lucy in a quiet voice.

The table lapsed into silence as we considered all manner of things that up until now had no simple explanation. The hot-water elements in boilers, for one, which went scaldingly hot twice a day for an hour, and pre-Epiphanic window glass, which buzzed itself clean at midday.

“Furthermore,” said Lucy as a final comment, “I’ve noticed that in an area of strong harmonics, a floatie will rise a good two or three extra inches—thus suggesting a link between music and gravity.”

We ate our pudding in silence following these dramatic revelations, and after lemon tea Mrs. Lapis Lazuli gave a talk on her lifetime’s research into bar codes, which, although carefully studied and diligently argued, was long on theory and short on facts. She had decoded seven of the known thirty-one variants, yet had been unable to explain exactly what benefit bar codes held over numbers, nor why almost everything tended to have them. Not just all the pre-Epiphanic artifacture but almost everything else, too—from Perpetulite to oaks, yateveos, slugs, fruit flies, mice, root vegetables, rhinosauruses—even us, with something similar to a bar code growing out of our left-hand nail beds. Her favored theory was that the Previous performed periodic stock-takes and needed to know not only where all the stuff was but how much there was of it. This seemed likely, as the Previous were renowned for their desire to count things in order to control them. She also noted that some things had partial or “vestigial” codes, like the now-unreadable smudges on the necks of donkeys, and that a few things had no trace of a bar code at all: most notably bats, apples, bar codes themselves and rhododendrons. She was given a round of applause at the end, and she thanked us all modestly, giving credit to her librarians, who had so ably assisted her in the research.

The rest of the evening was spent less in debating and more in general chitchat, and by the time the evening was out, and the lime had been passed round and peeked with enthusiasm, everyone was the best of acquaintances. Even Sally Gamboge was faintly acceptable, and she even made a joke about the shriveled toe that Bunty had found in her pinafore pocket.

I got home an hour before lights-out. Dad told me to go ahead, as he would be helping Mrs. Ochre tidy up. The streetlamp went out less than twenty minutes after I had got into bed, and I listened to the Morse chatter on the radiators for a while. It was mostly about the possibility of connection to the grid, the presence of the Colorman and who would be stupid or daring enough to volunteer for the High Saffron expedition. There was even talk about me and my attempt to rescue Travis the previous evening. The opinions ran from “insane” to “brave” to “I think he’s got a cute bottom.”

Across the top of the chat, the nightly serialized book was being tapped out by Mrs. Lapis Lazuli. And now that I knew it was she, I could hear the mild tremor in her hand. I listened to Renfrew for a while before falling asleep, thinking about whether I should tell the Colorman about Jane, or Jane about the Colorman, and whether starting a Question Club was a good idea. I also thought about the wisdom of advanced queuing theory, and, of course, the wheelbarrow.