Shades of Grey

Boundary Patrol

“Right, then,” said Prefect Turquoise. “I want a good Boundary Patrol, but I don’t want any silly accidents. No straying beyond the boundary unless absolutely necessary, and under no circumstances farther than the Outer Markers. There hasn’t been a swan attack for six years, and no one’s seen any Riffraff for thirty—but I don’t want anyone to think this means we can afford to be complacent. Usual pairings, keep your eyes open, don’t startle any megafauna and be sure to check in at every phone booth. Mr. Lime has asked us to keep a careful eye on any rhododendrons creeping over the boundary—if you see any seedlings, pull them up. You know how invasive they are. Those walking Delta and Echo sectors will be dropped at Harmony by Mr. Fandango in the Ford and work their way back.

Russett, you’ll be with Doug in Foxtrot sector. Any questions?”

“Yes,” said a light Yellow. “Will we be back in time for breakfast? You know how the Greys always scoff the bacon in the first five minutes.”

“First come, first served,” said Turquoise. “That’s the Rule, irrespective of hue. If you don’t dawdle, perhaps you might finally get to taste bacon.”

“I heard it’s really good,” said someone farther down the line, a sentiment that everyone seemed to agree with.

Sixteen of us were standing outside the town hall. We were dressed in Outdoor Adventure #9s, and carried no spots. I’d had similar duties since I reached eligibility at age thirteen, so was acquainted enough with the procedure to know how boring it could be. Swans rarely came close to settlements, and Riffraff were far too canny to be surprised by a Boundary Patrol. Besides, if you talked loudly enough they’d hide anyway, and would become someone else’s problem.

There were no other questions, so each team was handed a copy of a much-thumbed procedures manual, which contained detailed descriptions of the various types of swan, lightning and Riffraff, together with their individual peril ratings and a checklist of what to do if they were spotted. Turquoise wished us all well, told us again not to stray beyond the boundary and to call from every checkpoint, then left us to it.

“How are you this morning, Eddie?” asked Doug, who had a ready smile and was significantly more pleasant than Tommo, if a mite less interesting. Doug looked as though he were wired to fit in; Tommo was wired wholly for himself.

I said I was well, even though I wasn’t. The Jane/Colorman whom-do-I-tell-on-whom question had not resolved itself. The safest course was actually the simplest—do nothing at all and hope everything turned out for the best. It wasn’t a great plan, but it had the benefits of simplicity and a long tradition.

Doug set off and I followed, away from the houses of still-sleeping residents and past the lumpy grasslands in the direction of the linoleum factory. We chatted on the way, mostly about family. The Crimsons were on their way down the Spectrum, but unlike the Russetts, who had fallen dramatically from high perception, the Crimsons seemed to be slowly losing their Redness—about 10 percent a generation.

“Are you seriously going to marry Violet?”

“I guess,” he said with a shrug. “I’d sooner not, of course, but Violet’s very difficult to refuse. When she suggested a half promise that was binding on me but not on her, I tried to tell her I was going to join the Keepers of the Long Swatch and devote my life to silent devotion of the hue, but it came out as ‘Thank you, Violet, that would be very nice.’ ” I told him about Constance, and we exchanged views on marrying up-Spectrum. I think I was more optimistic than he was, but then Constance didn’t sound quite as bad as Violet, who once screamed so loudly to get her own way that she shattered a trifle bowl in another room.

“Mind you,” continued Doug, “if I marry into the deMauves, I’ll never be short of pocket money and a cushy job at the factory. Perhaps I should just lie back and think of the linoleum.”

I would probably do the same thing—only with string.

“Doug,” I said, thinking about the Apocryphal man, “do you have any jam?”

“Of course.”

“Loganberry?”

He rolled his eyes.

“I wish. There’d be some in the deMauves’ cellar.”

“Would they sell any to me?”

He laughed, which I took to mean no.

We crossed the river in silence, walked past the factory and railway station and then headed out along the western road. Ahead of us a narrow valley opened up into the wood-covered heights of the Redstone Mountains. In between the hills I could see a large grey structure, and I pointed this out to Doug.

“It’s the five-part dam complex left behind by the Previous,” he explained. “It rained a lot round here, even then. It still feeds Blue Sector West by way of a seventy-three-mile-long aqueduct. So big you could once walk inside, but the lime scale is about a foot thick these days. You’d pass the dams on the way to High Saffron. Mostly silted up, now.”

After an abrupt right turn up a pathway, we arrived at the boundary. It was much like the one at Jade-under-Lime: simply an earthen dike thirty feet high, topped with a partially dilapidated stone wall and a deep ditch filled with clutching brambles. It was enough to halt a rhinosaurus or an elephant but wouldn’t stop a ground sloth or bouncing goat.

There was a phone booth on the village side of the boundary, which for sound colornomic reasons was painted grey rather than red. There was no door; only three panes of glass remained and soil creep had buried it to almost a quarter of its height. But the Bakelite telephone was still in good order, kept safe and dry under a domed cloche that would not have appeared out of place covering a cake.

Doug took off the cloche, dialed a number and reported where we were. Turquoise would be underground in the Plotting Room, where, for doubtless sound but unknown reasons, the team’s positions and progress could be marked on a large table painted with a map of the sub-Collective.

This done, Doug replaced the receiver and cloche, and we trudged on, the sun still low and the air cool and laden with dew. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of natural red in the countryside’s rich bounty. The birds, roused perhaps by our tramping boots, popped their heads out from under their wings and sang.

“I’d sing, too, if I could fly,” said Doug. “See over there? The Fallen Man.”

He was pointing at a low-walled enclosure just outside the boundary, on a flat piece of cleared ground overlooked by two large ginkgo trees and several rhododendron bushes that looked as though they were discussing invasion plans. I found a footpath, and trotted down for a closer look. The enclosure was perhaps forty feet in diameter, built to less than waist height. The iron gate had been saved from rusty oblivion by a timely coat of paint, but was no more substantial than a spider’s web. The grass within the enclosure was kept short and neat by the industrious work of a team of guinea pigs, which blinked at me from their burrows as I opened the gate. Inside was the Fallen Man: Like our lodger, he was something inexplicable in a world of carefully ordered absolutes, so what remained of him was kept exactly as it was, with nothing taken away and, aside from the wall and the guinea pigs, nothing added.

The chair and the man were lying flat on the ground, having landed sideways. Of the Fallen Man’s body, little remained. He had rotted long ago, and the weather had broken down the bones to crumbling white dust wherever they poked out of the finely nibbled grass. His heavy boots were still relatively complete, as were his helmet and other scraps of clothing, some of which were a faded red in color. The chair was not at all like the stuffed-leather variety portrayed in the sign outside the tearoom . It had been beautifully constructed of aluminum, brass and chrome and had once been painted, but the sun and rain had burnished the metal to a dull grey, and even though half-embedded in the soil and badly crumpled from the impact, the chair had not corroded appreciably.

“How long has he been here?”

“I remember being brought up here soon after he landed,” replied Doug after a moment’s thought. “That would have been about thirteen years ago.”

“Where did he come from?”

Doug shrugged and pointed straight upward, which was of little help.

“With all the unanswered questions kicking around,” he said, checking the time, “the arrival of a strange man strapped to a metal chair is of little significance.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “the bigger mystery is that no one seems eager to find out. What do you think?”

“If you’re buttering me up to join your Question Club,” said Doug with a smile, “you’re barking up the wrong tree. Knowing where the Fallen Man came from will not substantially alter our lives—and neither will finding out what the Something That Happened was, or even the name of Munsell’s seventh apostle and the Unrevealed Abomination.”

“Okay,” I said, “that’s the last time I mention it.”

We climbed back up to the footpath, and carried on in silence for the next half hour, following the contours of the valley until the earthen dike curved around to the south. We intersected the western road where it left the boundary through a large pair of sturdy wooden gates, and stopped to report in. There was another phone booth here, along with a rain shelter and a Faraday cage, conveniently located to protect travelers from lightning.

“You can make the call this time, Eddie.”

I removed the cloche, and rang Turquoise. I gave him our code and the number of the phone booth. He told me not to dawdle, and the line went dead.

“We’re about halfway around our sector,” said Doug, taking a drink of water, “and making good time.

Do you want to see something pretty amazing?”

“You’re not going to turn blue, are you?”

He laughed. “You saw that sideshow, too, did you? No. It won’t take long—just past the markers.”

He opened the gate, and we walked on the smooth Perpetulite toward the Outer Markers, which were nothing more than a series of wooden posts running at twenty-yard intervals parallel to the boundary, about five hundred yards farther out. They were decorated with scrap red to mark the village’s predominant persuasion, and were freshened every year as part of the Foundation Day celebrations. The Outer Markers were technically the edge of our world, but the strip between the boundary and the posts was traditionally a Tolerance Zone, in which one could disport oneself with a modicum of privacy and freedom. One could amble, think, talk, touch-dance, have an impromptu picnic, shout—even indulge in a cheeky bundle or matters more usually reserved for the wool store, as long as they’re conducted with all due discretion.

We arrived at the posts, and Doug pointed at the roadway with a grin. “What do you think of that?”

I’d often seen it happen to foliage, occasionally to small creatures, but never to something so large as a giraffe. The poor creature had chosen to drop dead on the roadway and the organoplastoid compound, rather than move it to one side, had elected to absorb it.

“There isn’t much tree cover on the road to Bleak Point,” explained Doug, “and the anti-rhododendron fires have damaged it quite badly; it’ll absorb pretty much anything it can get.”

The giraffe had been digested like leaf litter, and all that remained of it was a giraffe-shaped image in the smooth Perpetulite, the skeleton clearly visible with a subtle image of the giraffe’s reticulated hide across the top of it. The bones and teeth were breaking down, and the powdered white calcites were forming a sweeping trail toward the road markings.

“Amazing stuff, isn’t it?” said Doug. “It’s only taken six days. Come on, we’d best be getting oj.”

We walked back toward the gates, and I told Doug about the Inner Boundary near Viridian, which was another Perpetulite road, only ten times as broad as this one. Since it was hemmed in by concrete and isolated from any easy source of nutrients, the compound would aggressively absorb anything organic that happened to be unlucky enough to tread on the surface. It would take ratfinks, an unwary dog and even a bird with a speed that was quite frightening.

“It sounds really dangerous.”

I shrugged. “We’ve grown up with it. But because of this, the Inner Boundary really is a boundary. Only the very stupid or very brave would attempt to dash across, even with bronze-soled running shoes. But it’s not all bad,” I added, “for what keeps us out of the Great Southern Conurbation also keeps the Riffraff in. What’s that?”

I was pointing at a pair of leather boots sticking out of the grass under a gum tree, about midway between the boundary and the markers. It was unusual, because something so valuable would never be discarded, and it’s difficult to lose boots without realizing it. We walked over to investigate, only to discover that the boots were still being worn, and Travis Canary was the person still wearing them. It was not as though he would use them again, for he was quite dead—by lightning. Not by fork lightning, which usually leaves flash burns, but by ball lightning, which disfigures horribly. Most of his head had been burned away. But though partially eaten, he was still recognizable. The flies buzzed merrily about, and already his hands were puffy and shiny. He hadn’t even made it past the Outer Markers.

“This will really upset Mr. Turquoise,” said Doug, wrinkling his nose as the smell of decayed flesh wafted in the air toward us. “He hates paperwork.”

As soon as Doug had gone to make the call, I squatted down for a closer look. Despite the large quantity of time, energy and resources spent on lightning avoidance, this was the first victim I’d seen—if you don’t count the cautionary pictures published weekly in Spectrum.

Breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell, I peered into what remained of his head. It was badly burned inside, and looked far more dramatic than any of the lightning strikes I’d read about. Intrigued, I picked up a stick and gently probed the cranial cavity. I leaned closer, then delicately reached in and pulled out a fused lump of metal about the size of a chess piece. I stared at it for a moment, realized what it was and then quickly wrapped it in my pocket handkerchief. I then looked around, for I had seen Travis leaving the village carrying his overnight case. I couldn’t see it at first, but the puzzle was soon solved, for the Perpetulite roadway was close by and I found what I was looking for scattered along the bronze curb.

“What have you got?” asked Doug who had just returned.

“Look,” I said, pointing at the road, where there was still a case-shaped stain on the Perpetulite. “He must have dropped his valise on the roadway. The leather gets absorbed, but the indigestible stuff is moved to the verge.”

Doug bent down and sorted through the small collection. Aside from the case’s brass locks, hinges, rivets and name plate, there were several coins, his lime compact, a belt buckle, a can of sardines, part of a remote viewer with images of moving fish on it, several toy cars, a few nuts and bolts and two spoons—one engraved, the other not.

“What a waste,” exclaimed Turquoise, who arrived in the Ford with Carlos Fandango twenty minutes later. “If he was going to throw his life away, he might have done it in the name of exploration or achieving color scrap collection targets.”

And with a comment about how lethal ball lightning was, he made a few notes, took Travis’ boots, spoons, lime compact and cash, told us we could have anything else as a finders-keepers and then climbed back into the Ford.

“What are you waiting for?” remarked Turquoise as Fandango turned the Ford around. “Patrol continues, lads. Consider yourselves lucky I don’t demerit you for being outside the boundary.” Luckily for us, Boundary Patrol was completed without further drama. Unluckily for us, the delay caused by Travis meant the early land workers ate all the bacon after all. Turquoise was unsympathetic. “If you’d wanted to beat the Greys to the bacon,” he said, “you should have jusp left Travis for tomorrow’s patrol.” Doug agreed. After all, what was one more day to a dead body?

We divided up Travis’ possessions before we parted. Doug took the belt buckle, and I kept the pocketknife. Everything else we agreed to send to his relatives. They would doubtless want to have a few mementos, and to know what had become of him. I was planning to tell them it was a ball-lightning strike, even though it wasn’t. Travis had not been denied his full Civil Obligation by chance—it had been taken from him.