Shades of Grey (2 page)

“You,” said the Green woman, pointing her spoon at me in an exceptionally rude manner, “fetch me some marmalade.”

I dutifully complied. The Green woman’s bossy attitude was not atypical. We were three notches lower in the Chromatic scale, which officially meant we were subservient. But although lower in the Order, we were still Prime within the long-established Red-Yellow-Blue Color Model, and a Red would always have a place in the village Council, something the Greens, with their bastard Blue-Yellow status could never do. It irritated them wonderfully. Unlike the dopey Oranges, who accepted their lot with a cheery, self-effacing good humor, Greens never managed to rise above the feeling that no one took them seriously enough. The reason for this was simple: They had the color of the natural world almost exclusively to themselves, and felt that the scope of their sight-gift should reflect their importance within the Collective. Only the Blues could even
begin
to compete with this uneven share of the Spectrum, as they owned the sky, but this was a claim based mainly on surface area rather than a variety of shades, and when it was overcast, they didn’t even have that.

But if I thought she was ordering me about solely due to my hue, I was mistaken. I was wearing a
NEEDS HUMILITY
badge below my Red Spot. It related to an incident with the head prefect’s son, and I was compelled to wear it for a week. If the Green woman had been more reasonable, she would have excused me the errand due to the prestigious
1,000 MERITS
badge that I also wore. Perhaps she didn’t care. Perhaps she just wanted the marmalade.

I fetched the jar from the sideboard, gave it to the Green, nodded respectfully, then returned to the postcard I was writing. It was of Vermillion’s old stone bridge and had been given a light blue wash in the sky for five cents extra. I could have paid ten and had one with greened grass, too, but this was for my potential fiancée, Constance Oxblood, and she considered overcolorization somewhat vulgar. The Oxbloods were strictly old-color and preferred muted tones of paint wherever possible, even though they could have afforded to decorate their house to the highest chroma. Actually, much to them was vulgar, and that included the Russetts, whom they regarded as
nouveau couleur.
Hence my status as “potential fiancé.” Dad had negotiated what we called a “half promise,” which meant I was first-optioned to Constance. The agreement fell short of being reciprocal, but it was a good deal—a concession that, despite being a Russett and three generations from Grey, I
might
be able to see a goodly amount of red, so couldn’t be ignored completely.

“Writing to Fish-face already?” asked my father with a smile. “Her memory’s not
that
bad.”

“True,” I conceded, “but despite her name, constancy is possibly her least well-defined attribute.”

“Ah. Roger Maroon still sniffing about?”

“As flies to stinkwort. And you mustn’t call her Fish-face.”

“More butter,” remarked the Green woman, “and don’t dawdle this time.”

 

We finished breakfast and, after some last-minute packing, descended to the reception desk, where Dad instructed the porter to have our suitcases delivered to the station.

“Beautiful day,” said the manager as we paid the bill. He was a thin man with a finely shaped nose and one ear. The loss of an ear was not unusual, as they could be torn off annoyingly easily, but what
was
unusual was that he’d not troubled to have it stitched back on, a relatively straightforward procedure. More interesting, he wore his Blue Spot high up on his lapel. It was an unofficial but broadly accepted signal that he knew how to “fix” things, for a fee. We’d had crayfish for dinner the night before, and he hadn’t punched it out of ration books. It had cost us an extra half merit, covertly wrapped in a napkin.

“Every day is a beautiful day,” replied my father in a cheery manner.

“Indeed they are,” the manager countered genially. After we had exchanged feedback—on the hotel for being clean and moderately comfortable, and on us, for not bringing shame to the establishment by poor table manners or talking loudly in public areas—he asked, “Do you travel far this morning?”

“We’re going to East Carmine.”

The Blue’s manner changed abruptly. He gave us an odd look, handed back our merit books and wished us a joyously uneventful future before swiftly moving to attend someone else. So we tipped the porter, reiterated the time of our train and headed off to the first item on our itinerary.

 

“Hmm,” said my father, staring at the Badly Drawn Map once we had donated our ten cents and shuffled inside the shabby yet clean map-house, “I can’t make head nor tail of this.”

The Badly Drawn Map might not have been very exciting, but it was very well named. “That’s probably why it survived the deFacting,” I suggested, for the map was not only mystifying but mind-numbingly rare. Aside from the Parker Brothers’ celebrated geochromatic view of the Previous World, it was the only pre-Epiphanic map known. But somehow its rarity wasn’t enough to make it interesting, and we stared blankly for some minutes at the faded parchment, hoping to either misunderstand it on a deeper level or at least get our money’s worth.

“The longer and harder we look at it, the cheaper the entrance donation becomes,” Dad explained.

I thought of asking how long we’d have to stare at it before they owed
us
money, but didn’t.

He put his guidebook away, and we walked back out into the warm sunlight. We felt cheated out of our ten cents but politely left positive feedback, since the drabness of the exhibit was no fault of the curator’s.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Why was the hotel manager so dismissive of East Carmine?”

“The Outer Fringes have a reputation for being unsociably
dynamic,
” he said after giving my question some thought, “and some consider that eventfulness may lead to progressive thought, with all the attendant risks that might bring to the Stasis.”

It was a diplomatically prescient remark, and one that I had cause to consider a lot over the coming days.

“Yes,” I said, “but what do
you
think?”

He smiled.

“I think we should go and see the Oz Memorial. Even if it’s as dull as magnolia, it will still be a thousand times more interesting than the Badly Drawn Map.”

 

We walked along the noisy streets toward the museum and soaked in the hustle, bustle, dust and heat of Vermillion. All about us were the traders who dealt with daily requisites: livestock herders, barrow boys, water sellers, pie-men, storytellers and weight guessers. Catering for more long-term needs were the small shops, such as repairers, artifact dealers, spoon traders and calculating shops that offered addition and subtraction while you waited. Moderators and loopholists were hirable by the minute to advise on matters regarding the Rules, and there was even a shop that traded solely in floaties, and another that specialized in postcode genealogy. Amid it all I noticed a stronger-than-usual presence of Yellows, presumably to keep an eye out for illegal color exchange, seed trading or running with a sharp implement.

Unusually for a regional hub, Vermillion was positioned pretty much on the edge of the civilized world. Beyond it to the east were only the Redstone Mountains and isolated outposts like East Carmine. In the uninhabited zone there would be wild outland, megafauna, lost villages of untapped scrap color and quite possibly bands of nomadic Riffraff. It was exciting and worrying all in one, and until the week before, I hadn’t even
heard
of East Carmine, let alone thought I would be spending a month there on Humility Realignment. My friends were horrified, expressed low-to-moderate outrage that I should be treated this way and proclaimed that they would have started a petition if they could have troubled themselves to look for a pencil.

“The Fringes are the place of the slack-willed, slack-jawed and slack-hued,” remarked Floyd Pinken, who could comfortably boast all three of those attributes, if truth be known.

“And be wary of losers, self-abusers, fence leapers and fornicators,” added Tarquin, who, given his family history, would not have seemed out of place there either.

They then informed me that I would be demonstrably insane to leave the safety of the village boundary for even one second, and that a trip to the Fringes would have me eating with my fingers, slouching and with hair below the collar in under a week. I almost decided to buy my way out of the assignment with a loan from my twice-widowed aunt Beryl, but Constance Oxblood thought otherwise.

“You’re doing a
what?
” she asked when I mentioned the reason I was going to East Carmine.

“A chair census, my poppet,” I explained. “Head Office is worried that the chair density might have dropped below the proscribed 1.8 per person.”

“How absolutely
thrilling
. Does an ottoman count as a chair or a very stiff cushion?”

She went on to say that I would be showing significant daring and commendable bravery if I went, so I changed my mind. With the prospect of joining the family of Oxblood and of myself as potential prefect material, I was going to need the broadening that travel and furniture counting would doubtless bring, and a month in the intolerably unsophisticated Outer Fringes might well supply that for me.

 

The Oz Memorial trumped the Badly Drawn Map in that it was baffling in three dimensions rather than just two. It was a partial bronze of a group of oddly shaped animals, the whole about six feet high and four feet across. According to the museum guide, it had been cut into pieces and dumped in the river three centuries before as part of the deFacting, so only two figures remained of a possible five. The best preserved was that of a pig in a dress and a wig, and next to her stood a bulbous-bodied bear in a necktie. Of the third and fourth figures there remained almost nothing, and of the fifth, only two claw-shaped feet truncated at the ankles, modeled on no creature living today.

“The eyes are very large and humanlike for a pig,” said my father, peering closer. “And I’ve seen a number of bears in my life, but none of them wore a hat.”

“They were very big on anthropomorphism,” I ventured, which was pretty much accepted fact. The Previous had many other customs that were inexplicable, none more so than their propensity to intermingle fact with fiction, which made it very hard to figure out what had happened and what hadn’t. Although we knew that this bronze had been cast in honor of Oz, the full dedication on the plinth was badly eroded, so it remained tantalizingly unconnected to any of the other Oz references that had trickled down through the centuries. Debating societies had pondered long and hard over the “Oz Question,” and published many scholarly tracts within the pages of
Spectrum
. But while remnants of Tin Men had been unearthed by salvage teams, and Emerald City still existed as the center of learning and administration, no physical evidence of brick roads had ever been found anywhere in the Collective, either of natural or synthetic yellow—and naturalists had long ago rejected the possibility that monkeys could fly. Oz, it was generally agreed, had been a fiction, and a fairly odd one. But in spite of that, the bronze remained. It was all a bit of a puzzle.

After that, we paused only briefly to look at the exhibits in the museum, and only those of more than passing interest. We stopped and stared at the collection of Vimto bottles, the preserved Ford Fiesta with its obscene level of intentional obsolescence, then at the Turner, which Dad thought “wasn’t his best.” After that, we made our way to the floor below, where we marveled at the realistic poses in the life-size Riffraff diorama, which depicted a typical
Homo feralensis
encampment. It was all disturbingly lifelike and full of savagery and unbridled lust, and was for the most part based upon Alfred Peabody’s seminal work,
Seven Minutes among the Riffraff.
We stared at the lifeless mannequins with a small crowd of schoolchildren, who were doubtless studying the lower order of Human as part of a Historical Conjecture project.

“Do they really eat their own babies?” asked one of the pupils as she stared with horrified fascination at the tableau.

“Absolutely,” replied the teacher, an elderly Blue who should have known better, “and you, too, if you don’t respect your parents, observe the Rules and finish up your vegetables.”

Personally, I had doubts about some of the more ridiculous claims regarding Riffraff. But I kept them to myself. Conjecture was a dish mostly served up wild.

Asit turned out, the phonograph would
not
be demonstrated, because both it and the music disc had been put “beyond use” with a very large hammer. This wasn’t a result of mischief, but a necessary outcome of Leapback Compliance issues, as some fool hadn’t listed the device on this year’s exemption certificate. The staff at the museum seemed a trifle annoyed about this, as the destruction of the artifact reduced the Collective’s demonstrable phonographs to a solitary machine in Cobalt’s Museum of the Something That Happened

“But it wasn’t all bad,” added the curator, a Red with very bushy eyebrows. “At least I can lay claim to being the last person ever to hear Mr. Simply Red.”

After giving detailed feedback, we left the museum and headed off toward the Municipal Gardens.

 

We paused on the way to admire an impressive wall painting of great antiquity that was emblazoned across the gable end of a brick house. It invited a long-vanished audience to “Drink Ovaltine for Health and Vitality,” and there was an image of a mug and two odd-looking but happy children, their football-sized eyes staring blankly out at the world with obvious satisfaction and longing. Although faded, the red components in the lips and script were still visible. Pre-Epiphanic wall paintings were rare and, when they depicted the Previous,
creepy
. It was the eyes. Their pupils, far from being the fine, neat dot of normal people’s, were unnaturally wide and dark and empty—as though their heads were somehow hollow—and this gave their look of happiness an unnatural and contrived demeanor. We stood and stared at it for a moment, then moved on.