Shades of Grey (21 page)

“Then why—”

But she never got to finish. Tommo walked back in, and Lucy, who had been looking more and more unwell, promptly threw up all over the floor.

We found a mop and cleaned up while Lucy decided to sleep it off.

“Thanks for that,” whispered Tommo as we walked out of her house a few minutes later. “We can’t have the future Mrs. Cinnabar up on a charge of being saturated in public, now can we?”

“Lucy told me someone did the murder on her father.”

“As I said, it was the Green talking. Everyone knows he was Chasing the Frog; the prefects decided to lie for the good of the village. The communal fine would have been pretty swingeing—even more so for the prefects.”

This was true; with spectral rank came privilege, but also greater punishment when something went wrong. A prefect could be sent to Reboot for something a Grey would be fined fifty merits.

“Did Lucy say why she thought he was done in?”

I had to admit that she didn’t.

“Well and truly greened,” repeated Tommo, “and in an exciting way, a bit Lulu. Probably a tiger at youknow. Did I hear her offering you a friendship just now?”

“Yes.”

“Blast! She’s always turned me down when I’ve asked. In fact, I’m the only Red
not
on her list of friends.”

I decided to be diplomatic. “Perhaps she thinks of you as
more
than a friend.”

“That must be it,” he replied, much relieved. “Now, Rusty Hill—you won’t forget my shoes, will you?”

“Lucy wanted a spoon—and Mrs. Blood a pair of sugar tongs. Perhaps I should write a shopping list.”

“No need,” said Tommo. “I’ve got you one here.”

I looked at his list, which seemed to have everything on it: doorknobs, a pram, nail scissors, a trifle bowl, a butter dish, a unicycle tire, any shoelaces at all and a mackintosh, preferably in blue, which was silly, as I wouldn’t be able to tell. Tommo, it seemed, saw my excursion as a good marketing opportunity.

“I can’t get all this!”

“Just the size nines, then—and a spoon, of course, for Lucy.”

C
arlos Fandango arrived punctually with the Ford as promised, and
ahoogah
ed twice. He warmly shook hands with Dad and me, generously expressed his belief that we might one day be friends, then told me to ignore anything scurrilousthat Tommo had said. Before I could even deny that he had told me anything, Yewberry arrived with a carpenter and two journeymen carrying a hastily made crate in which to transport the Caravaggio. Yewberry then showed me a street map with the house where I would find the painting marked, and told me not to drop it or anything.

“And if anyone sees, hears or
feels
anything peculiar,” he added, “he
must
report it back to the Council.”

“How peculiar does something have to be before it’s worth reporting?” asked my father.

“
Unprecedentedly
so,” Yewberry replied. “I know it sounds stupid, but there were stories of Pookas just before the outbreak. Glimpses of travelers appearing here and there, now and then, to this one and that one. And keep an extra special eye out for swans. A
Cygnus giganticus carnivorum
can carry off a man—and at this time of year, a cygnet can eat eight times its own body weight per day.”

Dad and I looked at each other. Not because of the warning about swans, which were a well-known hazard—but about Pookas, which were not only of dubious existence but were listed as so in the Rules. Even if you saw one, it was better not to report it. People often laughed.

Dorian G-7, photographer and editor of the
Mercury,
was waiting for us with his camera. He nodded me a greeting and had us all pose near the Ford. Fandango remained disagreeable during the photoshoot, and I saw him move his head just as the shutter was fired, ruining the shot. Dorian saw it, too, but didn’t say anything and didn’t retake the picture. Photographic materials were strictly rationed.

“Here,” he said, handing us a small package. “It’s a snack for the journey. Sponge cake with bonemeal instead of flour. Tell me what you think.”

We climbed aboard, Fandango cranked the engine into life and we moved off with a judder. Luckily for me, Dad said I could sit up front, as he’d been in a Model T many times, so I sat there in silence while Fandango skillfully negotiated a route out of town. The Ford was a four-seater sedan that smelled of oil, leather and burned vegetable oil and, despite continual maintenance over the years, was definitely showing its age. Quite what that was remained a matter of conjecture, as even though the numerical date of the Ford’s pre-Epiphanic manufacture
was
known, the time between that and the Epiphany wasn’t. Conservative estimates had them seven hundred years apart, but they could be double that—there was really no way of telling.

We took the Perpetulite roadway that snaked off to the south, and passed the lumber store, twenty-six-acre glasshouse, hay barns and Waste Farm. After a brief pause to open the steel gate in the stockwall and place our spot-badges in a cubbyhole designed expressly for that purpose, Fandango shifted the Ford into top gear, and we were soon past the Outer Markers and thundering along at a terrific pace. Rusty Hill was about fourteen miles away, and at this speed we’d be there in half an hour.

Unlike all the other pre-Epiphanic roadways, which had long ago been rendered nearly invisible by centuries of natural reclamation, the Perpetulite’s powerful memory ensured that the road remained in almost pristine condition: smooth, well drained and clear of obstacles as close to forever as made no difference. But although it was clear of detritus,
images
of organic debris still remained in the dark grey covering—spidery imprints of fallen trees that had been absorbed to feed the organoplastoid’s self-maintaining agenda. At the
edge
of the Perpetulite it was a different matter, for the undergrowth grew unchecked right up to the bronze curb rail. The trees arched in above the road and entwined above our heads, which gave me the feeling that we were in a long and perfectly realized arboreal tunnel.

I wanted to ask Fandango a million questions, ranging from the Ford to the gyrobike of which I had heard much, but since he was a Purple—albeit a very light one—protocol demanded that I wait until he spoke first. So I sat on my hands in silence.

Traditionally, the profession of janitor was reserved for the lowest Purple in the village. The reason was probably because the job involved using Leapbacked technology on a Head Office exemption, and the Council wanted someone they felt they could trust. Janitors fell sharply into two categories: those on their way
up
the Spectrum, who embraced the job as a wonderful opportunity and a showcase for their responsibilities; and those on their way
down
, who lamented their lost status, and regarded the calling as nothing more than manual labor more suited to Greys. Carlos Fandango was apparently one of the former.

“Do you have a Ford in your village?” he said at last.

I told him that we had eight, although six were permanent members of our Mobile Lightning Fast Response Group. He said that Carmine had a second Model T, a flatbed that was used to hunt for ball lightning, then asked me how my village could possibly have amassed so many Fords in a time of great shortage.

“We had a very forward-thinking Council at the time of the last Great Leap Backward,” I explained, “and guessing the future, they secured eight Model Ts in the days when flatheads and Heavy Austins were still in widespread use. This year we acquired a pair of Darracqs and a DeDion Bouton, ready and waiting to take over when the Fords are put beyond use.”

“They won’t Leapback the Fords,” he said. “They’re just too useful.” He said it without conviction. The external telephone network had been about as useful as anything could be, and that had gone. He asked me where I was from and, when I told him, asked if I knew his cousin Elwood.

Few in the region didn’t. Elwood Fandango had been head accountant in the village, but had gone somewhat irresponsible in his senior years. During a Mutual Audit he had been found illegally mixing pigment in order to make a potent swatch of Erectile Blue
,
something that showed a considerable level of skill and experimentation, especially as he had mixed a fan of twenty-two different shades, to cover almost every level of perception in the village. Despite the severity of the crime, it didn’t surprise the auditor that Elwood had been leasing out the swatch for over ten years without anyone snitching. Unusually, Elwood survived being sent to Reboot due to his having amassed a huge amount of merits in a lifetime of unimpeachably high social conduct.

“I bet your head prefect was peeved,” mused Fandango as he slowed to negotiate a low branch that had grown across the road.

“Incandescent,” I replied, “partly because illegal home blending had been going on right under his nose, partly because he’d never been offered a peek but mostly because Elwood had used up his merits to offset mischief rather than for the betterment of the Collective, such as dedicating a park bench or contributing to the bandstand reroofing fund.”

Fandango looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “So we have Jade-under-Lime to blame for senior delinquency?”

I had to admit that this was true. The concept of blowing a lifetime’s good deeds on a flagrant breach of harmony had spread like all good loopholery to outlying villages, the region and finally the whole Collective. Head Office dealt with the problem with a hard-hitting training play that reminded seniors of their responsibilities.

“Is Elwood still with us?” asked Fandango. “News travels so slow these days.”

“He succumbed last year at the age of eighty-eight,” I explained. “The whole village turned out to cheer him off as he was wheeled into the Green Room.”

We had driven out of the arboreal tunnel by now, and aside from the invasive rhododendrons, which Fandango explained were due “for a burn” quite soon now, the countryside was more open. The river was to our right and on the opposite bank was the railway we had traveled the day before. To our left was a steep, rocky slope, and as we swept around a corner, Fandango stamped on the brakes. Lying in the middle of the road were several large boulders, one the size of a garden shed. There was space to drive around them, but we were in no particular hurry, and stopped to watch. The rockfall was recent, and already the roadway was working to dispel the intruders. With a series of sinuous, wavelike movements, the Perpetulite gently shifted the broken rock toward the side of the road. As kids, we’d sat on baking trays and planted ourselves in the middle of the road, then raced one another to the curb.

“How long have you been janitoring?” I asked as we watched the largest boulder being moved as easily as if it were a feather.

“Thirty-one years, give or take,” he replied. “Seen three Leapbacks in that time, each one worse than the one before. I dread to see what they’ll ban next. I suppose you’re too young to remember tractors?”

We felt the Ford start to move as it too was recognized as useless debris to be rejected, and Fandango reversed gently back and forth to fool the Perpetulite.

“Not quite,” I replied, as the Leapback in question occurred when I was five. Horses did the plowing and drilling these days, and any devices that needed static power, such as threshing machines, were run off agri-exempted Everspins, each one about forty times the size of the one I had in my valise.

“I’d been more annoyed by the loss of gearing on bicycles,” I said as the larger of the boulders was successfully toppled onto the verge, and we moved off. “Direct drive doesn’t really excite, to be honest.”

We drove on in silence for a few minutes, which allowed me to enjoy the untouched countryside, and after negotiating a long, unbroken stretch, we drove past the remains of an old town, reduced to little more than tussocky rubble by a series of aggressive excavations.

“This was Little Carmine,” said Fandango, slowing so we could see,

“picked clean of all hue in 00453. Great Auburn is about six miles to the east. It’s been our principal source of scrap color for almost three decades, but even that’s nearly exhausted. Most of our toshing parties these days concentrate on rediscovering individual villas or hamlets. It’s quite a skill, you know, reading a soft lump in the ground.”

We continued the journey, and Fandango and I chatted some more, mostly about the maintenance difficulties of the carbon-arc mechanism that lay at the heart of the central streetlamp—something that seemed to sap a disproportionate amount of his time. And it was in this manner that we passed the time until we arrived at the deserted railway station. Across the river was Rusty Hill, untouched and unvisited since the Mildew took everyone in it four years before.

D
ad and I climbed out of the car, and Fandango told us he would wait at the top of a nearby hill in case the Ford “proved difficult to start.” He wished us good luck, told us to signal when we wanted to be picked up and that he would
ahoogah
twice if he saw any swans. He then departed with almost unnatural haste in a cloud of white smoke.

Dad sat on a low wall and examined the town through his binoculars. Although unlikely this far west, it wasn’t unknown for Nomadic Riffraff to use abandoned settlements as homesteads, and neither Dad nor I had the slightest wish to bump into a grunge of well-established and dangerously territorial wildmen. There were gruesome stories that related to well-hued men being kidnapped, with the threat of plum removal if ransom wasn’t paid. I knew of no one who wore their spot beyond the boundaries.