Shades of Grey (23 page)

But the globes weren’t the only Leapback in the room, nor the most remarkable. Propped against a pile of books was a reconstructed remote viewer in a bespoke wooden frame. It was made up of about fifteen parts, the largest of which was the size of my fist and the smallest barely bigger than a one-merit piece. Unlike the small shards that we uncovered from time to time, and upon which the smallest and most inconsequential images flicked and jiggled, the fifteen component parts of this viewer produced a single, vaguely coherent moving picture that could be followed with relative ease, and I leaned closer to stare at the fine detail. Even though the picture jumped from viewpoint to viewpoint with bewildering rapidity, it seemed to be a dramatic play of some sort, with a couple in a bedroom somewhere. That they were Previous was in no doubt, as the difference between the sexes was comically exaggerated, and they had subtle features with eyes that seemed as hollow as the children in the Ovaltine wall painting. I moved closer and realized that I could hear the people in the viewer actually
speak
. They used a dialect that was obviously ancient but understandable. The woman seemed to say something about how the man wasn’t the same one she had known ten years before, and he retorted that it wasn’t the years but the mileage, which I didn’t quite understand. He used the pet name “honey,” which would indicate they were married, but I could see no wedding rings, which was confusing. As I watched, the man showed the parts of his body where he
wasn’t
hurt, and the woman kissed them in turn. He eventually pointed to his lips and she kissed them, too, which would have been a sneaky trick, had she not realized what he was up to, which I think she did, and I laughed out loud.

“How much do you know?”

By rights I should have jumped a foot in the air, but Jane’s presence was somehow oddly inevitable. She was staring at me with a mixture of surprise and suspicion on her face. My first thought was about how she had traveled here. I had last seen her at breakfast—barely ninety minutes ago and fourteen miles away. Without a Ford, an impossible feat—like her journey to Vermillion the day before. It was as though she could leap from place to place, like a Pooka.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point asking how you got here?”

“None at all. I’ll be honest, Red—you had me fooled with that shamefully ludicrous ‘I’m an idiot who fancies you’ act. And I don’t fool easily. But right now, I need to know who you are, how much you know and what you think you’ll do with the information.”

I blinked twice. I was glad that she seemed to now have
some
respect for me, even if through a misunderstanding, but as long as she kept thinking that I wasn’t groping in the dark, perhaps she might reveal just what she and the wrongspot had been doing in the Paint Shop that day. Or better still, start to like me.

“I’m sorry about Zane. It seems he was a friend of yours.”

“Two days ago he was a friend. This time next month he’ll be tallow, methane and bonemeal. How long have you known about him?”

“Oh, a while.”

“What else do you know?”

“About you—but only since Vermillion.”

“And who have you told about us?”

“Why don’t we discuss this over tea at the Fallen Man?” I asked, attempting to be suave. “I’ve heard the scones are excellent—or at least, more edible than yours.”

But she didn’t go for it. “I’d sooner discuss it right here and now.”

“Then perhaps,” I replied, “you should tell me what you were doing in the Paint Shop?”

She lapsed into silence for a moment, and moved across the room to touch one of the lightglobes. She didn’t need to—she was just positioning herself between me and the exit. I’d asked the wrong question. It told her that
I didn’t know
what she was doing in the Paint Shop. On reflection, a better question might have been “How long has this been going on?” or even “Tell me the whole story, right from the beginning—and leave nothing out.”

“Are you working for Thorny Yellowood?”

“I’m no fan of the Yellows.”

“You risked your life to save one last night.”

“He was a friend.”

“If that’s true, then you’re a privateer, in it for the merits. Which is arguably worse.”

“It is?”

“Of course. Snitching for the good of the Collective is misguided loyalty. Snitching for cash is nothing but personal greed.”

“Oh.”

“Irrespective of your motivations, I’ll take what you’re selling,” she went on, “but I need to know the quality of the silence I’m buying.”

I stared back at her, trying to figure out what I should do, and feeling hopelessly out of my depth.

“Unless,” she added, “you really are as dumb as you look and have stumbled onto Zane and myself by accident?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” I blurted in a vain attempt to regain lost ground. “How could I have known Zane lived here?”

This seemed to make sense to her, but at that moment I heard a distant whistle from my father. I was overdue. And if I didn’t come back, he’d start to look for me.

“Okay,” she said, stepping aside to let me past, “I’ll tell you everything.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You’ll stop to quarantine on the way back. Make an excuse and head toward the river. I’ll meet you down there. Understand?”

I told her I understood, and she nodded her head toward the door. I walked slowly out, hoping to impressher withmy insouciant manner, an effect that was somewhat dented when I stumbled on the doormat.

I picked up the Caravaggio and returned to where Dad was waiting for me at the color hydrant. He was not alone. There was a man with him, and he was from National Color. I knew this because he had the splashy paint-tin logo embroidered on his breast pocket, and his denim boiler-suit was liberally covered with smudges, drops, splashes and smears of a hundred different synthetic hues that hung to the cloth like jewels. It showed he had been doing the job for a while; the color-soiled coverall was a mark of rank and worn with pride. He had been checking the magenta in the hydrant as a cheery splash of vented hue lay glistening on the ground, and he was just putting away a leather-cased analyzer. Even more exciting was that he had arrived by bicycle—a sleek racing model of considerable vintage with all the gears fully working. It would be too much to hope he would allow me to ride the exempted Leapback, but I stared, nonetheless.

“Where the Ostwald have you been?” asked Dad.

“Exploring,” I stammered, my recent conversation with Jane still ringing in my ears. I wasn’t going to mention Zane, Jane or the faded Pooka woman in the Colorman’s presence—or indeed, at all. Dad didn’t like to be told stuff he shouldn’t know. Swatchmen could sometimes tread fine lines of conflicted loyalty between Council and family, and deniability helped.

“This is His Colorfulness Matthew Gloss,” remarked Dad, turning to the Colorman, “before he was elevated to National Color, he was a Russett—
distantly
related.”

I shook hands in something of a daze—I’d not met someone with the title “Colorfulness” before. It was a title rarely bestowed. I couldn’t stare openmouthed for long, however, as Dad said we should be leaving.

We crossed the river to the safety of the opposite bank, with myself and Dad carrying the Caravaggio and the Colorman with the stack of swatches Dad had liberated. Once there, we took the time to size each other up more carefully. Matthew Gloss was a relaxed-looking gent of late middle age with a craggy timeworn face. What little hair he did have was wispy and stuck out in many directions, and his ears seemed inordinately large.

“You say you’re from East Carmine?” he said, once more fulsome introductions were finally over. “Not on foot, surely?”

Dad explained that we had a Ford and suggested that he join us for the trip back, to which the Colorman readily agreed, as he had just pushed his bicycle across the roadless gap that began at the remote pump station at Yerwood, six miles away, and he could do with a break.

We sat on a wall to wait for Fandango, and the Colorman told us he was doing a pipeline inspection because Camberwick Red had been receiving their grid magentas at greatly reduced chroma, and that suggested a fracture somewhere in the network of feed pipes.

“It’s not an easy job, either,” he added, “the grid’s full of disused spur lines, most of which are unmapped.”

Fandango arrived soon after, having fortunately started the Ford without trouble, and after more introductions, we headed back toward East Carmine, complete with sixty-seven swatches, a cure for the sniffles, a Caravaggio, a traveling Colorman with a twenty-one-speed bicycle and the knowledge that Jane would finally tell me what was going on.

T
he janitor brought the Ford to a stop on a curved bluff next to the weathered WELCOME TO EAST CARMINE sign. We were within easy sight of the village, less than a mile away, and Fandango flashed a Morse code mirror-message that we had returned, were safe and well and had picked up a traveler. The lightning lookout flashed back that the message had been received, and confirmed that our quarantine would end at midday. If we were infected with Mildew, we would certainly show symptoms within two hours.

The morning was hot, so we sat under a nearby tree while Fandango brewed some tea on an oil stove and the Colorman told us about his career, which sounded forty times better than managing a stringworks. I listened with rapt attention as he spoke of the burning and intractable issues of the day with a sense of authority that I’d not heard before.

He told us that the Saturation Dispersion Index—known to all and sundry simply as the Fade—would doubtless continue to rise, which was glum news indeed. Mailboxes that had been typically painted once every half century now needed a new coat
every decade
. It placed an intolerable strain on limited pigment resources, and caused an increased demand for scrap.

“Is there any truth to the rumor that too much viewing accelerates the Fade?” I asked, as much had been written about the subject, and not all of it sensible.

“None at all,” said the Colorman. “In fact, I would recommend as much viewing as possible, to get the most out of the synthetic color before it goes.”

“Surely,” said Dad, “increased yield of the color harvest will take care of the shortfall?”

The Colorman told us that peak production was long past, and unless new toshing fields were opened up within the unspoiled Great Southern Conurbation, synthetic color might be rationed even more than it was.

“What about the Riffraff?” I asked, since if it weren’t for their continued occupation within the Inner Boundary and the problems crossing the hundred-yard-wide Zone of Disagreeability, the rich toshing fields of the Great Southern Conurbation would have been open long ago.

“Aggressive use of Variant-R Mildew,” said the Colorman in a low voice, “and if what I hear is correct, something like that will be happening quite soon.”

“How would such an action be framed?” asked my father, since the Rules
specifically
forbade the harming of any human, no matter how base their personal hygiene, habits or quality of speech. And
Homo feralensis,
although undeniably primitive, were definitely human.

“That’s the clever part,” said the Colorman. “The depredations they wreak upon the landscape and crops allow them to be reclassified as vermin—and thus within the scope of Rules regarding eradication.” He laughed and added, “Loopholery at its finest.”

Dad and I exchanged glances but made no comment. I couldn’t deny that Riffraff were little more than walking biohazards, but once Mildew touches your family, you never wish it on anyone—not Yellows, not unpopular prefects, not even the Riffraff.

Sensing our nonalignment with his strident views, the Colorman moved his conversation to safer territory and outlined his recent work at East Park, one of the three truly great gardens within the Collective.

“I heard it was spectacular,” said Dad, who was something of a Chromobotanist. “I’d like to go and view it one day.”

“It’s more magnificent than you can possibly imagine,” replied the Colorman. “Full CYM feed boosted to eighty pounds’ pressure. We can achieve chroma and brightness at almost sixty percent, and anything off-gamut is hand tinted. They don’t just stick to the Botanical Swatch, either—intermediaries, secondaries, triadics—an infinite blaze of subtle hues that enliven the spirit and banish greyness from the soul. The lupin beds are particularly fine, and last time I counted, we used eighty-four different shades of pink alone.”

For the next hour or so we listened to him talk about the problems with the grid and the color shortage, which was unnerving. He reiterated his opinions about the as-yet-untapped Great Southern Conurbation, but also made comment that there was a huge quantity of undiscovered scrap color under the soil, as the Age of Geniality had laid a blanket of calming soil and leaf mold atop the Age of Intolerance, and it just needed skilled toshers to tease it out. He and Dad then talked about the pros and cons of opencast and drift mining in tosh pits, and how National Color were looking at ways to make univisual hues from natural pigments and had even managed, using a form of Chromosynthesis, to liberate a pale shade of synthetic orange from carrots.

“Eight tons for a spoonful of enriched univisual orange that’s barely sixteen percent chroma,” said the Colorman. “It’s not great, but the tech boys haven’t given up.”

 

I didn’t get the opportunity to creep away and meet with Jane until Fandango handed me the Ford’s water can and told me to get it filled. I set off through a grove of oaks for the river.

I’d liked what I’d heard from the Colorman. Working at National Color was every resident’s dream, but few managed to make the grade. Every year they inducted fewer than four out of a thousand candidates. It was a dream, but as dreams go, the best: senior monitor status, unfettered movement around the Collective on an All Stations Super Season Apex
,
legal use of Leapback, requisition powers over any Ford and—best of all—surrounded by synthetic color at all times. The only snag was that even if you
did
have the qualifications and 60 percent minimum perception, you had to be put forward for selection by a head prefect—and prefects liked to retain the high-receptors to assist with color sorting. I’d not really considered it as a career because it had seemed somewhat distant and impossible, but it was probably worth a try.