Shades of Grey (34 page)

“Do you know anything about the Riffraff?” I asked, trying to make it sound like an intelligent question, and not the sarcastic remark I intended it to be.

“I’m not a big fact person,” said Mr. Crimson, who was honest, even if a twit. “Unproved speculation is more my thing. But Mrs. Gamboge knows a bit, don’t you, ma’am?”

I hadn’t noticed that the Yellow prefect had arrived, notebook in hand. It was usual for a prefect to be present to take minutes for the faculty’s record, as “great and important thoughts” sometimes emerged from the meetings. Thankfully, Courtland didn’t seem to be with her.

Sally Gamboge moved into the center of the room. She seemed marginally less unpleasant than usual, but that wasn’t saying much. Although she was not an ugly woman, her demeanor had soured her appearance into one that generated only mistrust. But she had my full attention, and my father’s. The rest had heard the story before, but stood in respectful silence regardless.

“I was visiting my sister in Yellopolis last year,” she said. “They’d had problems with Riffraff camping close enough to raid crops at dawn and dusk when no one was about, so they set a few snares around the Outer Markers. Astonishingly, they actually caught one.”

“What did it look like?”

“Scruffy beast. Unwashed, covered in lice, bad teeth, stained pinafore, torn dress and distinctly unshiny shoes—subhuman, if you ask me.”

“Could it have been Nightloss suffering from advanced nyctopsychosis?” asked my father, who, like most people, had seen or personally experienced the effects of a night panic: quivering, palpitations, irrational shouting, dissociation from reality and finally insanity.

“It didn’t have a postcode,” replied the Yellow prefect, tapping her left clavicle. “I checked when they stripped it off to hose it down.”

“Could it talk?” asked Lucy.

“A gutter mix of tongues,” replied Gamboge expertly, taking another sip of her yellow-tinged elderflower cordial. “Many of the nouns were s
lang
in origin, with the grammatical construction similar to our modern tongue, but with the sort of frightful mispronunciations one would expect from someone without access to proper schooling. I could understand
part
of what she was saying, but the language was so peppered with obscenities of the worst possible kind that it was barely worth trying to understand her at all.”

“A savage,” remarked Mr. Lemon-Skye with a shiver.

“Quite so,” replied Gamboge, “yet oddly enough, it did repeat a man’s name numerous times. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought it capable of a monogamous relationship.”

There was polite laughter at the somewhat fanciful notion, although I didn’t join in myself.

“But here’s the curious part,” continued Mrs. Gamboge. “The creature had lost part of its foot in the snare, and within a day infection set in. It grew listless, went pale and moaned in a most pathetic manner until it fell unconscious and died. It was all over in three days.”

“You mean,” said Lucy, “it didn’t catch traumatic Mildew?”

“Not a spore in sight. If any
civilized
person had suffered physical damage as bad as that, he’d have been carried off by Variant-T in a twinkling.”

The society went silent as they mused upon the possibility that the Riffraff had immunity from the Rot, excepting Granny Crimson, who told everyone she had just seen a bee fly past the window.

“I understand that some villages actually
trade
with the Riffraff,” announced Mrs. Ochre, being the perfect hostess and filling the hole in the conversation. “My sister Betsy lives in Hennarington on the Honeybun Peninsula, and they said the Riffraff leave sacks of sorted blue scrap at the Outer Markers, which they trade for semolina, Ovaltine and gravy granules.”

“If that’s true,” Aubrey replied, “one would have to come to the rather astonishing conclusion that the Riffraff may have a rudimentary understanding of color.”

Everyone nodded sagely in agreement.

“I have been studying
Homo feralensis
for many years,” remarked Mrs. Gamboge, “and I firmly adhere to the theory that they are Greys who have simply dropped the short distance into savagery. Without the stabilizing hand of Munsell’s Chromatic ideology, we would be like them—ignorant, filthy and bestial.”

“Is it true they eat their own babies?” asked Mrs. Crimson.

“It is
absolutely
true—and any other babies they can get hold of. Some say they produce babies only to eat.”

“How could feral
Greys
have a rudimentary sense of color?” I asked.

Mrs. Gamboge fixed me with an icy stare and announced in a doom-laden voice, “By eating the brains of those they slaughter, in order to inherit their Chromatic cognicity.”

“Eat their brains?” echoed Mrs. Ochre in a quavering voice, breaking the stunned silence that followed.

“Without a doubt,” murmured Mrs. Gamboge, “and with a spoon—the instrument of the truly barbarous.”

“Goodness!” Mrs. Lemon-Skye exclaimed. “Perhaps that’s why
Harmony
left spoons off the list of manufactured goods.”

“Truly, Munsell works in mysterious ways,” announced Mr. Crimson.

“The sooner we deal with the Riffraff problem once and for all,” continued Mrs. Gamboge, who was eager to drive her point home, “the sooner we can sleep safe in our beds at night.”

A chorus of agreement greeted this sentiment, followed by a long pause as everyone presumably thought about how lucky they were to be living within such a safe, ordered civilization. Except me, who was thinking about how I
already
slept safe in my bed.

“What utter balls!” came a loud and gravelly voice.

“Who dares to use such lang—” Mrs. Gamboge began, but she stopped when she saw it was the Apocryphal man, and changed the comment into a cough, while everyone stared at their drinks, or at the walls, or something.

Mrs. Ochre, attempting some misdirection, decided we should be seated. “Time for dinner,” she announced, clapping her hands together. “It’s boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl.”

W
e 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.”