Shades of Grey (50 page)

“Let’s all just calm down,” I murmured. “Tommo, are you
positive
it was someone?”

He took a deep breath and looked at both of us in turn, then shrugged. “It
could
have been alpacas,” he replied. “In fact, that
must
have been what it was.”

“Then I’m going on,” I murmured. “What about you two?”

Courtland gave Tommo a slap on the back of the head. “Idiot! Yes, I’m still coming—and so is porridge brains here.”

I jotted another note to the effect that Tommo had thought he had seen someone, added the time, tore out the page and left it under a small pile of stones as before. I made a similar note in my log, and we walked on, this time with a more nervous gait and with frequent looks over our shoulders.

After ten minutes or so we reached the top of the hill and entered a grove of beeches. Their heavy canopy was draped with creepers, and the occasional moss-covered fallen trunk blocked our way. Considering that we were less than two hours from the village center, it seemed odd that we were walking in a place almost completely unvisited for five centuries, yet was somewhere I could visit and be back by eleven. If I was so inclined. Being in the Outfield was exciting, but worrying, too. I could feel my heart beating faster, and my ears twitched at every sound.

After twenty minutes more of easy walking across a grassy plain with only giraffe, elk and deer for company, we entered a small spinney near another land crawler, then walked out the other side and came to an abrupt halt.

“Munsell in a
canoe,
” whispered Tommo.

“What is this doing here?” said Courtland. “I mean, why would anyone build a pipeline that goes from nowhere to nowhere squared?”

“I don’t know.”

In front of us was a good-sized oak. But not the usual drab grey variety. This one was bright, univisual purple. The bark, leaves, acorns, branches and even the patch of grass beneath it were full edge-of-gamut magenta. We stared at it for a while, as none of us had seen anything so large bearing such an inappropriate color. This was a chromoclasm
—
a fracture in the magenta pipe of the CYM color feed, where the dye had soaked up through the soil and stained the surrounding foliage. National Color doesn’t like anyone knowing anything about pipeline routes, partly because of the potential for damage by monochrome fundamentalists, and partly because local villages would ask for costly spur lines. But Courtland was right. It didn’t make any sense. We weren’t on a route that went from anywhere to anywhere, nor was there any way to tell in which direction the pipeline ran. But it looked as though we had found the breach the Colorman had been looking for.

“Good job Violet isn’t here,” said Tommo. “The brightness would give her a migraine in a flash, and you know how ratty she gets when she’s having a headache.”

“What’s that?”

“What?”

Courtland didn’t answer and instead walked into the purple grass and picked up a human femur. It too had been stained magenta. He looked around and found another bone, this time the left half of a pelvis, and tapped them together. They made the dullish thud that fresh bones make, and not the ringing click of the long dead.

“What do you think, Court?”

“Couple of years.”

We were all looking around then, to find something that might give a clue as to who it was or where they were from, but the bones had been scattered by animals. We didn’t find the skull, but I did find a single brogue, a belt buckle and a celluloid collar. It had a postcode and a name scratched on it: Thomas Emerald. Courtland and Tommo didn’t know him.

“A lot of Rebootees were lost out here,” said Courtland. “They never stayed long enough for us to learn their names.”

“He had three spoons on him,” said Tommo, picking them out of the soil and rubbing the magenta mud off so that he could read the codes engraved on the back, “and none of them were his. Do you think the codes are registered to anyone?”

“They’d be worth a small fortune if they’ve got clear title,” said Courtland. “Let me see.”

So Tommo handed them over, and Courtland put them in his pocket and grinned avariciously at him.

“Nice one, Court,” said Tommo. “Thanks for that.”

“Why would he take spoons with him on a toshing trip?” I asked.

“Maybe he didn’t,” remarked Courtland, with a greedy gleam in his eye. “Maybe he pulled them out of the soil at High Saffron.”

We looked at one another and walked on.

We came to a river and, after wading across, walked past the five-arched bridge that had once carried the roadway, now sitting rather pointlessly over a grassy dent. The mutual anxiety we were feeling had momentarily cleared the bad air, and we walked along side by side for a while, talking nervously.

“So,” said Tommo with forced bonhomie, “what was Violet like?”

“Exactly as you might imagine.”

“Yikes.”

Courtland voiced what we were allreally thinking about. “Why didn’t we find Thomas Emerald’s skull?”

We suddenly stopped and looked nervously about, the unspoken horror of having our brains eaten by Riffraff suddenly making us more than jumpy. But no matter how hard we stared, it was simply an empty landscape with trees, wildstock and grassland. And aside from the occasional
pwoing
of a bouncing goat, it was quiet, too—oppressively so. We were utterly alone. At least, we
hoped
we were.

“Okay,” said Tommo after I had told everyone to move off, “what do we do if we see a Riffraff?”

“Run,” I said.

“Fight,” said Courtland.

“You fighting is good,” said Tommo. “While they’re occupied with you, Ed and I will be activating the ‘run like a lunatic’ plan.”

We passed through a grove of beech trees that had grown over the track in happy profusion, then came across some grass-covered earthworks, a few bramble-filled pits and a deep, grassy ditch that zigzagged away to the left and right of us. We paused for a moment on the edge of the open moorland and stared at the road, which carried on in a straight line until it vanished over the summit. It was the loneliest section of the route, a two-mile stretch without any sort of cover at all. I looked up at the sky to confirm that the likelihood of lightning was low, then set off at a brisk walk.

The course of the road was easily delineated by the flat profile and two low, grassyridgesabout thirtyfeet apartthat might once have been walls. The landscape up here was different, as the road had been disrupted by several large pockmarks, some of which had filled with water and might have been natural dew ponds but for their uniform roundness. Here and there we could see rusty scrap and twisted aluminum poking out of the turf like a metallic harvest that no one had troubled to remove, and the wildstock were considerably tamer. As we approached the isolated herds that drifted across the upper pastures, they parted languidly to let us through, with only the mildest sense of curiosity. It portended well, as they spook easily, and Riffraff were known to kill and eat them. I even spotted an antelope I hadn’t seen before. It was a dark reddish color with stripes down its front and back legs, the latter doubling as a convenient place to display its bar code. I jotted down as much of its Taxa as I could before it turned away.

We walked like this in silence for a good forty minutes until we encountered the first proper structure we had seen since leaving East Carmine. The flak tower stood in a commanding position at the top of an escarpment that looked down on the broad, fertile valley hiding the remains of High Saffron. Cynics that Courtland and Tommo were, I think even
they
were impressed, and we all stopped to soak up the view.

A
lthough I had seen the ocean on at least three occasions, I had never witnessed a more beautiful stretch of coastline than greeted my eyes that afternoon. The land was dappled with the shadows of the clouds as they drifted lazily across the sky, the sunnier patches highlighting points of interest better than any tour guide. The town nestled comfortably on either side of a long tidal estuary that led into a bay where several abandoned ships were anchored. The biggest of these was a flat-decked vessel so large that it was now an artificial breakwater, the sloping deck white with the guano of seabirds, and the gently rusting hulk altering the dynamics of the bay so dramatically that the whole area between the ship and the shore had silted in and was now dry land.

Of the town, not much could be seen from where we stood. The remains of the bypass appeared as a circular swathe of different-colored vegetation, and a bridge across the river was still standing. The town itself was hidden within the foliage of thick woodland, from whose canopy only a few buildings protruded. The outlying commercial and residential areas could just be seen as a faint grid pattern of different trees and brush. There seemed to be a road that led out to the east and another to the north, but of the open spaces Yewberry had hoped for, I could see nothing.

“We’ve still got a good four-hour walk to go,” I said, estimating the distance. “Less if we can meet the Saffron end of the spalled Perpetulite. Five minutes’ break.”

“We’ll take ten,” said Courtland, and he and Tommo trotted off toward the tower. Scrap found on trips like this could be claimed as personal trove and was worth 50 percent of its value—not a huge sum, unless you’d brought a handy wheelbarrow, but enough for a scone or two at the Fallen Man
.

I looked around to make some notes. Easy vehicular access past the looming six-story tower was blocked by a large grassy mound. To one side was a corroded bulldozer, which had sunk a foot into the earth. Behind this was a jumbled collection of boxy-looking vehicles, which were all in the middle stage of rust death and shrouded with nettles, brambles and outcrops of hawthorn and elder. The tower itself was identical to the one at East Carmine, except that it had not been stripped of its narrow bronze window frames. The tower was one of eight that I could see, ringing the town from the highest points all around and, it seemed, connected by a series of steel posts at least twenty feet high and set at fifty-foot intervals. I walked to the first of the high posts and noticed that in places it was still draped with the remains of wire, and that glass insulators similar to those on the telephone poles were bolted to the steel.

I recalled Jane’s advice to go no farther than the flak tower, and since she had known with all certainty that the tower was there—something that Yewberry hadn’t—it meant that she probably knew what she was talking about. We had done enough for today anyway. I would make detailed notes of this area, and after that we would return, report the magenta tree and continue the expedition another day. No cash and no glory, and quite possibly a disappointed Council. But I like to think I take my role as team leader seriously.

I retraced my steps to the tower, where I could hear Courtland talking to Tommo. The main door was of bronze almost eight inches thick and had seized in the partially open position. I stepped inside and walked down a short corridor, then through an inner door. I had expected it to be dark inside, but it wasn’t. Two lightglobes were burning brightly in the interior. One was in Courtland’s hand as he searched the debris, and the other was fixed precariously to the ceiling, where Tommo was trying to dislodge it with a stick.

“What’s the point?” I said, “They’re Leapback. You can’t take them back with you.”

They ignored me, and I looked around. The room was large, perhaps half the size of the ground floor, with a room off to one side and another bronze door, which partially hid a flight of steps that led upward. Dominating two walls were long sections of steel desks, upon which lay the shattered remains of remote viewers. I found a working shard that had text on it that moved when I drifted my finger across, but nothing like the one I’d seen in Zane’s parlor. The floor was covered with dust, rust, broken furniture, scraps of clothing, general rubbish and
bones
—some relatively new, others so old they crumbled to dust between finger and thumb. As I sorted through the debris with my foot I saw several red objects wink at me, and I picked up a crimson button and rubbed it on my shirt.

“Here,” said Courtland who had been exploring one of the antechambers. “I’ve found another of the missing.”

I walked across to where Courtland was waiting at a bronze door leading off the main room.

“She’s at the back,” he said, passing me the lightglobe, “ten years dead, perhaps more.”

I walked inside and found myself in what looked like a storeroom. There was only one narrow vertical slit for a window, and the shelves had collapsed so the floor was now covered with rusty tins, the odd jar and a heavy carpeting of dust that kicked up as I walked. But Courtland was right. Lying on the floor was the body of a woman, fully dressed and with skin stretched as tight as parchment across her bones. She had a satchel next to her, and I emptied the hardened leather bag onto the floor. It had about twelve spoons in it, and a large quantity of coins.

“Wow!” said Tommo, reaching forward to collect them. “That’ll buy Lucy from Mrs. Ochre.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, mostly to myself. “She’s dressed for travel or light leisure, not for outdoor adventure.”

I scratched my head. The remains of Thomas Emerald had been wearing a
brogue
. I didn’t know where these two had come from, but they weren’t from East Carmine, and they certainly weren’t part of an expedition.

“We’re going back,” I told them, searching the woman’s clothing for a name tag.

“Going back?” echoed Tommo in surprise. “Lying-that-we-got-to-High-Saffron going back, or aborting-the-mission going back?”

“Aborting. We come back another—”

“But we don’t get paid,” he interrupted, “at least, not if you insist on being honest and stuff.”