Shades of Grey (7 page)

“Already?” grunted my father when I nudged him awake. He got up, pulled our bags from the luggage rack and laid them in the corridor before turning to me. “Eddie, how long have we been father and son?”

“As long as I can remember.”

“Exactly. Now, remember: Best behavior, and keep your wits about you. The towns in the Outer Fringes sometimes interpret the Rulebook a bit
differently
than we might be used to, and are awash with the potential for embarrassing faux pas.”

I nodded my agreement, and we watched as the tall chimneys grew larger and larger until, with a squealing of brakes, a hissing of steam and a cloud of water vapor that dispersed rapidly in the warm air, we arrived at East Carmine.

W
aiting to greet the train were a stationmaster, a freight dispatcher, a postman and a Yellow arrivals monitor, whose job it was to log in the arrivals. The youthful stationmaster wore a Blue Spot on his uniform and remonstrated with the driver that the train was a minute late, and that he would have to file a report. The driver retorted that since there could be no material difference between a train that arrived at a station and a station that arrived at a train, it was equally the stationmaster’s fault. The stationmaster replied that he could not be blamed, because he had no control over the speed of the station; to which the engine driver replied that the stationmaster could control its
placement,
and that if it were only a thousand yards
closer
to Vermillion, the problem would be solved. To this the stationmaster replied that if the driver didn’t accept the lateness as his fault, he would move the station a thousand yards
farther
from Vermillion and make him not just late, but
demeritably
overdue.

The postman watched the argument with a bemused grin, then swapped the outgoing mail package with the incoming before setting off back to the village without a word. The freight dispatcher ignored everyone and walked to the flatbeds at the rear to oversee the loading of linoleum and the unloading of raw materials.

We were the only ones to alight, so the Yellow had little to do.

“Codes and point of departure?” she said without preamble, or even a welcome.

Dad gave her our postcodes and the name of our home village, and she wrote them in her logbook. She was in her mid-twenties, had rounded features and wore a long dress that reached to her ankles. Of the twenty-six permitted modes of dress for girls, it was the one that spent the least time in fashion. It was less of a dress and more of a bell-tent with ankles. And as usual for the sort of Yellow who wore his or her blighted shade with an almost obscene pride, the dress was enriched with synthetic yellow. There was no mistaking the adherence to her hue, and equally, she wanted you to know it.

“I’m the holiday relief swatchman for Robin Ochre,” said Dad, looking around. “I was expecting him to be here to meet us.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “Did you know him?”

“We were at Chromaticology school together.”

“Ah,” replied the Yellow, and lapsed into silence.

“So,” said Dad to fill the embarrassing silence, “is there
anyone
here to meet us?”

“Sort of,” she replied, without giving any further information. Her attitude would have been considered outrageously rude in any other hue; with Yellows it was pretty much standard operating procedure.

“There’s a Rebootee hiding on the train,” I said, recalling that Travis Canary owed me ten merits.

The Yellow looked at me, then the train, then marched off without a word.

“That was a rotten thing to do,” whispered Dad. “I thought I told you Russetts never snitched?”

“He paid me to. We each get five merits out of it. His name’s Travis Canary. He set fire to three tons of undelivered mail, then cooked spuds in the embers.”

“Life was a lot less complex
before
you tried to explain.”

We both jumped as a chirpy voice rang out behind us, “Welcome to East Carmine!”

We had expected Robin Ochre or a prefect to greet us, but we got neither. The man addressing us was a
porter
. Despite the implied insult that we were little better than Grey ourselves, he was well turned out. He wore an immaculately pressed uniform, was just touching middle age and had a friendly demeanor about him, as though he had just been told a very funny joke not half a minute ago.

“Mr. Russett and son?” he inquired, looking at us both in turn. Dad said that we were, and the porter responded with a polite bow, “I’m Stafford G-8. The head prefect asked me to take you to your quarters.”

“They are busy, then?”

“Oh, lumme,” he muttered, suddenly realizing that a prefectless welcome might seem a mite insulting. “Please don’t read anything into it. The prefects always play mixed doubles on Tuesday afternoons.”

“Croquet or tennis?”

“Scrabble.”

Dad and I exchanged glances. It perhaps confirmed what we had already suspected—that a streak of discourtesy had corrupted the Outer Fringes. While we thought about this, the porter noticed the Yellow woman approaching with Travis.

“Who’s that?” he asked, already infringing protocol by initiating a conversation.

“He set fire to some potatoes,” confided Dad, “then cooked some undelivered post in the embers.”

“Did he, now?” said Stafford. “What a strange fellow. I would have done it the other way around.”

“With respect, ma’am,” we heard Travis say as they drew closer, “I’m not sure I fully understand how a poorly knotted tie can undermine the Collective.”

It was said in a sarcastic tone that the Yellow woman missed.

“A sloppy half-Windsor is the first symptom of serial indolence,” she replied in the patronizing voice that Yellows reserved for Rule-breakers, “and ignoring the infraction gives the impression that it is acceptable to be inappropriately attired. The next day it might be badly polished shoes, then uncouth language, showing off and impoliteness. Before one knows it, the rot of disharmony would start to disassemble everything that we know and cherish.”

She then said something about how he was a “disgrace to his hue,” and they took a footpath toward the village.

“Who was the Yellow?” asked my father.

“Miss Bunty McMustard,” explained Stafford, picking up our cases, “deputy snitch and unwavering supporter of Sally Gamboge, the Yellow prefect. Bunty’s a nasty piece of work, and totally untrustworthy. If I tell you she’s the nicest Yellow in authority, it will give you an idea of how bad the others are.”

“The least bitey piranha?”

“Got it in one. Speaking of piranhas, watch out for Mrs. Gamboge’s son. His name’s Courtland, and he’s the best.”

“The best what?”

“The best avoided. He and Bunty are due to be married, as soon as Courtland gets around to asking her.”

The porter picked up our cases and placed them in the back of his cycle-taxi. We settled ourselves in the front, and he pedaled off at a brisk pace on the smooth Perpetulite roadway.

As we neared the factory I could hear the clanking and grinding of industry from deep within, while on the air there was a sharp taste like burned cooking oil.

“Every square yard of linoleum you’ve ever walked on would have been produced here,” Stafford announced proudly. “Back in 00427, East Carmine hosted Jollity Fair. The ‘House of Linoleum’ was the focal point—a building made
entirely
from linoleum. They even developed a new foodstuff especially for the occasion: Bisquitoleum. It’s still a local delicacy, even today.”

“Any good?”

“What it lacks in taste, it makes up for in longevity. We have a linoleum museum, too. Would you like a quick visit? I do the guided tours.”

“Perhaps later.”

“Everyone says that,” replied the porter, crestfallen. “Do you mind if I loosen my tie? The day is hot.”

Dad gave his permission, and we pedaled on. The going was easy on the smooth roadway, and after a few minutes we came to a stone-arch bridge that had a weathered
WELCOME TO EAST CARMINE
notice next to it. As we passed the sign, I saw a young woman with long dark hair standing by the side of the road. She was holding a swinging pendulum in the air above her palm, and next to her on the parapet was an open notebook. She stared at us in a strange, off-kilter manner.

“That was Lucy Ochre,” said the porter as soon as we had passed, “Mr. Ochre’s daughter. A bit of an oddball.”

“What’s with the pendulum?”

“She’s searching for
harmonic pathways
—a musical energy that runs through the Collective, she calls it.”

“What do the prefects think?”

“They think she’s a bit odd,” he replied with a shrug, “but belief in odd things isn’t against the Rules, as long as it’s done on your own time, and you don’t try to convince anyone else.”

Dad turned to look at her as we cycled past, but the girl had returned her attention to her pendulum.

Soon after the bridge we crested a rise and found ourselves within sight of the village. It was a low-lying, highly fenestrated conurbation with whitewashed walls and a roofline bewhiskered with heliostats, chimney pots and water heaters. Between us and the village was an empty landscape of low, grassy mounds interspersed with occasional stacks of standing masonry, weathered concrete and the odd finger of rusty iron. East Carmine, despite being on the very Outer Fringes of the Collective, had once been big. Back at Jade-under-Lime we had barely five streets of abandoned housing, but here the rough landscape continued for almost a half mile in every direction.

“East Carmine is only a fraction of the size it once was,” remarked Stafford. “The deFacting wasn’t quite as severe over this way, and one can still find artifacture that’s almost perfect. I restore vintage office equipment in my spare time. I have six working staplers and a Gestetner stencil duplicator. I can punch holes at competitive rates—and my recipe for black ink is famous all over the sector.”

We continued past the undulating grassland, the ancient layout of the old town easily discerned from a crisscrossing of smooth, grassed-over roads dotted with eroded mailboxes and streetlamps. There was little in the way of trees or low shrubs, as this was an area traditionally kept for pasture and reserved to accommodate any of the Previous who might return. Once, it was presumed, the houses had simply stood empty, waiting. But time, weather and neglect had taken their toll, and all that remained was these soft grassy mounds and an inviolable Rule that they be kept that way. No one seriously considered that the once-numerous Previous
would
come back, but Rules are rules.

“What do you think of our crackletrap?” asked Stafford, indicating the large structure that had been placed atop the flak tower.

“Impressive,” I murmured.

“The prefects—Mrs. Gamboge in particular—are very big on the dangers of lightning,” explained the porter. “It’s been finished only since Winternox, and has already been struck over a hundred times.”

The lightning lure was a wooden latticework affair topped with a domed bronze attractor about thirty feet in diameter. Since every house in the Collective had a metallic daylight-collection device on its roof, homes were highly susceptible to a wayward bolt, which would course down the steel adjustment rods and cause electrical mayhem within the house. The luckless were sometimes fused to anything metallic, sometimes half vaporized and at other times simply dead in their beds, their eyeballs and internal organs boiled to something closely resembling minestrone soup. Lurid accounts and photographs were published every week in
Spectrum
.

“I expect you take lightning-avoidance issues seriously where you come from?” asked Stafford.

“Our Council are more concerned about swan attack, but lightning isn’t ignored,” replied my father. “We have a fleet of a half-dozen specially adapted Fords, each with a bronze attractor mounted on a pylon in the flatbed. They’re driven in to intercept a storm when the direction and severity are known.”

“We have an anomaly ten miles or so upwind,” said Stafford, “so ball lightning can be a problem in these parts. There are plans to erect a steel catch-net on the Western Hills, but it’s mostly talk.”

Fork lightning could be easily lured from areas of habitation, but ball lightning was a law unto itself. It drifted along with the breeze, became caught in eddies and sometimes entered houses. It was sticky, too, and would attach itself to anything organic. A bad ball strike could leave the victim almost completely incinerated; nervous residents who were unspooned etched their names on steel plates to keep in their pockets, just in case.

We continued on the road down to the village itself, a knot of houses on a raised hillock. The dwellings were built in the Salvagesque style, a hodgepodge of construction methods using a wide variety of materials ranging from the deeply ancient carved stone to reused timber, rubber roof tiles, brick, adobe and, in some places, the more modern oak-framed wattle and daub. As we moved off the Perpetulite and onto the cobbled street, Dad asked the porter about Robin Ochre, the previous swatchman.

“Mr. Ochre’s absence is deeply regretted,” he remarked. “He left a wife and daughter.”

“He will send for them in due course, I suppose?” I asked, wholly misunderstanding the comment.

“I’m not sure he’s in much of a condition to do anything.”

“I was led to believe,” said Dad slowly, “that Mr. Ochre had retired from the profession.”

“Ah!” said Stafford. “While euphemistically true, the phrase is also potentially misleading. I can only repeat the Council’s own findings: that Mr. Ochre was . . .
fatally self-misdiagnosed.
”

“Robin is dead?” asked my father.

“I’m no medical expert, of course,” replied the porter thoughtfully, “but yes, that’s precisely what he is. Four weeks ago to the day.”