Shades of Grey, Page 2

  Unusually for a regional hub, Vermillion was positioned pretty much on the edge of the civilized world. Beyond it to the east were only the Redstone Mountains and isolated outposts like East Carmine. In the uninhabited zone there would be wild outland, megafauna, lost villages of untapped scrap color and quite possibly bands of nomadic Riffraff. It was exciting and worrying all in one, and until the week before, I hadn’t even heard of East Carmine, let alone thought I would be spending a month there on Humility Realignment. My friends were horrified, expressed low-to-moderate outrage that I should be treated this way and proclaimed that they would have started a petition if they could have troubled themselves to look for a pencil.

  “The Fringes are the place of the slack-willed, slack-jawed and slack-hued,” remarked Floyd Pinken, who could comfortably boast all three of those attributes, if truth be known.

  “And be wary of losers, self-abusers, fence leapers and fornicators,” added Tarquin, who, given his family history, would not have seemed out of place there either.

  They then informed me that I would be demonstrably insane to leave the safety of the village boundary for even one second, and that a trip to the Fringes would have me eating with my fingers, slouching and with hair below the collar in under a week. I almost decided to buy my way out of the assignment with a loan from my twice-widowed aunt Beryl, but Constance Oxblood thought otherwise.

  “You’re doing a what?” she asked when I mentioned the reason I was going to East Carmine.

  “A chair census, my poppet,” I explained. “Head Office is worried that the chair density might have dropped below the proscribed 1.8 per person.”

  “How absolutely thrilling. Does an ottoman count as a chair or a very stiff cushion?”

  She went on to say that I would be showing significant daring and commendable bravery if I went, so I changed my mind. With the prospect of joining the family of Oxblood and of myself as potential prefect material, I was going to need the broadening that travel and furniture counting would doubtless bring, and a month in the intolerably unsophisticated Outer Fringes might well supply that for me.

  The Oz Memorial trumped the Badly Drawn Map in that it was baffling in three dimensions rather than just two. It was a partial bronze of a group of oddly shaped animals, the whole about six feet high and four feet across. According to the museum guide, it had been cut into pieces and dumped in the river three centuries before as part of the deFacting, so only two figures remained of a possible five. The best preserved was that of a pig in a dress and a wig, and next to her stood a bulbous-bodied bear in a necktie. Of the third and fourth figures there remained almost nothing, and of the fifth, only two claw-shaped feet truncated at the ankles, modeled on no creature living today.

  “The eyes are very large and humanlike for a pig,” said my father, peering closer. “And I’ve seen a number of bears in my life, but none of them wore a hat.”

  “They were very big on anthropomorphism,” I ventured, which was pretty much accepted fact. The Previous had many other customs that were inexplicable, none more so than their propensity to intermingle fact with fiction, which made it very hard to figure out what had happened and what hadn’t. Although we knew that this bronze had been cast in honor of Oz, the full dedication on the plinth was badly eroded, so it remained tantalizingly unconnected to any of the other Oz references that had trickled down through the centuries. Debating societies had pondered long and hard over the “Oz Question,” and published many scholarly tracts within the pages of Spectrum. But while remnants of Tin Men had been unearthed by salvage teams, and Emerald City still existed as the center of learning and administration, no physical evidence of brick roads had ever been found anywhere in the Collective, either of natural or synthetic yellow—and naturalists had long ago rejected the possibility that monkeys could fly. Oz, it was generally agreed, had been a fiction, and a fairly odd one. But in spite of that, the bronze remained. It was all a bit of a puzzle.

  After that, we paused only briefly to look at the exhibits in the museum, and only those of more than passing interest. We stopped and stared at the collection of Vimto bottles, the preserved Ford Fiesta with its obscene level of intentional obsolescence, then at the Turner, which Dad thought “wasn’t his best.” After that, we made our way to the floor below, where we marveled at the realistic poses in the life-size Riffraff diorama, which depicted a typical Homo feralensis encampment. It was all disturbingly lifelike and full of savagery and unbridled lust, and was for the most part based upon Alfred Peabody’s seminal work, Seven Minutes among the Riffraff. We stared at the lifeless mannequins with a small crowd of schoolchildren, who were doubtless studying the lower order of Human as part of a Historical Conjecture project.

  “Do they really eat their own babies?” asked one of the pupils as she stared with horrified fascination at the tableau.

  “Absolutely,” replied the teacher, an elderly Blue who should have known better, “and you, too, if you don’t respect your parents, observe the Rules and finish up your vegetables.”

  Personally, I had doubts about some of the more ridiculous claims regarding Riffraff. But I kept them to myself. Conjecture was a dish mostly served up wild.

  Asit turned out, the phonograph would not be demonstrated, because both it and the music disc had been put “beyond use” with a very large hammer. This wasn’t a result of mischief, but a necessary outcome of Leapback Compliance issues, as some fool hadn’t listed the device on this year’s exemption certificate. The staff at the museum seemed a trifle annoyed about this, as the destruction of the artifact reduced the Collective’s demonstrable phonographs to a solitary machine in Cobalt’s Museum of the Something That Happened

  “But it wasn’t all bad,” added the curator, a Red with very bushy eyebrows. “At least I can lay claim to being the last person ever to hear Mr. Simply Red.”

  After giving detailed feedback, we left the museum and headed off toward the Municipal Gardens.

  We paused on the way to admire an impressive wall painting of great antiquity that was emblazoned across the gable end of a brick house. It invited a long-vanished audience to “Drink Ovaltine for Health and Vitality,” and there was an image of a mug and two odd-looking but happy children, their football-sized eyes staring blankly out at the world with obvious satisfaction and longing. Although faded, the red components in the lips and script were still visible. Pre-Epiphanic wall paintings were rare and, when they depicted the Previous, creepy. It was the eyes. Their pupils, far from being the fine, neat dot of normal people’s, were unnaturally wide and dark and empty—as though their heads were somehow hollow—and this gave their look of happiness an unnatural and contrived demeanor. We stood and stared at it for a moment, then moved on.

  Any colorized park was a must-see for visitors, and Vermillion’s offering certainly didn’t disappoint. The color garden, laid out within the city walls, was a leafy enclave of dappled shade, fountains, pergolas, gravel paths, statuary and flowerbeds. It also had a bandstand and an ice cream stall, even if there was no band, nor any ice cream. But what made Vermillion’s park really special was that it was supplied by color piped direct from the grid, so it was impressively bright. We walked up to the main grassed area, just past the picturesque, ivy-gripped Rodin, and stared at the expanse of synthetic green. It was a major improvement on the park back home, because the overall scheme was tuned for the predominance of Red eyes. In Jade-under-Lime the bias was more toward those who could see green, which meant that the grass was hardly colored at all and everything red was turned up far too bright. Here the color balance was pretty much perfect, and we stood in silence, contemplating the subtle Chromatic symphony laid out in front of us.

  “I’d give my left plum to move to a Red sector,” murmured Dad in a rare display of crudeness.

  “You already pledged the left one,” I pointed out, “in the vague hope that Old Man Magenta would retire early.”

  “Did I?”

  “Last autumn, after
the incident with the rhinosaurus.”

  “What a dope that man is,” said Dad, shaking his head sadly. Old Man Magenta was our head prefect and, like many Purples, would have trouble recognizing himself in a mirror.

  “Do you think that’s really the color of grass?” asked Dad after a pause.

  I shrugged. There was no real way of telling. The most we could say was that this was what National Color felt the color of grass should be. Ask a Green how green grass was and they’d ask you how red was an apple. But interestingly, the grass wasn’t uniformly green. Anareathe size of a tennis court in the far corner of the lawn had changed to an unpleasant bluey-green. The discordancy was spreading like a water stain, and the off-color area had also taken in a tree and several beds of flowers, which now displayed unusual hues quite outside Standard Botanical Gamut. Intrigued, we noticed there was someone staring into an access hatch close to the anomaly, so we wandered over to have a look.

  We expected him to be a National Color engineer working on the problem, but he wasn’t. He was a Red park keeper, and he glanced at our spots, then hailed us in a friendly manner.

  “Problems?” asked Dad.

  “Of the worst sort,” replied the park keeper wearily. “Another blockage. The Council are always promising to have the park repiped, but whenever they get any money, they spend it on swan early-warning systems, lightning protection or something equally daft.”

  It was unguarded talk, but we were Reds, too, so he knew he was safe.

  We peered curiously into the access hatch where the cyan, yellow and magenta color pipes fed into one of the many carefully calibrated mixers in order to achieve the various hues required for the grass, shrubs and flowers. From there they would feed the network of capillaries that had been laid beneath the park. Colorizing gardens was a complex task that involved matching the osmotic coefficients of the different plants with the specific gravities of the dyes—and that was before you got started on pressure density evaporation rates and seasonal hue variation. Colorists earned their perks and bonuses.

  I had a pretty good idea what the problem was, even without looking at the flow meters. The bluey-green caste of the lawn, the grey appearance of the celandines and the purplish poppies suggested localized yellow deficiency, and this was indeed the case—the yellow flow meter was firmly stuck on zero. But the viewing port was full of yellow, so it wasn’t a supply issue from the park substation.

  “I think I know what the problem is,” I said quietly, knowing full well that unlicensed tampering with National Color property carried a five-hundred-merit fine.

  The park keeper looked at me, then at Dad, then back to me. He bit his lip and scratched his chin, looked around and then lowered his voice.

  “Can it be easily fixed?” he asked. “We have a wedding at three. They’re only Grey, but we try to make an effort.”

  I looked at Dad, who nodded his assent. I pointed at the pipe.

  “The yellow flow meter’s jammed, and the lawn’s receiving only the cyan component of the grass-green. Although I would never condone Rule breaking of any sort,” I added, making sure I had deniability if everything turned brown, “I believe a sharp rap with the heel of a shoe would probably free it.”

  The park keeper looked around, took off his shoe and did what I suggested. Almost instantly there was an audible gurgling noise.

  “Well, I’ll be jaundiced,” he said. “As easy as that? Here.”

  And he handed me a half merit, thanked us and went off to package up the grass clippings for cyan-yellow retrieval.

  “How did you know about that?” said Dad as soon as we were out of earshot.

  “Overheard stuff, mostly,” I replied.

  We’d had a burst magenta feed a few years back, which was exciting and dramatic all at the same time—a cascading fountain of purple all over the main street. National Color was all over us in an instant, and I volunteered myself as tea wallah just to get close. The technical language of the colorists was fairly obfuscating, but I’d picked up a bit. It was every resident’s dream to work at National Color, but not a realistic prospect: Your eyes, feedback, merits and sycophancy had to be beyond exemplary, and only one in a thousand of those who qualified to take the entrance exam.

  We ambled around the garden for as long as time would permit, soaking in the synthetic color and feeling a lot better for it. Unusually, they had hydrangeas in both colors, and delicately hand-tinted azaleas that looked outside of the CYM gamut: a rare luxury, and apparently a bequest from a wealthy Lilac. We noted that there wasn’t much pure yellow in the garden, which was probably a sop to the Yellows in the town. They liked their flowers natural, and since they could cause trouble if not acceded to, they were generally given their own way. When we passed the lawn on our way out, the grass in the anomaly was beginning to turn back to fresh lawn green, more technically known as 102-100-64. It would be back to full chroma in time for the wedding.

  We stepped out of the color garden, and walked back toward the main square. On the way we passed a Leaper who was seated by the side of the road, covered entirely in a coarse blanket except for his alms arm. I put my recently acquired half merit in his open palm, and the figure nodded in appreciation. Dad looked at his watch.

  “I suppose,” he said with little enthusiasm, “we should go and have the rabbit experience.”

  Paint and Purple

  2.6.19.03.951: A resident shall be deemed Purple if his or her individual red and blue perception values are (a) individually higher than 35 or (b) within 20 points of each other. If outside these parameters, the individual shall be defined as the stronger of the two colors. Marital conversion rules apply as normal.

  The route to the rabbit we would never see took us past Vermillion’s Paint Shop, something we hadn’t considered when we planned our itinerary. If I’d known National Color had a regional outlet, I would have insisted on at least five slow walk-pasts. The storefront was decorated in docile shades of synthetic olive and primrose, with the National Color lettering a mid-blue that was how I imagined the sky might appear. On display inside the window were paint cans arranged seductively in rows, along with small, garden-sized tubes of plant colorizers for those unable to afford connection to the grid. There were also tins of clothes dye for those eager to flaunt their color, and racks of glass ampules containing food coloring to add that extra I-don’t-know-what to otherwise boring dinner parties.

  I slackened my pace as I walked past the Paint Shop since it was considered exceptionally low-hued to gawp, and stepping inside was almost taboo, as I had no business to be there. Some of the hues in the window display I recognized, such as the single shade of yellow that often graced daffodils, lemons, bananas and gorse, but there were others, too—wild and sultry shades of blue that I’d never seen before, a cheeky pale yellow that might color who-knows-what and a wanton mauve that gave me a fizzy feeling down below. On the cans I noted familiar terms like umber, chartreuse, gordini, dead salmon, lilac, blouse, turquoise and aquamarine, and others that I hadn’t heard before, such as cornsilk, rectory, jaguar, old string, chiffon and suffield. It was all very eye-worthy. I slowed my pace even more when we passed the door, for the interior was as brightly decorated as the exterior, with chatty and hue-savvy National Color salespeople helping prefects from the outlying villages with their choices for communal glory. Our prefects would have come to a place very like this to negotiate a price for the terre verte that now graced our town hall, and so would have Mr. Oxblood. Constance’s family was wealthy enough to have its own bespoke colors mixed—wild, crowd-pleasing shades of etruscan and klein to free the spirit and tremble the cortex during the Oxbloods’ annual panchromatic garden parties.

  And then we were past the open door and the color and the wonder; and the rabbit, which had earlier seemed such a fantastically attractive idea, somehow seemed dull and pointless. The train station was also in this direction, and we would not pass this way again today, if ever.

  But something happened
. There was a scuffle and a thump and several shouts, and a few seconds later, a National Color employee rushed into the street.

  “You!” he said, pointing to the first Grey he saw. “Fetch a swatchman and be quick about it!”

  It was one of those moments when you are suddenly glad someone might be unwell, or even dead. For Dad was a swatchman, and someone else’s misfortune might just get me inside a Paint Shop, even if only for a few minutes. I tapped him on the arm.

  “Dad—?”

  He shook his head. It wasn’t his responsibility. There would be plenty of health practitioners in Vermillion, and if the situation turned brown, he’d be the one shouldering the bad feedback. I had to think fast. I tapped my wrist where I would have worn a watch, then made a rabbit-ears signal with my fingers. Dad understood instantly, turned on his heel and made straight for the door of the Paint Shop. As far as he was concerned, a choice between negative feedback and avoiding the rabbit was no choice at all. And that was it. We didn’t see the Last Rabbit, and I was on my way to being eaten by a yateveo.

  The sweet smell of synthetic color tweaked my nostrils the moment we stepped into the shop. It was an instantly recognizable odor, a curious mixture of scorched toffee apples, rice pudding and mothballs that put me in mind of the annual repaintings I witnessed as a child. We’d all stand downwind of the painters, breathing in deeply. The smell of fresh paint was inextricably linked to preparations for Foundation Day, and to renewal.

  “Who are you?” demanded the Blue colorist who had instructed the Grey, eyeing Dad’s Red Spot suspiciously.