Shades of Grey (35 page)

“
Stars?
” murmured Lucy. The obsolete word sounded ancient to our ears. But we all murmured our understanding. We’d
heard
about them but hadn’t considered that we would ever be able to observe them in any meaningful way. Like the Pyramids, the Great Sweat, Chuck Naurice, Tariq Al-Simpson, M’Donna and the Rainbowsians, we all knew they had once existed, but there was no record, or proof—they were now just labels on lost memories, cascading down the years from resident to resident, echoes of lost knowledge.

“But these are
not
points of light,” observed Aubrey. “They’re
circles
.”

“Arcs,” repeated Mrs. Lapis Lazuli. “Let’s just stick to the facts, eh?”

“They
move,
” said the Apocryphal man, “and describe a circular motion in the night sky. What you see is not a moment in time, but seven hours of time, seen as one.”

Granny Crimson repeated what he had said, word for word.

There was another silence as we all took this in, and I felt a thrill of discovery, of gained intelligence. But there was something else, too: an overwhelming sense of inconsolable
loss
. Progressive Leapbacks had stripped so much knowledge from the Collective that we were now not only ignorant, but had no idea
how
ignorant. The moving stars in the night sky were only one small part of a greater understanding that had gone for good. And as I stood there frowning to myself, I had a sense that everything about the Collective was utterly and completely
wrong
. We should be dedicating our lives to
gaining
knowledge, not to losing it.

“But
why
do the stars move?” asked Mrs. Crimson.

“They don’t.”

“They don’t,” repeated Granny Crimson.

“But you said—”

“
We
move,” remarked Lucy with a flash of understanding. “The earth rotates about its axis once a day. If you think about it, our own sun
also
describes a circle about us.”

I saw the Apocryphal man nod his head agreeably, and everyone went silent, pondering the notion carefully.

“I must say I find this extremely far-fetched,” said Mrs. Gamboge, who was doubtless miffed that we were debating anything at all. “It is well known that mental incapacity places Granny Crimson not a week from Variant-G. Besides, what you are saying cannot be true, for there is a single point, right in the middle of the rings, which does not move at all.”

“Arcs,” said Mrs. Lapis Lazuli.

“I suggest,” replied Granny Crimson, once the Apocryphal man had spoken, “that it is a distant star perfectly aligned with the rotating axis of the earth.”

We all fell into a hushed silence. The Apocryphal man spoke self-evident truths with such clarity that we all felt humbled. But my father put it best. He looked straight at Granny Crimson and said, “I have been to Debating Society meetings for over twenty years. In all that time I have listened to nothing but poorly reasoned theories and weakly argued supposition. Tonight, we have listened to true knowledge.”

“I’ll get the rice pudding,” said Mrs. Ochre, and hurried from the room.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Lemon-Skye, addressing the Apocryphal man but looking at Granny Crimson, “you might bring your keen intellect to bear on another intractable puzzle that has confounded our weekly gathering for some years?”

The Apocryphal man made no sound, but Aubrey didn’t get to ask his question, for Lucy interrupted to pose one of her own. “What is the music of the spheres?”

The Apocryphal man stared at her for a long time, then, with great deliberation, said, “Once, music was
everything
. It answered all problems, fulfilled all needs. It powered industry, transport, entertainment. It delivered comfort and light, information, books, communications and death. It could even bring . . . music.”

He then yawned as though tired of the proceedings. He took out a pocket handkerchief, filled it with food and walked out of the room.

Before Granny Crimson had even finished repeating his answer, Aubrey Lemon-Skye let his feelings be known. “Well, thank you very much,” he said sarcastically to Lucy. “There I am, about to ask the timeless riddle about why apples float and pears sink, and you go and annoy him—sorry, her, with your silly harmonic pathways, which, might I say, are of questionable relevance. Music bringing music? Ridiculous!”

There was a sharp intake of breath at Aubrey’s rudeness. He had almost—but not quite—raised his voice.

Lucy stared back at him, hot with indignation. “Their relevance might be in doubt, sir,” she replied with a thin veneer of cordiality, “but compared to
your
question, they are raised to a level of unprecedented profundity.” She was talking heavily out of hue—Crimson was higher and redder than she—but we were all guests in the Ochre house, so her conduct, while unacceptable, was not technically actionable.

“And
I
say it is all poppycock and fiddle-faddle,” announced Mrs. Gamboge, who obviously felt she didn’t have to guard her language at all, an opinion embraced by Granny Crimson, who declared that Lucy’s interest in the supernatural was “the milk shake of the indolent.” She probably wouldn’t have said it if Mrs. Ochre was in the room, and I could sense that Lucy and her talk of harmonic pathways had gotten up everyone’s noses several times in the past.

Lucy said nothing but quietly stood up, took a lead ball and a length of thin steel wire from her pocket and, after fetching a thumbtack from the bureau, attached the pendulum to the top of the door frame, set it swinging and then returned to her seat.

“And what is that supposed to prove?” asked Aubrey, just as Mrs. Ochre brought in the rice pudding I had made, plus her own treacle sponge and custard “just in case.”

“Have I missed something?” asked Mrs. Ochre, since Aubrey’s rudeness toward Lucy had caused something of a silence to descend on the room, and we were all staring at the pendulum with mild embarrassment, for it would reflect badly on Lucy when it did what pendulums do, which was to stop.

“Your daughter is demonstrating her theory of harmonics,” said my father, and after Mrs. Ochre had said, “Fancy that!” we concentrated on the dessert, and the conversation turned to approximating the migration cruising altitude of the species
Cygnus giganticus
, and a reason why they seemed to constantly fly in large figure-eight patterns.

“Sometimes they are so high they barely look like swans at all,” remarked Mrs. Crimson.

The talk didn’t stay on swans for long, however, as everyone’s attention turned back to the lead ball, which had not slowed and stopped, as one would expect from a pendulum of less than a foot in length, but seemed to be
increasing
.

“How curious!” remarked Mr. Crimson, echoing our thoughts perfectly.

As we watched, the pendulum increased its swing until the lead ball came into contact with the underneath of the door frame with a sharp
snock
, swiftly followed by another as the ball struck the other side. From then on the swing increased ever more dramatically, and within a minute the wire was invisible, the lead ball a semicircular blur and the noise a sharp staccato of sound that increased in volume until it was a continuous howl and several of the diners leaned back in alarm.

As the wood on the door frame began to splinter with the constant hammering, the wire suddenly broke and the lead ball shot off, bounced on the sideboard, shattered a tumbler in front of Mrs. Lapis Lazuli and then vanished out the window, leaving an almost perfect hole in the glass.

Lucy said nothing, for there was little to be said. Aubrey gamely said that he would pay for the damage, which was about as good an apology as one might expect from someone born a Yellow.

“Before you ask,” said Lucy, “I have no idea why it works. But it
does
.”

“It’s the motive power behind the Everspins,” I mused, building on the Apocryphal man’s contention that to the Previous, music was everything, “and probably runs the lightglobes, too.”

“How does it do it?” asked Mrs. Crimson, which was a question no one even attempted to answer.

“I think maybe there’s a huge tuning fork somewhere,” suggested Lucy, “or a network of them, and they resonate together in harmony, each feeding off the other, sending vibrations through the air around us.”

“And still humming after five centuries?” observed my father. “It must be a very large tuning fork indeed.”

“Enormous,” remarked Lucy in a quiet voice.

The table lapsed into silence as we considered all manner of things that up until now had no simple explanation. The hot-water elements in boilers, for one, which went scaldingly hot twice a day for an hour, and pre-Epiphanic window glass, which buzzed itself clean at midday.

“Furthermore,” said Lucy as a final comment, “I’ve noticed that in an area of strong harmonics, a floatie will rise a good two or three extra inches—thus suggesting a link between music and gravity.”

We ate our pudding in silence following these dramatic revelations, and after lemon tea Mrs. Lapis Lazuli gave a talk on her lifetime’s research into bar codes, which, although carefully studied and diligently argued, was long on theory and short on facts. She had decoded seven of the known thirty-one variants, yet had been unable to explain exactly what benefit bar codes held over numbers, nor why almost everything tended to have them. Not just all the pre-Epiphanic artifacture but almost everything else, too—from Perpetulite to oaks, yateveos, slugs, fruit flies, mice, root vegetables, rhinosauruses—even us, with something similar to a bar code growing out of our left-hand nail beds. Her favored theory was that the Previous performed periodic stock-takes and needed to know not only where all the stuff was but how much there was of it. This seemed likely, as the Previous were renowned for their desire to count things in order to control them. She also noted that some things had partial or “vestigial” codes, like the now-unreadable smudges on the necks of donkeys, and that a few things had no trace of a bar code at all: most notably bats, apples, bar codes themselves and rhododendrons. She was given a round of applause at the end, and she thanked us all modestly, giving credit to her librarians, who had so ably assisted her in the research.

The rest of the evening was spent less in debating and more in general chitchat, and by the time the evening was out, and the lime had been passed round and peeked with enthusiasm, everyone was the best of acquaintances. Even Sally Gamboge was faintly acceptable, and she even made a joke about the shriveled toe that Bunty had found in her pinafore pocket.

I got home an hour before lights-out. Dad told me to go ahead, as he would be helping Mrs. Ochre tidy up. The streetlamp went out less than twenty minutes after I had got into bed, and I listened to the Morse chatter on the radiators for a while. It was mostly about the possibility of connection to the grid, the presence of the Colorman and who would be stupid or daring enough to volunteer for the High Saffron expedition. There was even talk about me and my attempt to rescue Travis the previous evening. The opinions ran from “insane” to “brave” to “I think he’s got a cute bottom.”

Across the top of the chat, the nightly serialized book was being tapped out by Mrs. Lapis Lazuli. And now that I knew it was she, I could hear the mild tremor in her hand. I listened to
Renfrew
for a while before falling asleep, thinking about whether I should tell the Colorman about Jane, or Jane about the Colorman, and whether starting a Question Club was a good idea. I also thought about the wisdom of advanced queuing theory, and, of course, the wheelbarrow.

“R
ight, then,” said Prefect Turquoise. “I want a good Boundary Patrol, but I don’t want any silly accidents. No straying beyond the boundary unless absolutely necessary, and
under no circumstances
farther than the Outer Markers. There hasn’t been a swan attack for six years, and no one’s seen any Riffraff for thirty—but I don’t want anyone to think this means we can afford to be complacent. Usual pairings, keep your eyes open, don’t startle any megafauna and be sure to check in at every phone booth. Mr. Lime has asked us to keep a careful eye on any rhododendrons creeping over the boundary—if you see any seedlings, pull them up. You know how invasive they are. Those walking Delta and Echo sectors will be dropped at Harmony by Mr. Fandango in the Ford and work their way back. Russett, you’ll be with Doug in Foxtrot sector. Any questions?”

“Yes,” said a light Yellow. “Will we be back in time for breakfast? You know how the Greys always scoff the bacon in the first five minutes.”

“First come, first served,” said Turquoise. “That’s the Rule, irrespective of hue. If you don’t dawdle, perhaps you might finally get to taste bacon.”

“I heard it’s really good,” said someone farther down the line, a sentiment that everyone seemed to agree with.

Sixteen of us were standing outside the town hall. We were dressed in Outdoor Adventure #9s, and carried no spots. I’d had similar duties since I reached eligibility at age thirteen, so was acquainted enough with the procedure to know how boring it could be. Swans rarely came close to settlements, and Riffraff were far too canny to be surprised by a Boundary Patrol. Besides, if you talked loudly enough they’d hide anyway, and would become someone else’s problem.

There were no other questions, so each team was handed a copy of a much-thumbed procedures manual, which contained detailed descriptions of the various types of swan, lightning and Riffraff, together with their individual peril ratings and a checklist of what to do if they were spotted. Turquoise wished us all well, told us again not to stray beyond the boundary and to call from
every
checkpoint, then left us to it.