Shades of Grey (6 page)

“How did that go down?”

“Not very well. I was fined thirty merits for ‘insulting the simple purity of the queue.’ ”

“You should have registered it as a Standard Variable.”

“Does that work?”

Travis said that it did. The Standard Variable procedure was in place to allow very minor changes of the Rules. The most obvious example was the “Children under ten are to be given a glass of milk and a smack at 11:00 a.m.” Rule, which for almost two hundred years was interpreted as the literal Word of Munsell, and children were given the glass of milk and then clipped around the ear. It took a brave prefect to point out—tactfully, of course—that this was doubtless a spelling mistake, and should have read “snack.” It was blamed on a scribe’s error rather than Rule fallibility, and the Variable was adopted. Most loopholes and Leapback circumvention were based on Standard Variables. Another good example would be the train we were riding on now. Although “The Railways” had been banned during Leapback III, a wily travel officer had postulated that a singular rail
way
was still allowable—hence the gyro-stabilized inverted monorail in current usage. It was loopholery at its very best.

“It’s not generally known, but anyone can apply for a Standard Variable,” explained Travis, “and all the Council can say is no.”

“Which they will.”

“Sure, but at least you’re covered.”

I finished making the tea, and then looked for some biscuits, without success.

“Hey,” said Travis, as he had an idea, “what’s this East Carmine place like?”

“I don’t know. It’s Outer Fringes—so pretty wild, I should imagine.”

“Sounds perfect. Who knows? A fellow Yellow may take pity on me and negotiate a pardon. Do you have five merits on you?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I’ll buy them off you for ten.”

“What’s the point in that?”

“You’re going to have to trust me.”

Intrigued, I handed over a five-merit note.

“Thanks. Now snitch on me to the Duty Yellow when we arrive at East Carmine.”

I agreed to this, then thought for a moment. “Can I have another peek of your lime?”

“Okay.”

So I did, and I felt all peculiar again, and told Travis rather gushingly that I was going to marry an Oxblood.

“Which one?”

“Constance.”

“Never heard of her.”

 

“About time!” scolded the Green woman when I finally returned, tea in hand. “What were you doing? Gossiping like the worst sort of Grey?”

“No, ma’am.”

“And my biscuit? Where is my biscuit?”

“There were no biscuits, ma’am—not even nasty ones.”

“Humph,” she said, in the manner of someone horribly aggrieved. “Then another tea, boy, for my husband.”

I looked at the Green man, who until his wife had mentioned it had not considered that he wanted a cup.

“Oh!” he said, “What a good idea. Milk with one—”

“He’s not going,” said my father without looking up from his copy of
Spectrum
.

“It’s all right,” I said, thinking about Travis and his lime, “I’ll go.”

“No,” said Dad more firmly, “you
won’t
.”

The Green couple stared at us, incredulous.

“I’m sorry,” said the Green man with a nervous laugh. “For a moment there I thought you said he wasn’t going.”

“That’s precisely what I said,” repeated Dad in an even tone, still not looking up.

“And why would that be?” demanded the Green woman in a voice shrill with self-righteous indignation.

“Because you didn’t use the magic word.”

“We don’t
have
to use the magic word.”

Living in a Green sector as a Red had never endeared the hue to my father. Although the Spectrum was well represented in Jade-under-Lime, there was a predominance of Greens, which tended to push a pro-Green agenda, and Dad was only a holiday relief swatchman because he’d been pushed from a permanent position by a Green swatchman. In any event, Dad had seen enough not to be pushed around. I’d never traveled with him before, but it was rather exciting to see him defy those further up in the Spectrum.

“If your son is unwilling or unable to do a simple chore, I’m sure we can ask the Yellow to conciliate on the matter,” continued the Green man in a threatening manner, nodding his head in the direction of the Yellow passenger. “Unless,” he added, suddenly thinking that he might have made a terrible mistake, “I have the honor of addressing a prefect?”

But Dad wasn’t a prefect. Indeed, his senior monitor status was mostly honorary and carried little authority. But he had something they’d never have: letters. He fixed the Greens with a glare and said, “Allow me to more fully introduce myself: Holden Russett, GoC (Hons).”

Only members of the Guild of Chromaticologists or the National Color Guild and Emerald City University graduates had letters after their names. They were the only permitted acronyms. The Greens looked at each other nervously. It wasn’t what Dad’s letters
stood for
, but the inferred threat of mischief that went with them. There was a fear—enthusiastically stoked by other Chromaticologists, I believe—that if you annoy a swatchman, he’d flash you a peek of 332-26-85, which dropped an instantaneous hemorrhoid. Doing so was strictly forbidden, of course, but the
perception
of a threat was eight times as good as a real one.

“I see,” gulped the Green man as he engineered a rapid about-face, “perhaps we have been overhasty in our demands. Good day to you.”

And they moved swiftly off up the carriage. I stared at Dad, impressed by his ability to punch above his hue. I’d not seen him do anything like that before, and was interested to see what else I would learn about him in our stay together in East Carmine. But he was unconcerned by it all, and had closed his eyes in anticipation of a nap.

“Do you do that a lot?” I asked, rubbing my temples. The lime was beginning to get its own back, as small bursts of pink had started to appear on the periphery of my vision.

He gave an imperceptible shrug. “Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it. Impoliteness is the Mildew of mankind, Eddie.”

It was one of Munsell’s truisms, and unlike most of Munsell’s truisms, actually true.

 

We stopped at Persimmon-on-River, where the Oranges alighted, a couple of Blues got on and a piano was delicately manhandled from one of the boxcars while freight was checked and loaded. We steamed out of there and ten minutes later passed Three Combs Junction, where we clattered over some points, banked to the right and then rumbled across a wooden trestle bridge to steam up a broad treeless valley. Scattered herds of ground sloths, giraffes, kudus and bouncing goats were grazing but paid us little attention. The line shifted direction to the north and plunged into a steep valley of almost indescribable loveliness. The track ran alongside a cascading, rock-strewn river, and steep hills laced with oak and silver birch rose on either side, with kites wheeling over the limestone crags high above.

I stared out the window, my eyes searching for red as a ratfink stalks a squarriel. It was midsummer; we were past the welcome cascade of early orchids, and it was now the time of the poppies, sorrel and pink campions. Once they were done, the snapdragons and maiden pinks would sustain us until the end of the season, and it was in this manner that we Reds leapfrogged through the spring and summer on a frugal diet of seasonal blooms. Mind you, the cooler weather at year’s end didn’t completely dull our senses. Although better suited to Orange and Yellow eyes than ours, autumn was quite often a rapturous explosion of delights, if the leaves lingered on the branches long enough to be reddened by a fortuitous warm spell. It was the same story for the other colors, to a greater or lesser degree. The Yellows had more seasonal bloom, Blues and Oranges had less. Greens, as they constantly reminded us, had only two Chromatic seasons: the abundant muted and the abundant vibrant. Growing bored, I turned my attention to Dad’s copy of
Spectrum
.

The magazine contained pretty much the same articles that it always did. There was an editorial extolling the functional simplicity of the color-based economy, and then, on pages two and three, graphically illustrated accounts of recent swan attacks and lightning deaths. Following this were some “Top Tips” on what you could do to increase your survival chances if caught out after dark, and the weekly Very Racy Story. There were stoppage listings on the rail network and the Science Wild Conjecture page, which this week had an article that linked sun-spot activity to the increased fade-rate. There were amusing anecdotes sent in by readers, a comic strip, Gus Honeybun’s Birthdays, a preview of what to expect this year at Jollity Fair and the likely contenders for the Fourth Great Leap Backward in three years’ time.

But the first thing I read was always Spouse Mart—not because I was looking for a partner away from home, but because it gave a rough scale of prices in the the complex issue of the Chromatic marriage market, a subject pertinent to me, as Dad would have to cough up a fair bit of cash to see me married into the Oxbloods.

There were two types of ads. Some were from parents eager to offer a shedload of merits to marry off their children up-color, such as this one:

On the other side of the coin were parents willing to trade down-Spectrum in order to
receive
a shedload of merits, like this dodgy chap:

Coincidentally, I even found one from East Carmine, where we were now headed:

The ad was steeped in code, as the Rules were quite strict as to what could and could not be said. “Available soon” meant she was not yet tested for her perception, but “strong Purpleness” meant she was
expected
to hit the 50 percent mark, which made the six thousand asking price about right, since she already had an egg chit. Reading between the lines, it looked as though her parents were hoping for a wealthy Purple family who had recently lost hue but retained hopes of dynastic recovery, and wanted someone who could child pretty soon. The amount of virtues listed meant little, but the “Option to refuse waived” spoke volumes: Whichever Purple came along with the largest wad won the young lady. Either she was very compliant, or her parents were tyrants. Most parents these days at least
consulted
with their children before negotiating dowries on their behalf, and some forward-thinking parents even allowed them a veto.

As we emerged from the valley, a recently abandoned town appeared on our left, just on the other side of the river. I caught the name of the station as we clanked past without stopping: Rusty Hill
.
The platform was liberally sprinkled with animal droppings and windblown soil. Grass and weeds grew in happy profusion from the paving-slab cracks, but nothing had been touched since abandonment. Cups and plates still sat on the station canteen’s tables, and in the waiting room I could even see a pile of leather suitcases slowly turning to blackened mulch beneath a leaking roof. I looked across at the town, and noted a few missing slates and broken windows. It looked as though it had been lived in as little as five years ago.

We moved through Rusty Hill’s abandoned farmland, past a Faraday cage or two and fields that were now covered in tall grasses, low shrubs, brambles and saplings. Wildstock had broken in long ago, and the stone walls had been breached by wandering megafauna. Even the iron-framed glasshouse was slowly succumbing to a dual assault of external weather and rampant growth within—the branch of an unpruned apple had pushed out several panes of glass. Without intervention in the next twenty years, the village would be irrecoverable. We left Rusty Hill’s boundary by way of an unattended railgate, and then skirted along one side of a broad valley that was an empty wilderness punctuated by mature woodland and the troublesome rhododendron, which was growing out here in even greater quantities. I noted a few subtle markers of the Previous as we rolled past: a long stretch of perfectly smooth roadway; a few dilapidated buildings that had somehow resisted collapse; the remains of a steel bridge, now marooned in empty grassland by a river that had long since meandered elsewhere; and most spectacularly, a cast-iron phone box eroded by wind and rain to the delicateness of filigree.

Twenty minutes later we entered another steep valley, crossed the river and passed through a V-shaped gap in the hills. Then, as the trees thinned and the smoke and steam momentarily cleared, I had my first glimpse of East Carmine: the twin redbrick chimneys of what I would later learn was the linoleum factory. The train passed through the Outer Markers, crossed the river, slowed for the stockwall railgate, then entered the neatly tilled land of the sub-Collective. East Carmine’s patch must have been perhaps thirty miles by ten at its widest part and occupied the middle section of a wide, fertile valley, with low hills to the east and mountains to the north and west. I could see now why there was a settlement here. It was quite lovely in a quaint, uncomplicated sort of way and, despite being on the weather side of the country, warmer and lusher than I had imagined. The railway station was a half mile or so from the village, which was fairly low-lying—except for the omnipresent flak tower, which, along with the Perpetulite roadways, was probably the most visible evidence of the Previous, and no less strange. Quite why anyone would build stark, windowless towers all over the country was never fully explained, nor was how they came by their name. But oddly, East Carmine’s flak tower seemed to have a nonstandard domed construction on top of it.