Shades of Grey Read online

  “I couldn’t sell it to you even if I wanted to. I gave it to deMauve for safekeeping.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “It is?”

  “Certainly. DeMauve bargains hard. I’d probably have to pay him twice what I’d pay you.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “Yes, of course I’m kidding you,” he said in the manner of someone who probably wasn’t. “Come and have a look at what living color we do have.”

  We walked on toward the eastern end of the town square, where there was a sunken garden. About the size of a tennis court, it was enclosed by a low wall that was just the right height for a seat. It was East Carmine’s one and only color garden, and it was drab—the grass was a dark shade of green, and the flowers were all in muted versions of blue and yellow. The garden would be run on large toothpaste-tube-shaped pigment refills. Worse, they would be using the outdated Red-Blue-Yellow Color Model, which gave a miserably poor choice of hues.

  “The red cartridge ran out last week,” said Tommo. “We expect the yellow to dry out any day now, and you know what that means.”

  “Right,” I said, seeing the problem instantly. “Blue grass. That’s rotten—no village should be without a color garden.”

  “We’ll still have Mrs. Gamboge’s,” he said with a sneer. “She spends all her bonuses on nothing else. Even has a gardener employed full-time to tint by hand.”

  “With the labor shortage as it is?”

  “It’s not against the Rules. What do you think of that door?”

  We were walking past the Prime Residences on the sunny side of the square. The door that Tommo had indicated was painted univisual red, so everyone knew that it was the home of the village Red prefect. The artificial hue made the door almost obscenely bright; all detail and texture were obliterated by an overpowering color that was so strong it cross-fired into my other senses. I could smell burned hair, my ears started ringing and an odd jumble of memories popped into my head. Of my mother, a long-dead family pet and a performance of South Pacific I’d seen once.

  “Fairly bright,” I said, understanding what he was up to in an instant. He was trying to gauge my red perception.

  “Hmm,” said Tommo, “not painfully so, then? Any . . . tinnitus or memory sweeps? Visions of Repaint Your Wagon, for example?”

  “Not really. How about you?”

  “More shades of Seven Brides for Seven Colors, really—and Chuckles, our pet badger.”

  If that was true, he was almost as receptive as me. But from what I knew already of Tommo, bragging up his perception would be pretty much standard operating procedure—and everyone knew an oversaturation of one’s own color fired off memories of musicals and family pets.

  We walked on. Within a dozen paces we found ourselves outside a large building with LIBRARY written on the front.

  “Is that the library?” I asked.

  “Your deductive powers are quite extraordinary.”

  “I need to look something up,” I said, ignoring the sarcasm.

  “You go ahead,” he replied, “but it’s not for me. If I wanted to go and look at empty shelves, I’d prefer the supermarket. It smells better, and you don’t get pestered.”

  The unLibrary

  Imaginative thought is to be discouraged. No good ever comes of it—don’t.

  The Munsell Book of Wisdom

  I pushed open the doors and walked inside. The library was large and open-plan, with a circular void in the upper floor from where light descended vertically. Dotted around were tables and chairs, and a few mirrors on stands, useful for directing light to study. Or at least, it would have been, had there been any books to look at. As Tommo had already mentioned, the shelves were pretty much empty, and what books remained were so read-worn front and back that barely the middle chapters remained. Reading a book these days was a bit like learning what someone was doing, but never knowing how they got to be there or how it eventually turned out. It hadn’t always been like this. Successive Leapbacks had stripped the shelves of science, history, biography, geography, cookery, self-help, poetry, art—and now fiction, genre by genre. There were still books other than the strongly encouraged Very Racy Novels, but they were so few and far between that they were always either being borrowed, in transit or worn out. Not here in the library, anyway.

  “Can we help you?” came several hushed voices in unison and I jumped, for seven Blues had all crept silently up behind me and were now peering at me with expressions of wonder. The Rules had decreed that books be part of the successive Great Leap Backward, but due to a poorly drafted Leapback directive, staffing levels had remained unchanged and would remain so forever. The chief librarian was a tall and imperious-looking woman who was covered head to toe in bright synthetic blue and had a large quantity of jewelry draped about her neck and a tiara perched precariously on a large shock of bouffant white hair. She had drawn circles around her eyes, which were joined by a line across the bridge of her nose. It was the traditional mark of her calling, but no one knew why.

  “I am Mrs. Lapis Lazuli,” she announced in a voice that sounded like rusty wire under tension. “You must be the new swatchman’s son. You’re here to count chairs, I understand?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Hmm. I heard you fell for the Widow deMauve’s cherry cake scam. Watch out for that conniving old hag. The sooner she’s carried off by the Mildew, the better. Do you have a name?”

  “Edward,” I said, meek beneath her baleful stare. “I was actually after the reference section.”

  “Not fiction, then?” she asked in a hopeful tone of voice.

  I waved an arm in the direction of the empty shelves.

  “With the greatest of respect, ma’am, I think I’m about three centuries too late.”

  “Nonsense. I shall give you a personal guided tour. Visitors to the library are almost as rare as books. Indeed, the librarians here outnumber the books seven to one—if you don’t count Reference, those frightful Racy Novels or the Collected Thoughts of Munsell.”

  She guided me to the first of the empty shelves, while her assistant librarians all followed close behind.

  “I am ninth-generation librarian here in East Carmine,” she announced grandly. “Certain information has descended down the years, even if the books have not.”

  She pointed to a shelf, and I could see that carefully arranged in a row were the much-faded bar codes that had once been affixed upon the departed spines. She tapped a shelf.

  “This was where The Little Engine That Could once sat.”

  She lapsed into silence and we all stood there respectfully, staring at an empty space in the air.

  “What was it about?” asked one of the junior librarians, as it seemed a tour was an honor not often bestowed.

  “It was about an engine,” said Mrs. Lapis Lazuli, “that could.”

  “That could what?”

  “Over here,” she continued, gripping my elbow and sweeping me to the other side of the corridor, “were the complete works of Beatrice Potter. You may test me if you wish.”

  She turned her back, and at the other librarians’ urging, I picked a bar code at random. “Shout them out!” called Mrs. Lapis Lazuli, back still turned.

  “Thin thin, medium, modest,” I recited as I read the bar code, “thick, broad, minor, fat, token, token, slim, thin, medi—”

  “The Tail of Tom Kitten,” she announced happily. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, somewhat confused, since there was no information anywhere, either on the bar code or on the shelf.

  “Sixth from the left?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned back to me and beamed.

  “You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.” She pointed to the shelf opposite. “Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.”

  She moved swiftly to another wholly empty bookcase.

  “Th
is used to be the crime section.”

  She tapped a finger at various points on the shelves and barked out the titles of books, long since extinct.

  “The Most Serious Affair at Stiles,” she announced, “Murdoch on the Orientated Ex-Best, The Glass Quay, A Missed Simile’s Foaling in Snow, Gawky Park . . .”

  I looked across at the librarians, who were nodding to themselves as they attempted to memorize what she was saying and thus somehow perpetuate the knowledge. It seemed utterly pointless but also, in a curious way, noble.

  “. . . The Science of the Slams,” she continued, her pointing finger moving rapidly around the empty bookcase in a haphazard manner, “The Pig’s Leap, Monday Morning, The Force Bear, The Complete Sheer Luck Homes. Are you impressed, Master Edward?”

  “Very,” I replied.

  “My father taught me. And his mother before him. And her father before her—and so on. Do you get the picture?”

  “I do.”

  She paused and a sort of lost, dreamy look came over her.

  “All those words,” she whispered, “so diligently placed together, and so pointlessly torn apart.”

  She was suddenly overcome by a sadness and paused for several moments, before turning to me with a despondent smile.

  “What did you come in here for, anyway?”

  I had to think to remember. “The reference section.”

  “Of course! Hannah will take you to that chair over there, whereupon Gerard will escort you to the stairs. Silas with pick you up there and take you to general fiction, where Nancy will show you to the reference section. Cath will compose the risk assessment.”

  “What do I do?” asked Terri, as all the others eagerly went to their places to assist me the thirty feet to the reference section.

  “You’ll be assisting the young man to select the correct book.”

  She opened her eyes wide and jumped up and down in excitement, while the others grumbled enviously.

  Once Mrs. Lapis Lazuli had gone back to pacing the library, mumbling to herself and pointing at the shelves, I was expertly escorted to the reference section. I asked for the local Residents’ Manifest, and Terri obliged while the others stared from the doorway.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “An old friend asked me to check on some relatives living in the area,” I lied, and opened several books at random to disguise my intent. But I found what I was looking for. The postcode on the back of the Grey wrongspot’s spoon had been LD2 5TZ, and according to the records, it was in use by a four-year-old Grey living here in East Carmine, which wasn’t possible. Codes were only reallocated after death.

  “Do you have the historical records?” I asked. This elicited a squeak of pleasure from Terri, who vanished for a moment and then returned with a second volume, even more battered than the first. This was more help, and I found the information I wanted. My tasks complete, I thanked the librarians in turn, filled out their feedback forms and was shown to the door in a similarly labor-intensive manner.

  “How did you get along with our resident bookworm?” asked Tommo, who was waiting for me on the library steps.

  “She’s a bit fierce, isn’t she?”

  “Her bark is worse than her bite. Despite her position as deputy Blue prefect, she’s not averse to bending the Rules when it comes to story time.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’ll see—as long as your Morse is up to scratch.” He nodded toward the library. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Not really.”

  That wasn’t strictly true—or indeed, true at all. The holder of LD2 5TZ before the four-year-old had been a man who lived in Rusty Hill, the abandoned town we had rattled past on the way in. He would be sixty-eight by now, which fitted the Grey wrongspot perfectly. His name had been Zane G-49, and according to the records, he’d died four years ago in Rusty Hill’s Mildew outbreak. Two people had shared the same code. Such a concept was unthinkable. The finite quantity of postcodes kept the Collective’s population at sustainable levels. One in, one out—that’s how it worked. With two sharing one, the Collective was technically overpopulated—an abomination in the eye of the Rules. But it didn’t tell me what he was doing in the Paint Shop, or even what Jane had to do with it. I was as ignorant now as I had been when I awoke this morning.

  We walked on for a few moments in silence until Tommo looked at his watch, shook it and adjusted the hands so they matched the town clock.

  “Right,” he said enigmatically. “We’re off to the Sorting Pavilion. It’s time you met the Big Banana.”

  Courtland Gamboge

  5.2.02.02.018: Yellows are permitted to break Rules in the pursuit of Rule-breakers, but all Rules to be broken must be logged beforehand, and countersigned by the Yellow prefect.

  The Big Banana, I discovered, was the name given to Courtland Gamboge, the Yellow prefect’s son. I asked Tommo why Courtland wanted to meet me, and Tommo explained that Gamboge-the-younger liked to meet everyone. He had apparently topped eighty points in his Ishihara two years before and was certain to take over from his mother when she retired.

  “Not that she will anytime soon,” Tommo added, “but Courtland has to go some way to fill her shoes with the same level of ruthless unpleasantness.”

  “All Yellows are ruthless. It’s what they do.”

  “Not like these. Prefect Sally Gamboge has refused the Greyforce a holiday for seventeen years and has had them on sixty-eight-hour weeks for as long as anyone can remember. She treats them like dirt and is always drumming up bogus infractions. Even I think it’s out of order, and I’m grotesquely indifferent to the Greys.”

  “Is there a reason she’s so particularly unpleasant?”

  “The Gamboges think they should be players on a bigger stage. Lots of Yellow, all the overzealous ruthlessness—but a hopelessly provincial CV37 postcode. Transfer requests are simply ignored.”

  It was a familiar story. Despite being officially only used for addresses, the right code meant a lot, and snubbing was common, if illegal. I was glad that I had an RG6.

  “But she has to pay them overtime,” I pointed out, still thinking about the Greys. “That’s a compensation, at least.”

  “It would be if there was anything they could spend it on.”

  “Or even share, pool or bequeath their merits,” I said, pointing out one of the more iniquitous regulations regarding Grey wealth.

  “Serves them right for always eating the bacon,” said Tommo, whose outrage at the Greys’ treatment was lamentably short lived, “Apart We Are Together, and all that guff.”

  “If the Gamboges are so frightful,” I said, “I’m surprised you have anything to do with them.”

  “That’s precisely the reason I do. If there’s a tiger in the room, I want to be the one that combs its whiskers. Besides, Courtland has an Open Return, and he might just sell it to me.”

  We had been walking in the direction of the river.

  “That’s where the Greys live, over there.”

  He was pointing at a huddle of terraced houses set apart from the rest of the town. The twin rows of dwellings faced each other, with a roadway between them. Behind the houses were small gardens, tidy masses of runner-bean canes, fruit bushes and garden sheds, and clean laundry fluttering in the breeze. The homes must have numbered a hundred or more. I had never entered a Greyzone alone or known anyone who had. Even the Yellows thought twice about a visit. But rather than admit they were nervous, they simply said the place was unhygienic, which was patently untrue. Greys just didn’t like us there, in the same way that they weren’t permitted in the village unless on business. The big difference was, Chromatics were allowed in the Greyzone—but thought it wiser to stay away.

  “We have a Grey named Jane as our maid,” I said, attempting to glean some information. “She seems a trifle . . . volatile.”

  “We call her Crazy Jane, but never to her face. She’s broken more bones than almost anyon
e else in the village.”

  “Accident-prone?”

  “Not hers. Ours. She’ll punch anyone who mentions her nose, and once fractured Jim-Bob’s arm because she thought he was looking at her whatnots.”

  “Was he?”

  “Not on that particular occasion. But she won’t bother us for much longer. We’re not sure how deep into negative merits she is, but it’s rumored five hundred or so.”

  I whistled low. “But she’s pretty, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll concede that her nose is definitely the cutest and most retroussé in the village,” said Tommo, “but as for pretty—so is a viper. If you tried to kiss either, you’d get bitten on the face.”

  The well-worn path through the lumpy grasslands took us past one of the many ancient streetlamps still standing.

  “Repainted every year without fail,” said Tommo proudly, pausing for a moment to admire the cast-iron lampposts. “The janitor had to take the Ford into Vermillion to have the bands relined, so he took Jabez and me. On the outskirts you drive through a town that is long gone, but the streetlamps are still there, running in great rows upon the land, and standing in the middle of open pasture like stunted oaks.”

  “Could one get to Vermillion and back in a morning?” I asked, Jane’s apparently impossible trip to Vermillion and back still on my mind.

  “You could do it in the Ford.”

  “Is that a practical proposition?”

  “No. For a start, Carlos—he’s our janitor—treats the Model T better than his own daughter, and every drop of fuel oil has to be logged and accounted for. You might get in by Penny-Farthing, but you’d have to push it across the six miles of rutted track between Rusty Hill and Persimmon. Plus you’d have to find a way across the ferry without any transit papers. Believe me, if there was a way, I’d be the first person to try it. There are a hundred reasons for me to get to Vermillion, all of them highly profitable.”