Shades of Grey Read online

  “Dad,” I said, “what would a Grey posing as a Purple be doing in a National Color Paint Shop in Vermillion?”

  “Steady,” said Dad with a smile. “Curiosity is a descending stair—”

  I finished the oft-spoken rhyme with him: “—that leads to only who-knows-where.” Then I added, “but inquisitiveness will pay dividends when I’m a senior monitor.”

  “If you become a senior monitor,” he corrected. “We don’t know whether you’ve got the Red—and Constance’s hand is not yet won. And remember: The inquisitive have a nasty habit of ending up in Reboot. Like that Carrot fellow—what was his name again?”

  “Dwayne.”

  “Right. Dwayne Carrot. Too many silly questions. So be careful.”

  And after this sweepingly general piece of advice, he unfolded his copy of Spectrum and started to read. Despite our closeness, I had never told Dad that I could actually see a lot more red than I let on. The question was not whether I had the 50 percent needed to be Chromogentsia and senior monitor, but whether I had the 70 percent required to become a potential Red prefect. I was quietly confident that I could, but I wasn’t certain. Color perception was notoriously subjective, and the very human vagaries of deceit, hyperbole and self-delusion all conspired to make pre-test claims pretty much worthless. But all doubts came to nought the morning of your Ishihara. No one could cheat the Colorman and the color test. What you got was what you were, forever. Your life, career and social standing decided right there and then, and all worrisome life uncertainties eradicated forever. You knew who you were, what you would do, where you would go and what was expected of you. In return, you simply accepted your position within the Colortocracy, and assiduously followed the Rulebook. Your life was mapped. And all in the time it takes to bake a tray of scones.

  Travel to East Carmine

  3.9.34.59.667: In order to maintain the quality of breeding stock and to maintain public decency, complementary colors are absolutely forbidden to marry. (Examples: Orange/ Blue, Red/Green, Yellow/Purple.)

  A few minutes later, and with the shiny steam locomotive huffing out large clouds of white vapor with a rhythmic, hissy thump, the train moved slowly out of Vermillion. I could hear the gyros whining softly, and the air was full of the hot odor of oil and coal smoke. We gathered speed, and then gently banked as we curved past sidings full of twin-rail locomotives, abandoned since the last Great Leap Backward almost a century before.

  There was only one passenger carriage, and it was relatively empty. A couple of Blue factory managers were talking loudly about the fact that employment had once more increased, and how they were thus compelled to extend the Greys’ working week. It was a worrying development. Once all Greys were overemployed, the next highest on the scale—Reds—would be expected to make up the shortfall. Luckily, it would be the lower-perceptor Reds first, so overemployment would have to reach dangerously high levels before I would be expected to pick up a hoe or stand on a production line.

  Across from the worried Blues was a Yellow senior monitor who did nothing but study The Pocket Guide to Your Civil Obligations, and right at the front of the carriage were two overdressed Oranges who looked as though they were traveling players. They had been tutted at by the Blues, who considered that they should be at the front of the carriage, then by the Yellows and Greens for the same reason. The Oranges had merely nodded in a friendly manner, and compelled the other passengers to take up seats in no particular order, which made everyone visibly agitated. The downside of this was that the bossy Greens we had met earlier perched themselves opposite us, and we continued the mutual disdain begun at breakfast.

  I sat and stared out at the countryside, mostly to avoid the baleful glare of the Green woman, who was no doubt trying to devise an errand for me. My mind, however, was full of the quirky Grey girl who had threatened to break my jaw. She had, in a few short words, utterly defiled, defamed and defaced the finely tuned social order that was the bedrock of the Collective. But what was strangest was this: that anyone capable of such rudeness could have survived her youth. The disruptive were always flagged early by six-monthly reviews of merit tally and feedback. If the system was working, she would long ago have been spirited away to Reboot to learn some manners. The fact that she hadn’t intrigued me, and her glaring antisocial defects made her not only interesting but curiously attractive.

  “I think I need a cup of tea,” said the Green woman, who was no doubt of the opinion that a lower color sitting idle was a lower color on his way to a lifetime of indolence. I ignored her, since it was not yet an order, but that soon changed. She jabbed me with the point of her umbrella and repeated her request.

  “Boy? Fetch me a tea. No sugar, and lemon if they have it.”

  I looked at her and took a deep breath.

  “Of course, madam.”

  “And a biscuit. Anything with chocolate on it, and failing that, anything without chocolate on it.”

  The guard’s van was stacked high with boxes of fresh fruit, crates of chickens and personal luggage that couldn’t go in the boxcars. The train was too small to waste a Grey on manning a buffet, so there was a small serve-yourself kitchenette. I wasn’t the only one in the guard’s van. Sitting on a pile of leather suitcases was a shabby-looking man in early middle age, who was attired with great incongruity in Standard Social #4: a casual sport jacket with a striped shirt and a loosely knotted, plain tie. Quite unsuitable for travel. He had a faded Yellow Spot on his grubby lapel, and his hair was not only without a neat parting, but without any sort of parting. I should have disliked him upon first noting his hue, but there is always something ineffably sad about a Fallen Yellow—perhaps because Yellows hated them more than they hated us. I lit the spirit stove and set the copper kettle to boil.

  “Where are you headed?” I asked.

  “Emerald City,” he said in a soft voice, “on the Night Train.”

  He meant Reboot. The arrival at Reform College at first light was meant to signify a new dawn and a fresh beginning.

  “You’re on the wrong train for that,” I observed. “Green Sector North is on the other side of the Collective.”

  “The farther, the better. I was expected there a week ago. You don’t have any grub on you, do you?”

  I gave him a slice of seedcake from the kitchenette, and popped a ten-cent piece in the jar. He consumed the cake hungrily, then told me his name was Travis Canary, from Cobalt City.

  “Eddie Russett,” I said, “from Jade-under-Lime, Green Sector South.”

  “Friend?”

  It was unusual to be offered friendship from a Yellow, and ordinarily I would have refused. But I quite liked him.

  “Friend.”

  We shook hands.

  “So where are you going?” he asked.

  “East Carmine. Their swatchman retired unexpectedly, and Dad is to fill in for a couple of weeks until they find someone permanent.”

  “I wanted to be a swatchman,” said Travis thoughtfully, playing with the label on a consignment of cocoa beans, “healing people, y’know. But I’m third-generation sorting office manager, so I didn’t have much choice. Why are you with your father? Apprentice?”

  “No,” I replied. “I made Bertie Magenta do the elephant trick at lunch. Two jets of milk shot out of his nostrils and went all over Miss Bluebird. I successfully pleaded Prank status, but the head prefect thought a bit of humility reassignment in the Outer Fringes might be good for me. Bertie is his son, you see.”

  “Did they set you a Pointless Task?”

  “I’m conducting a chair census.”

  “It might have been worse,” he remarked with a grin.

  This was true. I could have been checking the Collective’s stool firmness for Head Office’s dietary research facility or something. Mind you, that was a worst-case scenario.

  I found some tea and placed a measure into the house-shaped infuser, then searched in vain for some lemon. Travis looked around for a moment, reached into his pocket a
nd pulled out a silver swatch case. He snapped open the compact, took a deep gaze at the color hidden inside, then said, “Lime?”

  I considered for a moment that he might be trying to trick me into an infraction so he could steam me for some merits, but he looked so lost and beaten and hungry that I decided he was genuine. Besides, I hadn’t green-peeked for months. Dad was quite strict about it, because he thought lime could lead to harder colors, but was realistic. “As soon as you’ve taken your Ishihara,” he had told me, “you can look at whatever you beigeing well please.”

  “Go on, then.”

  Travis turned the compact toward me, and as my eyes fell upon the calming shade I felt my muscles relax and my anxieties about traveling to East Carmine fade away. Everything about the world suddenly seemed rather jolly—even the crummy bits, of which there were many. Constance’s inconstancy, for one, and the fact that I wouldn’t see the quirky rude girl with the retroussé nose again. But I was unused to peeking, and my head was suddenly full of Handel’s Messiah.

  “Steady, tiger,” he said, and snapped the compact shut.

  “Sorry?” I asked, momentarily deafened by the music.

  He laughed and asked me if it was Schubert.

  “Handel. So, listen,” I said, my inhibitions lowered by the lime, “what did you do to get sent off to Reboot?”

  He thought for a moment before answering.

  “Do you know why residents are discouraged from relocating within the Collective?”

  I knew that travel was limited, but I had never thought to question the reason.

  “To stop the spread of Mildew and disrespectful jokes about Purples, I should imagine.”

  “It’s to save the postal service from descending into chaos.”

  “That’s a nonsensical suggestion,” I retorted.

  “Is it? Centuries of unregulated relocation have created a terrible burden. A letter might have to be redirected any number of times, as its mail route would have to follow not only your own but all your ancestors’ meanderings around the Collective.”

  This was true. The Russetts had moved only twice since we were downgraded, so we could receive mail in two days. By contrast, the ancient and well-traveled Oxbloods, with their prestigious SW3 postcode, were on an eighty-seven-point redirection service, and would be lucky to receive mail in nine weeks, if at all.

  “A bit nutty,” I conceded, “but it works, doesn’t it?”

  “On the contrary. If you, or an ancestor of yours, had lived in the same place more than once, the mail redirection service defaults to the earlier redirection and goes around again. Three-quarters of the postal service does nothing but move post that is stuck in perpetual redirection loops and is never delivered at all. But here’s the really stupid bit: The postal service’s operating parameters are enshrined in the Rules and can’t be changed, so Head Office reduced personal relocation in order to impose a lesser burden on the postal service.”

  “That’s insane,” I said, my tongue still loosened by the lime.

  “That’s the Rules,” said the Yellow, “and the Rules are infallible, remember?”

  This was true, too. The Word of Munsell was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed: The banning of the number that lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But they were the Rules—and presumably for some very good reason, although what that might be was not entirely obvious.

  “So where do you come into this?” I asked.

  “I used to work in the main sorting office in Cobalt. I attempted to circumvent the Rules with a loophole to stop redirections for long-deceased recipients. When that failed, I wrote to Head Office to complain. I got one of their ‘your request is being considered’ form letters. Then another. After the sixth I gave up and set fire to three tons of undeliverable mail outside the post office.”

  “That must have been quite a blaze.”

  “We cooked spuds in the embers.”

  “I suggested a better way to queue once,” I said in a lame attempt to show Travis he wasn’t the only one with radical tendencies, “a single line feeding multiple servers at lunch.”

  “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 railway 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 th
e 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.”