Shades of Grey Read online

  “East Carmine is only a fraction of the size it once was,” remarked Stafford. “The deFacting wasn’t quite as severe over this way, and one can still find artifacture that’s almost perfect. I restore vintage office equipment in my spare time. I have six working staplers and a Gestetner stencil duplicator. I can punch holes at competitive rates—and my recipe for black ink is famous all over the sector.”

  We continued past the undulating grassland, the ancient layout of the old town easily discerned from a crisscrossing of smooth, grassed-over roads dotted with eroded mailboxes and streetlamps. There was little in the way of trees or low shrubs, as this was an area traditionally kept for pasture and reserved to accommodate any of the Previous who might return. Once, it was presumed, the houses had simply stood empty, waiting. But time, weather and neglect had taken their toll, and all that remained was these soft grassy mounds and an inviolable Rule that they be kept that way. No one seriously considered that the once-numerous Previous would come back, but Rules are rules.

  “What do you think of our crackletrap?” asked Stafford, indicating the large structure that had been placed atop the flak tower.

  “Impressive,” I murmured.

  “The prefects—Mrs. Gamboge in particular—are very big on the dangers of lightning,” explained the porter. “It’s been finished only since Winternox, and has already been struck over a hundred times.”

  The lightning lure was a wooden latticework affair topped with a domed bronze attractor about thirty feet in diameter. Since every house in the Collective had a metallic daylight-collection device on its roof, homes were highly susceptible to a wayward bolt, which would course down the steel adjustment rods and cause electrical mayhem within the house. The luckless were sometimes fused to anything metallic, sometimes half vaporized and at other times simply dead in their beds, their eyeballs and internal organs boiled to something closely resembling minestrone soup. Lurid accounts and photographs were published every week in Spectrum.

  “I expect you take lightning-avoidance issues seriously where you come from?” asked Stafford.

  “Our Council are more concerned about swan attack, but lightning isn’t ignored,” replied my father. “We have a fleet of a half-dozen specially adapted Fords, each with a bronze attractor mounted on a pylon in the flatbed. They’re driven in to intercept a storm when the direction and severity are known.”

  “We have an anomaly ten miles or so upwind,” said Stafford, “so ball lightning can be a problem in these parts. There are plans to erect a steel catch-net on the Western Hills, but it’s mostly talk.”

  Fork lightning could be easily lured from areas of habitation, but ball lightning was a law unto itself. It drifted along with the breeze, became caught in eddies and sometimes entered houses. It was sticky, too, and would attach itself to anything organic. A bad ball strike could leave the victim almost completely incinerated; nervous residents who were unspooned etched their names on steel plates to keep in their pockets, just in case.

  We continued on the road down to the village itself, a knot of houses on a raised hillock. The dwellings were built in the Salvagesque style, a hodgepodge of construction methods using a wide variety of materials ranging from the deeply ancient carved stone to reused timber, rubber roof tiles, brick, adobe and, in some places, the more modern oak-framed wattle and daub. As we moved off the Perpetulite and onto the cobbled street, Dad asked the porter about Robin Ochre, the previous swatchman.

  “Mr. Ochre’s absence is deeply regretted,” he remarked. “He left a wife and daughter.”

  “He will send for them in due course, I suppose?” I asked, wholly misunderstanding the comment.

  “I’m not sure he’s in much of a condition to do anything.”

  “I was led to believe,” said Dad slowly, “that Mr. Ochre had retired from the profession.”

  “Ah!” said Stafford. “While euphemistically true, the phrase is also potentially misleading. I can only repeat the Council’s own findings: that Mr. Ochre was . . . fatally self-misdiagnosed.”

  “Robin is dead?” asked my father.

  “I’m no medical expert, of course,” replied the porter thoughtfully, “but yes, that’s precisely what he is. Four weeks ago to the day.”

  Dad and I glanced at each other. For some unknown reason we hadn’t been told, and as I was trying to figure out what “fatally self-misdiagnosed” might mean, we arrived at a red door set into an unbroken terrace that made up the south end of the town square. That is to say, we arrived at the rear, tradesman’s entrance. The façade with the front door would face the town square. If we hadn’t just received the disturbing news about Robin Ochre, I daresay my father would have insisted on being taken to the front entrance. As it was, he said nothing.

  The porter opened the door, bid us enter and then placed our bags in the scullery hall as we stood, blinking, in the gloom.

  “My goodness,” he said, “it’s as dark as the belly of a frog in here.”

  He walked past us and into the kitchen, where by the dim glow of the windows I could faintly see him turn the winding crank and then fiddle with the two manual-override rods that dangled from the ceiling. High above us the roof mirror rotated toward the afternoon sun; catching the rays, it then beamed them down the light well and onto a frosted-glass panel set into the ceiling.

  “Whoops,” said Stafford as the light swept the muddy gloom from the house. “I should have wound the heliostat spring before you arrived. No one’s lived in this house for a while. Will there be anything else?”

  “How on earth can one be ‘fatally self-misdiagnosed’?” asked Dad, who was still not over the news that his former colleague was dead. The porter thought for a moment.

  “The Council decided at the inquest that he must have thought he had the Mildew and consigned himself to the Green Room to be hastened. As it turned out, he didn’t.”

  “A shocking mistake to make.”

  “It was, sir, yes. Fine man, Mr. Ochre. We haven’t lost a single resident to the Mildew for seven years. And he wasn’t hue-specific, if you know what I mean.”

  “Munsell stated that health care is universal,” remarked my father, but we knew what Stafford meant. Some swatchmen favored those only of a similar hue.

  Dad gave a shiny half merit to Stafford, who tipped his hat and told us he hoped our stay in East Carmine would be happily uneventful. I saw him to the back door, then asked him if the prefects read outgoing telegrams.

  “Mrs. Blood is the communications clerk,” he said, “and is well known for her discretion—as long as an extra twenty cents is added to the fee. But,” he added, “even Yvonne might balk at sending a message of improper raciness or anything against the best interests of the Collective.”

  “It’s poetry,” I confessed, “to a sweetheart.”

  Stafford smiled. “I understand. Mrs. Blood would have no problem with that. She’s something of a romantic herself.”

  This was good news, albeit expensive. But with the Oxbloods on a nine-week redirection service and me away for only a month, there was little choice.

  “Excellent!” I remarked. “I suppose—” Suddenly my eye was caught by the figure of a man in his early thirties, standing in the shadows of the alleyway opposite. He was grimy and unshaven and had NS -B4 carved rather clumsily below his left clavicle—most scars were neat affairs, but his looked like a bad weld. He was also inappropriately naked and, while staring vacantly up at the sky, was actually peeing on his left foot.

  “Stafford?” I whispered, a tremor of fear sounding in my voice.

  “Yes, Master Edward?”

  “There’s a naked man in the alleyway behind us. I think it might be . . . Riffraff.”

  Stafford turned around, looked at the man and said, “I don’t see anyone.”

  “How can you not see him? He’s peeing on his own foot.”

  “Master Edward, you can’t see him.”

  “I can.”

  “You can’t. He doesn’t
exist, Master Edward—take Our Munsell’s word for it.”

  I suddenly understood. The Rules, despite their vast complexity and extensive range, had no way of dealing with anything that had no explainable position within a world of ordered absolutes. So instead of attempting to understand or explain them, they were simply awarded the status of Apocrypha and stridently ignored lest they raise questions of fallibility.

  “He’s Apocryphal?” I asked.

  “He would be if he were there—which he isn’t.”

  I understood Stafford’s reticence. Admitting that Apocrypha actually existed was a grave impiety punishable by a five-hundred-merit fine. A whole range of euphemistic language had developed to refer to them, but generally no one did—a slip of tense could leave your hard-won merit score in tatters.

  “I’ve never actually seen an Apocryphal man,” I noted, unable to stop staring, “and, um, still haven’t. Do you think they might all look the same—if they existed?”

  “I’ve only not seen one,” said Stafford, following my gaze to where the unseeable man was now pouring cooling water over himself from a water butt, “so I’ve no idea what one shouldn’t look like. Would you excuse me? I promised to go and search for Mr. Yewberry’s second-best hat. It’ll be on his head as usual, but he tips well.”

  He gave another short bow, and I quietly closed the door before rejoining my father in the kitchen. “That was very strange.”

  “I know,” he agreed, looking up from where he had been searching the cupboards out of curiosity. “You can’t misdiagnose the Mildew. Especially on yourself. It’s just too obvious.”

  “No,” I said, “there was an Apocryphal man peeing on his foot in the alleyway opposite.”

  “As I was going down the stair, I saw a man who wasn’t there,” replied Dad with a smile. “That’s the Outer Fringes for you. I pity the poor clucks he’s not lodging with.”

  The House

  9.3.88.32.025: The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable.

  We began by exploring the house. It was a timber-framed affair that looked as though it dated from the first century after the Something That Happened and, while in good order, was showing its age. The floor was tiled to keep the house cool in summer, and I noted that the mullioned windows were doubled up with shutters and drapes. The walls were rough-plastered and whitewashed to maximize natural light, and the faint smell of borax told me the cavities had been recently rewooled.

  There were three floors. The well-appointed kitchen had a gas range, along with a stained ceramic sink, a table, a clock and a glass-fronted dresser full of Linotableware. A goodly quantity of pots and pans hung from the beams, all as clean as new pins, and in the cutlery drawer were knives and forks but, predictably enough, no spoons.

  I put the kettle on in case the prefects arrived without warning, found the tea caddy and the least-chipped bone china and swiftly set a tray.

  “Better not put out saucers with the cups,” said Dad. “We don’t want to be seen to be putting on airs.”

  “Unless they drink from them,” I pointed out.

  “Good point. Better lay them out as usual.”

  The kitchen door opened into a corridor that gave access to a small wood-paneled study, with a walnut desk, a chair and a highly polished Bakelite telephone—presumably linked to the village’s internal network and not like Old Man Magenta’s instrument back home, which was connected only to itself. Farther on, the corridor led to a tiled main entrance hall, with the front door directly ahead. To the left and right were two reception rooms. In each was a large bay window facing the town square, the top third of each paneled with Luxfer prisms to increase the natural light. The rooms were delightfully paneled in various shades of wood-effect linoleum, the furniture was worn but usable, and in the drawing room hung a pair of Vettrianos. Below this was a sealed glass case that held a few Articles of Interest that would have been dispersed out here as part of the Localization. Among the assorted bric-a-brac were three chess pieces crudely carved from ivory, an ornate ceremonial sword, a finely decorated egg and several unusual medals marked “XCIV Olympiad.” It was an impressive collection, especially this far from the hub. But then, as we had already seen, East Carmine was once much larger and presumably more important than it was now. The only house I’d visited that was this opulent was the Oxbloods’. It was on the occasion when Constance presented me to her parents, an event made very uncomfortable when she left to inform the butler there was one more to supper and Mr. Oxblood forgot what I was doing there and mistook me for a footman. I didn’t know what to say, and if Constance hadn’t returned when she did, I probably would have served them tea and filed his corns.

  The staircase was circular and faced the front door. It was not just a stairwell but a light well, with the polished heliostat easily discernible through the glazed octagonal skylight high above.

  We climbed the creaking treads and discovered three bedrooms on the second floor, which were comfortable, if austere. Each had a bed, a bureau, a chair, a trouser press and a writing table with notepaper inscribed EAST CARMINE—GATEWAY TO THE REDSTONES. There were also a couple of brass angle-poise reflectors to beam light where required.

  “I’ll take the bedroom at the front,” said Dad, exploring his chosen room. After a brief recce, I took the room at the back. It was lighter and faced the setting sun. I was about to carry on up to the third floor when I stopped. It appeared that someone was in residence. Cardboard boxes were stacked up on the stairs in a haphazard manner, and there was a pungent smell in the air. Most of all, I could hear music.

  “Goodness,” said my father, who had arrived by my side. “That’s Ochrlahoma!”

  It was, although not from any libretto I knew. Hearing the show itself was not so strange, as it was mandatory for all villages to put on at least two musicals per year, but hearing a phonograph was unusual. Wax cylinder was the last of the replay methods allowable, and ownership could be undertaken only with a yearly exemption, approved by the Council. It made up for the disappointment of the one we hadn’t heard at Vermillion’s museum, but it was still very odd.

  “Hello?” I called, but there was no answer.

  “I’ll leave this in your capable hands,” muttered Dad nervously. “I have our postal redirection forms to complete before the head prefect arrives. Why not invite our lodger for supper this evening?” And without waiting for a reply, he swiftly made his way downstairs.

  I hailed our unseen lodger again, then, not receiving any answer, slowly began to climb the stairs. I got to just within sight of the top corridor when my eyes started to water, and I sneezed. By the tenth step I was sneezing almost continuously, aggressive, painful explosions that welled up spontaneously and caused my eyes to water so badly my vision blurred. I beat a hasty retreat to the second-floor landing, where the fit ceased as quickly as it had begun. I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief, and tried again. On the ninth step and sixth sneeze, I gave up and returned to the landing, mildly confused and with a runny nose. Just then, the music stopped. Not at the end of the recording or when the motor had wound down, but as though the needle had been lifted from the cylinder. I heard the sound of a chair being pushed out. Our lodger was in residence.

  “Hello?” I said in my most polite voice, “My name is Eddie Russett and my father and I were wondering if you’d take supper with us this evening?”

  I was greeted with silence.

  “Hello?” I said again.

  A creak on the staircase below made me turn. I had expected it to be my father, so was surprised to see the naked figure of the Apocryphal man climbing the stairs. He didn’t acknowledge my presence. In fact, I had to step back, as he would almost certainly have bumped into me. It was only as he headed up the stairwell that I realized what he was doing here. He was the lodger—or at least, he and whoever had pushed out the chair upstairs
.

  “The ex-presidents are surfers,” he said as he walked past, “and don’t you yell at me, Mr. Warwick.”

  I ignored him, as protocol dictated, noted that he didn’t sneeze as he mounted the stairs, then walked slowly to my room to unpack.

  I placed my clothes neatly in the single chest of drawers in case of an inspection, but kept all my private stuff in my overnight valise. I had brought it with me, as the valise was the only private place that we had—two cubic feet that we could call our own. The Rule was so inviolably sacrosanct that without the next of kin’s agreement, a valise couldn’t even be opened after death. But there was a downside: Anything I had left behind at home would not be covered by the 1.1.01.02.066 Privacy Rule and could be discovered and confiscated, and, if appropriate, I would be punished. So I had to take everything unruleful with me, just in case.

  Needless to say, most people’s cases held contraband, either surplus-to-requirement spoons, illegally held hue or Leapbacked technology. Most often, though, the valise contained private collections of pre-Epiphanic artifacture, which was regarded as unofficial currency, always useful as a hedge against deflation. A doll’s head might be worth a cream tea, and a good piece of jewelry could be exchanged for a weekend in Redpool.

  Everyone owned something left behind by the Previous, for the simple reason that they left behind a lot. In my own modest collection I had a mock-tortoiseshell comb with all its teeth, various metal buttons, some coins, half a Bakelite telephone receiver, a Trik Trak car and, best of all, a lemon-sized motor known to the Previous as a PerMoCo, Inc., Mk6b 20W Everspin™, and probably used to power some sort of domestic appliance. I had found it in the river a mile beyond Jade-under-Lime’s Outer Markers, the long, slow bend being a good spot for alluvial toshing. I had been up there alone panning for buttons when I came across the Everspin and a lot more besides. I returned to the village that morning with an armful of brightly colored red plastics and a shiny painted-metal toy that turned out to be vivid blue.