Shades of Grey (29 page)

“And why does that forbid anyone from making any more spoons?”

Turquoise’s face fell. It was a thorny question that had been hotly debated for years. It seemed that spoons had been omitted from the list of approved manufactured goods as proscribed in Annex VI of the Rules, and the more daring debaters had suggested it might be an
error
in the Word of Munsell—proof of fallibility.

“You pseudo-rationalists always drag up the spoon issue, don’t you? Our Munsell works in mysterious ways. Top Chromatologians have thought long and hard over the spoon question, and have come to the conclusion that, since the Word of Munsell
is
infallible, there must be some greater plan to which we are not yet privy.”

“What plan
could
there be for not having enough spoons?”

“This is
precisely
why the Debating Society is open only to the Chromogentsia,” he said in an exasperated tone. “Open discussion leads to the mistaken belief that curiosity is somehow desirable. Munsell tells us over and over again that inquisitiveness is simply the first step on a rocky road that leads to disharmony and ruin. Besides,” he added, “asking a poor question gives it undeserved relevance, and attempting to answer a bad question is a waste of spirit. The question you
should
be asking yourself is: How can I discharge my Civil Obligation most efficiently to improve the smooth running of the Collective? And the answer to that is: Not wasting a prefect’s valuable time with spurious suggestions for associations.”

He stared at me, but not in a bad way—I think he was secretly enjoying the discussion as much as I was.

We had arrived at the circular head of a tosh pit, brick built and protruding three feet from the ground. The wooden cover was off, and two Greys were on duty—one with a polished bronze mirror on a stand to reflect the sun’s rays down the mine to the workers below, and another who held a rope, presumably to haul dirt and scrap color to the surface. Beside them was a cart, half-filled with damp black soil, while laid out on trestle tables close by was low-quality rubbish, ready for sorting.

“Good morning, Terry,” said Turquoise.

“Sir.”

“Anything to report?”

“Not much this morning, sir. Jimmy found what he thought was a car at vector 65-32-420, but it was only a front wing.”

“That’s annoying,” said Turquoise, running an eye over the tosh. I could see that little of it was red, and by the look of the prefect’s demeanor, not much blue, either.

“Better get it down to the Pavilion as soon as you can—the Colorman wants to have an inspection tomorrow.”

The Grey nodded and we walked away.

“We had a tosh-pit collapse last week that almost cost us a first-class miner,” said Turquoise. “We’re all about colored out. Another good reason for you to go to High Saffron for a look-see. What about two hundred and fifty merits?”

“I’ll consider it,” I said, actually meaning I’d do no such thing. “And my Question Club?”

“Very well,” replied Turquoise through gritted teeth, since, according to the Rules, he couldn’t refuse. “Consider your association formed. We will allocate you a slot within the prescribed time frame.”

He stared at me for a moment.

“Just because you can pull wool, Russett, it doesn’t follow that you should. With the leadership of an association comes responsibility, something I trust we will not see abused.”

I told him I would do no such thing, and asked to be excused if he was done with me, which he was. I’d just noticed a figure a few fields off with a camera on a tripod, and this could only be Dorian—he had requested an interview from me for the
Mercury
.

D
orian was photographing that year’s floatie harvest. I walked past a field where a team of horses was pulling a plow through the harvested wheat field. As I watched, small specks of the floating material rose from the ground as they were unearthed, then started to drift off downhill, where they were channeled by a natural dip into long muslin nets strung a yard above the ground.

“Hello!” said Dorian, who was framing the billowing muslin with an oak tree in the background for his photograph. “Look at this one.”

He showed me an exceptional floatie that was the size of a chicken’s egg and still had a part number stamped on the side and some wiring attached. It was resting in the net with a lot of smaller sections—fragments, really, and some almost dust—and I tapped a finger on the top to gauge its strength. Ten merits per negative ounce was the usual price, and with the fragments, he might make twenty or thirty merits on this crop alone.

“We got up here late, so missed a few,” he said, pointing in the downhill direction that floaties always took. “Redby-on-Sea have a net across the estuary, but only in the past decade or so, and it doesn’t catch them all.”

I stared at the odd pieces of metal thoughtfully. That they were man-made was without dispute, and also that they were parts of something much larger. Quite what, no one knew, as a floatie’s natural propensity for heading off out to sea to seek the lowest point almost guaranteed there would be few around to study. The only pieces we could find these days were either trapped in natural hollows or embedded in the ground because of some past accident or burial.

“Where does it all end up?”

“Rumor speaks of a floating island somewhere on the oceans which is actually lived upon, but you’d need several thousand cubic meters of the stuff to have any chance of supporting a settlement. More than likely it’ll be a home for seabirds and the like—until the weight of the guano pushes it beneath the waves.”

I switched my attention to his camera, which was a full-plate Linhof. As in most cameras, the shutter had gummed up years ago, but emulsions were slower these days, and exposure was more usually controlled by simply removing the lens cap for the requisite period. I’d often asked for Constance and me to be photographed together, but her mother had forbidden it, lest “we get used to the idea.” Dorian let me look at the image formed upside down on the viewing screen, and the framing was actually very good.

“I need some good clouds for it to be perfect,” he said, staring up at the sky. “Had you heard that a deep red filter increases the contrast in the sky?”

I
had
heard that but didn’t know quite how it worked.

“I heard the trip was a huge success,” he added as we walked toward the handcart that held all his photographic gear and some tea-making equipment. “How were the bonemeal cakes I gave you?”

“Inedible.”

“I thought so, too. Have a look at this.”

He showed me the photograph he had taken of the expedition, which was suitably heroic if you didn’t count Carlos Fandango, who had ruined the picture by moving his head. I pointed this out.

“He did it on purpose. Mr. Fandango and I don’t agree on several fundamental issues. So,” he continued, “tell me about the trip—for the
Mercury,
you understand.”

So we sat on the grass and I told him as much as I dared, omitting the bits about Jane, Zane G-47’s house with all its treasures and the Pooka.

“Tell me,” I said while he was writing down the bit about meeting the Colorman, “how does a Grey get to be the editor of the village news sheet?”

“Before my Ishihara I was Lilac,” he said with forced cheerfulness. “My parents were frightfully disappointed, although not surprised—the family’s been going downhill for a while. My great-great-grandmother was head prefect in Wisteria, and Dad was the janitor here in Carmine before he died.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was inevitable. In any event, I was doing the editing job
before
my Ishihara, and deMauve took pity on an ex-Purple and allowed me to keep it, although for loophole reasons, I’m officially the assistant typesetter—the highest wage grade I’m permitted to hold.”

“That’s annoying.”

“On the contrary,” he said with a smile. “It keeps me from twelve-hour shifts in the factory under the watchful eye of the delightful Mrs. Gamboge.”

“You should do an exposé on the way Greys are treated here.”

“Yes,” he said, “that would be
really
smart. On reflection, it would be better to reserve my ire for more acceptable outrages—such as the scandalous level of sin at the Jollity Fair sideshows.”

I couldn’t agree, but didn’t say so. The unregulated “added attractions” were the best part of the fair.

“Hmm,” said Dorian, staring down at his shorthand. “I think I’ll leave out the heaps of dried bones and the rotted prefect, and just concentrate on the Caravaggio. I should have given you my Speed Graphic to take a picture.”

To Dorian, this was more than his job. He took his interest in photography seriously, and told me that in the past twenty-four hours he had taken the East Carmine Scrabble team’s group photograph, a picture of Mr. Eggshell’s champion lupin, the Rusty Hill expedition picture, several individual portraits and the inquest photograph of yesterday’s power guillotine accident. “Do you want to see?”

“Go on, then.”

He opened one of the many bulging portfolios that were lying on the cart. The pictures were of village life, the harvest, fields, residents swimming in the river, that kind of stuff.

“Look,” he said, “that’s Mr. and Mrs. Beetroot just before they were burned alive in their home, and this is one taken just afterward. The Rules state only that the sprinkler system has to be
fitted
. They don’t state that it has to work.” He turned over another. “This one is of the village performing
Hamlet, Prince of Tyrian
last year—Violet deMauve played Ophelia, as you can see.”

“Was she any good?”

“She was
awful
. Everyone cheered when she drowned.”

“How did she take it?”

“She rose from the dead, told us all to go to Beige, then died again.”

He showed me another. “This was taken a few minutes after Jerry was dragged screaming into the threshing machine. The largest part we found of him was his leg.”

He showed me the picture of the limb, which lay on the ground with a crowd of curious villagers standing around.

“I remember seeing this in the cautionary-photo section of
Spectrum
.”

“Thank you,” he said modestly. “They pay ten merits and a positive feedback for every one they print. What do you make of this?”

He showed me another photograph, which made me frown. It was taken from an attic window, as the rooftops and the town hall were clearly visible—not so strange in itself, except for the fact that the sky was pitch-black with a series of very fine circular white lines radiating out from a central point.

“Where did you take it?”

“Outside—at
night
. I had set the camera up to try to photograph lightning, but then I fell asleep and left the shutter open. What you see here is a seven-hour exposure.”

“And these circles in the night sky?”

“I don’t know what they are. It might be some sort of—I don’t know—unexplained phenomenon. But here’s weird for you: There was no moon that night.”

The notion that there was a small amount of light reflected from the moon was pretty much accepted wisdom. Although much too feeble for us to see by, it was enough for some creatures: Tracks of Nocturnal Biting Animals were often found in the morning where none had been the night before, and I had once seen a herd of grazing capybara and a hippo illuminated by a lightning flash. But Dorian’s picture posed an entirely new concept: that there was light from
another
source when the moon had waned—enough to illuminate the buildings and hills over seven hours—and that this source might be the curious circles in the night sky that he had photographed.

“Can I have this?” I asked.

“Sure. This is yesterday’s accident,” he said, handing me another photo. “Look.”

The atmosphere of the shot was particularly strident. A shaft of light had shone in from one of the factory windows at precisely the right moment, backlighting the victim’s severed head agreeably.

“I like the framing,” I said, “especially the windows reflected in the pool of blood.”

“Thank you.”

At that moment a pretty girl trotted up. I was partially hidden behind Dorian’s handcart, and she didn’t see me.

“Snookums—!” she said to Dorian with a smile, and my heart fell. The girl was Imogen Fandango, and Dorian was the “unsuitable attachment” the janitor had alluded to.

“Oh!” said Imogen as soon as she saw that Dorian wasn’t alone. “Master Russett. I, um, didn’t see you there. I actually meant ‘Snookums’ in a
pejorative
sense—Dorian and I hate each other—don’t we, darling?”

She wasn’t fooling anyone.

“I’m not going to snitch,” I told her.

Acutely embarrassed, Dorian rubbed his forehead, and Imogen shyly clasped his hand after looking around to check that we were unobserved.

“We don’t know what to do,” she said, glad, I think, to be able to share the problem. “Daddy has been advertising in
Spectrum
and wants six thousand for me. Who’s this Purple he’s asked you to contact?”

“Just some guy back home,” I said awkwardly. “He probably won’t be interested.”

“That’s a relief,” replied Imogen, blinking her large eyes. “There’s still hope. Perhaps Daddy will get bored and let us marry—he said he loves me, after all.”

“The only thing he loves about you is your ability to have Purple children,” grumbled Dorian. “If he wants to trade in eggs, he should start a chicken farm. It’s not as though you’re even his daughter.”

They then started to have an argument, right there in front of me. It was all a bit embarrassing. Imogen told Dorian that her father was a good man “compelled by circumstance” to sell her to the highest bidder. Dorian was more the one for action, and hinted darkly at “extreme measures,” which I took to mean an escape.