Shades of Grey (52 page)

“I can see someone,” I whispered, leaning closer to Jane.

“Just relax. Keep staring at the Gordini and tell me when you hear the big dogs.”

“If you suffer any undue discomfort during reconfiguration,” continued the young man in a jolly singsong sort of voice, “you may wish to seek assistance with customer services, available on .” He smiled again. “National Color. Here for
your
convenience. And remember, feedback helps us help you.”

And he vanished. I continued to stare at the Gordini, as did Jane. The pins and needles were replaced by the smell of freshly baked bread and I could hear my twice-widowed aunt Beryl talking about cats, which she never did. And through it all, music and onions.

“Mantovani.”

“I get Brahms. Keep staring.”

The edge of my vision fringed with all the colors of the rainbow, and then, for a brief and very exciting moment, I could see in full color. It was like the world had been transformed into a color garden—but one that exhibited not the limited CYM palette of National Color, but an infinite variety of hues, delicately complementing and enhancing one another in a complex Chromatic harmony—I could even see the off-gamut violets, a color I had never seen before. The world as it was
meant
to look.

“It’s . . . beautiful!”

I then heard the sound of rushing water. My fingers snapped straight and I blinked uncontrollably.

“Got the dogs yet?”

“No, I’m still at blinking.”

And then they started up. Terriers yipping and wailing in an annoying fashion as the pathways in my head cross-fired. Light to sound, smell to memory, touch to music, and color to everything.

“Small dogs any good?” I asked.

“Keep at it.”

The small dogs were joined by medium-sized dogs, then finally the deep, throaty
woofs
of Great Danes. They were joined by bloodhounds and wolfhounds, and pretty soon my head was full of dogs doing nothing but barking, whining and panting.

“Big dogs.”

She snapped the compact shut, and the sound abruptly cut out. I staggered for a moment.

“Steady,” she said, holding my elbow.

“What was that?”

“Precautions. A little bit of reconfiguring in the cortex. The big dogs just indicate you’re done—like the whistle on a kettle. Make a note of the time. We’ve got a couple of hours to be safe.”

“I saw colors.
Real
colors. And a Pooka.”

“He’s actually a
Herald
. A lost page from a missing book. He’s always there and always says the same thing.”

But I wasn’t really listening; I had far too many questions.

“You said ‘precautions’? And what do you mean, ‘We’ve got a couple of hours’? A couple of hours for what?”

“All in good time, Red. Come on, we better catch up with Courtland.”

“The Herald said something about ‘Gordini Protocols.’ What are
they
?”

“Trust me, Red, all in good time.”

 

We found Courtland waiting for us at a stone meetinghouse that was smothered with heavy ivy and still a creditable two stories high.

“Thought I’d lost you,” he said. “Get a load of this!”

He pointed inside the meetinghouse. The roof had vanished long ago, and the floor was covered in a thick carpet of moss. Floating just inside the doorway was an elegant craft about the size of a Ford. It was definitly a vehicle of some sort, but without wheels and constructed entirely of floatie material. Despite a thick layer of lichen and creepers that were draped on it from above, it was still drifting free. A yard-high mark around the inside of the meeting house showed where it had moved about with the air currents, scraping against the walls. The only reason it had not drifted out and eventually made its way to the sea was that the meetinghouse door had partially collapsed, blocking its only escape. I placed my hand on the craft but, even by pulling hard, could make it dip only a small amount.

“At least six hundred negative pounds,” murmured Courtland, “spoons, a complete floatie. This place has riches in abundance—am I glad I came!”

I looked at Jane, who said nothing, and we moved off. The road we had been following was soon joined by a second that snaked in from the north. But it wasn’t any easier going. If anything, it was worse. The road was covered with the grassed-over lumps of rubble, long-rusted wreckage, stunted trees trying to grow as best they could on the thin soil, and at times impenetrable rhododendron that had to be skirted around, further slowing our progress.

“Where does the Perpetulite start?” asked Courtland.

“About a mile down the way,” Jane replied.

I looked at my watch. “We’re getting pressed for time. At this rate all we’ll manage is a quick look around before we need to head back.”

“You won’t want any more than that.”

After thirty minutes of scrambling over debris, we finally arrived at the Perpetulite. It was a four-lane roadway of perfect grey-black compound, and the bronze pins had been driven in closer together than at Bleak Point, so the spalling was less severe.

“Thank Munsell for that,” breathed Courtland, emptying a bootful of earth and sitting on the glossy black central barrier. The roadway even had Perpetulite lampposts of a much more modern design than the iron posts I was used to, and the lightglobes, where still present, were alight.

We walked down the road, which seemed somehow more incongruous here in the depopulated wasteland than at home. There, at least, there was someone to use the road or even see it; here it existed purely for its own sake.

A
s we walked toward the town, the scattered broadleaf forest was replaced by the curved, whiplike branches of the yateveos, and since they always kept the ground beneath them meticulously clear of any brush or vegetation, the verges, side roads and collapsed buildings had a creepy well-manicured look to them. Not that our path was totally maintenance-free and perfection; the Perpetulite’s ability to remove debris worked only as far as the curb, so the edges of the road were marked by low banks of grass-covered detritus, a little like piecrusts.

Courtland saw his first spoon ten minutes later. It was by the side of the road, but he didn’t pick it up. There was a yateveo looming above, and Jane told him there would be more spoons farther on. Even though the canopy of the carnivorous trees extended almost completely across the roadway and the barbed spines were at tensioned readiness, as long as we kept from yelling and didn’t smell of blood, they wouldn’t be able to sense us. The root sensors of the yateveo could not break through the tough layer of Perpetulite.

The road entered a circular junction, and we took the route that led to a bridge across the river. The tide was out, and by looking seaward along the silted-in tidal reaches, we could clearly see the large, flat-decked ship that dominated the mouth of the estuary. Even from this distance it was gargantuan; the gulls that wheeled above its superstructure looked like little more than specks.

Fifty yards beyond the bridge we came across a railway track. To the left it continued on toward the coast but looked unused; the way was impeded by trees and thick shrubbery. To the right the tracks curved off into the trees and headed north. We were standing at some kind of station, made entirely of Perpetulite. There were platforms, benches and light stands, but no ticket hall or canteen. It was quiet, too, and as we stood there, a bird fell from the sky and landed at our feet, quite dead.

“Spoons!” exclaimed Courtland, and he was right. Dotted along the side of the road were more of them, in great abundance. There were no yateveos here, so he scooped them up by the handful and poured them into his satchel with a satisfying jangle. But as we moved on he discovered more and, unable to carry them all, he became more selective. By the time we had walked the short distance to the twice-lifesize bronze of Munsell, he was nonchalantly tossing aside spoons that were not perfect and started collecting only the ones that were pristine or had unusual postcodes on the back, or those he described as yellow.

Beyond Munsell’s bronze was what looked like an open-air meeting place. It was a flat, circular piazza perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, with a series of ionic columns set about the periphery at fifteen-foot intervals. On top of these was a continuous and gently curved architrave, and decorating this in a long unbroken frieze were animals, human figures and Leapbacked technology, some familiar, some not. We passed slowly through the processional entrance arch and noticed that the columns, floor, panels and even benches and classically styled lamp stands were made entirely of a reddish veined Perpetulite, as though attempting to emulate the more transient marble.

It was, perhaps, the most awe-inspiring construction I had ever laid eyes on. Not just because of the scale or the symmetrical perfection, but the
craftsmanship
. The capitals were finely sculpted with a dramatic flourish, and the delicate sinews of the horses’ bodies within the frieze were as finely detailed now as they had been since construction, and would remain so as long as there was oxygen in the air and there were nutrients in the soil.

It was between the columns that the rain-tarnished spoons had gathered. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them—perhaps more. They were heaped right where the swirly-patterned Perpetulite ended and the lawns began, and they lay in a long jumbled mass that was so high I could barely step over them. But oddly, while most were already covered in moss, leaf mold and lichen, the ones facing the piazza were still shiny and new. I walked across to the simple stone monolith that stood in the center of the piazza. It was slender and tall, and it bore a familiar inscription. I sat on one of the benches to look at it:

“What do you think?” asked Jane, sitting down beside me.

“It’s certainly impressive, if not a bit disturbing,” I replied. “The centerpiece of some long-abandoned town?”

“Actually, this is just the beginning of High Saffron,” she said as Courtland whooped with joy over some particularly fine spoon he’d just discovered. “The rest of the town carries on toward the coast. But it’s not deserted. Not always. Far from it.”

The sun went behind a cloud, and I shivered. The atmosphere in the piazza seemed suddenly oppressive, and I noticed for the first time that there was no wildlife of any sort, not even so much as a butterfly. I lifted my hand from the bench. There was a sharp pain as I left some skin behind, and a droplet of bright red blood splashed on the bench; a second later it began to bubble.

“It’s best to keep on the move,” said Jane, and we stood up. My foot knocked against a spoon that I hadn’t seen, and as I bent to pick it up, I yelled. Lying beneath the surface of the Perpetulite, like a drowned man under ice, was a blank face staring back up at me. His mouth was wide open and his hands palms up. His bones were all perfectly visible within the gentle overlay of soft tissue, and even the herringbone pattern of his jacket was discernible. Like the giraffe I had seen outside East Carmine, the indiscriminate organoplastoid had simply absorbed him as if he were nothing more than rainwater or leaf litter. But as I stared at the apparition in the smooth surface, I noticed that another, more fully digested body was just discernible to his left. And beyond that there was another. And
another
. As I looked around, I saw that the swirling pattern I had assumed was as random as that in linoleum was actually a jumble of semi-digested people, lying in haphazard profusion. The Perpetulite had consumed their tissue, bones, teeth, clothes—and left behind only the indigestible parts, which were simply moved tidily to the side. You didn’t take much to Reboot, but tradition dictated that you always took a spoon. And it wasn’t just spoons at the curbside. It was buttons, buckles, shoe nails, coins, all stained rust-red from the hemoglobin.

“The Night Train from Cobalt junction,” I murmured. “It doesn’t go to Emerald City at all, does it?”

“No,” said Jane, “it comes right here.”

I looked around at the piles of spoons. All those people who had been sent to Reboot because of sedition, unruliness, bad manners or disrespect, or by deceit or accident. They said you were reallocated to another sector once you had been educated. They lied. All the Rebootees ended their days here, except perhaps the few who got away—the woman in the flak tower and Thomas Emerald’s remains under the purple tree. Little wonder they had been dressed in Standard Casuals.

“But it’s against the Rules,” I cried, shocked not just about the murder but about the subterfuge that accompanied it. “The prefects lied to us. It’s against everything Munsell stands for.”

“Technically speaking, you’re wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s written that the pursuit of Harmony requires sacrifices from all of us. It just doesn’t specify what. Hard work, selflessness, Civil Obligation—and sometimes something else. And I’m not sure the prefects actually know anything about this at all. It’s Head Office.”

I looked around at the spoons and had an idea.

“All these people wouldn’t have had their postcodes reallocated, would they?”

“No,” she agreed. “Now you know why the Collective is so underpopulated.”

“But the Previous numbered eighty million or more! You’re not telling me that they were all sent to places like this?”

She looked across at me.

“I don’t know what happened to the Previous.”

“Does the Apocryphal man know?”

“He might have an idea, but to him it’s not emotive—merely history.”

We stood for a moment in silence. There was so much unknown, and so much to discover. But right now, I had only questions.

“Why didn’t more people attempt to walk out? Why would you just stand here and wait to be absorbed?”