The Blue prefect stared at the pest minutely, which squirmed in Mr. Lime’s hand and gave out a series of high-pitched squeaks in the key of F.
“Can you eat them?”
“We haven’t tried.”
“Get a Grey to volunteer. If they’re not palatable I can still define them as ‘farmed comestibles’ under Rule 2.3.23.12.220. We can then simply trap them, fry them and dump them. Or, if they are palatable, feed them to the Greys. It might make them leave some bacon for us.”
Mr. Lime nodded agreeably at this fine display of loopholery, upon which we said our farewells and passed out of the south side of the glasshouse to walk in the direction of the Waste Farm.
“Now,” said Turquoise, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, “activities. Sport and dancing are compulsory, of course—do you favor cricket or soccer?”
I told him I preferred cricket but denied my skill with the bat. Being able to actually see the naturally red ball gave an Alpha Red an edge. If you wanted to hide your bestowal, it was good practice to miss a few.
“And your favorite hoof?”
“We used to dance the lambada quite a lot in Jade-under-Lime.”
Turquoise looked shocked, even though it was a leg-pull. I’d never danced the lambada—not even by myself, in secret.
“Quite inappropriate, Master Russett. We are fox-trot and rhumba people in East Carmine. Tango is permitted on occasion, but only for approved couples and well out of sight of the juniors. How about pastimes? Beekeeping? Photography? Reenactment societies? Slug racing?”
“You can race slugs?”
“It’s quite popular out here in the Redstones. Since slugs are hardwired for strict territorial limitations accurate enough to keep them out of gardens, all you need do is log the bar code on a local slug and then release it outside Vermillion. First one back wins the pot.”
“That must take a while.”
“Decades, sometimes. A champion my father released eighteen years ago should be hitting the home stretch in about two years.”
“I had no idea slugs were so long-lived.”
“It’s not the original slug,” he explained. “The command string for territoriality descends through the offspring, so all we need do is read the Taxa numbers on the slugs as they come in—their heredity can be quickly established. It takes about four generations per mile, Mrs. Lapis Lazuli tells me. It could be done faster, but slugs are easily distracted. So, what shall I put you down for?”
“None of them hugely appeal, sir.”
“Listen here, Russett, I have to put you down for something.”
“The Photography Society, then. But under Rule 1.1.01.23.555 I’d like to form my own association for the social advancement of the Collective.”
“I see,” Turquoise said suspiciously. He knew 1.1.01.23.555 well enough. It was one of the loopholes that had been serially abused over the years. “And just what would this association do?”
I thought of Jane wanting me to remain curious as a smokescreen for her own activities. “A Question Club.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Horses? No problem. Everyone likes horses. Especially horses. Horses like horses most of all.”
“No, no, not Equestrian Club—a Question Club.”
“There’s already a Question Club,” he said. “It’s called the Debating Society. There’s a meeting this evening, isn’t there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Frightful waste of time. An hour spent on the jigsaw puzzle would be an hour much better spent. If we don’t get a move on, we’ll not see the puzzle finished in our lifetime, and I must confess I’d rather like to know what the puzzle actually depicts before they wheel me into the Green Room.”
We had arrived at the Waste Farm, which for drainage purposes was always lower than the rest of the village. We found the chief-of-works next to one of the off-rotation settling tanks that was being scraped clean. He was a middle-aged man who was short, had a weather-worn face and whistled when he spoke, owing to a missing tooth that for some reason had failed to grow back. Like most of those versed in the arcane recycling arts, he was highly eccentric. He wore a bowler hat and insisted on a three-piece suit with a gardenia in his buttonhole. He wore no spot or gave any hint of Chromatic Hierarchy, which didn’t help me know whether I should talk up or down to him.
“Hullo!” said the chief-of-works, who gave his name only as Nigel. “I heard you had a spot of bother with a tree this morning.”
“You could say that.”
“Don’t feel bad by being outsmarted by a vegetable. You’re not anyone until you’ve been wandering in the forest whistling a merry tune, only to find yourself suddenly hauled in the air by your ankle and dumped in ninety gallons of partially digested kudu. I know I have.”
I looked around.
“The farm doesn’t smell half as bad as I thought it would.”
“The very idea!” exclaimed Nigel. “All the pits are sealed. If you can smell something it means we’re not doing our jobs properly. But listen, if you want to know how bad it can smell, come and poke your nose in the rendering sheds.”
Turquoise stayed in the office to check that the 87.2 percent recycling target was being met, and Nigel escorted me past the methane solidifiers to a brick building where the hot air was heavy with the pungent smell of heated offal. Despite the rudimentary exterior of the shed, the interior was scrubbed and tidy, the steel equipment all polished to a high shine. The concrete floor looked as though it was frequently hosed, and two of the plant’s workers were feeding chunks of animal waste into a shredder that was driven by an Everspin. The combined kettle and press were to one side, and a gloopy substance—yellow, apparently—was slowly dripping into a bucket as the machine heated and folded the waste to remove the fat.
I covered my mouth and nose with my handkerchief.
“It’s actually more skilled than you think,” said Nigel with a smile. “The renderers get paid extra when they have to deal with a villager—which is stupid, really, since it’s only something we walk around in. Mind you, I’m not entirely without feeling. I excuse them rendering duty if it was a friend or family member.”
I almost gagged at the foul smell and staggered outside.
“Not for the squeamish, eh?” said Nigel as he followed me out. “We’ve got a backlog at present—we’ve been working our way through an elephant that dropped dead fortuitously just inside the Outer Markers.”
“An elephant? I heard they weren’t worth troubling with—low-quality tallow and whatnot.”
Nigel leaned closer.
“It’s the targets,” he said with a grin. “An elephant really boosts the figures.”
Once Turquoise had signed off on the pachyderm-assisted target and calculated the monthly bonuses, we struck out from the Waste Farm and into the open fields, where expansive fields of wheat were gently rolling in the breeze.
“What were we talking about?” asked Turquoise.
“I was requesting a Question Club, sir.”
“Oh, yes. And I was telling you we already have one—the Debating Society.”
“The debating society is restricted to the Chromogentsia,” I pointed out. “I want a club where anyone can ask questions.”
He stared at me suspiciously.
“What sort of questions?”
“Unanswered questions.”
“Edward, Edward,” he said with a patronizing smile, “there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can’t find the correct answer, then you are obviously asking the wrong question.”
This was an interesting approach, and initially I could think of no good answer. We were walking along a track that was in a slight dip, and all that could be seen of the village was the flak tower with the lightning lure on top of it. It seemed a good point to raise.
“What were flak towers used for?”
“It’s a nonquestion. The intractable ways of the Previous are
best forgotten. Their ways are not our ways. Before, there was material imbalance and a wholly destructive level of self. Now there is only the simple purity of Chromatic Hierarchy.”
“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.
Dorian and Imogen
1.1.6.23.102: The raising of one’s voice is permissible only at sporting events, and only by the spectators. At all other times, speech is to be kept at a polite volume.
Dorian 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?”