Shades of Grey (3 page)

Any colorized park was a must-see for visitors, and Vermillion’s offering certainly didn’t disappoint. The color garden, laid out within the city walls, was a leafy enclave of dappled shade, fountains, pergolas, gravel paths, statuary and flowerbeds. It also had a bandstand and an ice cream stall, even if there was no band, nor any ice cream. But what made Vermillion’s park
really
special was that it was supplied by color piped direct from the grid, so it was impressively bright. We walked up to the main grassed area, just past the picturesque, ivy-gripped Rodin, and stared at the expanse of synthetic green. It was a major improvement on the park back home, because the overall scheme was tuned for the predominance of Red eyes. In Jade-under-Lime the bias was more toward those who could see green, which meant that the grass was hardly colored at all and everything red was turned up far too bright. Here the color balance was pretty much perfect, and we stood in silence, contemplating the subtle Chromatic symphony laid out in front of us.

“I’d give my left plum to move to a Red sector,” murmured Dad in a rare display of crudeness.

“You already pledged the left one,” I pointed out, “in the vague hope that Old Man Magenta would retire early.”

“Did I?”

“Last autumn, after the incident with the rhinosaurus.”

“What a dope that man is,” said Dad, shaking his head sadly. Old Man Magenta was our head prefect and, like many Purples, would have trouble recognizing himself in a mirror.

“Do you think that’s really the color of grass?” asked Dad after a pause.

I shrugged. There was no real way of telling. The most we could say was that this was what National Color
felt
the color of grass should be. Ask a Green how green grass was and they’d ask you how red was an apple. But interestingly, the grass wasn’t
uniformly
green. Anareathe size of a tennis court in the far corner of the lawn had changed to an unpleasant bluey-green. The discordancy was spreading like a water stain, and the off-color area had also taken in a tree and several beds of flowers, which now displayed unusual hues quite outside Standard Botanical Gamut. Intrigued, we noticed there was someone staring into an access hatch close to the anomaly, so we wandered over to have a look.

We expected him to be a National Color engineer working on the problem, but he wasn’t. He was a Red park keeper, and he glanced at our spots, then hailed us in a friendly manner.

“Problems?” asked Dad.

“Of the worst sort,” replied the park keeper wearily. “Another blockage. The Council are always promising to have the park repiped, but whenever they get any money, they spend it on swan early-warning systems, lightning protection or something equally daft.”

It was unguarded talk, but we were Reds, too, so he knew he was safe.

We peered curiously into the access hatch where the cyan, yellow and magenta color pipes fed into one of the many carefully calibrated mixers in order to achieve the various hues required for the grass, shrubs and flowers. From there they would feed the network of capillaries that had been laid beneath the park. Colorizing gardens was a complex task that involved matching the osmotic coefficients of the different plants with the specific gravities of the dyes—and that was before you got started on pressure density evaporation rates and seasonal hue variation. Colorists earned their perks and bonuses.

I had a pretty good idea what the problem was, even without looking at the flow meters. The bluey-green caste of the lawn, the grey appearance of the celandines and the purplish poppies suggested localized yellow deficiency, and this was indeed the case—the yellow flow meter was firmly stuck on zero. But the viewing port was full of yellow, so it wasn’t a supply issue from the park substation.

“I think I know what the problem is,” I said quietly, knowing full well that unlicensed tampering with National Color property carried a five-hundred-merit fine.

The park keeper looked at me, then at Dad, then back to me. He bit his lip and scratched his chin, looked around and then lowered his voice.

“Can it be easily fixed?” he asked. “We have a wedding at three. They’re only Grey, but we try to make an effort.”

I looked at Dad, who nodded his assent. I pointed at the pipe.

“The yellow flow meter’s jammed, and the lawn’s receiving only the cyan component of the grass-green. Although I would never condone Rule breaking of any sort,” I added, making sure I had deniability if everything turned brown, “I believe a sharp rap with the heel of a shoe would probably free it.”

The park keeper looked around, took off his shoe and did what I suggested. Almost instantly there was an audible gurgling noise.

“Well, I’ll be jaundiced,” he said. “As easy as that? Here.”

And he handed me a half merit, thanked us and went off to package up the grass clippings for cyan-yellow retrieval.

“How did you know about that?” said Dad as soon as we were out of earshot.

“Overheard stuff, mostly,” I replied.

We’d had a burst magenta feed a few years back, which was exciting and dramatic all at the same time—a cascading fountain of purple all over the main street. National Color was all over us in an instant, and I volunteered myself as tea wallah just to get close. The technical language of the colorists was fairly obfuscating, but I’d picked up a bit. It was every resident’s dream to work at National Color, but not a realistic prospect: Your eyes, feedback, merits and sycophancy had to be beyond exemplary, and only one in a thousand of those who qualified to take the entrance exam.

We ambled around the garden for as long as time would permit, soaking in the synthetic color and feeling a lot better for it. Unusually, they had hydrangeas in both colors, and delicately hand-tinted azaleas that looked outside of the CYM gamut: a rare luxury, and apparently a bequest from a wealthy Lilac. We noted that there wasn’t much pure yellow in the garden, which was probably a sop to the Yellows in the town. They liked their flowers natural, and since they could cause trouble if not acceded to, they were generally given their own way. When we passed the lawn on our way out, the grass in the anomaly was beginning to turn back to fresh lawn green, more technically known as 102-100-64
.
It would be back to full chroma in time for the wedding.

We stepped out of the color garden, and walked back toward the main square. On the way we passed a Leaper who was seated by the side of the road, covered entirely in a coarse blanket except for his alms arm. I put my recently acquired half merit in his open palm, and the figure nodded in appreciation. Dad looked at his watch.

“I suppose,” he said with little enthusiasm, “we should go and have the rabbit experience.”

T
he route to the rabbit we would never see took us past Vermillion’s Paint Shop, something we hadn’t considered when we planned our itinerary. If I’d known National Color had a regional outlet, I would have insisted on at least five slow walk-pasts. The storefront was decorated in docile shades of synthetic olive and primrose, with the National Color lettering a mid-blue that was how I imagined the sky might appear. On display inside the window were paint cans arranged seductively in rows, along with small, garden-sized tubes of plant colorizers for those unable to afford connection to the grid. There were also tins of clothes dye for those eager to flaunt their color, and racks of glass ampules containing food coloring to add that extra I-don’t-know-what to otherwise boring dinner parties.

I slackened my pace as I walked past the Paint Shop since it was considered exceptionally low-hued to gawp, and stepping inside was almost taboo, as I had no business to be there. Some of the hues in the window display I recognized, such as the single shade of yellow that often graced daffodils, lemons, bananas and gorse, but there were others, too—wild and sultry shades of blue that I’d never seen before, a cheeky pale yellow that might color who-knows-what and a wanton mauve that gave me a fizzy feeling down below. On the cans I noted familiar terms like umber, chartreuse, gordini, dead salmon, lilac, blouse, turquoise and aquamarine, and others that I hadn’t heard before, such as cornsilk, rectory, jaguar, old string, chiffon and suffield. It was all very eye-worthy. I slowed my pace even more when we passed the door, for the interior was as brightly decorated as the exterior, with chatty and hue-savvy National Color salespeople helping prefects from the outlying villages with their choices for communal glory. Our prefects would have come to a place very like this to negotiate a price for the
terre verte
that now graced our town hall, and so would have Mr. Oxblood. Constance’s family was wealthy enough to have its own bespoke colors mixed—wild, crowd-pleasing shades of etruscan and klein to free the spirit and tremble the cortex during the Oxbloods’ annual panchromatic garden parties.

And then we were past the open door and the color and the wonder; and the rabbit, which had earlier seemed such a fantastically attractive idea, somehow seemed dull and pointless. The train station was also in this direction, and we would not pass this way again today, if ever.

But something happened. There was a scuffle and a thump and several shouts, and a few seconds later, a National Color employee rushed into the street.

“You!” he said, pointing to the first Grey he saw. “Fetch a swatchman and be quick about it!”

It was one of those moments when you are suddenly glad someone might be unwell, or even dead. For Dad
was
a swatchman, and someone else’s misfortune might just get me inside a Paint Shop, even if only for a few minutes. I tapped him on the arm.

“Dad—?”

He shook his head. It wasn’t his responsibility. There would be plenty of health practitioners in Vermillion, and if the situation turned brown, he’d be the one shouldering the bad feedback. I had to think fast. I tapped my wrist where I would have worn a watch, then made a rabbit-ears signal with my fingers. Dad understood instantly, turned on his heel and made straight for the door of the Paint Shop. As far as he was concerned, a choice between negative feedback and avoiding the rabbit was no choice at all. And that was it. We didn’t see the Last Rabbit, and I was on my way to being eaten by a yateveo.

The sweet smell of synthetic color tweaked my nostrils the moment we stepped into the shop. It was an instantly recognizable odor, a curious mixture of scorched toffee apples, rice pudding and mothballs that put me in mind of the annual repaintings I witnessed as a child. We’d all stand downwind of the painters, breathing in deeply. The smell of fresh paint was inextricably linked to preparations for Foundation Day, and to renewal.

“Who are you?” demanded the Blue colorist who had instructed the Grey, eyeing Dad’s Red Spot suspiciously.

“Holden Russett,” said Dad, “holiday relief swatchman class II.”

“Right,” was the gruff reply. “Do your thing, then.”

While Dad knelt to attend to his patient, I looked about curiously. On the walls were samples of National Color’s full range of universally viewable hues, a guide to colorizing your garden “on a budget” and a poster advertising an all-new color that had just been added to the Long Swatch: a shade of yellow that would give bananas Chromatic independence from lemons and custard. There were also full-sized tissue paper outlines for murals, with numbers for easy reference printed on the blocked panels; and next to the counter were displays of mixing kettles, maulsticks, thinners, reabsorbers, every sort of brush imaginable and, for the prestigiously large jobs, rollers. Beyond the stored cans of paint I could also see the entrance to the Magnolia Room, where customers cleared their visual palette before savoring a particularly fine hue.

Dad nudged me, and I knelt next to him on the floor. The patient was a mature, well-dressed man of perhaps sixty and was lying prone, head on one side, with eyes staring blankly into the middle distance. He had upset a pot of blue on the way down, and the staff were busily scraping the floor with scoops and trowels to get the valuable pigment back into the can.

Dad asked the man his name and, when there was no answer, swiftly opened his leather traveling swatch case and clipped a monitor to the patient’s earlobe.

“Hold his hand and keep an eye on his vitals.”

The monitor took a moment to read his internal music, and the middle light glowed without flashing, which was a good sign. Steady amber—it might be something as simple as the summer vapors.

Dad dug his hand into the man’s breast pocket, pulled out his patient’s merit book, then flipped to the back page to read his Chromatic rating.

“Oh, flip,” he said, in the way that meant only one thing.

“Purple?” I asked.

“Red 68, Blue 81,” he affirmed, and I obediently wrote the rating on the man’s forearm while Dad dialed the correct offset into the spectacles. I hadn’t planned on following him into the profession but had been around him long enough to know the drill. Although many of the broad-effect healing hues used in Chromaticology worked irrespective of one’s color perception, the more subtle shades needed Standard Vision to have an effect on the cortex—hence the color offset on the spectacles.

“He’s a Purple?” echoed one of the salespeople in a worried tone. Purples looked after their own, and if anyone had slacked in his attempt to maintain this man’s continuance of life, there could be severe repercussions.

“Seventy-four percent,” I remarked after doing some impressive head math, then added, perhaps unnecessarily, “almost certainly a prefect.”

We rolled the man over so he was on his side, and as soon as the staff and the customers saw the Purple Spot pinned to his lapel, they all went quiet. Only an Ultraviolet having an inconvenient dying event right here in their store would cause more headaches. But this placed Dad under pressure, too. If he tauped this, he’d have not only negative feedback, but some serious explaining to do. Little wonder swatchmen generally stayed away from passing shouts.