“I’ve changed my mind,” I said hurriedly, “I don’t want to hear the half-truths. Anyone have any facts?”
“Mining speculators arrive in the village every now and again,” said Daisy, “lured by stories of unimaginable Chromatic riches. The prefects sell these miners a speculating license,” continued Lucy, “and they take the road to High Saffron and do not return. Or at least, not this way.”
“I heard that travelers arrived by sea,” said Doug, “who came from the same place as the man who fell from the sky. And they take people to work for them somewhere across the ocean.”
“I heard that High Saffron is populated entirely by cannibalistic Riffraff,” added Arnold in a remark that possibly helped the least, “and they eat the brains of everyone who approaches.”
“There are many who blame the Riffraff for the disappearances,” said Lucy, giving Arnold a sharp kick under the table, “but if there was a community there, we’d know about it by now. And someone would have escaped to tell the tale.”
There were other stories, none of them helpful, and all of them unproved.
“I’m on my own, aren’t I?” I said in a quiet voice. No one replied, which was answer enough.
Joseph Yewberry
1.2.23.09.022: A unanimous verdict by the primes will countermand the head prefect.
“Good of you to drop around,” said the Red prefect as soon as I had settled on the sofa opposite him. He seemed chirpy and friendly, despite our recent enmity—it was probably because he was confident I’d not live long enough to take his job. The front room of his house was what I called “untidy chic.” Prefects weren’t subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect’s room.
“Comfortable?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can’t have that. I need you as sharp as a tack. Here, sit on this piece of metal. How’s that? Still comfortable?”
“Not in the least.”
“Good. Since you’ll be off at dawn tomorrow, I wanted to brief you fully over the trip to High Saffron. I’d be joining you myself, but the burden of leadership precludes one from doing one’s duty. Since no one else volunteered, you’ll be going on your own. Have a look at this.”
He laid a hand-drawn map on the coffee table.
“This is us here—and that’s your destination. So you have to go from here”—he pointed to East Carmine—“and travel all the way to—”
“High Saffron?”
“You’ve done it before?”
“I understand the theory about traveling—that it involves moving between two points, usually different ones.”
“But not always,” said Yewberry, eager not to give me the intellectual upper hand.
“True,” I conceded.
“Excellent. This map is an amalgam of every trip that was aborted in the High Saffron direction, mixed with a few guesses and some unsubstantiated rumor. As you can see, the Perpetulite only goes partway. It spalled at Bleak Point, and after that it’s about sixteen miles, all on foot, all trackless. Mr. Fandango will take you to the Bleak Point and drop you there. The track of the abandoned roadway can be clearly seen, and it was worked on up until thirty years ago—you may find some abandoned Leapback on the way and a Faraday or two. In fact, it’s all plain sailing until you get to . . . here.”
He pointed to a spot on the map about five miles beyond Bleak Point, where there was a picture of a flak tower. I leaned forward and studied the map carefully. Beyond this, the detail was worryingly vague. Of High Saffron itself, there was only its position on an estuary. But also marked on the map were Riffraff, man-eating megafauna, an impenetrable grove of yateveos and the Apocryphal bird with the long neck that wasn’t an ostrich. I pointed this out.
“Mapmakers can get carried away,” he admitted. “The sorry truth is that once past Bleak Point, it’s all pretty much guesswork.”
“May I take the map?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I wouldn’t want anyone to find his way back here.”
I knew he meant nomadic Riffraff, but I said, “Like who? Swans?”
“That’s not funny, Russett. Any more of that kind of disrespectful backchat and you could find yourself—” He stopped, wondering what he could do to make my life any worse. He couldn’t, so instead opened a wooden box and showed me a compass.
“Can I take that with me?”
“Absolutely not!” said Yewberry. “I just thought I’d show it to you—the only one in the village. Beautiful, isn’t it? I like this leather bit here especially.”
“Very nice. So . . . what can I expect to find in High Saffron?”
“We’re not really sure. A detailed study of the Council minutes suggests that the founders of East Carmine first attempted to mine it about three hundred years ago. They described it as about forty square miles in size, with evidence of a bypass, a harbor, a railway station, several thousand domestic dwellings, municipal buildings, something loosely described as ‘defensive structures’ and two temples of commerce. But to be honest, that might describe any one of hundreds of pre-Epiphanic towns, and they saw it only two centuries after the Something That Happened. So aside from the odd cementless building and anything made of Perpetulite, there won’t be much left.”
“And what do you want me to actually do?”
“You’re to sketch, observe and describe. Take any pieces of scrap color that you can find for appraisal back here, and keep an eye out for a route that the Ford might take. But most of all, we really want to know if it’s safe. No swans or Riffraff, that sort of thing—and what happened to the others, of course.”
“How do I report back if it’s not safe, sir?”
“Hmm,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I think you’ve got me there. Returning would help, I suppose.”
He thought for a moment, then showed me his daylight calculations. “You’ve got a little over sixteen hours of daylight tomorrow, but I can’t give you any accurate journey timings as the precise terrain and distances are unknown. You’ll need to time yourself from Bleak Point to the flak tower, and from there to High Saffron. No matter what happens, make sure you leave enough time to get back to Fandango an hour before sundown—that’s when he’ll leave.”
“Marvelous,” I said, somewhat rattled. A four-hour walk beyond Jade-under-Lime’s Outer Markers was the farthest I’d ever gone from the safety of civilization. Even in the long days of high summer, a two-hour margin for safety was the minimum during an extended toshing trip—although tough nuts had been known to make it back with only twenty minutes of light left. Mind you, I always suspected that they’d engineered it that way. That they might have got back hours ago and then waited around the corner, for the hero effect.
“Now,” said Yewberry, “we want you to complete this mission, but not to throw your life away unnecessarily.”
“I’m with you on that one, sir.”
“Good man. Is that sofa still uncomfortable?”
“Almost excruciating, sir.”
“Excellent. Watch out for eruptives on the summit section, keep a wary eye out for megafauna, clutching brambles and yateveos—and don’t keep any metal that is unusually warm to the touch. Oh, yes,” he added, “if you you find any toy Dinky cars, bring them back for my collection. I’ll give you an extra ten merits for each one you find. Any questions?”
“Yes,” I said. “What do I get in my packed lunch?”
“Whatever you decide to put in it, I suppose.”
Pepetwlait and Vermeer
1.2.02.03.059: All residents are expected to learn a musical instrument.
I sat on the wall of the color garden for a moment, thinking hard. If I was to have even a hope of returning from High Saffron, I would need someone to go with me. Someone motivated, highly adaptable and capable of violence. Someone like Jane, in fact. I found her potting tomato seedlings in the glasshouse. I hadn’t talk
ed to her since the hockeyball match, and she had a bruised left eye.
“Hello,” she said with a refreshing lack of animosity that made me feel a great deal better. “How’s Violet’s new sweetheart?”
“Wishing he was Violet’s ex-sweetheart.”
“Think how happy you’ve made Doug. He’s had his eyes on Tabitha Auburn for a while.”
“He should get a half promise in before Violet changes her mind. The carnage at hockeyball was partly your fault, wasn’t it?”
She smiled.
“Just trying to even the score. I managed to plant a small one on Violet, but Courtland was just too quick. What made you volunteer for the High Saffron gig?”
I shrugged. “Getting back up to residency, and Constance, I suppose. Do you know anything about the town?”
“Enough to know that no one ever comes back.”
I wanted to ask her to come, too, but straight out was probably not the best approach. Luckily, I had a host of other questions I wanted to ask her.
“How did you get to Vermillion and back in a morning? Or even to Rusty Hill for that matter?”
I knew she didn’t like my asking, but I hoped that her hostility had moved from “naked” to “implied” in the time we’d known each other.
She looked at me and thought for a moment.
“Promise not to tell?”
She punched out on the time clock and we walked out of the glasshouse, past the Waste Farm and through a small spinney to where we came across the Perpetulite roadway. It was a leafy spot, hung about with beech trees whose long boughs trailed ivy against the grass. It was also conveniently deserted. In one direction above the brow of a hill was the village; in the other was the stockgate, and beyond, Rusty Hill. She checked that we were quite alone and then took a small pendant from around her neck.
“Do you know what this is?”
“A really ugly piece of jewelry?”
“It’s the key that enabled the Previous to talk to the roads. If you see anyone coming, yell.”
She laid the bronze key on the surface of the Perpetulite and almost instantly a rectangular sunken panel about the size of a tea tray appeared in the road. It was barely a half inch deep and, curiously, was still the same color and texture as the roadway, but now had several raised buttons, a few graphs and windows in which figures constantly updated. Across the top on a separate panel were some curious words that looked as though they had been engraved into the surface.
“Pepetwlait Heol Canolfan Cymru A470 21.321km Secshwn 3B. Wedi codi 11.1.2136,” I read with a frown. “What does all that mean?”
“I’m not sure. The designation of the road and when it was built, probably. Despite all you’ve heard, the Previous were quite astonishingly clever. We all know that Perpetulite is a living organoplastoid that is able to self-repair, but what is less well known is that it’s possible to access the road’s inner workings through this panel. We can monitor the health of the Perpetulite and see what minerals it lacks, and best of all, we can tell it to do things.”
She let this sink in before continuing.
“I’m still learning, but I can set the temperature to keep ice off in the winter and illuminate the white lines. I can fine-tune the absorption rate of organic debris and the speed at which water is removed, and display messages on the road itself, presumably intended to assist the travelers who once used it.”
“And how did you discover the panel was right here?”
She smiled. “It’s not here. It’s wherever I place the key.”
To demonstrate, she picked up the pendant, and the panel melted back into unblemished roadway. She walked a few yards down the way and laid the key on the road again, and the same panel opened there instead.
“If they could make something as mundane as roads do this,” she murmured, “just think what else they must have been able to do.”
I thought of harmonics and floaties, remote viewers, lightglobes and Everspins. It was like arriving at a concert just as the orchestra had finished, and all that was hanging in the air was the final chords, fading into nothingness.
“But how did you use this to get you to Vermillion?”
“Ah!” she said with a smile. “Watch this.”
She pressed one of the buttons, and the panel changed shape to a new set of buttons, each with some similarly unreadable writing above them. She expertly manipulated the controls, and the road began to ripple silently in a curious fashion, much as it does when removing objects. But instead of a localized ripple running sideways across the road, the movement ran laterally in the direction of Rusty Hill.
I looked at Jane, who seemed uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the whole thing.
“It’s a conveyor,” she explained, “I think intended for the removal of spoil when the road was built, although its uses could be almost without number. Watch this.”
She stepped on to the edge of the Perpetulite and was moved ever so slowly down the road. The center of the roadway rippled faster, however, and by simply walking to the middle of the road, she was moved swiftly off toward Rusty Hill. After thirty yards or so she again moved to the edge, where she once more slowed down; then she stepped off and trotted back to where I was waiting.
“I can make it go forward, backward—even limit the distance of the conveyor. Sit on a chair in the center of the road and you can be in Rusty Hill in twenty minutes. On a trip to Vermillion I’d convey to Rusty Hill, get off, walk the empty section and then rejoin the Perpetulite all the way to Vermillion—leaving out the ferry, of course, and getting off well before anyone sees me.”
She switched it off and the road abruptly reverted to its usual state, and when she picked up her pendant, the sunken panel vanished from view.
“It’s astonishing.”
“It seems astonishing now—but it was once so ordinary you’d not have given it a second’s thought. And, Red?”
“Yes?”
“You can’t tell anyone about this.”
I assured her I would add it to the long list of secrets, and she laughed. A sudden thought struck me.
“You’re not going to submit to Reboot, are you?”
A look of seriousness came over her face, and she replaced the pendent around her neck.
“No. Monday morning I’m gone. It’s not an ideal outcome, but I’m eight hundred merits below zero.”
“Eight hundred? What did you do?”
“It was what I didn’t do. When people take a dislike to you, it’s amazing how quickly you can become a demerit magnet.”
“Where will you go?”
“I have no idea. Rusty Hill, perhaps. It’s not an ideal situation, but at least transport isn’t a problem. I can ride the conveyor to wherever I want.”
I said the first thing that came into my head: “I’ll miss you.”
“Red,” said Jane, placing a hand on my arm with a rare display of tenderness, “you won’t be around to.”
I fell into silence for a moment. Despite her annoying forthright-ness, it was the first vaguely pleasant conversation I’d had with her—she hadn’t once threatened to kill me or hit me with a brick or anything, and we’d been talking for nearly twenty minutes. I’d like to think it was because she trusted me, but it was more likely that she, like everyone else, didn’t rate my chances at High Saffron very high. But I still didn’t feel the moment was right to ask her to come with me. I had an idea.
“Can you accompany me into the zone?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to have a look at the Vermeer.”
I’d visited the Greyzone in Jade-under-Lime only a few times, when much younger. It wasn’t somewhere Chromatics generally went. Partly because we had little business to be there, partly because the Rules were fairly strict when it came to Grey privacy and partly because we simply weren’t welcome.
I looked around curiously as we walked in. The houses were built in the twin-terraced fashion of mostly stone, with a single roadway in between t
he buildings, which had their doorways facing each other in an unusual fashion. The streets were scrubbed, and everything was as tidy as a new pin. Since almost a third of any town’s population was made up of Greys, the zone was a large part of the residential area but always slightly removed from the Chromatic part of the village. Apart We Are Together.
I had expected to be stared at when we walked in, but I wasn’t—no one took the slightest notice of me.
“It all seems very friendly,” I observed.
“You’re with me,” she said. “I wouldn’t attempt this on your own. Don’t believe me? Watch.” And she told me to wait for her as she ducked into a house.
I suddenly felt very alone and vulnerable. Within a very short time I was being stared at, and after less than a minute, a young man approached and spoke in a voice that, while polite, carried with it a sense of understated menace. “Have you lost your way, sir?”
“I was waiting—”
“He’s with me,” said Jane, coming out of the house, holding a plate with a slice of cake on it. “Clifton, this is the swatchman’s son. Red, this is Clifton, my brother.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, his manner entirely changed. “Jane says you’re ‘mostly deplorable,’ which for her is quite a compliment.”
I looked at Jane, who said, “Don’t listen to him. It’s every bit as insulting as it’s intended to be.”
“So,” continued Clifton, who seemed as gregarious as Jane was serious, “for you it’s death or marriage to Violet. You do like difficult choices, don’t you?”
“If I get back, she’s the last person I’d marry.”
He laughed. “So you say. Violet can be very persuasive. She and I have had an understanding that goes back a couple of years.”
He opened his eyes wide so the meaning was clear. “You won’t be disappointed. Mind you,” he added, “I upped the feedback score to ensure repeat business.” He winked and added, “If you don’t use the word no in her presence, I daresay you’ll be very happy.”