“Really? I heard the Outer Fringes were awash with uncollected scrap.”
“Yes,” said Tommo sarcastically. “As you can see, the streets here are paved in yellow. It’s all complete plums, sorry to tell. The Previous were always more numerous in the south. There are parts around here where I don’t think they ever lived. Besides, everything local has been pretty much teased out.”
It was a problem that was becoming increasingly common. Distribution of synthetic hue was strictly controlled by National Color and could be earned only in a single way: by the collection of scrap color for recycling into raw pigment. It was said that a ton of red tosh might yield about a gallon of univisual pigment—enough to keep three hundred roses at full color for six months or, at halfhue, a year. Some villages spent their every light-hour collecting scrap color, even to the detriment of basic food production.
Color, and the enjoyment thereof, was everything.
“The linoleum factory must bring in a few merits, surely?” I asked.
“We’re selling it at a tenth of the price it was two hundred years ago. The Council has been pleading with Head Office to either cut production or license it for use as roof tiles. It’s a little too hard wearing, to be honest.”
“I’d heard that about linoleum.”
We were still staring at the soothing olive color of the town hall.
“Do you think that’s really green?” asked Tommo.
“I’ve no idea,” I replied, for no one could explain how we could see a univisual green but not a real one.
After all, color in itself has no color—it’s simply a construction of the mind: a sensation, like the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly and the smell of honeysuckle. I knew what a red looked like, but I’d be hard pressed to explain what it actually is.
We had been staring at the town hall for a while now, so decided to move on before a prefect or a monitor walked by.
“So . . . have your family been here long?” I asked.
“I moved here only a year ago. I come from a less well-known strand of the Cinnabars. We’re shopkeepers. Good ones, too. Our co-op was the most profitable in Red Sector East.”
“So why are you out here?”
“Bog off.”
“You bog off.”
“No—BOGOF:‘Buy one get one free.’ It seems the Council took exception to my aggressive selling techniques. The ‘free kettle every morning for a week’ didn’t go down too well, either.”
“You could have covered yourself by logging them as Standard Variables,” I said, attempting to sound knowledgeable, even though I’d learned that from Travis on the way in.
“I know that now.”
I frowned.
“What’s the point in ‘buy one get one free’? Why not just offer something at half price?”
“Which would you prefer,” he retorted, “something at half price or something for free?”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It is and it isn’t,” he replied with a smile. “I think there was a whole science involved around selling. The Council said I had shown contempt of the Rules by using arcane knowledge, and I was fined thirty merits and shipped out here to study Floon beetle migrations.”
“Did deMauve take your Open Return?”
“Not at all—I lost it on a dead cert at Jollity Fair that came in third. I’ve been trying to buy my way out, but it’s not going too well; in fact, I’m well below zero.”
I frowned. Anywhere else, having negative merits would be seen as deeply shameful—Tommo seemed to be wearing his imminent Reboot with pride.
“Then Reboot doesn’t bother you?”
“Should it?”
“Of course.”
He patted me on the shoulder.
“You worry too much, Eddie. I’ll figure out something before Monday.” He was taking his Ishihara this Sunday—the same as Jane. Back in Jade-under-Lime, we weren’t due to take our Ishihara for another eight weeks. But since we were being so open with each other, I decided to ask an indelicate question.
“Just how many merits below zero are you?”
“Around a hundred, I think,” he said with a laugh, “but deMauve said he’d give me five if I showed you around—and as long as I didn’t inveigle you into any Tommo-inspired devilry.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“Don’t be. Tommo devilry is of the very highest quality. Do you want to sell your Open Return?”
“With what would you buy it?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “it’s only book merits I’m short of. Cash is a different bird entirely.”
It meant he’d been working the Beigemarket. But if his cash merits were unofficially earned, they wouldn’t help him when it came to Reboot. He could be richer than Josiah Oxblood, but it wouldn’t matter. You couldn’t take cash to Reboot, either—just a spoon. A good one usually, and sometimes two. It was said the remedial teachers liked to exchange them for privileges.
“I couldn’t sell it to you even if I wanted to. I gave it to deMauve for safekeeping.”
“That’s bad.”
“It is?”
“Certainly. DeMauve bargains hard. I’d probably have to pay him twice what I’d pay you.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“Yes, of course I’m kidding you,” he said in the manner of someone who probably wasn’t. “Come and have a look at what living color we do have.”
We walked on toward the eastern end of the town square, where there was a sunken garden. About the size of a tennis court, it was enclosed by a low wall that was just the right height for a seat. It was East Carmine’s one and only color garden, and it was drab—the grass was a dark shade of green, and the flowers were all in muted versions of blue and yellow. The garden would be run on large toothpaste-tube-shaped pigment refills. Worse, they would be using the outdated Red-Blue-Yellow Color Model, which gave a miserably poor choice of hues.
“The red cartridge ran out last week,” said Tommo. “We expect the yellow to dry out any day now, and you know what that means.”
“Right,” I said, seeing the problem instantly. “Blue grass. That’s rotten—no village should be without a color garden.”
“We’ll still have Mrs. Gamboge’s,” he said with a sneer. “She spends all her bonuses on nothing else.
Even has a gardener employed full-time to tint by hand.”
“With the labor shortage as it is?”
“It’s not against the Rules. What do you think of that door?”
We were walking past the Prime Residences on the sunny side of the square. The door that Tommo had indicated was painted univisual red, so everyone knew that it was the home of the village Red prefect.
The artificial hue made the door almost obscenely bright; all detail and texture were obliterated by an overpowering color that was so strong it cross-fired into my other senses. I could smell burned hair, my ears started ringing and an odd jumble of memories popped into my head. Of my mother, a long-dead family pet and a performance of South Pacific I’d seen once.
“Fairly bright,” I said, understanding what he was up to in an instant. He was trying to gauge my red perception.
“Hmm,” said Tommo, “not painfully so, then? Any . . . tinnitus or memory sweeps? Visions of Repaint Your Wagon, for example?”
“Not really. How about you?”
“More shades of Seven Brides for Seven Colors, really—and Chuckles, our pet badger.”
If that was true, he was almost as receptive as me. But from what I knew already of Tommo, bragging up his perception would be pretty much standard operating procedure—and everyone knew an oversaturation of one’s own color fired off memories of musicals and family pets.
We walked on. Within a dozen paces we found ourselves outside a large building with LIBRARY written on the front.