“Where did you take it?”
“Outside—at night. I had set the camera up to try to photograph lightning, but then I fell asleep and left the shutter open. What you see here is a seven-hour exposure.”
“And these circles in the night sky?”
“I don’t know what they are. It might be some sort of—I don’t know—unexplained phenomenon. But here’s weird for you: There was no moon that night.”
The notion that there was a small amount of light reflected from the moon was pretty much accepted wisdom. Although much too feeble for us to see by, it was enough for some creatures: Tracks of Nocturnal Biting Animals were often found in the morning where none had been the night before, and I had once seen a herd of grazing capybara and a hippo illuminated by a lightning flash. But Dorian’s picture posed an entirely new concept: that there was light from another source when the moon had waned—enough to illuminate the buildings and hills over seven hours—and that this source might be the curious circles in the night sky that he had photographed.
“Can I have this?” I asked.
“Sure. This is yesterday’s accident,” he said, handing me another photo. “Look.”
The atmosphere of the shot was particularly strident. A shaft of light had shone in from one of the factory windows at precisely the right moment, backlighting the victim’s severed head agreeably.
“I like the framing,” I said, “especially the windows reflected in the pool of blood.”
“Thank you.”
At that moment a pretty girl trotted up. I was partially hidden behind Dorian’s handcart, and she didn’t see me.
“Snookums—!” she said to Dorian with a smile, and my heart fell. The girl was Imogen Fandango, and Dorian was the “unsuitable attachment” the janitor had alluded to.
“Oh!” said Imogen as soon as she saw that Dorian wasn’t alone. “Master Russett. I, um, didn’t see you there. I actually meant ‘Snookums’ in a pejorative sense—Dorian and I hate each other—don’t we, darling?”
She wasn’t fooling anyone.
“I’m not going to snitch,” I told her.
Acutely embarrassed, Dorian rubbed his forehead, and Imogen shyly clasped his hand after looking around to check that we were unobserved.
“We don’t know what to do,” she said, glad, I think, to be able to share the problem. “Daddy has been advertising in Spectrum and wants six thousand for me. Who’s this Purple he’s asked you to contact?”
“Just some guy back home,” I said awkwardly. “He probably won’t be interested.”
“That’s a relief,” replied Imogen, blinking her large eyes. “There’s still hope. Perhaps Daddy will get bored and let us marry—he said he loves me, after all.”
“The only thing he loves about you is your ability to have Purple children,” grumbled Dorian. “If he wants to trade in eggs, he should start a chicken farm. It’s not as though you’re even his daughter.”
They then started to have an argument, right there in front of me. It was all a bit embarrassing. Imogen told Dorian that her father was a good man “compelled by circumstance” to sell her to the highest bidder.
Dorian was more the one for action, and hinted darkly at “extreme measures,” which I took to mean an escape.
“Don’t try anything stupid,” I warned. “Elopements always end in failure—and sometimes put you on the Night Train.”
“Didn’t Munsell say that we should always choose the lesser of two evils?” retorted Imogen. “Besides, it’s said that Emerald City is so large a couple might find work without questions being asked.”
“That’s right,” said Dorian. “We can vanish into the city.”
I wasn’t convinced. “You’d never get farther than Cobalt junction.” “We’re going to wrongspot. Not even a Yellow would dare question a Violet.”
It was a crazy plan, and they both knew it. Romantic-induced walk-outs were always returned, but wrongspotting was punishable by a ten-thousand demerit. Reboot, effectively. And at Reboot, couples are always separated. It showed how desperate they had become. It also explained why Dorian had wanted to buy my Open Return.
“You’re not going anywhere without tickets.”
“We’ve got one,” explained Dorian. “The other is . . . under negotiation.”
“Courtland says he wants me in the wool store for it,” said Imogen, “which is all fine and good, except that he won’t hand over the Open Return until he’s been paid in full.”
“He has no intention of giving up the ticket.”
“Yes, we know.”
“Blast!”
“What?”
I said it was nothing, but it wasn’t. Having now met these two, I couldn’t introduce Bertie Magenta to Fandango, and in consequence of that, I would not be receiving my one-hundred-fifty-merit commission.
And that was almost a year’s wages—for one lousy telegram. It was the fastest one-fifty I never made.
“Listen,” I said, “my cousin the Colorman goes to Emerald City on a regular basis. Let me make some inquiries, and I’ll get back to you. Just don’t do anything stupid, and don’t take Courtland up on his offer.”
They both stared at me.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Perhaps,” I said, “I want for you what I can’t have for myself. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do my Useful Work.”
School, Poetry, Co-op
2.1.01.05.002: All children are to attend school until the age of sixteen or until they have learned everything, whichever be the sooner.
The school was situated at the back of the village, two streets behind the town hall and opposite the firehouse. Due to the architectural infallibility of the Rules regarding school design, no better building could or would be thought of, so every school in the Collective was identical. I immediately knew my way around, and the place had an eerie familiarity about it.
I paused in the main hall next to the bronze bust of Munsell and read the school’s oft-quoted mission statement: “Every pupil in the Collective will leave school with above-average abilities.” It wasn’t until I had studied advanced sums that I realized this could not be possible, since by definition not everyone could be of above-average ability.
“It’s a historical average fixed soon after the Something That Happened,” my mentor, Greg Scarlet, had explained when I dared broach the subject. “How else would you be able to compare one year with another? Besides, an average pegged to a time when education was considerably worse than it is now ensures that no pupil is ever stigmatized by failure.”
This was true, and since one’s career path was never decided by ability or intellect, it didn’t much matter anyway. Lessons were generally restricted to reading, writing, French, music, geography, sums, cooking and Rule-followment, which meant sitting in a circle and agreeing on how important the Rules were. Most pupils referred to the subject as “nodding.”
I made my way to the head teacher’s office and tapped nervously on the door.
“Glad you could make it,” she said as soon as I had explained who I was and what I was doing there.
She introduced herself as Miss Enid Bluebird. She was a slight woman who was dressed in shabby tweeds and carried the benign expression of the inwardly harassed. This was not surprising, as her office was knee-high in stacks of dusty and much-faded examination papers.
“I’ve managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years,” she announced with some small sense of achievement. “I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.”
“A very worthy aim,” I replied, thinking carefully about how I could apply queuing theory in this instance.