Russett, you’ll be with Doug in Foxtrot sector. Any questions?”
“Yes,” said a light Yellow. “Will we be back in time for breakfast? You know how the Greys always scoff the bacon in the first five minutes.”
“First come, first served,” said Turquoise. “That’s the Rule, irrespective of hue. If you don’t dawdle, perhaps you might finally get to taste bacon.”
“I heard it’s really good,” said someone farther down the line, a sentiment that everyone seemed to agree with.
Sixteen of us were standing outside the town hall. We were dressed in Outdoor Adventure #9s, and carried no spots. I’d had similar duties since I reached eligibility at age thirteen, so was acquainted enough with the procedure to know how boring it could be. Swans rarely came close to settlements, and Riffraff were far too canny to be surprised by a Boundary Patrol. Besides, if you talked loudly enough they’d hide anyway, and would become someone else’s problem.
There were no other questions, so each team was handed a copy of a much-thumbed procedures manual, which contained detailed descriptions of the various types of swan, lightning and Riffraff, together with their individual peril ratings and a checklist of what to do if they were spotted. Turquoise wished us all well, told us again not to stray beyond the boundary and to call from every checkpoint, then left us to it.
“How are you this morning, Eddie?” asked Doug, who had a ready smile and was significantly more pleasant than Tommo, if a mite less interesting. Doug looked as though he were wired to fit in; Tommo was wired wholly for himself.
I said I was well, even though I wasn’t. The Jane/Colorman whom-do-I-tell-on-whom question had not resolved itself. The safest course was actually the simplest—do nothing at all and hope everything turned out for the best. It wasn’t a great plan, but it had the benefits of simplicity and a long tradition.
Doug set off and I followed, away from the houses of still-sleeping residents and past the lumpy grasslands in the direction of the linoleum factory. We chatted on the way, mostly about family. The Crimsons were on their way down the Spectrum, but unlike the Russetts, who had fallen dramatically from high perception, the Crimsons seemed to be slowly losing their Redness—about 10 percent a generation.
“Are you seriously going to marry Violet?”
“I guess,” he said with a shrug. “I’d sooner not, of course, but Violet’s very difficult to refuse. When she suggested a half promise that was binding on me but not on her, I tried to tell her I was going to join the Keepers of the Long Swatch and devote my life to silent devotion of the hue, but it came out as ‘Thank you, Violet, that would be very nice.’ ” I told him about Constance, and we exchanged views on marrying up-Spectrum. I think I was more optimistic than he was, but then Constance didn’t sound quite as bad as Violet, who once screamed so loudly to get her own way that she shattered a trifle bowl in another room.
“Mind you,” continued Doug, “if I marry into the deMauves, I’ll never be short of pocket money and a cushy job at the factory. Perhaps I should just lie back and think of the linoleum.”
I would probably do the same thing—only with string.
“Doug,” I said, thinking about the Apocryphal man, “do you have any jam?”
“Of course.”
“Loganberry?”
He rolled his eyes.
“I wish. There’d be some in the deMauves’ cellar.”
“Would they sell any to me?”
He laughed, which I took to mean no.
We crossed the river in silence, walked past the factory and railway station and then headed out along the western road. Ahead of us a narrow valley opened up into the wood-covered heights of the Redstone Mountains. In between the hills I could see a large grey structure, and I pointed this out to Doug.
“It’s the five-part dam complex left behind by the Previous,” he explained. “It rained a lot round here, even then. It still feeds Blue Sector West by way of a seventy-three-mile-long aqueduct. So big you could once walk inside, but the lime scale is about a foot thick these days. You’d pass the dams on the way to High Saffron. Mostly silted up, now.”
After an abrupt right turn up a pathway, we arrived at the boundary. It was much like the one at Jade-under-Lime: simply an earthen dike thirty feet high, topped with a partially dilapidated stone wall and a deep ditch filled with clutching brambles. It was enough to halt a rhinosaurus or an elephant but wouldn’t stop a ground sloth or bouncing goat.
There was a phone booth on the village side of the boundary, which for sound colornomic reasons was painted grey rather than red. There was no door; only three panes of glass remained and soil creep had buried it to almost a quarter of its height. But the Bakelite telephone was still in good order, kept safe and dry under a domed cloche that would not have appeared out of place covering a cake.
Doug took off the cloche, dialed a number and reported where we were. Turquoise would be underground in the Plotting Room, where, for doubtless sound but unknown reasons, the team’s positions and progress could be marked on a large table painted with a map of the sub-Collective.
This done, Doug replaced the receiver and cloche, and we trudged on, the sun still low and the air cool and laden with dew. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of natural red in the countryside’s rich bounty. The birds, roused perhaps by our tramping boots, popped their heads out from under their wings and sang.
“I’d sing, too, if I could fly,” said Doug. “See over there? The Fallen Man.”
He was pointing at a low-walled enclosure just outside the boundary, on a flat piece of cleared ground overlooked by two large ginkgo trees and several rhododendron bushes that looked as though they were discussing invasion plans. I found a footpath, and trotted down for a closer look. The enclosure was perhaps forty feet in diameter, built to less than waist height. The iron gate had been saved from rusty oblivion by a timely coat of paint, but was no more substantial than a spider’s web. The grass within the enclosure was kept short and neat by the industrious work of a team of guinea pigs, which blinked at me from their burrows as I opened the gate. Inside was the Fallen Man: Like our lodger, he was something inexplicable in a world of carefully ordered absolutes, so what remained of him was kept exactly as it was, with nothing taken away and, aside from the wall and the guinea pigs, nothing added.
The chair and the man were lying flat on the ground, having landed sideways. Of the Fallen Man’s body, little remained. He had rotted long ago, and the weather had broken down the bones to crumbling white dust wherever they poked out of the finely nibbled grass. His heavy boots were still relatively complete, as were his helmet and other scraps of clothing, some of which were a faded red in color. The chair was not at all like the stuffed-leather variety portrayed in the sign outside the tearoom . It had been beautifully constructed of aluminum, brass and chrome and had once been painted, but the sun and rain had burnished the metal to a dull grey, and even though half-embedded in the soil and badly crumpled from the impact, the chair had not corroded appreciably.
“How long has he been here?”
“I remember being brought up here soon after he landed,” replied Doug after a moment’s thought. “That would have been about thirteen years ago.”
“Where did he come from?”
Doug shrugged and pointed straight upward, which was of little help.
“With all the unanswered questions kicking around,” he said, checking the time, “the arrival of a strange man strapped to a metal chair is of little significance.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “the bigger mystery is that no one seems eager to find out. What do you think?”
“If you’re buttering me up to join your Question Club,” said Doug with a smile, “you’re barking up the wrong tree. Knowing where the Fallen Man came from will not substantially alter our lives—and neither will finding out what the Something That Happened was, or even the name of Munsell’s seventh apostle and the Unrevealed Abomination.”