Shades of Grey Read Free

advise on matters regarding the Rules, and there was even a shop that traded solely in floaties, and another that specialized in postcode genealogy. Amid it all I noticed a stronger-than-usual presence of Yellows, presumably to keep an eye out for illegal color exchange, seed trading or running with a sharp implement.
    Unusually for a regional hub, Vermillion was positioned pretty much on the edge of the civilized world. Beyond it to the east were only the Redstone Mountains and isolated outposts like East Carmine. In the uninhabited zone there would be wild outland, megafauna, lost villages of untapped scrap color and quite possibly bands of nomadic Riffraff. It was exciting and worrying all in one, and until the week before, I hadn’t even heard of East Carmine, let alone thought I would be spending a month there on Humility Realignment. My friends were horrified, expressed low-to-moderate outrage that I should be treated this way and proclaimed that they would have started a petition if they could have troubled themselves to look for a pencil.
    “The Fringes are the place of the slack-willed, slack-jawed and slack-hued,” remarked Floyd Pinken, who could comfortably boast all three of those attributes, if truth be known.
    “And be wary of losers, self-abusers, fence leapers and fornicators,” added Tarquin, who, given his family history, would not have seemed out of place there either.
    They then informed me that I would be demonstrably insane to leave the safety of the village boundary for even one second, and that a trip to the Fringes would have me eating with my fingers, slouching and with hair below the collar in under a week. I almost decided to buy my way out of the assignment with a loan from my twice-widowed aunt Beryl, but Constance Oxblood thought otherwise.
    “You’re doing a what? ” she asked when I mentioned the reason I was going to East Carmine.
    “A chair census, my poppet,” I explained. “Head Office is worried that the chair density might have dropped below the proscribed 1.8 per person.”
    “How absolutely thrilling . Does an ottoman count as a chair or a very stiff cushion?”
    She went on to say that I would be showing significant daring and commendable bravery if I went, so I changed my mind. With the prospect of joining the family of Oxblood and of myself as potential prefect material, I was going to need the broadening that travel and furniture counting would doubtless bring, and a month in the intolerably unsophisticated Outer Fringes might well supply that for me.
     
    The Oz Memorial trumped the Badly Drawn Map in that it was baffling in three dimensions rather than just two. It was a partial bronze of a group of oddly shaped animals, the whole about six feet high and four feet across. According to the museum guide, it had been cut into pieces and dumped in the river three centuries before as part of the deFacting, so only two figures remained of a possible five. The best preserved was that of a pig in a dress and a wig, and next to her stood a bulbous-bodied bear in a necktie. Of the third and fourth figures there remained almost nothing, and of the fifth, only two claw-shaped feet truncated at the ankles, modeled on no creature living today.
    “The eyes are very large and humanlike for a pig,” said my father, peering closer. “And I’ve seen a number of bears in my life, but none of them wore a hat.”
    “They were very big on anthropomorphism,” I ventured, which was pretty much accepted fact. The Previous had many other customs that were inexplicable, none more so than their propensity to intermingle fact with fiction, which made it very hard to figure out what had happened and what hadn’t. Although we knew that this bronze had been cast in honor of Oz, the full dedication on the plinth was badly eroded, so it remained tantalizingly unconnected to any of the other Oz references that had trickled down through the centuries. Debating societies had pondered long and hard