Shades of Grey

The unLibrary

I pushed open the doors and walked inside. The library was large and open-plan, with a circular void in the upper floor from where light descended vertically. Dotted around were tables and chairs, and a few mirrors on stands, useful for directing light to study. Or at least, it would have been, had there been any books to look at. As Tommo had already mentioned, the shelves were pretty much empty, and what books remained were so read-worn front and back that barely the middle chapters remained. Reading a book these days was a bit like learning what someone was doing, but never knowing how they got to be there or how it eventually turned out. It hadn’t always been like this. Successive Leapbacks had stripped the shelves of science, history, biography, geography, cookery, self-help, poetry, art—and now fiction, genre by genre. There were still books other than the strongly encouraged Very Racy Novels, but they were so few and far between that they were always either being borrowed, in transit or worn out. Not here in the library, anyway.

“Can we help you?” came several hushed voices in unison and I jumped, for seven Blues had all crept silently up behind me and were now peering at me with expressions of wonder. The Rules had decreed that books be part of the successive Great Leap Backward, but due to a poorly drafted Leapback directive, staffing levels had remained unchanged and would remain so forever. The chief librarian was a tall and imperious-looking woman who was covered head to toe in bright synthetic blue and had a large quantity of jewelry draped about her neck and a tiara perched precariously on a large shock of bouffant white hair. She had drawn circles around her eyes, which were joined by a line across the bridge of her nose. It was the traditional mark of her calling, but no one knew why.

“I am Mrs. Lapis Lazuli,” she announced in a voice that sounded like rusty wire under tension. “You must be the new swatchman’s son. You’re here to count chairs, I understand?”

“Among other things.”

“Hmm. I heard you fell for the Widow deMauve’s cherry cake scam. Watch out for that conniving old hag. The sooner she’s carried off by the Mildew, the better. Do you have a name?”

“Edward,” I said, meek beneath her baleful stare. “I was actually after the reference section.”

“Not fiction, then?” she asked in a hopeful tone of voice.

I waved an arm in the direction of the empty shelves.

“With the greatest of respect, ma’am, I think I’m about three centuries too late.”

“Nonsense. I shall give you a personal guided tour. Visitors to the library are almost as rare as books.

Indeed, the librarians here outnumber the books seven to one—if you don’t count Reference, those frightful Racy Novels or the Collected Thoughts of Munsell.”

She guided me to the first of the empty shelves, while her assistant librarians all followed close behind.

“I am ninth-generation librarian here in East Carmine,” she announced grandly. “Certain information has descended down the years, even if the books have not.”

She pointed to a shelf, and I could see that carefully arranged in a row were the much-faded bar codes that had once been affixed upon the departed spines. She tapped a shelf.

“This was where The Little Engine That Could once sat.”

She lapsed into silence and we all stood there respectfully, staring at an empty space in the air.

“What was it about?” asked one of the junior librarians, as it seemed a tour was an honor not often bestowed.

“It was about an engine,” said Mrs. Lapis Lazuli, “that could.”

“That could what?”

“Over here,” she continued, gripping my elbow and sweeping me to the other side of the corridor, “were the complete works of Beatrice Potter. You may test me if you wish.”

She turned her back, and at the other librarians’ urging, I picked a bar code at random. “Shout them out!” called Mrs. Lapis Lazuli, back still turned.

“Thin thin, medium, modest,” I recited as I read the bar code, “thick, broad, minor, fat, token, token, slim, thin, medi—”

“The Tail of Tom Kitten,” she announced happily. “Am I right?”

“I don’t know,” I said, somewhat confused, since there was no information anywhere, either on the bar code or on the shelf.

“Sixth from the left?”

“Yes.”

She turned back to me and beamed.

“You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.” She pointed to the shelf opposite.

“Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.”

She moved swiftly to another wholly empty bookcase.

“This used to be the crime section.”

She tapped a finger at various points on the shelves and barked out the titles of books, long since extinct.

“The Most Serious Affair at Stiles,” she announced, “Murdoch on the Orientated Ex-Best, The Glass Quay, A Missed Simile’s Foaling in Snow, Gawky Park . . .”

I looked across at the librarians, who were nodding to themselves as they attempted to memorize what she was saying and thus somehow perpetuate the knowledge. It seemed utterly pointless but also, in a curious way, noble.

“. . . The Science of the Slams,” she continued, her pointing finger moving rapidly around the empty bookcase in a haphazard manner, “The Pig’s Leap, Monday Morning, The Force Bear, The Complete Sheer Luck Homes. Are you impressed, Master Edward?”

“Very,” I replied.

“My father taught me. And his mother before him. And her father before her—and so on. Do you get the picture?”

“I do.”

She paused and a sort of lost, dreamy look came over her.

“All those words,” she whispered, “so diligently placed together, and so pointlessly torn apart.”

She was suddenly overcome by a sadness and paused for several moments, before turning to me with a despondent smile.

“What did you come in here for, anyway?”

I had to think to remember. “The reference section.”

“Of course! Hannah will take you to that chair over there, whereupon Gerard will escort you to the stairs.

Silas with pick you up there and take you to general fiction, where Nancy will show you to the reference section. Cath will compose the risk assessment.”

“What do I do?” asked Terri, as all the others eagerly went to their places to assist me the thirty feet to the reference section.

“You’ll be assisting the young man to select the correct book.”

She opened her eyes wide and jumped up and down in excitement, while the others grumbled enviously.

Once Mrs. Lapis Lazuli had gone back to pacing the library, mumbling to herself and pointing at the shelves, I was expertly escorted to the reference section. I asked for the local Residents’ Manifest, and Terri obliged while the others stared from the doorway.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“An old friend asked me to check on some relatives living in the area,” I lied, and opened several books at random to disguise my intent. But I found what I was looking for. The postcode on the back of the Grey wrongspot’s spoon had been LD2 5TZ, and according to the records, it was in use by a four-year-old Grey living here in East Carmine, which wasn’t possible. Codes were only reallocated after death.

“Do you have the historical records?” I asked. This elicited a squeak of pleasure from Terri, who vanished for a moment and then returned with a second volume, even more battered than the first. This was more help, and I found the information I wanted. My tasks complete, I thanked the librarians in turn, filled out their feedback forms and was shown to the door in a similarly labor-intensive manner.

“How did you get along with our resident bookworm?” asked Tommo, who was waiting for me on the library steps.

“She’s a bit fierce, isn’t she?”

“Her bark is worse than her bite. Despite her position as deputy Blue prefect, she’s not averse to bending the Rules when it comes to story time.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’ll see—as long as your Morse is up to scratch.” He nodded toward the library. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Not really.”

That wasn’t strictly true—or indeed, true at all. The holder of LD2 5TZ before the four-year-old had been a man who lived in Rusty Hill, the abandoned town we had rattled past on the way in. He would be sixty-eight by now, which fitted the Grey wrongspot perfectly. His name had been Zane G-49, and according to the records, he’d died four years ago in Rusty Hill’s Mildew outbreak. Two people had shared the same code. Such a concept was unthinkable. The finite quantity of postcodes kept the Collective’s population at sustainable levels. One in, one out—that’s how it worked. With two sharing one, the Collective was technically overpopulated—an abomination in the eye of the Rules. But it didn’t tell me what he was doing in the Paint Shop, or even what Jane had to do with it. I was as ignorant now as I had been when I awoke this morning.

We walked on for a few moments in silence until Tommo looked at his watch, shook it and adjusted the hands so they matched the town clock.

“Right,” he said enigmatically. “We’re off to the Sorting Pavilion. It’s time you met the Big Banana.”