“Hmm,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I think you’ve got me there. Returning would help, I suppose.”
He thought for a moment, then showed me his daylight calculations. “You’ve got a little over sixteen hours of daylight tomorrow, but I can’t give you any accurate journey timings as the precise terrain and distances are unknown. You’ll need to time yourself from Bleak Point to the flak tower, and from there to High Saffron. No matter what happens, make sure you leave enough time to get back to Fandango an hour before sundown—that’s when he’ll leave.”
“Marvelous,” I said, somewhat rattled. A four-hour walk beyond Jade-under-Lime’s Outer Markers was the farthest I’d ever gone from the safety of civilization. Even in the long days of high summer, a two-hour margin for safety was the minimum during an extended toshing trip—although tough nuts had been known to make it back with only twenty minutes of light left. Mind you, I always suspected that they’d engineered it that way. That they might have got back hours ago and then waited around the corner, for the hero effect.
“Now,” said Yewberry, “we want you to complete this mission, but not to throw your life away unnecessarily.”
“I’m with you on that one, sir.”
“Good man. Is that sofa still uncomfortable?”
“Almost excruciating, sir.”
“Excellent. Watch out for eruptives on the summit section, keep a wary eye out for megafauna, clutching brambles and yateveos—and don’t keep any metal that is unusually warm to the touch. Oh, yes,” he added, “if you you find any toy Dinky cars, bring them back for my collection. I’ll give you an extra ten merits for each one you find. Any questions?” “Yes,” I said. “What do I get in my packed lunch?” “Whatever you decide to put in it, I suppose.”
Pepetwlait and Vermeer
1.2.02.03.059: All residents are expected to learn a musical instrument.
I sat on the wall of the color garden for a moment, thinking hard. If I was to have even a hope of returning from High Saffron, I would need someone to go with me. Someone motivated, highly adaptable and capable of violence. Someone like Jane, in fact. I found her potting tomato seedlings in the glasshouse. I hadn’t talked to her since the hockeyball match, and she had a bruised left eye.
“Hello,” she said with a refreshing lack of animosity that made me feel a great deal better. “How’s Violet’s new sweetheart?”
“Wishing he was Violet’s ex-sweetheart.”
“Think how happy you’ve made Doug. He’s had his eyes on Tabitha Auburn for a while.”
“He should get a half promise in before Violet changes her mind. The carnage at hockeyball was partly your fault, wasn’t it?”
She smiled.
“Just trying to even the score. I managed to plant a small one on Violet, but Courtland was just too quick. What made you volunteer for the High Saffron gig?”
I shrugged. “Getting back up to residency, and Constance, I suppose. Do you know anything about the town?”
“Enough to know that no one ever comes back.”
I wanted to ask her to come, too, but straight out was probably not the best approach. Luckily, I had a host of other questions I wanted to ask her.
“How did you get to Vermillion and back in a morning? Or even to Rusty Hill for that matter?”
I knew she didn’t like my asking, but I hoped that her hostility had moved from “naked” to “implied” in the time we’d known each other.
She looked at me and thought for a moment.
“Promise not to tell?”
She punched out on the time clock and we walked out of the glasshouse, past the Waste Farm and through a small spinney to where we came across the Perpetulite roadway. It was a leafy spot, hung about with beech trees whose long boughs trailed ivy against the grass. It was also conveniently deserted.
In one direction above the brow of a hill was the village; in the other was the stockgate, and beyond, Rusty Hill. She checked that we were quite alone and then took a small pendant from around her neck.
“Do you know what this is?”
“A really ugly piece of jewelry?”
“It’s the key that enabled the Previous to talk to the roads. If you see anyone coming, yell.”
She laid the bronze key on the surface of the Perpetulite and almost instantly a rectangular sunken panel about the size of a tea tray appeared in the road. It was barely a half inch deep and, curiously, was still the same color and texture as the roadway, but now had several raised buttons, a few graphs and windows in which figures constantly updated. Across the top on a separate panel were some curious words that looked as though they had been engraved into the surface.
“Pepetwlait Heol Canolfan Cymru A470 21.321km Secshwn 3B. Wedi codi 11.1.2136,” I read with a frown. “What does all that mean?”
“I’m not sure. The designation of the road and when it was built, probably. Despite all you’ve heard, the Previous were quite astonishingly clever. We all know that Perpetulite is a living organoplastoid that is able to self-repair, but what is less well known is that it’s possible to access the road’s inner workings through this panel. We can monitor the health of the Perpetulite and see what minerals it lacks, and best of all, we can tell it to do things.”
She let this sink in before continuing.
“I’m still learning, but I can set the temperature to keep ice off in the winter and illuminate the white lines.
I can fine-tune the absorption rate of organic debris and the speed at which water is removed, and display messages on the road itself, presumably intended to assist the travelers who once used it.”
“And how did you discover the panel was right here?”
She smiled. “It’s not here. It’s wherever I place the key.”
To demonstrate, she picked up the pendant, and the panel melted back into unblemished roadway. She walked a few yards down the way and laid the key on the road again, and the same panel opened there instead.
“If they could make something as mundane as roads do this,” she murmured, “just think what else they must have been able to do.”
I thought of harmonics and floaties, remote viewers, lightglobes and Everspins. It was like arriving at a concert just as the orchestra had finished, and all that was hanging in the air was the final chords, fading into nothingness.
“But how did you use this to get you to Vermillion?”
“Ah!” she said with a smile. “Watch this.”
She pressed one of the buttons, and the panel changed shape to a new set of buttons, each with some similarly unreadable writing above them. She expertly manipulated the controls, and the road began to ripple silently in a curious fashion, much as it does when removing objects. But instead of a localized ripple running sideways across the road, the movement ran laterally in the direction of Rusty Hill.
I looked at Jane, who seemed uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the whole thing.
“It’s a conveyor,” she explained, “I think intended for the removal of spoil when the road was built, although its uses could be almost without number. Watch this.”
She stepped on to the edge of the Perpetulite and was moved ever so slowly down the road. The center of the roadway rippled faster, however, and by simply walking to the middle of the road, she was moved swiftly off toward Rusty Hill. After thirty yards or so she again moved to the edge, where she once more slowed down; then she stepped off and trotted back to where I was waiting.
“I can make it go forward, backward—even limit the distance of the conveyor. Sit on a chair in the center of the road and you can be in Rusty Hill in twenty minutes. On a trip to Vermillion I’d convey to Rusty Hill, get off, walk the empty section and then rejoin the Perpetulite all the way to Vermillion—leaving out the ferry, of course, and getting off well before anyone sees me.”