“What’s with the pendulum?”

“She’s searching for harmonic pathways —a musical energy that runs through the Collective, she calls it.”

“What do the prefects think?”

“They think she’s a bit odd,” he replied with a shrug, “but belief in odd things isn’t against the Rules, as long as it’s done on your own time, and you don’t try to convince anyone else.”

Dad turned to look at her as we cycled past, but the girl had returned her attention to her pendulum.

Soon after the bridge we crested a rise and found ourselves within sight of the village. It was a low-lying, highly fenestrated conurbation with whitewashed walls and a roofline bewhiskered with heliostats, chimney pots and water heaters. Between us and the village was an empty landscape of low, grassy mounds interspersed with occasional stacks of standing masonry, weathered concrete and the odd finger of rusty iron. East Carmine, despite being on the very Outer Fringes of the Collective, had once been big.

Back at Jade-under-Lime we had barely five streets of abandoned housing, but here the rough landscape continued for almost a half mile in every direction.

“East Carmine is only a fraction of the size it once was,” remarked Stafford. “The deFacting wasn’t quite as severe over this way, and one can still find artifacture that’s almost perfect. I restore vintage office equipment in my spare time. I have six working staplers and a Gestetner stencil duplicator. I can punch holes at competitive rates—and my recipe for black ink is famous all over the sector.”

We continued past the undulating grassland, the ancient layout of the old town easily discerned from a crisscrossing of smooth, grassed-over roads dotted with eroded mailboxes and streetlamps. There was little in the way of trees or low shrubs, as this was an area traditionally kept for pasture and reserved to accommodate any of the Previous who might return. Once, it was presumed, the houses had simply stood empty, waiting. But time, weather and neglect had taken their toll, and all that remained was these soft grassy mounds and an inviolable Rule that they be kept that way. No one seriously considered that the once-numerous Previous would come back, but Rules are rules.

“What do you think of our crackletrap?” asked Stafford, indicating the large structure that had been placed atop the flak tower.

“Impressive,” I murmured.

“The prefects—Mrs. Gamboge in particular—are very big on the dangers of lightning,” explained the porter. “It’s been finished only since Winternox, and has already been struck over a hundred times.”

The lightning lure was a wooden latticework affair topped with a domed bronze attractor about thirty feet in diameter. Since every house in the Collective had a metallic daylight-collection device on its roof, homes were highly susceptible to a wayward bolt, which would course down the steel adjustment rods and cause electrical mayhem within the house. The luckless were sometimes fused to anything metallic, sometimes half vaporized and at other times simply dead in their beds, their eyeballs and internal organs boiled to something closely resembling minestrone soup. Lurid accounts and photographs were published every week in Spectrum.

“I expect you take lightning-avoidance issues seriously where you come from?” asked Stafford.

“Our Council are more concerned about swan attack, but lightning isn’t ignored,” replied my father. “We have a fleet of a half-dozen specially adapted Fords, each with a bronze attractor mounted on a pylon in the flatbed. They’re driven in to intercept a storm when the direction and severity are known.”

“We have an anomaly ten miles or so upwind,” said Stafford, “so ball lightning can be a problem in these parts. There are plans to erect a steel catch-net on the Western Hills, but it’s mostly talk.”

Fork lightning could be easily lured from areas of habitation, but ball lightning was a law unto itself. It drifted along with the breeze, became caught in eddies and sometimes entered houses. It was sticky, too, and would attach itself to anything organic. A bad ball strike could leave the victim almost completely incinerated; nervous residents who were unspooned etched their names on steel plates to keep in their pockets, just in case.

We continued on the road down to the village itself, a knot of houses on a raised hillock. The dwellings were built in the Salvagesque style, a hodgepodge of construction methods using a wide variety of materials ranging from the deeply ancient carved stone to reused timber, rubber roof tiles, brick, adobe and, in some places, the more modern oak-framed wattle and daub. As we moved off the Perpetulite and onto the cobbled street, Dad asked the porter about Robin Ochre, the previous swatchman.

“Mr. Ochre’s absence is deeply regretted,” he remarked. “He left a wife and daughter.”

“He will send for them in due course, I suppose?” I asked, wholly misunderstanding the comment.

“I’m not sure he’s in much of a condition to do anything.”

“I was led to believe,” said Dad slowly, “that Mr. Ochre had retired from the profession.”

“Ah!” said Stafford. “While euphemistically true, the phrase is also potentially misleading. I can only repeat the Council’s own findings: that Mr. Ochre was . . . fatally self-misdiagnosed.”

“Robin is dead?” asked my father.

“I’m no medical expert, of course,” replied the porter thoughtfully, “but yes, that’s precisely what he is.

Four weeks ago to the day.”

Dad and I glanced at each other. For some unknown reason we hadn’t been told, and as I was trying to figure out what “fatally self-misdiagnosed” might mean, we arrived at a red door set into an unbroken terrace that made up the south end of the town square. That is to say, we arrived at the rear, tradesman’s entrance. The facade with the front door would face the town square. If we hadn’t just received the disturbing news about Robin Ochre, I daresay my father would have insisted on being taken to the front entrance. As it was, he said nothing.

The porter opened the door, bid us enter and then placed our bags in the scullery hall as we stood, blinking, in the gloom.

“My goodness,” he said, “it’s as dark as the belly of a frog in here.”

He walked past us and into the kitchen, where by the dim glow of the windows I could faintly see him turn the winding crank and then fiddle with the two manual-override rods that dangled from the ceiling.

High above us the roof mirror rotated toward the afternoon sun; catching the rays, it then beamed them down the light well and onto a frosted-glass panel set into the ceiling.

“Whoops,” said Stafford as the light swept the muddy gloom from the house. “I should have wound the heliostat spring before you arrived. No one’s lived in this house for a while. Will there be anything else?”

“How on earth can one be ‘fatally self-misdiagnosed’?” asked Dad, who was still not over the news that his former colleague was dead. The porter thought for a moment.

“The Council decided at the inquest that he must have thought he had the Mildew and consigned himself to the Green Room to be hastened. As it turned out, he didn’t.”

“A shocking mistake to make.”

“It was, sir, yes. Fine man, Mr. Ochre. We haven’t lost a single resident to the Mildew for seven years.

And he wasn’t hue-specific, if you know what I mean.”

“Munsell stated that health care is universal,” remarked my father, but we knew what Stafford meant.

Some swatchmen favored those only of a similar hue.

Dad gave a shiny half merit to Stafford, who tipped his hat and told us he hoped our stay in East Carmine would be happily uneventful. I saw him to the back door, then asked him if the prefects read outgoing telegrams.