Dispatch from a Colored Room

by Matt Weber

match the lines.

  “Mlle Leblanc,” the meatpuppet says, leaning back, and everything about him screams it: He doesn't know how to modulate his voice to the resonances of the office, he's not accustomed to this posture of extreme authority, he's a bit too tall for the chair. They've plucked some sucker from middle management, slapped a short-term skinjob on to disguise his face, and sat him at Salmant's desk like a scratch and stricken child playing dress-up.

  I look at the genie and get a sharp look back. We're on the same side here, he's reminding me, and I literally blink when I remember that this is actually true.

  “Greyking Books,” the meatpuppet continues, “claims to hold the rights to a rather lucrative piece of intellectual property. On the one hand, this has attracted our interest in the account. On the other, we are concerned with the potential impact of its legal exposure. In fact, more than one lawsuit is currently in prosecution against Greyking Books, with a claim of prior art---and we are informed that the Ministry of Culture is planning to file a suit on grounds that the art in question is in the public domain. I know it is a great deal to ask of a woman whose father died before her first year, but have you, or has your family, any record of the origination of that art?”

  Now, this---this sounds like a legitimate concern, and of course it is, but take a moment to contemplate the context. Imagine yourself standing before the president of a bank (or a poorly done simulacrum whomof), run ragged and barely in your skull amidst opulence so alien to your experience that it is actually unearthly, and he tells you that there's a problem with the account and that there's something you maybe could do to make it go away. But, of course, you can't do anything, you never could, and now you're going to have to tell the biggest name in the bank—into whose office you've wandered, stinking and half out of your mind, with your toddler drooling on some peasant's shoulder—that you can't help him out. It's a tactic, and once you know it's a tactic, every detail of the interaction suddenly takes on a stark tint of malevolence. “You want to see the main branch, bitch? We'll show you the main branch.''

  I'm pure fury at this point; the inside of my cheek is bleeding. Aimée blinks once, twice, thrice, and between blinks her eyes are huge, but her pupils, despite the gloom, are tiny. And then something amazing happens.

  She digs in the satchel by her side, where I thought all she had was food and toys for Sim, and she pulls out a sheet of battered paper. I can see spidery handwriting on it, the ink faded but still legible. She shambles over to the immaculate desk, which makes the Salmant meatpuppet very nervous, but all she wants to do is slap the paper down. It obliges her, or me at any rate, with a satisfying rustle and thump.

  “I thought you might be interested in this,” she says. “When Pel said my father, I knew it was this. I didn't want to show it to her. Not out in my house. But here?” She rolls her eyes up at the vaulted ceiling. “This is the real thing.”

  The meatpuppet is totally wrong-footed by this point, but decides he ought to look it over; the genie does the same and, because I've realized that none of these people are actually empowered to punish me without going through channels, so do I. And there, with a date that's about contemporaneous with Aimée's birth, I read:

  My love is greater than the land

  My love, she is so small

  My horror is a colored room

  With almost no one there at all

  I met my love a-laboring

  I knew my love at toil:

  I glimpsed my love when first I freed

  A flower from the soil

  My love is louder than the sea

  My love speaks not a word

  My horror is a colored room

  Where two cannot be seen or heard

  I sing my love a serenade

  I kiss my love good-night

  I fall in a warm nearby bed

  And scratch my eyes in fright

  My love is every man's desire

  My love is no man's wife

  My horror is a colored room

  And me too weak to use the knife.

  That's right, knights and knaves. The colored room poem. Earliest. Attested. Reproduction.

  Now, at this point, Aimée succumbs to a potent cocktail of fatigue, withdrawal, hypoxia, and dehydration, and much of the ensuing time is spent in a not-much-publicized little ward within St. Nox's waiting for her electrolyte balances to stabilize. So perhaps I'll take this opportunity to explain the significance of this event to those of you who have yet to read your history.

  The colored room poem, margraves and mendicants, is Greyking Books' major asset—well, I suppose they have other big properties now, but it was at the time. Because we're here at the Heap, I know I need hardly inform this particular audience of the breakaway success of Elila Parlabane's Chroma cycle, based on the poem; of the authorship controversy; of the interpretation controversy; of the slew of imitators trying their own hand at resolving the interpretation controversy; of the Leveau-Qing duel, the Opera House Feud—which is still ongoing, I'm informed, courtesy of Daniel Utterquick here in front, a quick round of applause, if you would, and Sainted Doria, who doesn't seem to have graced us this night—anyway, those of you who've been in the business for a bit will remember all these things and their culmination in the Motley Arsons, which brought great embarrassment and an inconvenient elevation of police presence here to Folio, which in turn effectively quelled the craze, though not before Greyking had collected its fat cut in licensing fees.

  Between the authorship controversy and the interpretation controversy, the latter was of course more potent. And you can see why—the thing reads almost like a nursery rhyme, it hardly sounds like the kind of thing that some person wrote. The attribution to “Jon Lecorce,” which everyone soon learned was an obscure old nickname for Tirhare Barkman, only reinforced the idea. But Greyking Books insisted it had been written, if pseudonymously, and that they owned the rights. And, with the success of Parlabane's play, they could pay to enforce those rights.

  The contract to license those rights couldn't be pseudonymous, of course. Every time Greyking sued to enforce them, Gauthier Leblanc's name entered the public record anew. But no one had met him, not knowingly. No one knew who he was. No one would have guessed he was a no-account teacher and day-laborer from the sixth, nor that he'd left a wife and daughter there.

  So this is where we are, sinners and sumners. A poem seizes the collective imagination of the fourth's artists, makes big money for a small press, and burns a few houses down before the seizure's through. The writer dies, but the operators on the ground cut his family out of the estate, until: Enter Catherine Pelerine—not my real name—agent of the financial establishment, gamely toiling to set the world a little bit righter every day.

  And I see you fidgeting, Daniel. How is this even a story, right? “Immense bureaucracy does right thing for once,” I mean, for fuck's sake, as a headline it's on the order of “Stopped clock displays 20th accurate time in 10 days.” Conceded.

  But things are stranger than that. Let me read something to you.

  I have had an experience that I ought not commit to paper. But, Aimée, you will learn this if ever you give me a grandchild: One gains wisdom as a parent, only to lose it when one's child is far away. In any case, this may be the hinge between two parts of a life, the key to understanding how I have moved given where I had been before.

  I had despaired of learning my poem's fate. We had a few good weeks, Jesson and I, every day saving a little of our meager take; but he has committed some indiscretion whose nature he will not disclose, and the cost of moving, lease-breaking, and bribing the landlord (thankfully we are paid in cash) has ruined us again. Naturally, I did not leave a forwarding address, not even yours—especially not yours!

  There is no highway here; I work harvesting blue scum from the drug bogs. This material will be strained, separated, dried, and sent to my former workplace, where it will be loaded into trucks, shipped to some higher terrace, and refined into
an anti-chancre agent that would cost me a month's salary for a week's supply. (You may wonder if eating the raw scum could possibly have a similar effect. The agent in question does not reduce chancres of the brain, and in any case the critical dosage is in the gallons daily, with the near certainty of poisoning from other chemicals in the scum—so, you see, I made the inquiry regardless. Why not? I am desperate.) Particulates in the air have turned my mucus an alarming cyan shade and greatly increased its production, compromising my breathing; naturally, a number of treatments have been developed for this condition, and all are sold on the routes between the bogs and the fetid workers' dormitories, in one of which Jesson and I share a room. I have tried many of these prophylactics, and the only one that provides reliable relief is a simple nasal irrigation with some sort of weakly medicated solution—in any case, there is a small boutique where I stop weekly for the treatment, and at my last stop I was accosted by the Dandelion Knight.

  Note well, now: When I say "The Dandelion Knight," I do not mean some crew of hooligans who carve asterisks on walls to justify their other vandalisms. I mean Aurcryn-Jon himself, pale and yellow-haired, switch-thin in green motley, lounging in one of the irrigator's questionable chairs with a finger on his staff. Watching the door, so there was no chance of my running unnoticed,