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With a crunch, and a squeal, and a mushroom cloud of shiny powder, the balloon elevator box hit the basement of the Starharbor Regional Justice Center. The crunch and squeal weren’t the noises of warping and compressing cage-metal, and the powder wasn’t mortar and stone turned to chalky dust. All this came from the packing peanuts which caught the dropping lift. They squeaked, groaned, compressed, and exploded. They filled the air around the fallen lift with a choking Styrofoam fog. They did their job.
Mr. Grey exited both elevator and Styrofoam cloud with an undignified lurch; coughing out plastic powder and alternating between waving away dust and trying to brush the foamy rubble from his robe. He stepped into a cavernous space, where the ceiling yawned into sightlessness overhead. The mine walls textured themselves in the standard chiseled earth; dotted here and there with standard lanterns, and non-standard motivational office posters. Behind Mr. Grey, the settling powder gradually revealed the array of balloon elevators and the safety-beds of packing peanuts. Ahead of him, railroad tracks ran out of sight into a gloomy distance.
Where tracks began, a tiny watchman’s box nestled like a flea against the cavern wall. In the box, the forewoman of the mines - Mr. Grey recognized the woman’s occupation by her hi-vis safety-robe and headlamp spectacles - sat composedly. She made a show of not noticing the elevator’s crash-landing, and kept her eyes roaming over the Regular Sunshine Post (which, I must tell you, was the name of the newsparchment, as well as the delivery service, and several other industries besides; but that’s not important).
Mr. Grey plucked pieces of Styrofoam from his robe and made sure the Notice still dwelt safely in his pocket. He walked with measured steps towards the watchman’s box and spoke with measured words to attract the forewoman’s attention. The footsteps and the words ran off after they’d done their job, away along the tracks, away down the tunnel, echoing madly.
The forewoman looked politely at Mr. Grey’s face while he spoke, and pointedly ignored his hands as they plucked Styrofoam bubbles from his robe, like flies from a honeypot. She listened, with her headlamp spectacles glaring into Mr. Grey’s eyes, as he related the contents of the Notice. Mr. Grey passed her the crumpled and world-weary parchment. The forewoman read it.
The Notice of Not Existing came from a lengthy, bureaucratic stock, very respectable language of the time and place. It contained delightful phrases such as, “Herein are set the certifications which…” or “Section 203, as amended, sanctions the accumulation of emolumentary…” The smallness of the text and the length of the parchment precludes its inclusion as a whole within this story, as it would invariably crowd out all that remains to be told. The persevering reader shall have to imagine the fascination of such a document. Those who feel jilted by its exclusion might find satisfaction in a fireside perusal of the latest issue of Terms and Conditions.
In brief, the contents of the Notice were thus. An old woman of inconsequential name had ceased existing by natural causes. She ceased existing in a place named ‘Glory Days’ (which has more to do with the story, but that will come later). The Notice entered its existence because this old woman, before abruptly giving up her own, had spent her early age in Starharbor. She had moved away by obtaining a travel visa - in a time even farther behind, when such documents were easily acquirable - and not returned. She had, however, left relations behind. The Notice required serving to any living relatives who remained in Starharbor. The Notice did not contain the original address information, which was why it first came to Mr. Grey. His task was to retrieve the change of address form, filed in ages past, which lay somewhere deep in the Parchmentwork Mines.
That was the summary of the Notice’s content. Also, Mr. Grey’s reason for having it. Also, his reason for being where he now was; brushing off packing peanut debris from his robe with a spark-singed hand, while the forewoman scanned the noble, bureaucratic Notice.
When the forewoman finished reading, she reshaped the Notice into something like a golf ball and flung it under the watchbox counter, into a waste basket. There the Notice’s part in this story ended. Mr. Grey would still need a Notice for the next of kin, but Time and Bother had worked that one too hard to be presentable. Mr. Grey would just clickety-clack the copy he needed from memory.
The forewoman once more put Mr. Grey under the twin spotlights of her lenses. She asked him what he wanted, which Mr. Grey had thought evident. He explained how he needed the old change-of-address form. This displeased the forewoman. She grumbled in several different directions; about it being ages old, and probably not in any current lode, and needing to commission an excavation team, and eons of digging, and being just about to go on her break besides. Mr. Grey expressed his sympathy, but explained again - without changing his tone or words - that he needed the old change-of-address form.
The forewoman muscled a crisp stack of parchment from a lower watchbox shelf and thudded it onto the counter. She slid it toward Mr. Grey slowly, like a live blasting brick. She said, if he wanted to commission an excavation, he’d need to fill the information on such-and-such pages, and get signatures from such-and-such sirs and madams, up in this-and-that department. Then the forewoman pulled her lunch from an even lower shelf in the tiny watchbox. She began arranging her meal courses on the counter by size and value.
Mr. Grey walked back to the balloon elevator array, filling forms as he went. The forewoman thought she’d disposed of the matter handily. She contemplated her meal. She considered starting with the least valuable course; the leftmost, a cupful of onyx beans. She changed her mind, breaking tradition, and pulled in the rightmost item instead; a tiny barrel of cart-beer.
The forewoman had just touched the barrel-rim to her lips when the noise of the elevators caught her attention. She turned and… it couldn’t be! There was Mr. Grey, the block of parchment tucked neatly in a right-angled elbow crook, looking clean and dry. He exited the lift, this time without the accompanying crash. He walked towards and stepped up to the counter. Mr. Grey placed the parchmentwork, fully filled out, next to the untouched lunch.
What could she do? The parchments were correct. The forewoman cast a final, mournful spotlight on her perfectly arranged lunch. Then she left her watchbox and her untasted meal to cower in the huge loneliness of the room. She ordered for a railcar. A moment later one rolled up to them from the gloom, heralded by the rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak of a rusted wheel. The cart stopped at their waists. They boarded, and the forewoman began up-and-down pumping on the control lever with striated, marbly arms.
They shot off in the direction the cart had come from, into the hungry dark. The cold cave breath snatched at their hair and clothes. The forewoman’s glasses shone ahead as two scanty light-cones. Mr. Grey broke up the monotonous ride with earmuff adjustments, and examinations of his pocket-ticker. The latter action did nothing to tell the time; Mr. Grey sat fully caught in umbral darkness. But even that inky dark, like the harsh lanterns of the office hallways far above, couldn’t overcome the man’s greyness. Even in that dark stretch of railway, with the headlamp glasses carving cones of light in front, and everything behind caught in the bleakest night, there dwelt an obscure splotch of grey in the void.
Many moments rushed invisibly past in that dark stretch, before a new spark glimmered suddenly in the distance. The spark grew hastily to a glow as they rushed; into a solid orb of pure light as they rolled. Their cart entered a newer, bigger room, which cracked its knuckles and flexed its muscles. In this room, every wall carried uncountable numbers of what looked like giant, crawling glow-beetles. They were, in fact, beetles; thousands and millions of bugs with glowing shells. The bugs lit the walls of the cave. The walls didn’t vanish into nothingness above, thanks to the beetles, but they did vanish into the distance. Like a vertical horizon, the cave walls traveled up, and up, and up, until they met at a point where sight no longer distinguished individual sides. Inconceivably high went those walls, as though the rail had turned upside-down halfway through their trip, and gravity had reversed, and now the cave could climb as far down as it wanted, and never stop. And all that was, in fact, precisely the case.
In the center of this endlessly tall, endlessly sprawling room, a mountain loomed. Casually. Though impressively large, as mountains generally are, its presence wasn’t quite the spectacle it would have been beneath the sky. Compared to the endlessly high walls, the mountain looked almost dwarfish, and its slight droop at the top lent an informal, lazy attitude to the landmark.
This mountain's unique feature was that not one earthly element made up its composition. This mountain formed from portfolio crags, and draft-bill gullies, and manilla summits. This mountain fanged its way out of the ground as a mass of ink and parchment.
As Mr. Grey and the forewoman’s cart stopped at the fresh-record foothills, their noses met the mixed scents of library stacks and workers’ sweat. Cords of coarse rope ran along pitons up the rugged ridges of the mountain. The lines disappeared into holes dug into the archival sides, dimly lit by captured glowbugs. Parchment miners pulled themselves along the ropes, with hands calloused through countless parchment cuts, and permanently stained by ink. Some miners dug in the new-fallen documents of the foothills, while others plumbed the depths of those glowing holes, following veins of increasingly golden parchment, searching for amendments of apocryphal legality.
The forewoman created a new team of workers. She explained the age and type of document they needed. The team began by consulting a separate, smaller mountain, which held documents detailing the main mountain’s layers and regions. Then the commission was ready. The workers hammered in new pitons and tied off new lengths of scratchy rope. They found a surface of lesser parchment density - topsoil, mostly made of meeting transcripts - and started digging.
Deep into the crust of the parchmentwork mountain delved the miners, glowbug lights in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. Mr. Grey sat on a hard pile of ‘business requirements’ and occupied himself sorting a nearby hill of ‘trademark licensing’.
Many more moments passed, scored by the music of the mines: complaints of bum knees, the lunchroom activities of ‘that guy’, the infrequent sounds of actual work being done. Eventually, a grim faced, office-scarred veteran miner interrupted Mr. Grey’s leisurely parchmentwork. The man stomped up to Mr. Grey, gruffly placed a document in his dry hands, then returned to the mines.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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Wending my way through the dilemma of Mr. Grey - very much enjoying the ride. Reminds me of one of my favorite writers; Terry Prachett - dark and steam punky with some whimsy. I’ve come to the party late so it’ll be a minute to get caught up but I’m looking forward to it! I especially like the surprise of a wind who converses. Will say more as I read more! I will recommend this - as soon as as I can figure out how!