Art: Emily Simeoni
It was a splendid midsummer day, a tawny-golden sousaphone-D-major toasted-sesame day. Aeron Highsmith walked to work with a spring in his step (¾ time), in his favorite maroon suit (flavors of paprika and rock salt), under a sky whose eggshell blue –when he looked at it –brought a tinkling piccolo to his ears and the taste of matcha tea to his tongue.
Along the way he passed his beloved newsstand and tarried a moment. Its velvet curtains, thick and rich as the last honeyed chords of a sultry coronation waltz, were thrown open to the world. The thirteen bells hanging from its eaves tinkled out cut-crystal notes every color of the rainbow. Aeron paused and plucked a copy of the Theaportou Times-Gazette, that noble monochrome publication, and the baroque print in every shade of alabaster, sable, pearl, charcoal, milk and obsidian smiled back at him.
“REVOLT IN THE COLONIES!!!” shouted the headline.
Aeron essayed a small frown. With days as splendid as these, he simply could not conceive what the rebels were so exercised about.
It was another day, a lovely day at the cusp of autumn. The sky outside the office windows was forget-me-not blue and harp concertos, with a flavor so subtle Aeron couldn’t recognize it.
Almost bland, that taste.
He poured himself a glazed ceramic mug of radiant coffee and sniffed at the cloud of Saturdays that rose above the rim. Delicious.
Lizabet, Aeron’s office neighbor, leaned over next to him, inclined like an eroded obelisk, her dress a tapestry of moonlight.
“So how about these qualia shortages, huh?”
“Shortages?”
“It was all over the radio!”
“I never listen to that stuff.” The radio programmes were too bright for Aeron, too colorful; and whatever the various scents, they always had a sort of metallic Wednesday aftertaste too.
“So you don’t know? The rebels blew up six refineries and the big pipeline, and the government says the crisis will all be resolved very crisply now, but there may be some momentary interruptions for the general public. That’s why, you know . . .” she pointed out the window with her chin.
“What?”
“You know,” she repeated, licking her lips theatrically.
Aeron stared out at the sky above the city. Understanding dawned.
“You mean it’s flavorless –”
“Shhhh!” A glance over the shoulder, in notes of February and a creaking door hinge. “But, yes. Shortages, you see? Evenly distribute the burden? Everybody chip in to share the load?”
“Good God.” In the twenty years since he had moved to the city, Aeron Highsmith had never seen a flavorless sky. Sure, he knew what it was like; he’d grown up in a small town in the provinces where the sky was only flavored on major national holidays and he still visited occasionally –though usually on major national holidays. Hell, back home and in his childhood, there had sometimes been those rolling summer soundouts, when the sky had neither taste nor music, was nothing but a perfect, beautiful color. But that was home. This was the big city: Theaportou, heart of the Empire, home of countless qualia fountains, private and public alike, which imbued every jot and tittle of life with endless sensation. Where the merest scrap of litter would, on closer inspection, ring out with every instrument of an orchestra.
“I’m sure it’ll be over soon,” muttered Aeron. He felt sullen, even rebellious. He could no longer bear to look up at that tasteless sky.
It was a fine day, half a season onward. The sky was light blue.
The government-provided orchestra gramophones on every street corner blared a patriotic symphony, more or less synchronously. It was loud and brassy and distasteful. It was nothing like the sky had been.
Their tinny melody reached even into the procurator’s office where Aeron and Lizabet worked as mid-level clerks.
“Really, we should have the rebels all rounded up and shot,” said Aeron. The words surprised him; he never used to say things like that. He’d always been rather tenderhearted about colonial disturbances, he thought. But it felt right.
Lizabet looked at him as though he were a rather stupid child. Her dress was that same shade of silver she always favored, but it didn’t look like moonlight anymore. It looked like a dress.
“You don’t understand, do you,” she said. “We’re losing.”
“But the radio said –”
“The radio lies.”
“But the army –”
“Shut up and drink your coffee.”
He drank. The mug was white, the coffee brown and hot. There were no notes of anything at all.
It was a cold day, months later. Pale sky.
Aeron and Lizabet stood in a long, snaking line.
“But the samizdat digest says we still ship in seventy million kilos a day,” said Aeron. “From trading partners. And the strategic reserve.”
“That’s what I hear,” said Lizabet. Her coat had many different baubles on it. They were of different colors and glosses.
“And there’s twenty million of us in the city,” said Aeron. “So why’s the daily ration only half a kilo?”
Lizabet jabbed with her chin in the general direction of the nearby Aldercliffe district, that fashionable (and expensive) neighborhood of skyscrapers and terraced mansions. “It’s the private market,” she said.
“But the rationing –it’s illegal to hoard –” said Aeron. He did not say what was rationed, what was illegal to hoard. You didn’t use those words; not in private, certainly not on the ration line. Not unless you wanted violence.
Lizabet shrugged. “It must be somewhere.”
It was a day. Tens of days later. Blank sky.
Aeron and Lizabet stood in line. It was a very long line now. Since the blockade had begun, even officials and the wealthy had come to stand in the line. The temperature was very low, and there was frozen water everywhere.
Next to them, on the pavement, droned a monk. The monk’s prayer was a single nasal syllable, endlessly repeated.
“The monks say, if you meditate, you can sort of . . . make it yourself,” said Aeron.
“Can you meditate?”
“No.”
“Nor I.”
It was a very long line. Aeron and Lizabet stood in it. Many seconds passed and they did not shuffle forward. Many seconds passed again.
A truck roared by in the street. It was unmarked and unlabeled, but something about it –the timbre of its engine, the shine of its paint, the bouquet of gasoline –
Aeron knew. Lizabet knew.
Everyone in line knew.
The sound that rose up from the line could not be described. Everyone ran after the truck. Its tires squealed as it accelerated, blowing through a stop light and making for Aldercliffe. The mob followed.
The truck was headed for the Mirabaud Manor, and it got there before the mob. But the guards opened the gate too slow.
The mob slammed into the side of the truck and rose up like a wave. The vehicle rocked, toppled –
Slam and the impact burst the back door open, ruptured the leaky tanks within, and qualia tumbled out gushed out sublimed out radiated out and Aeron could feel it, the ground-coffee grain of his socks and the badger fur scent of his own sweat and Lizabet’s red and furious face glowing like the solstice sunset, and everyone in the crowd could feel the rage and injustice and need that coursed through them like molten brass, like acid and molasses, grabbing the stuff, shoving it in their pockets and in their faces –
And then it was all gone. Used up. Even a truck is a finite volume, much less than the needs of many. Absence rushed in where presence had vanished.
The mob turned. It moved toward the open gate.
And here came the guards now, firing into the crowd, and humans fell, bleeding blank blood onto colorless snow and colorless stones, making loud irregular noises and producing saltwater and bile.
But the mob moved. It took the gate off its hinges and the guards off their feet and trampled them shapeless.
Mirabaud Manor was an old house, built in the days when the rich remembered to fear riots. But it had been rebuilt more recently.
The mob broke down the door.
In the mansion there was some qualia –well, a little –just enough to curl gold around the yellow threads of tapestry, to sing a silent octave into the shine of silverware. Not that much.
The mob expanded from room to room, smashing and searching. Old Mirabaud survived in his basement; his niece was not so lucky. The mob found what there was of the qualia, and they took it, and they left.
Nobody took the arts or jewels or metals. They were worthless.
It was another day in spring. The slice of sky visible from the basement where Aeron and Lizabet were hiding was grey.
The rebel troops marching in the street were more disciplined than either Aeron or Lizabet had expected. They wore strange-cut uniforms in unexpected colors.
The radio was speaking of surrender in a muted voice.
There were cans in the basement, and Aeron opened one for their dinner. Despite all his practice, the can slipped. The sharp edge of the can’s top struck his inner thumb.
The blood that beaded on his skin did not sing out like trumpets and the pain did not taste like spicy pepper.
But at least it was red.
It was the first day of summer. Aeron and Lizabet were walking through the park.
The provisional government had ended the rationing by ending the rations. That was the rebels’ demand, it seemed: an end to qualia extraction. Subjective experience was what you made of it.
And do you know? It seemed, more or less, to work. It wasn’t like before, of course; but it wasn’t like during, either. Or how it had been, Aeron now realized, in the colonies all along. Without the qualia extraction engines running everywhere, everything seemed to have at least a little bit of it to go around. Share the load.
Lizabet’s old silver dress was the silver of an old silver dress, not the moon, but in it she still looked quite lovely. And so did Aeron in his prewar maroon suit, for that matter.
Up in the dogwood trees, the flowers were blooming, each the color and scent of a dogwood flower. In the branches sat the larks, and each of them sang with the high, twittering melody of a lark.
Down on the ground, Aeron and Lizabet’s hands found each other. They were warm, and soft, and alive. Up above, the sky was an unbroken, flawless shade of sky blue.
* * *
Louis Evans is not a doctor of philosophy, but sometimes he makes believe. He is a lifelong, though occasionally lapsed, New Yorker. His work has appeared in Vice, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, Analog SF&F, Interzone, and many more. He's online at www.evanslouis.com and in the fediverse at wandering.shop/@louisevans.