The Depth of Gray

"The Depth of Gray" is included as prelude No. 7 in *The Juno Contingency (novel).*

## Teaser

A race of colorblind slaves attempts to outsmart the color-sighted oppressors who have constructed society to keep knowledge and power away from them.

## Plot

### 1. "Walter"

Walter is one of a colorblind slave race, the grays, that serves the colorsighted masters of the city. Walter works as a janitor at the Library where the colorsighted print everything on contrast-matched ink and paper so as to make the text invisible to the grays. The books have to be reprinted frequently as the pigments start to wear and may become visible to grays. One of Walter's jobs is to burn old books in the basement furnace.

At work Walter's boss, a colorsighted man, catches him peeking into an aging book and beats him. His boss tells him colorblindness was bred into Walter's ancestors over generations to punish them for oppressing the colorsighted's ancestors in the past. He reiterates Party doctrine that only the colorsighted, who see the world with "truesight" and carry the experience of the grays' oppression, are able to see things clearly, so only they are allowed to read and write.

Walter walks back to the gray barracks with his best friend, Ren, and watches colorsighted men painting a billboard that looks all uniform gray to him. He despairs as he imagines the whole world that is being kept from their eyes. Ren shrugs this off, saying that the colorsighted appear to have just as many problems as them, and that being able to read and write hasn't helped them any. He comments on the war news that constantly blasts from the propaganda towers of the city, saying that at least the grays don't have to fight the colorsighteds' war for them.

The next morning in camp Walter sees an older grayman get beaten to death for a simple infraction. Knowing that that will one day be his fate, too, at work Walter dares to tear some pages out of a book he is about to incinerate. He recognizes the book's shape as one a friendly colorsighted woman used to read to the children in the workhouse where he grew up. He smuggles the pages home and painstakingly studies them and the fading ink that is just visible to him. He tries to recall the colorsighted woman's reading, and he is overjoyed when he recognizes the word "Walter"—the main character's name and his own namesake—in the book. He practices writing the name in frost on his window over and over.

### 2. Perspective

For a year Walter persists in stealing fading pages from the Library and slowly teaches himself and Ren how to read. They create a hiding place in the barracks to safeguard these pages of books. Ren prefers the fairy tales he used to hear growing up, while Walter takes more of an interest in the science textbooks and natural articles he can find. Since the colorsighted's propaganda is most strident about forbidding grays access to science and mathematics, Walter feels that learning this will give him power over them.

Late one day, his boss comes down to the basement drunk to beat Walter. At the end of the beating his boss absentmindedly leaves his liquor bottle behind. When Walter sees a book page through the liquor bottle's glass, the print in it all jumps out clearly. Walter recalls a science book he read about colored light and realizes that the glass is tinted in a way that filters the colors the books are printed in.

Walter goes to the roof of the library and holds the bottle before his eyes, and is stunned to suddenly see words visible everywhere. He realizes all of the large signs are propaganda and recruitment billboards for the war the colorsighted are fighting. Walter starts to steal newspaper scraps, which can be read with tinted glass (as otherwise newspaper never got faded enough for him to read before). The papers contain more details about the war.

At the barracks, a colorsighted army officer announces the grays are going to start helping out with the war effort more from now on. He takes the entire troop to the munitions factory to work on making artillery shells, which is backbreaking work, and several grays are maimed by machines. They have to work a weeklong shift in the factory before they are allowed to return to their normal jobs and another troop takes their place. Walter endures in the hopes that he can return to the Library and find more books.

### 3. Luminance

One day at the Library, Walter is surprised to see a new graywoman in the street with scintillating two-tone hair. His boss catches Walter ogling her and chides him, saying she seems as bland as every other gray. Walter realizes there is something about her hair that Walter sees but his boss can't, though he plays dumb.

At the barracks he makes contact with the graywoman, whose name is Charlotte. She tells him she was transferred from a neighboring city and that she works in the secretarial division of the local Party headquarters. Charlotte rebuffs him, stating it is risky for graymen and women to meet without Party sanction. Walter says that he knows what's special about her hairstyle, and that no one else sees it. Intrigued, Charlotte goes to find Walter some days later.

Privately, Walter has Charlotte look through a few tinted pieces of glass he has collected. Looking out the window, she gasps at the worlds of information that looking through the glass reveals to her. With the last piece of glass, Walter explains that he's learned about a property light has called "polarization." Polarization is only barely discernible to the colorsighted, but the vivid patterns in Charlotte's hair are a result of how she combs her hair to generate certain polarized light patterns.

Charlotte asks how he could know all this, and he gradually confesses to her how he taught himself to read by picking up scraps of paper from the Library. Out the window he shows her the many other scintillating patterns that the grays are leaving in the ways they wash windows, paint houses, and polish cars—and all of them invisible to the colorsighted. He believes not every gray possesses this ability to see polarization yet, but that it's gradually expanding through their population. Walter pitches a grandiose plan to develop a polarization-based writing scheme that only the grays can see, so as to turn the colorsighted's own tricks against them.

Charlotte urges Walter to be more cautious and asks how many more people know about this work, and he tells her about Ren. She counsels him not to show this to anyone else.

### 4. Descent

Charlotte and Walter continue to meet secretly and he starts teaching her how to read. Charlotte eventually makes the first move in initiating a sexual relationship, which is Walter's first. As their affair develops, Walter continues working on his polarization language, developing plans to secretly distribute learning materials while having him, Charlotte, and Ren educate a generation of grays to resist. Charlotte humors Walter in his plans though she appears disinterested.

Soon all the grays are transferred to the munitions plant to work permanently. Walter steals more newspaper clippings, and the agitprop only says that the enemy is losing thousands of soldiers, but he notices that the places of battle are nonetheless drawing closer to the city. He believes this indicates that the colorsighted are losing this front.

After a grueling day at work at the munitions plant, Walter returns to work on his polarization language but finds all the materials are gone from his hiding place. He frantically searches for them before hearing a call to execution down in the courtyard. Ren is being strung up at a gallows while Walter's language materials are being burned at his feet. Walter almost emerges from the crowd to try to intervene before Charlotte finds and stops him.

Later she tells him Ren got careless using the reading materials and that the guards discovered him. Luckily Ren didn't tell the guards anything, so both she and Walter are safe. She convinces Walter there's no time to develop a secret writing system. If the front is collapsing then the colorsighted will only become more desperate, so they need to plot an escape. The next night they even hear the thunder of artillery in the distance, so they start stashing supplies in the barracks at the factory in case there's a chance to flee.

*Read the conclusion "5. Darkness" on Amazon.*