They had learnt to recognize the colours. Life under the Skysheet had taught them, and they had remembered the lessons. They all knew of the shades, Calissa perhaps more than others. The young girl lifted her head up from her berry basket to observe the bright blue surface above them. She caught the glimpse of a change and her breath shortened. She had always been able to detect the slightest flicker in the Sheet. Everyone said she should be a Watcher, and she had heard it so many a time she could barely imagine doing anything else. Her future, after she’d turned fifteen, would be at the top of one of the rickety towers scattered across the fields. But that would be later, Calissa was too young for the moment, her hands were better employed in the berry fields. She wasn’t a Watcher.
And yet she craned her neck, squinting hard, her eyelashes almost knitted together to protect her fragile, humid globes from dust and wind and sunshine. She wasn’t a Watcher, and yet she observed the Skysheet warily, careful of the details. If she had been on one of the towers, she would have alerted the population.
The inhabitants of the croplands had grown used to the artificial shimmer of the Sheet. The last elder who said he remembered Realsky was long dead now, and Realsky itself had become a myth. It existed, people knew, beyond the Sheet, but everyone was forgetting. It had only been a century, the books said, Calissa had read about it not a week before at school. Everyone knew the timeline, but nobody could answer the children when they asked why the Sheet had appeared, and adults hushed them up. And in the same way the population had learnt not to question the Sheet, children eventually learnt not to ask.
Stories went, telling of eerie objects called ‘clouds’ that carried omens about the weather. People used to know the meaning of each cloud; now people knew the meaning of each colour.
Almost each colour.
Calissa swallowed, anxious at the unusual colour of the sky, an unfamiliar hue leaving a sick aftertaste on her tongue. The Sheet told people what to do and when, making colours the only way to organize life. Bright blue was for work, and lately there had been lots of bright blue. The people obeyed, without knowing who picked the colours. They had learnt not to ask; they had learnt not to care; they had learnt not to want to know. Calissa imagined she wanted to know, but she didn’t dare think about it too much.
She flicked through the different sky colours she knew. Orange for getting up, pink for feeding time, purple learning time, green drinking time, and dark blue was sleep. Most of the time, the pattern was recognizable, scholars had spent years designing a timetable as precise as possible, so people wouldn’t be surprised.
It had become a matter of life and death; there was a legend, the story of the Man Who Would Not Sleep, told to children who were reluctant to go to bed. Calissa used to both love and fear this tale. Once, a few years after the Skysheet had been installed over the croplands, an old man had grown tired of obeying the colours, and had refused to go to bed when the sky had turned dark blue. The others had urged him to forget his endeavour, but he was inflexible. He had not slept, staying up staring, at the deep blue heavens, as he called them. In the morning, the Sheet hadn’t turned orange. It had darkened even more, until complete darkness reigned and within the hour half the villagers were dead.
The Man Who Would Not Sleep had survived the darkening of the Skysheet; not the rage of his companions.
Since then, rebellions had been rare. And anyway, the pattern was recognizable, most of the time.
Except when it wasn’t.
Calissa felt sick; she had only witnessed one unusual colour, a greenish, yellowish hue nobody had been able to connect to a specific action. It didn’t happen often, events of the sort were scarce in the history books, but every time people suffered an arbitrary death because the population didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what the orders were. Scholars had tried to classify the intermediate colours in vain: none of them ever appeared twice. An unusual colour meant death; a new shade meant fear. Calissa wondered if the ones changing the colours found it entertaining, to observe the population quiver in terror of the sky, waiting for the Watchers to warn everyone if a strange colour spread on the Sheet.
This time, the Watchers didn’t seem to have noticed. It was faint, oh so very faint. A greyer hue; the blue only slightly dimmed. Maybe she was wrong. She hoped she was wrong.
In any case, she was sure of it now: the Watchers hadn’t noticed. Calissa glanced at the nearest tower. She glanced at the Skysheet. She was sure of something else, too: the grey tint was there. She bit her lower lip. Perhaps she should warn the Watchers.
But then, what would it change? And perhaps it was yet another trap, to lure someone like her into stopping work. If she abandoned work, there would be reasons for the Sheet to send punishment. And it would be her fault. Calissa didn’t want it to be her fault. There was nothing she could do anyway, nothing any of them could do, Watchers, Scholars, Farmers… If death had to come today, there was no preventing it.
The young girl who could see better bent her neck and resumed picking berries, hoping she wouldn’t be the one to die.
A bell rang over the croplands, cold, clear, awakening primal fear. The sky was turning black.