Dispatch from a Colored Room

The colored room poem

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

Now, at this point, Aimee 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 stablilize. So perhaps I'll take this opportunity to explain a little bit.

The colored room poem, knights and knaves, 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, which was 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 estimate in 10 days." Conceded.

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