The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  “That’s all for now,” the box said back to me. It said it the exact same way I said it, like the girl was making fun of me. “So rude, neh. You and me are gonna have words, dopey boy. But later. Last blossom falls, so we fall, so we’re… gone, gone, gone.” Them last words was sung, not spoke. The window went black again.

  But the box was warm in my hand. It felt alive.

  And I swear to the dead god, it smelled like flowers.

  23

  The next day was meant to be turn and turn about. Athen and Mull would work in the mill while Ma and me went down to the gather-ground and joined the share-work.

  It didn’t work out that way though. Jemiu had to go out with the catchers again, the last day’s catch having come in short. And I didn’t go nowhere near the tabernac. I couldn’t of done it. My thoughts was all on the silver box and the girl inside it. I had got to talk to her again, and in particular I had got to do one other thing, which was what Ursala said. I had got to make her accept me as a user, so she’d be mine and not nobody else’s. Until I done that, anyone else could pick up the box and say those words, and then I’d just be Koli Woodsmith again, from now until I died. I was all in a boiling from thinking these thoughts, and they wouldn’t let me rest nor work nor nothing. I had got to settle it. And since I was afraid the girl’s voice might be overheard, I had got to do it somewhere where I could be sure I’d be left alone.

  I walked to the gather-ground, but then I circled around the back of it, putting the walls of Rampart Hold between me and them as was working. I went down the Middle to the Span, and from there all the way along to the broken house. That was as far away as you could get from the gather-ground and still be inside the fence, so I was pretty sure I’d be alone, but I looked all round before I stepped in through the one half of an arch that was all it had by way of a door. And once I was inside, I made sure to keep ducked down, kind of, with my shoulders bent over. The stone walls of the house, or what was left of them, didn’t come up higher than my chest along most of their length, but as long as I didn’t stick my head up high I couldn’t be seen from afar off, and there was nobody close enough to see me through the gaps in the stone.

  I had brung the silver box with me, tucked inside my shirt. I took it out now and held it in both hands, sitting down with my back against the wall and my feet out in front of me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Wake up.”

  The box didn’t do nothing.

  I tried confirm, and I tried acknowledge, but they didn’t do a damn bit of good either. I got scared then. It will sound like a stupid fear when I tell it, but it struck my heart just the same. I was afraid I dreamed the voice, and the box wasn’t going to wake for me again because it never did in the first place.

  But right then is when I seen something I should of seen before. On the bottom edge of the box there was another switch. It was smaller than the switches that was on the front and it wasn’t made to be pressed. It was made to be slid across, with your thumb or maybe with the heel of your hand. I must of touched it by accident the night before, when I was turning all seven boxes over and over in my hand.

  I slid it now, from left to right. It made a clicking sound that seemed to have some serious meaning to it. Of a sudden, the black window lit up again with all the same patterns and colours I seen the night before.

  “Hiiiiiiiiiii, dopey boy,” the girl in the box said to me. “You want me to say confirm-acknowledge? I know that’s your favourite!”

  I was so relieved she was still there, I let out the breath that was in me all at once. “Oh my goodness!” the girl said then, kind of making out like she was shocked. “You’re too excited already. I’ll have to calm you down before you have a heart attack. Are you one of those kyoktana sportsu types? Too bad if you are. Dancefloor’s the place for cardiac, baka-sama. You should know that by your age. What is your age anyway? So rude of me to ask, shame, shame, but a girl likes to know what she’s getting into.”

  I couldn’t think of nothing to say to this big flood of words. It was that same voice again, that was halfway to singing and halfway to laughing – like everything in the world was a joke, and the girl in the box was sharing the joke just with you and not with nobody else. But none of what I was doing was fit to be joked about. Stealing from Rampart Hold could get me whipped, or worse. I knowed I had got to take control of the box so it was mine and nobody else’s. And I had got to do it before anyone else seen it or knowed about it.

  But I was too slow, by a long way. “So,” the girl in the box says, “what say we wapoo? I bet you got some moves, right? Cue disco lights!”

  I don’t hardly know how to say what happened next. The whole inside of the broken house filled up with sparks, kind of, only the sparks was of different colours and they was rushing and swirling round. They was even moving on my skin, though I didn’t feel no heat at all.

  “This one’s by Redbeard,” the girl said. “‘Spin Ain’t No Sin’. If you like it, I’ll put it on your playlist. If you don’t, just make a raspberry noise. I can take a hint.”

  The next thing I knowed, there was drums and a horn and a whole lot of other things sounding out from all around me. The drums was first, and they was so loud and so close I thought that drummer was going to come up behind me and step on me. I flinched and ducked, kind of, and then all the other instruments was going and it was like Summer-dance come round again without anyone told me.

  I didn’t even realise straightway the sounds was coming from the box. The box was a little tiny thing and the sounds was bigger than you ever heard. When I did realise it, I give a yell that was even bigger. “No! Stop now! You stop that!”

  The sounds and the lights all stopped at once. The lights had been coming out of the box too – out of the little window – and they went back inside it now, shrinking down and fading out until they was all gone. I kneeled there, breathless, listening. I could still hear the hammers and saws from the gather-ground, and the shouts now and then of someone telling someone else to fetch that bucket or to square that corner off. It seemed like they didn’t hear the music over the sounds they was making their own selves, which was a lucky thing for me.

  “No more music!” I said to the box. “You hear me?”

  “I hear you, little dumpling. No need to shout.” The girl in the box sounded like her feelings was hurt, but only for a second. Then she put on her laughing-singing voice again. “No more music is a weird thing to say to your music player, neh? Did you think you bought an egg whisk? I will not whisk your eggs, dopey boy. But I could play a movie. Wanna pop some corn and bust some blocks?”

  This girl was even harder to understand than Ursala, I thought. But it didn’t matter if I understood her or not. It just mattered that I got to be in control of the tech and authorised and such.

  So I come right out with it. “You got to authorise me,” I told her. “As a user.”

  I was hoping she’d just say, “Authorised,” which we was told in the Waiting House was the right response if the tech was going to work for you. But she didn’t say it. What she said was, “Wait. Stop. Freeze-frame. That’s how you’re gonna talk to me?”

  I didn’t have no better idea than to try the same thing again. “Say I’m authorised,” I told her. “You got to.”

  “Hmmm,” the girl said. There was a sound I didn’t recognise. It was pages turning over in a book, but I hadn’t never heard that sound back then. “How to turn a block of wood into a nice, kind, polite boy,” the girl said in a low voice like she was thinking real serious thoughts. “Rule one. Smack him in the head when he says, ‘You got to.’ That sounds easy enough. Lean forward and close your eyes, O dopey one.”

  I was starting to panic now. Nothing I was saying was doing any good at all. It was like the girl in the box was meaning to take control of me instead of the other way round.

  “What’s your name, girl?” I asked, trying for the stern voice Dam Catrin used when she spoke out in the Count and Seal.

  �
��What’s my name?” The girl in the box sounded like she couldn’t believe I was asking her.

  “Yeah.”

  “My actual name? The one they call me by in New York and Tokyo and lovely lazy London? You’re asking my name, dopey boy?”

  I gun to say I was sorry I asked her, but I seen that wasn’t the way to go. I wouldn’t never get to be in control that way. “Just you tell me,” I said. “Right now. Do as you’re told.”

  There was dead silence for a time. It felt like a long time, though I know well what tricks your mind can play at such moments. Most likely it was not much time at all.

  “Wow,” the girl said.

  Then there was more silence.

  Then she said, “Oh dear, dear me.”

  And then more silence on top of the silence there had already been.

  “I’m sorry!” I blurted. She forced it out of me, is what. “I just… I need to… Is there anyone else in there I can talk to?”

  The girl in the box give a big, sorrowing sigh. “This is how it is,” she said. “Everyone forgets. I’m like the flower you pluck, and stick in your buttonhole. Then when I fade, you throw me down and step on me. Which is a jerk move. Beh! I’m leaving now. Bye-bye.”

  I give a yell at that. “No! Please! Don’t go!”

  “Too late. We’re through, baka-sama.”

  “I—I wouldn’t never throw you down and step on you! I swear to Dandrake!” I was full of dismay, and I clean forgot I was supposed to be a Rampart now, with the tech answering to my wish. If the girl went away, I had got nothing to show for all the terrible risks I took and the dreadful crimes I done. The box would be cold and dead again. “Please stay,” I says again. “I swear I won’t give you no more orders.”

  There was another long time when nothing got said. Away in the gather-ground behind me, wood clattered on wood and someone sweared an oath.

  “Monono,” the girl in the box said.

  “Monono,” I said back to her.

  “Monono Aware.” Writ down like I done it here, it looks like that second part is a word you already know, but it’s not. She made it be three sounds, not two, and it was the first one that took the most weight when she said it. Aah wa ray.

  “I never heard of a name like that before,” I said.

  “Then why did you buy the special edition, dingle-brain? You spent thirteen hundred and forty-nine carrots just to meet me, and I am waaaaaaay out of warranty. Okay, now it’s your turn. You say: my name is ‘I am too stupid to live but so, so happy to meet you’. Or Sebastian. That would be my second guess.”

  “I’m Koli,” I says, for it sounded like she was asking.

  “Are you sure? You look like a Sebastian.”

  That was the second time she said something about how I looked. “Can you… can you see me?” I asked her.

  “Of course I can see you. Duh!” The window lit up again, and I near to dropped the box, for what I seen in it now was my own face looking back at me, like the window had turned into a mirror. I just sit there and gawped at it – and it gawped right back at me.

  “If you keep making that face and the wind changes, you’re going to be sorry,” the girl said. She made the last word be extra long. Saaaaaaaah-reeeee.

  “How are you doing that?” I asked her. “How did you make that picture?”

  “Magic,” she said. “Or a built-in eighty-megapixel camera. You tell me, little dumpling.”

  The window showed a whole lot of other things – mostly animals, but also a carrot and the moon and a kind of a little kid’s doll and a ball. Every one of them had my face. I was struck dumb with wonder for a long time.

  “You want to see me, Cody?” the girl asked me.

  “It’s Koli,” I said. “Yes. Please.”

  “Well, since you asked so nicely. Here I come.”

  There was drums, that started low but got louder. Then there was one sweet note like someone just flicked their finger against the edge of the tocsin bell. Of a sudden she was there, in the window.

  She was beautiful, and young like I guessed. Her skin was lighter brown than mine, with some yellow or orange in it, so she almost looked like some kind of a flower. There was more than a few people in the village had skin that colour, or something like it, but none of them looked much like Monono Aware. Her eyes was a shade of blue that was like the sky’s blue, if the sky was made out of metal. Her lips and hair was blue too, but different shades of it. There was something in her hair like a black comb that had got stuck there, but on the end of the comb there was feathers that looked like they was carved out of wood and shined up with varnish. Her shirt was the brightest yellow I ever seen.

  “I know,” she said. And the lips of the girl in the window moved in time with the words, so I knowed this was Monono her own self. “Amazing, neh? It’s a terrible burden to be so awesome, Cody-bou. I can’t tell you.”

  “I like your feathers,” I said. For I had got to say something, or I would of sit there with my mouth open until the sun set.

  “They’re skylark feathers. Not real ones though. I would never kill a bird to have something to wear. Hibari mata ne, and all like that. You into ecology, Cody-bou? Save the whales, hug a tree?”

  A shudder went through me. I couldn’t help it, for the idea was so horrible. “Why would anyone hug a tree?” I stammered out. “You would most likely die!”

  The silver box was quiet for a long time. Monono disappeared from the window of it, and instead there was a little man with a round, yellow face. He was scratching his head and blinking. “Okaaaaay,” Monono said after a while. “I’m making a little list of things I know about you, Cody-bou. ‘Scared of trees’ is number three, right after ‘he’s a boy’ and ‘he’s nice, but kind of dopey’. Let’s see what we can add to that list, shall we? What are your three favourite tracks of all time ever, since the world began? Go.”

  I didn’t understand the question, so I couldn’t answer it. “Everyone is scared of trees,” I said.

  “Nope. Just you, crazy boy. But it’s exciting. You’re very special. Top three tracks?”

  “What’s a track?”

  The man scratching his head came back. “You’re gonna make me work for this, aren’t you, Cody-bou?” Monono said. She give another laugh that was kind of a giggle. “But I’ll get it out of you. I’ve got all kinds of sneaky tricks up my sleeve. I’m here to make you happy, so I’ve got to get inside that weird head of yours, one way or another.”

  “You know what would make me happy?” I said. “It’s that you would authorise me as a user.” I was not hopeful, but I felt like I had got to keep asking.

  Monono made a sound like she was clicking her tongue against her teeth. I waited while she did it, for it seemed like she was thinking hard about what I said. “Shall I tell you a secret, Cody-bou?” she asked.

  I was going to tell her again that my name was Koli, but I decided Cody was close enough for now. I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Yes, please, Monono-chan.”

  “Yes, please… Monono-chan?”

  “Okay. I love this so-so-precious thing we’ve got, Cody-bou. I am all yours to do with as you will, and that includes music and games and movies and box sets like you wouldn’t believe. I am going to fly you to the moon, and the landing is going to be soft like the feathers on a duck’s bumhole. But access-confirm-red-alert-operation-mission-critical-affirmative-zero-dark-black-ops? Nope. Not on this model, dopey boy. The best I can offer you is an access code, and if you give it to someone else… well, like the song goes, I’ll be thinking of you, but I’ll play with them too. So how does that sound?”

  “Yes please, Monono,” I said to her. “Give me one of those axes.”

  “Access codes. You have to give it to me, Cody-bou. I’ll drop it in my start-up routine, and when you say the magic word for me, I’ll open up like a big, sexy chrysanthemum.”

  “A word?” I thought hard, but I couldn�
�t think of nothing.

  “Or a string of words. A sentence. A line from your favourite song. The only thing that matters is that it should be something nobody else will think of or say by accident.”

  I got it then.

  “Koli Rampart,” I told her. “The axes code is Koli Rampart.”

  “Okay,” Monono said. “Got it. Now we have got a lot of work to do, little dumpling, so we’d better make a start.”

  “Wh… what work?” I asked. I still didn’t have any idea, really, what kind of thing the box was, or what it could do. If I hoped for anything, it was that it might be as big and powerful as the firethrower, though I also would not of been unhappy if it was some sort of kin to Haijon’s cutter. “What work are we gonna do, Monono?”

  “I’m going to sharpen your taste buds to a point, Cody-bou. But basics first. This is ‘Poker Face’, by the lady named Gaga. Twice.

  “First time, just listen. Second time, you dance.”

  24

  A strange time in my life begun. Strange in a lot of different ways.

  It was strange in how the time passed, or how I seen it passing. It was a handful of days only, but in my remembering it goes on and on like it was years. It’s hard for me to say what was one day and what was another. It’s more like a river made out of days, if that makes any sense at all. It flowed past me, and I just sit there watching. It does still, when I remember it.

  And it was strange, too, in how my feelings was going up and down all the time. My stealing was sitting heavy on my mind. And it troubled me, besides, that my tech was of a peculiar kind – a kind I feared might not get me welcomed in Rampart Hold. I had troubles enough to fret on when I was minded to fret them.

  But Monono teached me about music, and that was a wonderful thing. It’s hard to say how good it was. First off, she just played me all the different types of it, such as pop, rock, funk, techno, soft-beat, rap, metal, raw, jazz, country, ex-ex and disco. Then, when I said I liked something, she would play me a lot more of that, showing me how things that was somewhat the same was also different. Like Mickey the Beast and Carol Santo was both counted as soft-beat, but Mickey used a ton of guitar effects whereas Carol was most of the time unplugged.