by M. R. Carey
The stuff I liked most of all, Monono would take it and put it on what she called a playlist. So if I said I was in a mood to hear some metal she would every time start me off with some Metallica, but after she might throw in a bit of classic Sabbath, a Pantera track from Vulgar Display of Power or some Black Wing or whatever else she thought I might like.
You might feel like all of this would be a really hard thing to do, since it had got to be done so secret. Nobody in the village knowed that I had got the silver box, nor I wasn’t ready yet to tell them. But Monono had a trick she could do that she showed me on that first day.
It was called an induction field, but it was not a field like the gather-ground. It was a thing Monono did with sound. She could make the music just be in my ears, so nobody else heard it. I had got to be in the same room as the silver box or it wouldn’t work, so for the most part I didn’t have no music by day. But at night she played me all kinds of songs, and she teached me to tell the differences between them – and the music was just inside my ears, not anywhere else in the room.
It was playing she called it, not singing. This wasn’t Monono’s voice I was listening to, but a whole lot of other voices and tunes and jigs and such that had been put inside the box a long time ago. Even the instruments that was being used to make the sounds – guitars and keyboards and sacks-of-bones and a hundred things besides – was things that hadn’t been in the world since my mother’s mother’s mother was born, or longer ago than that. But somehow all the sounds had been pulled down out of the air and packed away into the silver box. I didn’t know how that was done, or how Monono could find the sounds once they was in there and make them sound out again whenever she choosed it. She tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t know enough to make sense of it. I asked her if it was like when Rampart Remember asked the database a question and it answered right away, without having to think about it. “That’s exactly right, Cody-bou,” she says to me. “You hit the nail on the middle rail.”
She had lots of things that she said like that, that didn’t hardly make no sense to me. But it was just the way she talked, and by and by I got used to it far enough so it sort of seemed like sense.
She told me what the silver box was called too. It was a Sony DreamSleeve, or else it was a media player. You could call it by either name, and you would be right. “Just don’t ever say iPod, Cody-bou,” she warned me. “I would hate for the lovely thing we’ve got going to end in such an ugly way.”
What she meant by the lovely thing was our being friends, and I liked it just as well as she did. I hadn’t never knowed anyone like Monono. The way she talked, and the things she told and showed me, they seemed to come from a different world. They was like Spinner’s stories, back when I was Waiting. They carried me out of Mythen Rood and out of my own self, to a place that must of always been there but one I didn’t know and couldn’t of imagined. I loved her for that, and my heart was glad of it.
There was some things I noticed, though, as we gun to grow closer to each other. One thing was that she never could get my name right. It didn’t matter how many times I told her I was Koli, she always give me that other name, Cody, that I come to mislike considerably.
Another thing was her questions, which she would ask whenever I give her a chance to. What songs did I like the best? What places had I been to? What kinds of food did I eat? What was my idea of a great party? What was the things I was cleverest at doing, and what things vexed or wildered me? What was my favourite movies, and shows, and books? I knowed what books was, or thought I did, for they was talked of in old stories from time to time, on account of them being places where magic spells was to be found. But movies and shows was a mystery to me. So I could not answer that question, or most of the others she throwed at me, but Monono could not keep from asking. In fact, she kept on asking some of the questions again and again, as if she clean forgot that we had talked of them things before.
She had meant what she said that time, about how she would try her best to get to know me. She worked hard at it, but I could not make her altogether understand what kind of person I was, or how I lived.
And it’s not like I knowed her any better than she knowed me. I seen almost from the start that she was different from other people that was in my life. I don’t just mean on account of her living in a box. I mean, in what she was and what she wasn’t. One time, we was up in the broken house with the evening slipping down into night, and I was telling her about the races I used to run with Haijon and sometimes with my other friends. I told her how we used to run all round the walls.
“The walls of your house?” Monono said.
“No,” I told her. “The walls of the village.”
“That’s cute, Cody-bou. So Middle Earth, neh. I’m imagining you like a Hobbit now, with big hairy feet. I bet you lock the gates at night to keep the orcs out.”
I did not hardly know how to answer that. “We lock the gates to keep all kinds of things out, Monono,” I said.
She got quiet for a second, then off she went again down another path, which was something she done often. “So you run races with your friend. Are you one of those kyoktana sportsu types, Cody-bou? Too bad if you are. Dancefloor’s the place for cardiac, baka-sama.”
I remembered her saying them words to me before. The exact same words, in the exact same voice. And after I seen her do it that one time, I couldn’t keep from noticing when she did it other times, which was not seldom. It made a prickle go down my back, for it made me remember my mother’s mother, Jashi. I hadn’t never met her, but Jemiu said she got forgetful before she died. You could talk with her for half an hour, then walk out of the room and right back in again, and she would greet you like you was only just come there. She would say the same things to you, again and again, and not ever remember how you answered, so it was more like the way an echo bird talks than the way a person does. It seemed Monono was afflicted in somewhat the same way, though in every other way she was not like my grandmother at all.
The other thing that made her different from everyone else was how she was always happy. She could be stern with me from time to time, or seem to get her feelings hurt, or say sad things like about how the last blossom has got to fall and such, but them things was like clouds sailing past the sun, fast as anything. It never took but a moment for her to be cheerful again and joking with me. It was like all that mattered to her was to make me smile or laugh, which she knowed a thousand ways to do it. But though I loved her, and loved her music, she could not give me the thing I thought would make me happiest.
I was slow to let go of my hopes. I mean, my hopes that the silver box might be a weapon like the firethrower or the cutter or the bolt gun. I asked Monono about that – if the box could throw fire or cut things in pieces or shoot bolts or anything of that kind. She called me a crazy boy and said that no, it could not.
What the DreamSleeve was mainly meant to do, Monono said, was to entertain people. That was a word I never heard before, but it was an easy one to understand once she set it out for me. If someone played you a tune or sang you a song or told you a story, you was entertained. At least you was if they done it right. It meant you ended up happier than you was before they started.
There is no point in lying about it: I was disappointed and somewhat bitter. The music was an amazing thing, and Monono was much more amazing again on top of that, but it wasn’t to the purpose if I was going to be a Rampart. Ramparts was meant to use their tech for the good of the village to keep everyone safe. It was hard to see how the DreamSleeve could do that. Maybe if shunned men come against us and we wanted to pretend there was more of us than there was, I could play something real loud and hope they was fooled. But that didn’t seem like much.
So I had got to hang my hopes on the rules of the testing. If tech waked for you when you touched it, then you was a Rampart. Everyone knowed that. There wasn’t no rule to say that the tech had got to do something fearsome. And anyway, in some sense Monono was kind o
f like the database that Rampart Remember used. She knowed lots of things about the world that was lost, and she loved to talk about it.
She told me she was born in a place called Tokyo. “The biggest city in the world, Cody-bou. Can you imagine fourteen million people all riding the same subway train? Well, that’s my city.” I didn’t know what a subway train was, or a million, but I didn’t ask because I wanted her to keep on talking. Like I said before, listening to Monono was like hearing Spinner’s tales, back in the Waiting House. I never realised until then how much I missed that. “Tokyo is huge, and it’s busy, but you can’t ever get lost because everywhere you go there are signs, signs and more signs. The buildings in Shinjuku all go right up to the sky and tickle it in its tummy. And the crowds in the streets – oh my life! You’ll feel like you’ve got to be breathing people, because there isn’t any room for air. But here’s the thing that’ll zap your brain, little dumpling. All those millions of people, and you can walk right through them – right across Shibuya, even – without anyone ever touching you. It’s as though you’ve got a magic bubble around you. It’s because Japanese people are so polite. They wouldn’t dream of stabbing you in your personal space. Too shocking, neh!”
She told me lots more things about Tokyo. How there was times when the earth would shake and bury it, and then the people would build it up again even higher. How there was a million trees growing there, right among the houses, which was how I come to know that a million was another word for a lot; how there was bells ringing in the streets all the time that wasn’t bells at all but tech, in places that was called pachinkos. She made it sound beautiful and exciting, though she said it could be dangerous too, if you didn’t know the rules. I was not surprised it was dangerous, if they let trees grow inside their fence.
“Monono,” I asks her one time. “How far away is Tokyo? If it’s in Calder Valley, maybe Catrin would send some people out to find it. I bet we could do some good trade.”
“It’s a lot further away than that, Cody-bou,” Monono said. “You’d have to go there on a plane.”
“On a plane? Don’t joke with me, Monono.” I used planes every day when I was turning the seasoned wood into squared-off planks. I knowed as well as anyone what they was for, and they was not for riding through the woods.
“A plane,” she said again. “A jet plane.”
She didn’t sound like she was joking. “Do you mean a long-sole or a short-sole?” I asked, trying to get a picture of it in my head.
“Chikusho!” Monono said. “I’ll show you, dopey boy.” A picture popped up in the box’s little window. It showed a thing like a bird made out of tech that run along the ground and then jumped up into the sky.
I found out then that tech could be bigger than anything I ever seen. There was more room inside the plane than there was inside Rampart Hold, Monono said. And yet it could move through the sky as fast as a horse could gallop along the ground, or maybe faster, carrying more people than there was in all of Mythen Rood.
When she told me that, I couldn’t hope no more that Tokyo was still in the world. These was just the sort of wonders they had in the world that was lost, when every woman and every man was a Rampart born, and tech was everywhere you looked. But them times was gone, long before. Tokyo couldn’t be standing no more, nor them jet planes couldn’t be flying there. I wondered if I ought to tell that to Monono, but I was scared it would make her sad so I didn’t.
I said I was disappointed that the DreamSleeve couldn’t set things on fire or cut them or shoot bolts at them, and I was, but I loved the music and I loved being with Monono. When I look back on that time, it’s with a kind of wonder that such a miracle could of fallen into my life when I didn’t do nothing to be deserving of it and wasn’t proper grateful for it when it come.
It didn’t last though. I seen to that well enough.
25
Other things was happening while Monono and me was having these conversations.
The tabernac was being builded and decked out. The rush-walk was being laid down. The bonfire was being gathered and heaped. The tables and benches for the Salt Feast was being fetched up from the Underhold. And it wasn’t just up on the gather-ground that people was busy. Inside the houses they was digging out their best clothes, sewing and patching them up, maybe mixing up madder or glastum woad to dye some colour back into them, so they would look their best for the feast. They would of taken their clothes to Molo back when he was alive, but Spinner was in Rampart Hold now, and the dyeing vats at the tannery would stand empty until she went back to them.
All this labour passed me by. I knowed it was happening, but I kept away from it – which angered my ma greatly, since the family had got to make up the slack as far as the share-work went. We couldn’t be seen to shirk. I worked long days at the mill to balance it out, but still my not being up on the gather-ground was somewhat noted and it was left to Jemiu to make excuses for me.
It was a wrong thing I was doing, I know, but there was two things pressing on me. I didn’t want to do the share-work because the talk up there would all be of the coming wedding and what a great thing it was, which would of been a hard thing for me to bear. And I was spending all the time I could scrape up with Monono. As long as I was working at the mill, I could go off to my room when things was quiet and get the DreamSleeve out from under my bed where it was hid. If I was up on the gather-ground, I would be there for the whole day and could not hope to get away without being seen.
I was on fire with hurry, though to tell the truth I couldn’t of said why. My thoughts of becoming a Rampart had been all mixed up in my head with my thoughts of being with Spinner. But if there had ever been a time when I could of spoke my feelings to her, that time was long gone now. The wedding was bound to happen, and there wasn’t nothing I could do or say that would stop it. I shouldn’t even be wanting to. Spinner knowed her own mind, and she had chose what she wanted for everyone to see.
So now it was more like being a Rampart was what I had got left to make myself feel like I mattered somewhat. But that don’t explain it, for I could come to Rampart Hold at any time and say to Catrin and them “look what I got in my hand that’s waked and working”. It didn’t have to be soon. Yet still, I was hoping I could do it before the day of Salt Feast, and I was bending myself to that like my life depended on it. Maybe it was because Ramparts is like a family. If I was a Rampart, then I would be in that family the same way Haijon was, though blood was in it for him and not for me. When I stood and watched Spinner take Haijon’s hand and pledge to him, I would be like her brother at least, and live in the same house with the two of them.
I had not properly thought what that would mean, being so close to her and thinking always of that one time when we was together. I wasn’t running towards anything good. But running I was, for all that. The onliest thing that slowed me, and kept me from standing up right then and saying my piece, was that I was still kind of fighting against what the DreamSleeve was, and trying to make it be something it wasn’t.
“There’s got to be some part of you that’s a weapon,” I says to Monono, though she’d already told me a dozen times it wasn’t so. “People of the old times wasn’t idiots. They wouldn’t make a tech that could only sing.”
We was sitting in the broken house again. I mean, I was sitting, with my back up against the wall. The DreamSleeve was propped up on a stone a few feet away, so I could see the little window and Monono standing in the window looking out at me.
“Oh, how I wish I could help you, obnoxious boy,” Monono said. She looked and sounded so sad that she had got to be joking, but I didn’t see it. I was still learning her ways. “If only those super-duper engineers at Sony had given me a laser beam, I could shoot holes in all your enemies and then we could live happily ever after.”
She give a sigh. Then she said, “Oh!” like some other idea just come to her, and I got to hoping she did have a laser beam after all. But it was not that. “I just thought about t
hat word ‘happily’, Cody-bou. Do you think maybe making people ‘happy’ is important too, even if you can’t shoot holes in them? How weird! That would mean I wasn’t ‘only’ an entertainment console and you were ‘only’ a stupid, selfish dope.”
She folded her arms and turned her back on me. I realised I had made her angry again without meaning to. I said I was sorry and she made a tutting sound. A different picture come in the little window, of a cute kitten face that was rolling its eyes. I knowed she was just joking then, for I had seen the kitten face oftentimes before.
“Will you play ‘Enter Sandman’?” I asked her. For it always seemed to make Monono happy if I asked her to play me music. Only this time she didn’t answer right away.
I was fixing to ask again when she says, “This lethal-weapon nonsense is really important to you, isn’t it, Cody-bou?”
I gun to say entertainment was important too, for I hated to argue with her, but she shushed me. “Yes or no, dopey boy.”
“It would be something good to have, Monono, yes. But songs is—”
“Bah bah bah bah! Okay, there is one thing I could do. There might be one thing. Possibly. Not a laser beam, but something that’s maybe just a little bit laser-y and slightly beamish. But I’ve got to give you the scary speech first.”
“The what?” I asks her, all excited but also somewhat wildered.
“You’ll know it when you hear it, Cody-bou.”
“But what is this thing you’re—?”
“Ready or not. The product or service you are being offered falls outside the scope of your current contract with the Sony Corporation and its licensees and assignees. If you accept the offer, the terms of your contract will be amended accordingly. If this results in additional payments being levied, you will be liable for those payments under the laws pertaining in the state of California.”