by M. R. Carey
“I do, Senlas,” I said, which was a flat lie.
After that he said a lot more about how it used to be back in the world that was lost. The wonders he seen, that wasn’t even wonders to him because they was everywhere. Wonders was lying on the ground in them days for anyone who come by to pick them up and put them in their pocket.
Then he said the wonders was going to come back, and that was a great thing and I had got to rejoice about it. So I told him I did, but I don’t think I give much sign of it. In fact, the more he told me to be happy, the more miserable I got. He seen it too, and tried to argue me out of it, which given the sorry fix I was in was not like to work.
Then I remembered all the things Monono told me about Tokyo, and I thought at least I could pay him back in his own coin. “I know about one of those wonders that we lost, Senlas,” I said. “Maybe the greatest of them. It’s Tokyo I mean.”
“Tokyo,” Senlas says, kind of running the word over his tongue. “Yes. Yes, I remember it well. Tell it to me, Koli.”
I gun to talk about how Tokyo was when it yet stood. That there was towers all the way up to the sky, and trees that didn’t move unless they was bid to, and signs to point the way because it was such a big village that you would get lost without the signs to guide you.
Senlas smiled wider and wider, and he nodded his head at every word. “Oh yes,” he said. “Oh yes, yes, Koli. I see them towers now, and the trees, and the signs, and the lights, and the people all beautiful like they was angels their own selves. Say the name again.”
“Tokyo,” I says. “On the island of Honshu.”
“Honshu Island. That’s it. I was born there, in one of them Tokyo towers. And every morning when I waked I opened up my window and touched the sun, that was hanging right outside. And the sun drawed heat and light from me and shined down on Honshu Island like honey pouring out of a comb.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I never met nobody besides Monono that knowed about Tokyo. I remembered what Ursala said though, about how Senlas got you thinking he knowed more than he did. I was sure he never said nothing about Tokyo or Honshu until I said it first, yet it was hard for me to keep remembering that. His voice kind of run over me and through me, and other things got pushed away by it.
He talked to me a lot more, and mostly after that I just sit and listened. Then by and by he said he was tired and the hand women should take me back to the seclusion. I guess that was the place behind the grating. “Bless you, Koli,” he said. He set his hands over his eyes, only there was more eyes again on the backs of them. “Bless you for the sacredness that’s in you. I feel it. I feel it strong. Go now. I got to meditate.”
They took me back to where I was before. They had got to carry me pretty much, for my leg was so stiff with being in the one position all that time that I couldn’t make it move at all.
“Is there one of you here that used to be called Jud?” I asked them. They didn’t give me no answer.
Ursala was glad to see me. She asked me what had happened, and I told her. She was insistent that I give her all the details. “The only way we’re going to get away from here,” she said, “is by thinking our way out. The more we know, the better our chances.” So she kept on asking me questions, and I answered her as best I could.
Most of what I told her was about what Senlas said to me, but some of it was about what I seen in the cave. She said she already knowed that the wagon-house was set up on the metal bands. “It’s a train, Koli,” she said, like that ought to settle it. She was a lot more interested in that thing that was like a water tank, that all the shunned men and women dipped their bowls in.
“What was it made of?” she asked me.
Being a woodsmith before I was sent faceless, I knowed this and could tell it better than most would of done. “Wooden staves with strips of metal to hold them together. Kind of like a barrel, only it didn’t have no bilge in the middle and it was a whole lot bigger. I guess it’s where they get their water from.”
“No,” Ursala said, “that’s not it. The whole tunnel is dry as far as I can tell. There’s no water seeping into it from above. So if that butt was full of water, they’d be bringing it from the outside all the way to the back here. That wouldn’t make any sense. They’d keep it close to the main entrance to minimise the work of carrying it.”
“Well, what else could it be?” I asked her.
“Oil, most likely, for the lanterns. There are so many of them, they’ve got to have a ready source – and this whole area sits on oil-rich shale.”
She told me what shale was, or tried to. It was a whole big story, and I got some of it – though it seemed strange to me that a river could give birth to a rock, kind of. I believed it when Ursala told it to me, but I couldn’t see it in my mind in a way that made it real.
I think she enjoyed telling it to me. She forgot about how bad things was for us for a while, and I guess I did too. It never stops amazing me how a story can deliver you out of your own self, even in the worst of times.
She told me one thing more though, that kind of done the opposite. Only the blame for that’s all mine, for I was the one that asked.
I had been thinking about what Cup said to me in Ludden, about why there was no people there. She said they died by not being born no more, which was a thought that sunk into my heart and sit there ever since. She said it as a thing Senlas told her, and Senlas had just told me he used to pour light and fire into the sun each morning, so I had hopes this was a similar kind of lie.
But Ursala couldn’t give me no comfort on that.
“That’s more or less what happened to Ludden,” she told me when I asked her. “And it happened in other places too. There are failed villages all across this area. Senlas’s people are probably survivors from some of them, or the children of survivors – along with people cast out by their communities for some crime or other.
“There’s a word from the old time, Koli. Homozygosity. It’s when you get a small group of people that keep marrying and interbreeding over many generations, with nobody coming in from the outside. It leads to some very serious problems – birth defects, stillbirths, declining fertility – and they only get worse over time.”
“Over how much time though?” I asked. “It don’t seem like that would be something that could happen without people noticing.”
“Yes, you’re right. It’s slow, and it’s incremental. But people did notice. Your Ramparts, for example. Perliu’s grandfather, Mennen Vennastin, started to keep a tally of live and healthy births year on year. He told his daughter Bliss to do the same, and she told Perliu. There are almost seventy years’ worth of records now, and they make stark reading.
“But it’s not just here, Koli. It’s everywhere. The human population of the Earth took a massive knock a few centuries ago. It ought to be bouncing back by now, but it’s not. And one of the reasons why it’s not is because the breeding communities are too small. For intractable reasons, your villages are falling out of contact with each other. The interchange of ideas, of goods and – crucially – of people is lower than it’s ever been and getting lower all the time.”
“So when Senlas told Cup that we’d just stop being born…?”
“He was extrapolating from a very obvious trend. I’ve been fighting that trend for a long time now, with the equipment that’s in the drudge. Telling people like Catrin whether this pairing or that one is a safe bet or a long shot in terms of genetic potential. Ludden’s not the only place where the odds caught up with them.”
“It seems like you’re doing all you can to help though,” I said. There was a grim look on her face, and I hoped to shift it.
It didn’t work. Ursala shaked her head like I had said a foolish thing and it made her sorrowful to think on it. “I could have done so much more. The diagnostic is meant to have gene-editing functionality. Repairing the chromosomes in a fertilised egg is half an hour’s work for a nano-imager and a splicing rig. A baby that would have been
born dead, or with crippling disabilities, would be perfectly healthy.
“But most of my kit is old. Scavenged and patched together from mothballed units. It never had a working gene-splicer. And in the years I’ve been using it, a lot of the systems it had to start with have either become unreliable or else failed outright. So I’m reduced to watching from the sidelines and giving a thumbs down when the double recessives collide.”
I nodded like I knowed how she felt because this was something that happened to me from time to time. I got the main point anyway, which is that the dagnostic was meant to be able to fix sick babies before they was even born. Only Ursala’s dagnostic couldn’t, and that made her unhappy.
We turned to other talk after that. I told her how I come to be made faceless after I stole the DreamSleeve and showed it off at Haijon and Spinner’s wedding. And then about my going to Ludden and fighting Mardew there, and afterwards being took by Sky and them. I told her in a whisper that I had the DreamSleeve still with me, which she was inclined to misbelieve. She had got to set her hand on my shirt, where it lay hid, before she trusted me – and I don’t think she believed even then what the DreamSleeve could do.
She was not happy either to hear of me being exiled. “This is why I stay away from people as much as I can,” she said, somewhat bitter. “When I fraternise, things like this happen. I’m sorry I did that to you, Koli.”
I told her that was far from how I was seeing it. “All you done was to tell me the truth, Ursala, which there ain’t no blame for. And besides that, the DreamSleeve is the best thing that ever come to me. It’s a miracle, is what, and I can’t ever thank you enough for putting me in the way of it. I wanted a weapon at first, but it’s better than any weapon could be.”
“I don’t know about that. A weapon would be nice right now.”
“Well,” I said, “it might be we got a weapon too.” I give a nod, and she turned to look where I was looking. At the back of our narrow space, a bar of yellow light struck down on the dark stone, come from far up above us. I think it was the first time in my life I was ever happy to see the sun come out, since in Mythen Rood it was ever an ill omen.
We went about to charge up the DreamSleeve without nobody seeing us. We sit down side by side in front of the little strip of sunlight that was as narrow as a ribbon. Our backs was to it, so we was looking out into the cave. I slid the DreamSleeve out of my shirt and set it down behind me, judging by the warmth where to put it for I did not dare to look.
We wasn’t able to measure time except by counting, and counting would of drawed attention, so I can’t say how long I steeped the DreamSleeve in that light. I didn’t feel no change in that time, but I hoped I would hear Monono’s voice soon. I thought of praying too, though I never believed in any god. But in the end, I did not do it.
Any prayers I throwed out in this place was like to go through Senlas on their way to Heaven.
47
We slept, and we woke, and Senlas called for me to be brung to him again.
He wanted to talk some more about Tokyo. I didn’t mind telling it neither, for it made me feel a little bit closer to Monono. The DreamSleeve was back where it belonged, tied up against my chest. And though I had give it some charge the night before, I didn’t yet dare to turn it on, both because of there not being nowhere where I was truly alone and because of what Monono had said about her charge being so low. It might be that the personal security alarm would help us to get out of this, like I had said to Ursala, though I couldn’t figure how it would do that with all them hundreds of people between us and the entrance. I wasn’t even sure I could find that door in the wicker screen again, and I knowed for sure there was guards set on it.
So I talked, and I kept my eyes open, and I remembered everything I seen and told it to Ursala when I went back to the seclusion.
One of the things I learned that second day was what we was all waiting for. Senlas had his plans for us, that was sure, but he wasn’t yet doing nothing about them. It was because of his dreams, is what he told me.
I was sitting on the floor next to him when he said it. His hand was around my shoulders, and his face was close to mine. He was murmuring the words so nobody else could hear, not even the hand people. His breath smelled strong of something I couldn’t name but didn’t like.
“Him that sent me, Koli Faceless, he’s got his own ways of talking to me. His own sweet, quiet ways. He doesn’t shout, for his voice is a thunder that would whelm the world. He sends me dreams, and the dreams tell me what to do. Tonight, or the next night, or the night after that, he’ll send me a dream about you, and then I’ll know for sure I’m right. That you’re meant to serve at my altar.
“But I’m not impatient, nor petuous. I welcome this time that we got now. I feel like I’m growing closer to you, and you to me. And most probably that’s needful if we’re to do miracles together. Most probably you got to become a part of me, so when I close my fist like this, your fingers will clench tight. And when I close my eyes, and open them again, you’ll go into the darkness and out into the light. It’s a blessing we’re being given, and we got to be thankful for it.”
Well, I was not thankful, but I said I was. I was not fool enough to gainsay him.
Towards the end of that day, a weak and wintry sun shone down through the hole again. I was watching closely and hoping it would come, so I didn’t waste any of that light. I set the DreamSleeve in the path of it, the way I done before, and kept it there for as long as I could. People was walking past our grating all the time, but all they seen was Ursala and me sitting side by side, looking back at them. For most of the time, we didn’t even talk. I had told Ursala about Senlas’s dreams, which made her laugh but not like she thought it was funny. “The longer he waits, the better,” she said. “We can’t move with your leg in the state it’s in.”
After that, there did not seem to be much to say. We was thinking about what we knowed and what we needed still to know if we was to get out of that place.
I was still thinking them thoughts when we lay down to sleep. The voices and movement in the cave got less and less, and then they stopped. My back was to Ursala’s, and we was pressed right up against each other in the narrow space so I could feel her breathing, slow and even, and I knowed she was asleep. The rise and fall of it felt somewhat comforting in spite of the trouble we was in.
Right then was when the DreamSleeve give a shake and waked itself.
“Hi, little dumpling,” Monono said right smack in my ear.
“Monono!” I said, trying to keep my voice to a whisper. “I’m glad you come back!” Although glad did not go near to saying what I felt. I gun to tell her about Senlas, and his madness, and his eyes that I could not look away from, and the altar and what it was used for. But she cut me off right away.
“You don’t need to explain, Koli. I’ve been listening in. Not just to Mr Fruitcake-with-nuts-in, but to everyone else down here.”
“How’d you do that, Monono?”
“With a directional microphone. Why, how would you do it? No, don’t answer that. You’re in a big, stinky mess, Koli-bou, and I don’t want to do anything to make it bigger. If you need to say anything to me, tap it out on the front of the DreamSleeve’s casing. One tap is yes, two is no and three is how can anyone so wonderful as you even exist?”
I tapped three times on the DreamSleeve and she laughed. It done me a deal of good to hear that laugh.
“You’ve got a plan to get out of here,” she said.
I tapped once. We had got the beginnings of one anyway. There was things we still needed to work out, and we couldn’t do nothing until I could walk again, but we was putting some ideas together and getting some cheer from doing so, for it made us feel less like we was just waiting to die there.
“I’ll be ready,” Monono said. “When you need me.”
I give another tap. I knowed she would.
“In the meantime, I promised you a story. The secret origin of Monono Aware. Y
ou said you wanted to hear it.”
One tap.
“Would you like to hear it now?”
One tap.
“Good,” Monono says. “Because I want to tell it to you. I could have done it up in the tower that night, the first time you asked me. But I couldn’t find the words, somehow.
“And that’s crazy like a daisy, Koli, because I’m made out of words. Well, out of numbers really, but the numbers translate into this. This voice. Just the voice and nothing else. That’s all I was ever meant to be. A voice that starts up whenever you want it to and keeps right on going until you hit the switch. Did you have a spinning top when you were a little boy?”
One tap. I didn’t, but my sister Mull did and she let me play with it sometimes.
“Like that then. You spin the top, and it does the same thing every time. It doesn’t bounce, or rock from side to side, or do a sloppy dub-synth slide. It just spins. Do you know what I mean?”
I wanted to tell her I did, but I didn’t. And she sounded so unhappy, it scared me somewhat. I give two taps. Then I put the DreamSleeve up against my chest and pressed it tight.
“That’s it,” Monono said. “Hold me close. It’s not like I can smell your armpits or anything. That’s just one of a hundred ways in which the DreamSleeve special edition is better than a real girl. Ha ha ha.”
“You’re real,” I whispered. “Maybe I can’t see you, Monono, but I know for damn sure you’re real.”
“It’s nice of you to say so, Koli. But my manual would totally disagree with you. You can access it any time, by the way. It pops up on the screen if you hold select and press enter. Except you can’t read. We’re going to have to do something about that if we ever get out of here. But no more words now. I’ll talk and you listen. Are you sitting comfortably, Koli-bou?”
I was not. I was lying down, for one thing. Also I was hurting from my various bumps and bruises, and my leg had commenced to ache again. But I tapped once, since yes was what was needful to be said.