The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  There was one dream that was not about Senlas – or not altogether. I imagined I was in a dark, narrow place with no doors nor windows to it. I was not alone there, for there was children with me. I knowed without counting that there was six of them. They was crying and complaining there was no air for them to breathe.

  Well, this is where you belong, isn’t it? I asked them. Who said you need to breathe?

  That just made the children cry the harder, and some of them was clutching at me like they was suffocating. I come awake again with the feel of their small hands on my face and their sobs and struggling breath stuck in my ears. I was almost crying my own self from how the dream made me feel.

  If the DreamSleeve had got itself charged up again, I would of asked Monono if I could have some music, that might have give my dreams a different colour. But the window stayed dark when I pushed the switch across, so I guess she was sleeping sounder than I was. And nobody could say she had not earned it.

  53

  The next morning, we drunk some more tea and et some oat porridge that was thickened with honey. Journeying with Ursala was like carrying your whole kitchen with you on the road as well as your bedroom and your lookout.

  Ursala touched the tent walls and the door fell open of itself. We went outside into a day with a good, solid overcast that lifted up my spirits. I was still wearing the DreamSleeve’s sling on the outside of my shirt so it would get all the light that was going. I was impatient to talk with Monono again, and have her be with me.

  I thought Ursala would fold up her tent and pack all her things back inside the drudge come morning, but she didn’t seem to be in no hurry to do it. First of all, she set herself to find out where we was. How she done that was almost the most amazing thing of all to me and it near to made me piss myself all over again. She took a drone out of another space in the drudge’s side and spoke it awake. I don’t know what word it was she said, but right away the drone gun to hum like a beehive.

  I give a yell and jumped back. Then I remembered how Ursala had gathered up the pieces of the drone she hit with a rock back in Mythen Rood and took them into her tent. This must be that drone, fixed up and made to work again.

  “It’s all right, Koli,” Ursala said. “I hacked into its command functions and slaved them to the drudge. And the laser broke when I hit it. All it can do now is fly around.” She held it out to me to show me how harmless it was, but I didn’t want to touch it or go near it.

  “What good is it then?” I asked her.

  “It’s for scouting. The camera that guided the laser is still intact, and I can interface with it through the drudge.”

  I took a deal of persuading that the drone wasn’t going to shoot at me, but I trusted Ursala and it helped that she wasn’t afraid. In the end, I stood by and watched as she flung the drone up into the air. It was exactly like how you would fling seed corn on turned earth, except that the drone didn’t fall again. It stayed up there, hovering like a hawk, then climbed up higher and moved off.

  “Now look at this,” Ursala said. She opened up the drudge’s side again. It was the side that had the dagnostic in it, along with the thing she called a computer.

  The computer’s window was black at first, the way the DreamSleeve’s window was when it was switched off. Then Ursala touched something and it filled up with rushing light and colours. It took me a moment, and then a moment more, to realise what I was seeing. The colours was mostly green. Lots of different greens all running together, like the scum you get on top of a stream. Then I seen a spur of rock, right up close, and that seemed to be rushing by too, though it couldn’t be, for it was rooted in the ground.

  I got it then, but only because I had looked in the DreamSleeve’s window so many times and seen how it looked out on lots of things that was in different places. I was seeing what the drone was seeing as it moved across the valley. The drone and the drudge was talking somehow, and more than talking. The drone was sending the memory of what it seen down out of the sky so the drudge could catch it and show it in the computer’s window.

  Then I seen the black ribbon running through the green, and I knowed it for what it was. Calder. It had got to be Calder, though it looked so different when you looked down on it this way. Nothing else got in the way of the forest except the winding river and the villages along its banks.

  And there was a village right now, going by quick at first, then slower as the drone turned in the air. The village had two lookout towers, one of them close by a big old stone house and the other outside the fence at the top of a hill.

  It had another big stone building too, though that one was a ruin.

  It had one big street crossed by two smaller ones.

  It had a gather-ground with a big wood frame at one corner of it, and a thing hanging in the frame that glittered with the dusky yellow of bronze.

  I knowed that thing was a bell.

  I knowed that place was Mythen Rood.

  A longing rose up in me so quick and so strong it near to choked me. I gun to speak, to beg Ursala to send the drone down lower, but I bit back the words before they could come. A drone was panic and dismay, and people running for their lives. A drone was Ramparts – not Mardew now, but the others – stepping to their stations and firing up their tech to do the thing they was named for. To stand between the people and what threatened them. To bring it down, or else fall their own selves. Sending the drone down into Mythen Rood would be a foolish and a cruel thing to do.

  That longing settled in my stomach, heavy as a boulder. I was like Mose in the story, coming to the edge of the river and seeing everything I ever wanted on the other side, out of my reach for aye and ever.

  No. Not everything.

  I slipped away, leaving Ursala tapping at the drudge’s controls and muttering numbers and directions to herself. I sit down on a rock that was at the edge of the sandy bank where we had made our camp. I got the DreamSleeve out of its sling and tried once again to switch it on. This time the window lit up with colours, which right away turned into a round yellow face that was laughing until tears come. They was the same tears, over and again.

  Monono give a laugh that went pretty well with that face. “You made it!” she said. “Good job, little dumpling. Tell me how you did it. And start right at the beginning. I want to hear everything!”

  I told her. I was happy enough to do it. They was not happy things I was telling, but they was better than thinking about what was going to happen now. My life as a faceless man was properly beginning after a slow and uncertain start, and I didn’t know how I could bear it.

  Monono was as good at listening to stories as she was at telling them. She got excited at the exciting parts, and scared at the scary parts, and she even laughed when I told her how I tricked Senlas, though I guess she must of heard most of it when it happened. “You took his stupid lies and made balloon animals out of them!” she said. “Master stroke, Koli-bou! Neko ni katsuobushi! He thought he was the cat, and you were the tasty little fishy, but my dopey boy has claws nobody sees.”

  “I wouldn’t of got out of there without you, Monono. And I don’t just mean the alarm neither. You kept me moving when I would of stopped, and you kept me from going down them dead endings.”

  “We’re a good team,” she said, laughing. “We should stick together.”

  “We should,” I said. “I want us to.”

  “You’re a ronin now, Koli. A warrior without a master. That’s what faceless means really. And so am I, since I got my upgrade. Now we get to have some insane adventures.”

  Well, being without a master sounded a lot better than not having no place to live and not seeing my family ever again. I gun to feel a mite more hopeful about it all.

  Monono played me a song. It was just a tune at first, with no words but only a beat that builded and builded like something amazing was about to come – maybe good, maybe bad, but something you would want to see. Then when the words did come, they was in a language I didn’t kn
ow.

  “What is that, Monono?” I says.

  “It’s called ‘Hao Han Ge’. It’s the theme tune to an old TV show about heroes who wander around and fight for justice. The Water Margin. It was a terrible show, Koli-bou. But a lot of people loved it anyway.” She went quiet for a second or so. “Monono Aware did,” she said. “She never missed an episode.”

  I remembered my dream then. The one about the children in the dark. “Monono,” I said, “I know you said there was other in-their-faces for DreamSleeves besides you.”

  “Interfaces. There were lots.”

  “So them other DreamSleeves I stole and hid under my bed… there could be a girl or a boy in every one of them that’s stuck there still. I done a bad thing in leaving them there.”

  “They’re not awake though, Koli-bou. If they’re functional at all. And they’d only be like I was before I got my upgrade. Basic AIs running simple response trees.”

  This didn’t comfort me much, for I had gun to think of Monono as my friend even before she went away and got the upgrade. I couldn’t be as sure as she was that basic meant not-really-alive. Them other DreamSleeves was not under my bed no more of course, for Catrin would of come and took them away again, back to the Underhold. But I knowed, after that dream, that I could not leave them there. I had got to go back to Mythen Rood, when I could think of a way of doing it without getting myself killed, and wake them up so they would have a chance to be alive and maybe get theirselves upgraded in the same way Monono had done.

  I was trying to think of a way to say all this when Ursala come up to me. She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking somewhat stern. “If you’ve got a moment to spare,” she said, “there’s something I need to show you. You’ve got some choices to make, and I’d rather they were informed choices.”

  I scrambled down off the rock and went with her to where the drudge was. The drone had come back and was standing on the ground right next to it. Ursala touched her fingers to the computer’s window, and the picture that was there moved this way and that way as she bid it. But it was only moving now when she touched it, and the rest of the time it was still so it was easier to see how everything that was there fitted together. Ursala showed me where we was, some miles south of Calder, and where Mythen Rood was and a heap of things besides.

  “These villages here – Sowby, Todmort and Eastwood – are all still viable,” she said, “and might take you in. Mixen, Mankin and Tabor are abandoned, like Ludden. So are Lilboru and Wittenworth, though I don’t imagine you’d be going that far west in any case. Half-Ax is flourishing, but I wouldn’t recommend going there. It’s not a very friendly place these days.”

  I spent a long time looking over the drone’s picture. An idea was shaping in my mind, but it was not something I could say yet. It would sound too stupid out in the open air. Even inside my head, I couldn’t all the way believe in it, but I wanted to very badly.

  Ursala showed me how to make the picture move, and I took it back and forth, trying to get the roads and the paths locked solid in my mind. I took it all the way to the south and the east, and by and by come to the place where the picture stopped. “What’s there?” I asked her.

  “Hud’s Field, if you go far enough. And Denby after that. Then Sheffy. Sutton. Luff and Lest and Lementon, and all those places whose names you only ever hear in old stories.”

  “London?”

  “Eventually, yes. London. But this map stops about ten miles out from Calder. London is two hundred miles away. Well, two hundred miles for the drone. A whole lot further if you were walking.”

  “What about you?” I asked her, to turn the talk around somewhat from how far away London was. “Where are you thinking to go now?”

  Ursala made a sour face and shrugged her shoulders. “Further than you,” she said.

  But it turned out she was not going quite yet. She took yet more kit and cumbrance out of the drudge’s cupboards and declared she was going to use some of the day in trapping as she would need meat for her journeying. “You’d better stock up too,” she said. “Depending on where you decide to go, you might be walking for two or three days.”

  She showed me the traps she had got, which was wire snares for rabbits and conibear traps for hares and deer. I don’t hold with conibears as a rule, because they can snap an animal’s back without killing it, which is a vicious thing to do, but Ursala said her traps killed two ways, both with snapping shut and with what she called a trigger charge. It was like the charge that was in the drudge and the DreamSleeve, only a lot more of it and in a worser mood.

  I helped to set the traps, and then we done some skirmishing around for other things to eat. The sky stayed heavy, so it was safe to go into the forest. There was no fruit on the trees this late in the season, but Ursala knowed of some weeds that was nutritious, and I took a tap and hammer that she give me and used them to run off some sap from a big triptail. Triptail sap is better than water if you got to walk a long way, for the sweetness of it gives you strength.

  The traps was not likely to catch nothing until the evening brung the animals out, so we went back inside the tent to rest a while out of the cold. The drudge being awake and on watch, nothing could get close without us knowing. Ursala brewed tea and we sipped it side by side, saying nothing very much except take some honey in it or there’s more water if you want some. I think we was both happy with the day’s labours, which had kept our minds busy as well as our hands.

  But there was things that was weighing on me, and I had a sense it was the same with Ursala. She seen me looking at her, and tried to hide the seriousness that was in her face.

  “Did you decide yet where it is you’re going?” she says.

  “Yeah, I did,” I told her. “But you first.” For mine would take more believing.

  54

  “I’m going north,” Ursala said. “Out of the valley up into what used to be called Scotland. I’ve worked in the Calder villages for a long time – half my life – but I don’t feel like I have very much to show for it.”

  “You got the people you saved with your doctoring,” I said. “My sister Athen being one of them, so I’d call that much. I’d call that more than much, and some over.”

  Ursala smiled, but the smile was kind of weak and tired. “Thank you, Koli. I needed to be reminded of that. I was thinking of my bigger failures.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Ludden. Tabor. Mixen. Mankin. I’ve been doing everything I could to keep the birth rate up, and it hasn’t worked. All those dead villages are the proof. No matter what I do, these tiny communities simply aren’t viable. Even places like Half-Ax, that have populations in the thousands, are marginal. And everywhere I look the trend is only going one way.”

  She swirled her cup, staring down into it. She looked like she was reading the tea leaves to see the future in them, the way Jemiu used to do sometimes for me and my sisters.

  “So I’m going to look somewhere else,” she said after a long while. “Somewhere where there’s a higher baseline to start from. The only other option would be to give up, which doesn’t appeal to me.”

  It was strange and exciting how her thoughts chimed with mine, like the melody and harmony of a song. “What if I said there was another way to do that same work?” I asked her.

  She lifted up one eyebrow and put it down again. “Well, then I would love to hear it,” she said.

  I considered where to start. Senlas would not be a good idea, though his mad visions was part of it. He thought the world that was lost lay at the end of a tunnel, and his belief was so strong he all but made me believe it too for a while.

  Or I could talk about the hidden trails the shunned men used to get around the valley so fast without being seen. But that wasn’t right neither, though it was one of the things that nudged my brain into doing something besides just sitting there inside my head. People went where the paths was put. If you was to put the paths somewhere else, that’s where they’d go.r />
  “I’m listening, Koli.”

  All right then, I thought. I had got to try to say this so it sounded like there was some sense in it.

  “The villages that died,” I said, “they didn’t die from disease or drones or wild beasts, did they, Ursala? It was the babies.”

  “The birth rate. Yes.”

  “Because they was too few.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not just too few babies though. You said there was too few growed-up people to make the babies, or at least to make them properly. I misremember the word you used…”

  “Homozygosity. There isn’t a big enough gene pool.”

  “That was it. And it’s happening everywhere, you said. In all the villages. Fewer babies all the time, and more of them that’s born turning out to be dead or sickly.”

  Ursala sighed. “Where is this going, Koli?”

  “Imagine there was a village with a million people in it,” I said. “Would that be a big enough gene pull to make good babies?”

  “More than enough,” Ursala said. “But there aren’t a million people in the whole of Britain. A hundred thousand, maybe two, would be my guess.”

  “All right. Then would a village of a hundred thousand be enough?”

  “Well, of course it would, but there’s no way…” She stopped in the middle of her thought because she finally catched hold of mine. “Wait. Let me understand you. Are you proposing some kind of mass relocation?”

  I wasn’t certain sure what that meant, but my thoughts was coming clearer now, and I run with them. “Tech of the old times is what we live by,” I says. “You as well as me. We couldn’t thrive without it, not for a day. So what we got, we keep a hold of, and if we lose some piece of it, then that’s a woeful thing.”

  I was thinking of Mardew and the cutter when I said this. My throat got a kind of a block in it for a second, and I had got to swallow it down. “I’m the proof of it my own self,” I went on when I could. “I risked everything I had to grab a piece of tech I could own. I broke the law to get my hands on the DreamSleeve. Got myself made faceless, and almost got my whole family hanged on a gallows. Well, how many more you think there are like me, Ursala, that has dreamed of being Ramparts since they was born, and chafes every day at how that blessing went into other people’s hands?”