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