The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,59
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!”