The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,61
me welcomed in Rampart Hold. I had troubles enough to fret on when I was minded to fret them.
But Monono teached me about music, and that was a wonderful thing. It’s hard to say how good it was. First off, she just played me all the different types of it, such as pop, rock, funk, techno, soft-beat, rap, metal, raw, jazz, country, ex-ex and disco. Then, when I said I liked something, she would play me a lot more of that, showing me how things that was somewhat the same was also different. Like Mickey the Beast and Carol Santo was both counted as soft-beat, but Mickey used a ton of guitar effects whereas Carol was most of the time unplugged.
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.