The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,63
to let go of my hopes. I mean, my hopes that the silver box might be a weapon like the firethrower or the cutter or the bolt gun. I asked Monono about that – if the box could throw fire or cut things in pieces or shoot bolts or anything of that kind. She called me a crazy boy and said that no, it could not.
What the DreamSleeve was mainly meant to do, Monono said, was to entertain people. That was a word I never heard before, but it was an easy one to understand once she set it out for me. If someone played you a tune or sang you a song or told you a story, you was entertained. At least you was if they done it right. It meant you ended up happier than you was before they started.
There is no point in lying about it: I was disappointed and somewhat bitter. The music was an amazing thing, and Monono was much more amazing again on top of that, but it wasn’t to the purpose if I was going to be a Rampart. Ramparts was meant to use their tech for the good of the village to keep everyone safe. It was hard to see how the DreamSleeve could do that. Maybe if shunned men come against us and we wanted to pretend there was more of us than there was, I could play something real loud and hope they was fooled. But that didn’t seem like much.
So I had got to hang my hopes on the rules of the testing. If tech waked for you when you touched it, then you was a Rampart. Everyone knowed that. There wasn’t no rule to say that the tech had got to do something fearsome. And anyway, in some sense Monono was kind of like the database that Rampart Remember used. She knowed lots of things about the world that was lost, and she loved to talk about it.
She told me she was born in a place called Tokyo. “The biggest city in the world, Cody-bou. Can you imagine fourteen million people all riding the same subway train? Well, that’s my city.” I didn’t know what a subway train was, or a million, but I didn’t ask because I wanted her to keep on talking. Like I said before, listening to Monono was like hearing Spinner’s tales, back in the Waiting House. I never realised until then how much I missed that. “Tokyo is huge, and it’s busy, but you can’t ever get lost because everywhere you go there are signs, signs and more signs. The buildings in Shinjuku all go right up to the sky and tickle it in its tummy. And the crowds in the streets – oh my life! You’ll feel like you’ve got to be breathing people, because there isn’t any room for air. But here’s the thing that’ll zap your brain, little dumpling. All those millions of people, and you can walk right through them – right across Shibuya, even – without anyone ever touching you. It’s as though you’ve got a magic bubble around you. It’s because Japanese people are so polite. They wouldn’t dream of stabbing you in your personal space. Too shocking, neh!”
She told me lots more things about Tokyo. How there was times when the earth would shake and bury it, and then the people would build it up again even higher. How there was a million trees growing there, right among the houses, which was how I come to know that a million was another word for a lot; how there was bells ringing in the streets all the time that wasn’t bells at all but tech, in places that was called pachinkos. She made it sound beautiful and exciting, though she said it could be dangerous too, if you didn’t know the rules. I was not surprised it was dangerous, if they let trees grow inside their fence.
“Monono,” I asks her one time. “How far away is Tokyo? If it’s in Calder Valley, maybe Catrin would send some people out to find it. I bet we could do some good trade.”
“It’s a lot further away than that, Cody-bou,” Monono said. “You’d have to go there on a plane.”
“On a plane? Don’t joke with me, Monono.” I used planes every day when I was turning the seasoned wood into squared-off planks. I knowed as well as anyone what they was for, and they was not for riding through the