The Trials of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #2)

by M.R. Carey

What there is – all there is – is a language. When you tell the story, you don’t talk the way you do the rest of the time. You put on the storytelling voice, and the storytelling way, which sets you at a distance from what you’re saying even if you’re aiming to pop up in the story as your own self. That’s what I’m doing here, because I don’t know how else to go about it. Anyone who knows me and hears this may believe they spy a falseness in my voice. To any such, I say: you’re right, and then you’re wrong. I’m talking to you as straight and honest as I can. But I’m being a storyteller when I do it, and that’s why I use strange words from time to time, and a strange way of putting them together. This is me, not as I am in my own life but as I am in the story of that life, which is a different thing than the living of it. When I come into the story as a character, you’ll hear the words I spoke at the time, which will not be nearly so fine and polished as these words.

My own maimed hand had taught me the dangers of letting people pity you – which was a step towards them deciding for you and then discounting you.

What I think now is that all the tools we pick up and use come in the end to use us too. But it took a war to teach me that, and I think it is a telling for a later time.

The future rises out of the past like a fountain, and cannot be held back.

To teach what you were taught is the very heart of life, and gives you faith that life will hold.

Perliu waved the database angrily. “This thing,” he said, as if he hated it. “This dead-god-damned thing has got all the answers.” “Well,” I said, still scared and flustered, “that’s a blessing, Rampart. What do we need if it’s not answers?” He gave me a fierce scowl. I was somewhat glad of it. His anger was easier for me to bear than that dreadful sadness. “Why, we need questions,” he said. “I don’t know where to find the questions. My mind won’t go to them, or stay on them for long enough to build a thought. It’s hard even for me to remember who I’m talking to some days. And people will die if I get this wrong. All of us. Mythen Rood will die! Dead god help me, I don’t think I can do what’s been asked of me.”

It seemed to me, if you done some things you was really ashamed of then you would need to hold onto the ones you was proud of all the harder, and there wasn’t no harm in that.

When I try to imagine what it was like in the before-times, most often I think of a house. A house full of light, with curtains and furnishings in such rich colours it’s like being inside a picture when the paint’s still wet and shining. The people who live in that house are tall and beautiful, their skin so perfect you’d think they had lanterns burning inside them. The house loves them and cares for them. Whenever they want something, they reach out their hands and it’s there, the house having seen their need and provided for them. Except there’s so much plenty, they don’t have a word for want, or for need. They speak to each other in songs that are all of love and joy. But the people of those times made the firethrower too. And the cutter and the bolt gun. And the Challenger CR17-SA heavy armoured unit, which I had already talked to and was about to meet properly. They made weapons that could turn ambient molecules into bolts and bullets and incendiary liquids, harden the air into a blade that would cut through stone and turn a village the size of Mythen Rood into a hole in the ground in less time than it takes to clap your hands.

What were they like, our mothers’ mothers and our fathers’ fathers? Who did they hate so much to spend the fruits of their learning and the cunning of their hands on engines of such terrible cruelty? Was it their own selves?

Challenger had lain here, on the banks of the Calder, for so long that the war it was built to fight was scarcely a memory any more. We called it the Unfinished War, but we didn’t know what the quarrel was or who was fighting who. It was a fight like any other fight, I suppose, except that it went on for long enough that the world ended – not because of it, but all around it – and nobody got to claim that they had won.