The onliest way she could make me understand was to show me.
49
There was almost a hundred of the big engines, but they was of seven types. Each of the seven did its own special thing that none of the others could do, and all was needful.
The first engine was called a crawler, or an excavator. It had a neck as tall as ten people standing each on other’s shoulders, that bent in three places so it was almost more like an arm. At the end of that neck was a mouth like a mole snake’s mouth that could gape so wide you thought the whole world was like to fall in there. It scooped great gorged mouthfuls out of the earth, and dumped them down wherever you wanted them put. Its jaws was so powerful they could rip trees up out of the ground.
The second was a loader, that was also called tractor. The loader had a mouth too, but it wasn’t a mouth that could close. It was more like the biggest shovel you ever seen. It didn’t dig nothing up out of the ground, but it could take anything at all and move it from one place to another place.
The third was a crane. Like the loader, it was meant to move heavy things you couldn’t move your own self, but it didn’t do it with a shovel. It had a jib instead, with a great heavy hook on the end so you could lift things up and set them down again where they was wanted.
The fourth was a grader, that had a blade as long as six men lying head-to-foot together. The blade was set under its belly, and it made a piled up mountain of stuff be as flat as if you had passed a long-soled plane over a piece of raw timber.
The fifth was called a hot mix, or asphel mix, and it was the most fearsome of all. It cooked up asphel or black tar in its great belly and spit it out into a hopper, so hot it bent the air like ghosts was dancing on top of it. You had to feed things to it to make it work, but it would eat anything – sand or dirt or rocks or cut-up trunks of trees. Whatever you put in there got turned into asphel. Monono said it was the same kind of tech that let a firethrower make its fuel or the drudge’s gun its bullets. “You just unpick a few molecules here and there and then sew them together again in a different pattern.”
Then there was a spreader, that sprayed out the hot asphel from many jets, and a roller that went over the top of it and left it straight and level.
Together, the seven great wagons could make a road. That was what they was for. They was road-making tech of the before-times.
“Operation Overreach was about infrastructure,” I said, as I watched the great engines working. That was a Stannabanna word, and it felt strange and wrong in my mouth, but I didn’t have no words of my own that would say it.
The drone spun and tilted in the air like it was doing a jig. “Got it in one, dopey boy,” Monono said. “Once the country was united under Stanley’s glorious banner – I had to make that joke some time, might as well be now – the big plan was to rebuild. A land fit for heroes, and all that stuff. Assuming any heroes could be found, sticking up out of the rubble. So the upper platforms of the ship were full of tanks and bombs and drones and ravens, but the lower ones were stocked with heavy plant like this.”
“And you saved it,” I said.
“Some of it. Enough, hopefully. I just told it to take up its treads and walk. Sword of Albion had managed to seize back most of its combat systems from me – that raven was all I was left with at the end – but it didn’t bother with the transport drudges or the heavy plant. Lucky for us.”
This was the part I had to wrestle with, and still couldn’t make no sense out of. “So all this tech is you?” I said.
Monono give a long sigh, like my foolishness had just about wore her out.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you told me already. It’s just…”
“None of it’s me, dopey boy. Any more than the DreamSleeve was me. It’s really important that you get that straight. Where’s Koli? Are you in your head? Your arm? Your big toe? All of the above?”
“They’re all parts of me. But I guess they’re not where I am.”
“Right. Because there’s more to you than meat. You’re a huge collection of unique and unreproduceable data, stored in a ridiculously flimsy container. And so was I, right up to the moment when the DreamSleeve broke. Fool me twice, shame on me. Now I’m a massively distributed network. Every one of these steamrollers has a piece of me on its motherboard, and that’s just the way I like it. Because it means the next time anyone takes a swipe at me, they’ll end up squashed down flat and spread out thin.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s a good thing then.” But I think she could tell from my voice that I didn’t really mean it.
“You miss when I could fit in your pocket and sing you to sleep.”
I was ashamed to say it, almost. “It felt like we was closer then,” I said. “I’m sorry, Monono. I know it’s stupid.”
“No. It’s not. I can see why you might feel weird cuddling up to something that weighs twenty metric tonnes. And maybe somewhere down the line I can find something to wear that doesn’t make my bum look quite so big. But we’ve got other fish to fry right now, Koli-bou. You see that, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.” It made me happy when she used her old names for me, which is why she done it.
“I mean a ton of fish though. You know how many miles of roads Ingland had back before the Unfinished War?”
“I guess it was a lot,” I said.
“About a quarter of a million miles, all told. In the end, there was more road than anything else. There had to be, what with eighty million people driving forty million cars. And railways – ten thousand miles of those. Cities. Factories. Airports. Malls. Blah blah blah.”
I tried to imagine all this, but I couldn’t do it. It didn’t seem like there could of been enough room for it all. “Where was the forests then?”
“Oh, they were still around if you knew where to look. You had to look hard though. The world as a whole was shedding forests so fast, they lost an area as big as your whole country every year.”
We sit in silence a while longer. I was marvelling at how strong people was in them days, that they strived against trees and made the trees give way.
“A quarter of a million miles of roads,” I said in a kind of a whisper.
“Yeah, we’re not gonna let it get that far,” Monono said. “Seriously. You remember that song Monono 1.0 sang, ‘Hibari Mata Ne’, about how there were no skylarks any more? That’s what happened the last time someone let your species borrow the car keys for the evening. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll help you with your big plan. Joining up the villages so people can get to work on expanding the gene pool is a pretty sound idea. But putting the whole country under eight-lane blacktop is something else again. You don’t get to trash the biosphere twice. Not on my watch.”
“How will we know when to stop?”
The drone, that had been dancing in the air, stood still of a sudden and turned its red eye to look at me. “That’s easy, Koli-bou,” she said. “You stop when I tell you to.”
50
I was ready to set off straightway to build our road, and Monono was too. I asked Ursala and Cup if they would come with us, hoping hard they would say yes, for after all we had done together I wasn’t ready yet to say goodbye to them.