He walked to the door where we had come into the room, and stood and waited for us there. I looked at Cup and she looked back at me. I don’t think either of us wanted to go with Stanley, or to leave Ursala on her own with the other two. Lorraine made a shooing movement with her hands, as if we was dogs or cats. “Go on,” she said. “We’ve got lots to discuss with the doctor here. Stanley, this is a goof-off day. You can make up your lessons at the weekend.”
“Thanks, Lee,” Stanley said in that same dead voice. “Love you.”
“Just the central tower,” Paul Banner said. “Not the deck, and not the subspace. Don’t stray, Stan.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Stanley said over his shoulder as he walked out of the door. “I would never dream of straying. Straying would be wrong.”
We went back through all them cluttered rooms again to the stairs. As we was doing it, something very strange happened to Stanley. At the start of that walk, he went with dragging feet like he was two-thirds dead and the ground was pulling him down. But with each step he took away from Paul and Lorraine, he carried himself a little higher and a little more life come into his face.
Along with the liveliness, a lot of the nastiness come back too. He snapped at Cup to keep up, and when I tripped on some broke bits of wood on the floor he laughed like it was a funny thing to see. “Keep at it,” he said. “Bipedal locomotion is a tricky thing at first.”
We come at last to the hallway, and then to a door that opened when Stanley walked up to it. It led to another one of them little empty rooms that was more like a cupboard.
“Once upon a time,” Stanley said, “there’d be two lifts side by side. One for people, the other for freight. And you, my dusky friend –” He touched the tip of his finger to my chest. “– would have counted as freight.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“Of course you don’t.”
We went in. The doors shut on us, and the room shaked again, like before. This time was different though. This time it felt like my stomach was shifting inside me and all that wonderful food might not stay where it was supposed to. Cup felt it too, and grabbed my arm to steady herself. I grabbed her right back, both to tell her it was okay and to get some comfort my own self.
“Pace yourselves, eff-eff-ess,” Stanley said in a bored voice. “You don’t go to Disneyland and piss yourself at the ticket desk.”
7
I said that Sword of Albion was big enough that you could of fitted my whole village on its deck. That was true, but I don’t think it gives you the real sense of it. I didn’t get it my own self until I come out of the shaking room and looked all around me. This was the same thing I already seen from high up in the air, but being in the midst of it was very different.
We was standing at the edge of a level space that was about as big as our gather-ground in Mythen Rood or the Bowl in Many Fishes. All round this space there was towers and sheds of different sizes, every one of them made out of metal. It was like being in a village where they didn’t have no stone or brick or clay, nor canvas to make tents like in Many Fishes. I looked around to see what kind of people lived here, but there was nobody there I could see. Nothing was moving in all that bigness and emptiness except our own selves.
Just ahead of where we come out, there was a grey wall about as high as my middle. On the other side of the wall was the ocean, a long way down from where we was. It was not like being on a boat at all, even now I knowed that was what Sword of Albion was. It was more like we was up on top of a watch tower and the whole world was spread out under us.
I turned to Stanley. He was leaning against the doors of the shaking room, that had closed behind us. “Where was we just now?” I asked him. “Where did we come from?” It might sound like a foolish question, but I wanted to put all these enormous spaces together in my head. I thought it might make me feel a mite less dizzy.
Stanley pointed his finger straight up. And I guess I already knowed that, for I was not surprised. The sick feeling in my stomach, when we was in the shaking room, was the feeling of coming down too quick from a great height. And yet the ocean was still a long way below us. Everything we’d seen so far was in the towers, not in the spaces under the deck that had got to be bigger still. There wasn’t enough room in my head for Sword of Albion, nor there wasn’t enough room in the world.
“Wait, though,” I said. “Wasn’t we supposed to stay up there in the tower?”
“Yes, sir, we was s’posed to,” Stanley said. “But we isn’t, and we ain’t, and we don’t won’t not. If we’re gonna tour, citizens, we’re gonna grand tour. Feel free to take pictures, write your names on the walls and pocket stray deckplates as souvenirs. Mi warship es su warship.”
While I was trying to puzzle out this nonsense, Cup just walked out into the open space and tilted her head back. The brisk wind picked up her hair and tugged at her clothes like it was trying to get her attention. She was blinking in the sudden daylight, but it looked like she was relishing it a great deal after all them inside spaces that was like metal caves. And I guess I was too.
“Thank you,” I said to Stanley, “for showing us this.”
The boy bowed down low, and waved his hand in a lot of big circles. “Oh, you’re welcome,” he said. “Got to push the boat out for guests of your calibre. And Sword is a shit-ton of boat to push out.”
Cup turned to us with a big smile on her face. “I like this,” she said. “We don’t get to enjoy the sun all that much. The sun always means there’s things waking up that we got to be scared of. But here there’s nothing to wake up besides us.”
Stanley give a short laugh. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go with that.”
“What is Sword of Albion doing here anyway?” Cup asked him. “Why are the three of you all the way out in the ocean? Is this a special place you got to guard? Are you waiting for something to happen?”
“What is this place? What are we doing here?” Stanley tried to copy Cup’s voice, but it was not a good copy and I don’t think she even seen that he was aiming to make fun of her. “Well, I’m glad you asked, Calamity Jane. This is a you-double-ell-cee. An ultra-large logistical carrier. You rammed your little pea-green boat into the side of Noah’s ark. Only Noah was a shit-kicker compared to us. We didn’t stop at two, oh no. We’ve got about a million of everything you could think of. Except for me. I’m one of a kind, in case you didn’t cotton onto that factoid yet.”
He looked at our faces a little while longer, and we looked at his. There was a lot of anger in there still, and a lot of hate. It didn’t seem like the hate was for us though. It was more like it was just bubbling up from inside of him and was always there, even when there wasn’t nothing around but his own self. By and by, he shook his head like he was giving up on the both of us. “Screw it,” he said. “I’m going to go do some big game hunting. You can do whatever the Hell you like.”
He walked away from us without looking to see if we was staying with him.
“That boy needs a smack or two,” Cup said, scowling.