“It seems like he gets plenty from his father,” I said. “Maybe he needs less, not more.”
“They’re all of them crazy as sheep ticks.”
I nodded at that. I felt some warmness for Lorraine, if only because she had hugged me and fussed over me. But I hadn’t seen or heard nothing out of any of the three of them that made any sense. Paul and Lorraine was like Punch and Jubilee, the one all cruel, the other all smiles and kind words. Stanley was just plain mean, and sad besides. But what any of them was doing, stuck out here on the ocean all alone, was a question that wildered me just as much as it did Cup.
I could feel the DreamSleeve’s cold metal nestled in against my side. Normally when I couldn’t make no sense out of a thing, I would ask Monono about it and see what she had to say. I decided to do that now. Stanley was far enough away that he wouldn’t hear, and Cup was standing in between so he couldn’t see me clear. I took the little box out and thumbed the switch that would wake it up. Monono would oftentimes rouse to the sound of my voice, or would just start up talking when she wanted, even if I didn’t ask her to. Using the switch felt like knocking on the door, kind of, to see if she was minded to talk to me.
“Hey,” I said. “Monono. You okay in there?”
No answer come. I asked again and the same thing happened. “Is she asleep?” Cup asked.
“She doesn’t need to sleep.”
“If the water got into her, maybe she’s got to dry herself out before she can talk again.”
I turned it over in my mind. Paul had said the DreamSleeve was working fine, but I guess what he meant by that was that it could play music. He didn’t know about Monono.
And maybe Monono meant to keep it that way. Maybe she was staying quiet in case we was spied on or overheard. I decided I had better leave it for now and try again when I was on my own.
“Let’s go see what Stanley’s up to,” I said. “The more we can find out about this place, the better.”
We walked on after the boy. He had crossed the big open space and come to one of the towers around the edge of it. This one was smaller than most of the others and had stairs up the outside like a lookout tower. Stanley was already at the top of the stairs, and we went up right behind him. I was much more careful than I was wont to be, remembering the fall I took off that ladder.
The top of the tower was a kind of a platform, with a rail all round the edge of it like the one at the side of the ship. In the middle there was a wide metal column sticking up into the air to about the height of someone’s chest, and on top of that there was a thinner pipe, made out of the same metal, mounted so it could turn pretty much any way you wanted it to. Stanley was standing in front of this thing, where there was a kind of handle you could hold it by, twisting the pipe up and down and around. He was looking up in the sky as he done it.
“Okay,” he said. “That one, there.” He pointed at what I thought had got to be a gull or a cormorant flying high up above us, maybe following The Sword of Albion in its course the way birds would oftentimes follow our fishing boats in the lagoon.
“What are you doing?” Cup asked him. “Is that thing tech?” I thought then about the big metal wagon I met in Calder that talked but couldn’t move. It had a pipe just like this one sticking out of it, that turned out to be a gun like Rampart Arrow’s bolt gun, only twenty times bigger.
Stanley swung the pipe hard to the left and tilted it up towards the sky. “It’s a Helios,” he said. “A positioning laser. Sword uses it to maintain a precise distance from land, way out here in the middle of shitting nowhere. But if you hit the override and narrow the beam all the way down, you can do this.”
He swivelled the pipe a touch more, squinted with one eye and pulled on a little lever. A line of light shot out of the end of the pipe, straight up into the sky. In the bright sunlight it was hard to see, but I knowed it was there because it made the air shine like it was polished smooth.
Stanley was aiming for the bird, but he missed because right then it tucked its wings in against its sides and went into a dive. Maybe it had seen us, or seen the ship at least, and thought there might be something on it that was good to eat. It come right down on Sword of Albion, like a housemartin swooping on a big fat bluefly. Stanley swung the pipe around to track it, but the bird was turning in circles as it come, so quick it was hard to follow.
Then, as it got closer and closer to us and to the deck, something amazing happened. It flung out its wings again, that had been flat to its body. They unfolded in layer on layer like sheets being shook out on wash-day, stretched out wide to catch the air and slow the bird’s fall. And they was so thin you could see the sunlight through them, only the sunlight was broke up into shades of red and yellow and green and purple, as bright as splashed paint. I don’t remember when I ever saw anything more beautiful.
“Dandrake’s balls!” Cup whispered.
The bird hung in the air right over us, then it wheeled away and gun to climb again – but it did not get far. Stanley swung the pipe hard around. The light sliced the bird in two and set both halves of it on fire. They shot past us and over the side of the ship, tumbling in circles through the air. A moment or two later, black feathers rained down out of the sky like beans at a wedding. One of them hit me on the shoulder, bounced off and landed at my feet. When I looked down, I seen there was burned meat clinging to it.
Stanley give a whoop. “Yes!” he yelled. “The boy never misses! He just does not know how to miss!”
I was slow in figuring out what it was I’d just seen, and I think Cup was too. Both of us had hunted for food a thousand times. We was used to seeing almost anything that could run or fly or crawl as good for eating unless it had poison in it. But I’d never seen nothing killed the way that bird was, just for the cleverness of being able to kill it and the smugness of being able to tell it afterwards. I seen the look of surprise and disgust on Cup’s face, and I guess there was the same look on mine.
Stanley didn’t see it, or else he seen it and didn’t care. “You want to try?” he asked us. “We could go first to ten.”
Cup stepped away from the pipe, that I knowed now was a gun, and from the boy. “No thanks,” she said. I didn’t say nothing at all, but only shaked my head.
“Please yourselves,” Stanley said, with a shrug of his shoulders. “I guess I’ll just try to beat my record then.” He gripped the gun again and looked up at the sky, his eyes darting as he tried to spot another bird up there. That was too much for Cup.
“If you don’t come away from that thing,” she said, “I’ll take you off of it by the scruff of your damn neck.”
Stanley let go of the gun and turned round to her. There was wonder on his face that turned quickly into a scowl and then a mean laugh. “Well, fuck it and run,” he said. “Are you talking tall to me, cave-girl?”
Cup clenched both of her hands into fists. “You heard me,” she said. “Leave the birds alone. They’re not doing you no harm, so you let them be.”
Stanley took a step towards her. Then another step. He was still smiling, and I didn’t like the look of it. “I don’t think we want to fight,” I said quickly. “Let’s just go do something else.”