Paul brung my head onto a right line again. “‘Like green grass and blue sky’,” he said, giving me back my own words. “I do love homespun peasant wisdom. But in that case, what happens when I take your rights away, boy? Where do they go?”
“Let go of me!” I said. I meant to shout it, but I was wincing from the pain and my voice come out quieter and shakier than I would of liked. “Let me go, Paul!”
And he done it at once, lowering his hand back down to his side. He still stood right up against me though, glaring like it was me that laid hands on him.
“Rights aren’t a natural resource,” he said, flexing his fingers. “Only fools and rogues believe that. They’re a commodity, to be bought like any other. Not with money, but with loyalty and obedience and labour. If you give the state your faithful service, the state will accord you the rights that are due to you. If you don’t, the state will treat you as you deserve to be treated. Like effluent. The rights you have on board this ship are the same rights your faeces have when you flush them.”
Lorraine laughed like he’d made a joke. “Oh please!” she said. “Paul, take that scary face off. We don’t need to make threats. We’re all friends here.”
“Dandrake help your enemies then,” Cup said. She come over and stood in front of me, facing Paul, like she was daring him to try and touch me again. Stanley took a step towards me too, but then stopped like he’d forgotten what it was he was meant to be doing. He had that same look on his face he’d had when we was sitting at table, unhappy and confused and maybe a little scared. I wondered what had happened to him since yesterday. It was like there was two Stanleys, and one was the exact opposite of the other.
Paul stood where he was a while, and said nothing. His clenched teeth was showing again, and his arms was held out from his sides all stiff with the hands balled into fists. He looked like a bull looks when it paws the ground before it runs to gore you. But he didn’t run at Cup, and by and by the redness went out of his face.
He offered us a smile. It wasn’t no better than his other smiles had been, and I got to say I really wished he would stop trying. It wasn’t a thing he had any kind of a gift for. “You’re right, dear, of course,” he said, looking to Lorraine. “I’m only specifying the operational parameters, as it were. Good fences make good neighbours.” He turned to me and Cup again, keeping that smile on his face like he was holding up a curtain over a midden heap. “I’m sorry if I made it sound as though we’re punishing you or curtailing your freedom. It’s not like that at all. These rules are for your safety as much as anything. If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them.”
“I got a question,” Cup said.
Paul waved his hand. “Please.”
“Who in the dead god’s name are you fucking people?”
Paul stiffened up all over again, and I thought we was just gone round in a circle. He brung his fist down on the table, making the trenchers and dishes and knives that was on it jump into the air. He answered in a roar, his teeth showing in his mouth. “Are you an imbecile, child? Are you a functional idiot? Or does some part of your brain still work? I meant questions about what I just told you. WHAT I TOLD YOU!”
A silence fell after that. Cup was not scared – there was not many things she was scared of – but she was took by surprise to see so much anger coming up out of nowhere. Some part of her was disgusted with it too, and it showed in her face.
“We’re Albion,” Lorraine said, in a very different voice – sweetness after all that bile. “Albion incarnate. We are the sword of the common man, the beacon of the poor and the last rebuke to tyrants. We are the wheel the heedless nations break on, the fire that consumes. We are the one that comes of many and the rage that comes of love. You shall not stop or slow us, or vex us as we pass, but even with your bodies pave the road on which we walk. We are changeless and eternal. We are the war that never ends until pain and poverty end, until selfishness and cruelty end, until dissent and ignorance end. We are Albion.”
All of this was said in the same voice, without no breaks or stumbles, like the words was the words of a song or maybe some kind of prayer. Stanley was staring at her the whole time. I guess we all was, but Stanley’s face went through a lot of changes as he listened. It was like watching the side of a hill when clouds is going by overhead and the shadows keep changing. He smiled, and then he winced, and then he smiled some more. When she was done, he clapped his hands, very slowly.
“Here endeth the lesson,” he said. “Bravo, Lee. Bra-fucking-vo.”
I didn’t know if he was agreeing with what she said or making fun of her. I didn’t know what to make of him at all.
21
Lorraine took the three of us down out of the crow’s nest to a place called the aquarium.
While we was on our way there, with Lorraine leading the way and Stanley dawdling a long way behind, the DreamSleeve hummed against my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, dopey boy,” Monono whispered in my ear. “I couldn’t do anything to help you – and I didn’t even dare speak up with the two of them so close. There’s no telling what kind of sensors they could be packing under that fake skin.”
“It’s okay, Monono,” I said. “I wasn’t even scared that much. That nonsense Paul was talking was just too silly to fright anyone.”
“It’s called fascism, Koli-bou. It’s like ra-ra skirts and flared trousers. People get all hot for it and make themselves look ridiculous, then when the fad blows over they pretend they were never that into it.”
We smelled the aquarium before we seen it – a high, musty smell of salt and sourness and mildew. We come to it along corridors of white tile made all slick and slippery by green, growing stuff. Then we stepped through a big arch and we was there.
The aquarium was a roomful of water mostly. Curved windows rose all round us as high as we could see. On the other side of the windows there was tanks that was filled with water all the way to the brim, so big they was like ponds or lakes that had been brung into the ship. Inside the tanks, beasts you would not even of dreamed of was moving around – big and small, light and dark, quick as arrows or slow like clouds up at the top of the sky.
I guess I felt I knowed a great deal about wild beasts. We had come across a whole lot of them as we walked over Ingland to lost London. We was walking through woods and valleys that was seldom trod, and oftentimes the things that lived there was unlisted. That means they didn’t have no name for humankind to call them by, and maybe hadn’t been met by nobody before we seen them.
But I got to tell you, the oceans got so much strangeness they make the dry land look like nothing much at all. There was beasts in the tanks that had too many mouths, that kept opening and closing each after other like they was singing a round. There was fish with long claws or fingers growing out of their backs, and a thing that was like a flower with petals as long as your arm, all red and yellow and bright as anything. But when Stanley tapped the glass, the big flower turned inside out, and at the heart of it there was a face like an old man’s face, shrivelled and folded but with a million teeth in its wide-open mouth.