There was a story to the shadow show, or I think there was, but most of it was a big fight between two red tallies. The red tallies had leaders that was called Napoeyon and Wellenten. You never seen so many people as was fighting there, on a big field that didn’t seem to have hardly any trees in it. It was strange and sad. I asked Lorraine if that was the Unfinished War we was seeing. She said she had not heard them words before, but this was Napoeyon’s war. “He woke the lion of Albion, Koli Faceless, and he paid the price. Sic semper tyrannis.”
After the shadow show was over and the lights come back on, Lorraine left us with Stanley while she done something to the tech that had showed us the pictures. The yellow drone was close by but it was looking at Cup, who was walking up and down the long room on the backs of all the chairs. I moved close to Stanley.
“We got to thank you,” I said, “for the thing you give to Cup. We didn’t get to use it yet, on account of the drones, but it was a great kindness.”
The boy looked at me, all wildered. Then he looked at me like I had spit in his face. “What are you talking about?” he said. “What the Hell are you talking about, you idiot? What thing? Are you insane?”
I stepped back, away from all that sudden anger. “I – I thought—”
Stanley sneered. “You thought? What did you do that with? It’s pretty obvious you don’t have a brain.”
Lorraine had looked up when she heard voices raised, but Stanley was now walking quickly away from me, so she seen there was no need to come between us. She just went back to what she was doing with the tech.
I turned to Cup as she come up and joined me. “What’s the matter?” she asked, seeing my face. “What did he do this time?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Are you sure he give that key thing to you? It didn’t just fall out of his pocket or something, and you snatched it up?”
“He put it right in my hand, Koli.”
“Then I can’t make no sense of it. It’s like he’s two different people. He talks like he hates us oftentimes, and he was flat-out mazed when I thanked him for helping us.”
Monono spoke up inside the cone of silence. “Well, you asked him with the pink robot in the room, Koli-bou. He’s got to be careful.”
That was true, and it give me some solace to think it. But there was a fear that was growing in me, and I couldn’t make it go away. There wasn’t one thing on Sword of Albion that I understood. And I couldn’t see no way for us to get out of there. Not with Lorraine staying with us every hour we was awake, and the drones watching over us while we was sleeping.
So we went from one wonder to another. The climbing wall. The tennis cord. The arcade. Every day brung new things down on us like rain, and we was sick to death of each one before we even come to it. We was sick of Stanley too. I mean, of not knowing how we stood with him or what to make of him. He wasn’t ever happy, but that was the only thing you could rely on. Sometimes he was full of hate and sneering like a boil is full of pus, and you only had to say a word for it all to come pouring out of him. Other times he would talk like we was people he only just met and was prepared to get along with. He told us that all these things we was seeing was there because them that built Sword of Albion thought there would be hundreds of people living on it for years and years at a time.
And then there was sometimes when I could not of said for anything what Stanley was. At the arcade, we run a kind of race where we was sitting in chairs and a road come rushing at us so we felt like we was moving. Cup made a joke about how roads was meant to take you some place different from where you started.
“What?” Stanley said.
“Roads is meant to lead you somewhere. They join one place up with another place. This road is like Dandrake’s belt.”
Stanley stood stock-still for a long time, like he was thinking deep and troublesome thoughts. By and by, he nodded. “The sermon he gave before the battle,” he said in a voice that was all quiet and seemed to come from a long way away. “We heard it afterwards, from prisoners we took on the field. ‘If you fear death, you know not what life is. Life is like this belt. See, it has a beginning and an end. But when the buckle is tied, the end only leads back again to where it first began. You are the belt, and faith is the buckle. Believe in me and never die.’”
He said all this in that same flat, faraway voice. Then he smiled, and I swear it was a smile that didn’t have no place on a boy’s face. It was an old man’s smile, that had seen through the world and its ways and didn’t waste no thought on them. “As metaphors go, I think it’s missing something. ‘Have faith in me, and perhaps my trousers will stay up.’ No wonder he lost.” And he went off to play some different game, leaving us trying to figure out what we just had seen.
All we wanted to do in those days – and they was long days, that started at dawn and finished at what I still thought of as lock-tide – was to get away from Lorraine and Stanley and the drones so we could find a way off the ship. Then we could go to Ursala and tell her it was time to leave.
At least, we could do that if she was finished fixing the dagnostic. But when we asked Lorraine how that work was going, she never give us honest answer. All she would say was that Ursala was working hard, or that some place called Rome took more than one day to build it. And when we asked if we could go see Ursala our own selves, she said she wouldn’t hear of such a thing. “She’ll never finish if you keep interrupting her, Koli. You tend to your work and let her tend to hers.” And our work, it seemed, was being with Stanley all the time we was awake.
One time, when we was walking from some place to some other place, Stanley stopped dead in the middle of the hallway, like he was in a forest and the sun had just come out. He looked at the floor, then at Lorraine, his face all shocked and wildered.
Lorraine smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I knew you’d feel it as soon as we started to manoeuvre. I wasn’t going to mention it – out of some superstition, I suppose. But yes, it’s finally happening. We’re rounding Cornwall now, and bearing north. Our ETA is oh-seven-twenty tomorrow.” Then she turned and walked on.
This was a day when Stanley was mostly talking to us like we was people instead of shit on his shoe, so I walked up alongside him and asked him – in a low voice so Lorraine couldn’t hear – what all of that meant.
“It means we just started turning,” Stanley muttered, putting out his hand to touch the metal wall of the hallway we was in. “Didn’t you feel it?”
“Are we going somewhere then?” Cup asked him.
He turned on her, filled with rage that come on him of a sudden and filled him brim-full.
“What do you fucking think? Yes, we’re going somewhere. We’re going home, you pair of yokels.”
He speeded up to get away from us. We was happy to let him, for it give us a moment to talk alone.
“I guess that’s a good thing then,” Cup said. “At least if their home is any place in Ingland. If they take us back to land, one half of our problem is gone.”
“Why are they doing it though? They been out here a long, long time, from what they said. What’s changed?”
“I think you know the answer to that one, little dumpling,” Monono said.