The Fall of Koli Read online

  By and by, Ursala turned from the dagnostic to the other bits of tech that was on the table next to it. She picked up one piece and then another, looking at them in wonder.

  “Where did all this come from?” she said, almost in a whisper.

  “It’s what we could salvage,” Paul said. “After the attack. The labs were the part of the ship that was worst hit – intentionally, we believe – and very few of the facilities up here in the superstructure survived. Below decks…” He seemed to check himself, like he had almost said too much.

  “Below decks?” Ursala said.

  Paul shaked his head. “What’s down there is mostly in storage. We’re only meant to access it in a certain very specific set of circumstances. Anyway, most of the medical tech was up here, and you’re looking at what’s left of it. My wife and I are not technicians. Or doctors. So we just brought everything that looked as though it might belong. Hopefully you’ll have a better sense than us of what you can use. You said your unit was missing some of the expert plug-ins.”

  “Yes,” Ursala said. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Does it have a gene-splicer?”

  “No. And I’d given up hope of finding one.” Her eyes went to Paul, then back to all the tech that was on the bench. “There isn’t a complete sequencer here. But this…” She touched one of the bits of tech on the bench. “And this… I think I could…”

  “Well, that’s the issue. Could you? Working with what’s here, could you add gene-editing functionality to your diagnostic unit?”

  Ursala was still picking up this piece of tech and then that one, her face all lit up with eagerness. “I don’t know, but I’d like to try. If you’re really offering me free access to all this…”

  “I didn’t say free, doctor. We’d like a favour in return.”

  Ursala turned from the bench to face him. I could see how hard it was for her to stop looking at the tech and touching it. “What kind of favour?”

  “Our son has a medical condition. We’ve been treating it as best we can with the remedies available to us. But with a fully functional diagnostic unit, you’d be able to accomplish in minutes what we haven’t been able to achieve in years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Ursala said. “But… that’s all?” She could not keep her surprise from off of her face. “You just want me to use the diagnostic to treat your son’s illness?”

  “Yes. That’s all.”

  Ursala throwed out her arms in a kind of a shrug. “Well, of course. I would have done that anyway. I’ll be delighted to give all three of you a full screening.”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Paul said. “Lee and I are in perfect health.”

  “Just Stanley, then. But what does he have?”

  “It’s a kind of auto-immune disorder. A very rare and unusual one.”

  “Called…?”

  “It’s rare enough not to have a name,” Lorraine said. She had come into the room without any of us hearing. Stanley was there too. He had trailed in behind her and now was standing off to one side, almost out of sight. His shoulders was slumped and his arms hanging down by his sides, like he was too tired to make his body stand straight. Even his face seemed paler than it had been before. Whatever his treatment was, it had not took long, but it seemed to have left its mark just the same.

  “Then we’ll go by the symptoms,” Ursala said. “But if you’re treating it already, you must have had a diagnosis. Perhaps we should start there.”

  “We can discuss it later,” Paul said. “Obviously the immediate priority is to repair your unit.”

  “Thank you,” Ursala said. “But I’m only repairing the gene-splicing function. I won’t need that to treat Stanley.”

  “Yes,” Lorraine said. “You will.” She put her arm across Stanley’s shoulders and drawed him to her side. It seemed to me he flinched away from her a little, but she held him tight. “We’d like nothing better than to have you start treating Stan right away, but it will take all the resources of your tech – augmented by what’s left of ours – to do it. First things first.”

  Stanley rubbed a hand across his eyes. His lips was moving, but I don’t think he was saying anything out loud – only mouthing words under his breath. I might of been mistook, but it seemed to me now I looked that there was some fresh cuts in among the old scabbed ones on top of his head. I was thinking up to then that the treatment was some kind of medicine, but I gun to think something different.

  Ursala stood her ground. She looked somewhat troubled now. “I’d really like to know as much as I can about Stanley’s symptoms,” she said, “and about the interventions you’re currently using.”

  Lorraine leaned down so her mouth was next to Stanley’s ear. “Stan,” she said, “how would you like to show Koli and Cup your racetrack?”

  Stanley’s shoulders twitched in a kind of a shrug. It was the onliest answer he give.

  “Or the three of you could go up to the top of the tower. It’s a lovely day out there. The sun’s come out again, and Sword is something to see on a day like this. You should give them the pinnacle tour.”

  Stanley pulled free of her. “If they want to see the sun, they can see it from here,” he said. He sounded tired to the death, and he was blinking his eyes like the light in the room was hurting them, or like he was somewhat dizzy. “It’s ninety-three million miles away, after all. A few hundred feet aren’t going to make any damn difference.”

  “Stanley,” Paul said. “I warned you. I’m not going to continue to ignore your persistent bad manners and disobedience. I’m a peaceable man, but there are limits to my patience.” He hitched his jacket back and started to undo his belt, threading it back through the loops in his trousers. It wasn’t until the belt was loose and he folded it double that I seen what he purposed to do, which was to give Stanley a beating.

  Lorraine stepped in quick, putting a hand on his arm. “Let’s all take a deep breath, shall we?” she said calmly. “Paul, I don’t want to undercut you, but I’d love it if we could give Stan another chance. Just today. Since we’ve got guests and since we all want to get along. How about it?”

  The two of them locked eyes for a second, Lorraine still just about hanging onto her smile and Paul scowling something fierce. Stanley dropped his arms to his sides again and just stood there, like he didn’t mind how this come out so long as they made their minds up quick.

  After a few seconds, Paul put his own smile back on.

  “I hear you, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re seeing the big picture, the way you always do. And you’re right, you’re right, you’re very right. Stan, you get a stay of execution – provided you promise to entertain these young people while we speak with their guardian.”

  “Wow,” Stanley said in a voice like he had just trod in dog dirt. “And what’s in box number two?”

  “What do you think, young man? A minute and a half with me and the belt, and then a twenty-four-hour time-out.”

  There was a moment when Stanley stayed all slumped and looking at the ground. Then he lifted up his head of a sudden and smiled. It was a really good copy of Paul’s smile, much too wide and too quick to be really meant. “Gosh, Paul,” he said, “you’re making this really hard. But I guess I’ll go with the option where I keep the skin on my back.” He looked at me and Cup. The smile was gone again, inside of a breath. “Okay, you two, follow the leader. We can do taxi-metered corporal punishment another time.”

  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.

  “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.”