“We leave our outside clothes here,” said Ninde. “Get a bit dry and then report to Shade before we shower and eat. Come on – get those wet rags off.”
“Nothing else on,” muttered Gold-Eye. He was confused. The sexes were segregated in the Dorms, except at meal time, and they always washed separately. Petar and Jemmie had washed together – and done other things as well – but that was all just a hazy memory of half-seen sounds and misremembered images. He didn’t know how he was supposed to behave.
“Here, I’ll help you,” said Ninde, coming up close and taking hold of one extremely grubby sleeve. “It’ll be interesting to see what’s under all this dirt…”
“Ninde!”
The voice was Ella’s, followed a moment later by the girl herself, leaping down from the tube like a dangerous cat.
“Leave Gold-Eye alone – and put your towel on. You know the rules.”
“I was just teasing,” said Ninde, letting go with a shrug.
“He’s been out alone for a long time,” said Ella, with a nod to Gold-Eye to show she wasn’t talking over his head. “Years, probably. He’s got to get used to people all over again. Think of him as being much younger than he is… at least for a while.”
“Yeah. Sorry, Gold-Eye,” said Ninde, complicating her apology by removing her towel with deliberate slowness and wrapping it around herself with equal deliberation. Then she tossed her head back and opened another hatch halfway, slipping through it even as it swung back and closed with a heavy crash.
“Too many films from the old days,” said Ella with a sigh. “OK, Gold-Eye, we leave our outside clothes in these baskets for washing, and hang up our belts and swords for cleaning here. Shade has robots – little machines that can sort of think and do things – that do the washing and cleaning. Now, I’m going to turn my back and you turn that way, so we can get undressed. Imagine it’s just like the Dorms, only the wall between the boys’ and girls’ washrooms is missing.”
Gold-Eye obediently turned to face the wall and began to strip off the several layers of rags he used to think of as his clothes. At the same time, he fought off an urge to peek at Ella.
Just when he thought he might risk a look, a clanging noise announced the arrival of Drum. He’d taken a long time to come through, Gold-Eye thought – and was very noisy coming along the tube as well.
“Right, I’m ready,” said Ella loudly. “Gold-Eye?”
“Yes,” said Gold-Eye, quickly cinching the towel tight around his waist. It was a very big towel, going around him several times. Which was probably just as well.
“You go on,” whispered Drum as he lumbered down from the tube. “I won’t be long.”
“Right,” said Ella. “Gold-Eye, follow me.”
She opened the same hatch Ninde had gone through, spinning the locking wheel with one practised flip of her hand. After Gold-Eye had stepped through too, she shut it behind him.
“One of the rules,” she explained, as they continued down a long, narrow passage, pausing every now and then to go through another closed hatch. “All hatches have to be closed behind you, just in case some creatures get in. We’re in the central corridor here. It runs the full length of the Submarine. There are hatches off to the sides, above us and below us. It’ll probably take you a while to work out where everything is.”
“Where now?” asked Gold-Eye.
“You mean where are we going now? To report to Shade. His headquarters are in what used to be the engine room, till his robots cleaned it out.”
She hesitated, then added, “Don’t be surprised by Shade. He’s not exactly alive… and not exactly human. Well, I suppose he is… anyway, you’ll see.”
This didn’t exactly reassure Gold-Eye. He felt anxious about the coming meeting, but the feeling was curiously overlaid with something he hadn’t felt since the long-ago times with Petar and Jemmie. The sense that other, more capable people were taking care of everything.
“This is it,” said Ella, pausing before another hatch. “Stand next to me and look up.”
Gold-Eye looked up, meeting the glassy gaze of another silvery tentacle slowly uncoiling down from the ceiling. It looked at them for a few seconds, then coiled back up again. A loud click from the hatch announced that they’d passed its scrutiny and the way to Shade’s headquarters was opening.
But Gold-Eye didn’t walk in. He stood where he was, just looking, till Ella gave him a bit of a push and he stumbled over the lip of the hatch and into the cavernous chamber.
The room took up almost the entire aft third of the Submarine. The space once separated by bulkheads and partitions, and filled with engines, fuel tanks and machinery, had been opened up by Shade’s robots. Now it was a large open space. A dark space, with a single pool of light right in the middle, about thirty paces from the hatch.
Things the size of cats moved in the shadows and corners of the room, the light occasionally reflecting from their metallic sides. One scampered near the light and Gold-Eye saw it in its entirety – and shivered. It had a bulbous body, balanced lightly on eight segmented legs. Far too like a spider.
“Robots,” whispered Ella, seeing him shudder. “They’re safe. They work for us.”
The only visible furniture in the room – a broad, official-looking desk of dark red wood and a padded leather chair – were right in the pool of a light.
Two three-seater couches faced the desk at oblique angles. Ninde sat on one, draping her legs across to take up two places. Hearing the others enter, she looked round and sat up straight.
“Where’s Shade?” asked Ella as she sat down next to Ninde. Gold-Eye sat too, on the same couch – but right at the front of the cushion, ready to spring up and run. He still didn’t like the look of this dark room, or the constant, peripheral movement of the spiderish robots.
“He didn’t want to talk to me,” sniffed Ninde. “He said he’d wait for everyone. I suppose Drum is coming sometime?”
“He’ll be along in a minute,” replied Ella, frowning.
Sure enough, a few minutes later a loud click announced the hatch opening again and Drum entered the chamber. Unlike the others he wore a huge towelling robe that covered him from ankle to neck. Without saying anything, he walked across and sat on the empty couch, its springs groaning under his weight.
An expectant silence followed, broken only by the scrabble of the robots’ steely claw-legs on the decking.
Then Ella stood up and said, “Shade. We’re all here.”
VIDEO ARCHIVE TRAINING LESSON A41
<UNEDITED>
| Ella: | Why do I always have to do these? |
| Shade: | You’re the oldest. You know the most. |
| Ella: | You’re older – and you could just generate the images anyway. |
| Shade: | But you’ve actually been out there. The others respect you. |
| Ella: | Do they? They’re frightened of me, perhaps. Except for Drum… |
| Shade: |
That’s because you are single-minded.
|