Dragonhaven (41 page)

But if Bud believes it I believe it. Some of the other dragons don't. But there are probably stick-in-the-mud dragons like there are stickin-the-mud humans, who don't want to believe anything too new and strange and world-detonating, and personally I'd be happy to entertain a better (i.e., less scary) hypothesis if you've got one but I did say
better.

One thing that makes me think Bud is right, besides the fact that he's Bud, is that while Lois is sweating learning dragon language almost as hard as I am, we talk to each other better than we talk to anydragonbody else, most of the time, Lois and me. Maybe it's not really all that much
better
. But there's a kind of ease or fit to it that I don't have with any of the other dragons, even Bud. For example we have a, uh, let's call it a glyph, although it's maybe more a kind of spasm (maybe helps to explain the headaches, and the
wigglyness
of the dragon alphabet—or alphabets—or that
moods and layers
thing, thinking of a, uh, unit or module or something of it as a spasm) for “frustration” which we made up together out of how we felt about trying to learn to talk to (other) dragons. But when I used it on Bud he knew instantly what I was “talking” about, so Lois and I get gold stars and pats on the head for that piece of initiative-taking homework.

You don't have the smiling, nodding, pointing to your chest and saying your name option with dragons. Nor can you point to another object and say “rock” and wait to see what they say. They won't say anything. If you've been pointing at a rock and saying “rock” for the last six months, however, if you've been working at it really hard, you may have begun to wonder why after you say “rock” you very often get a kind of heavy sensation in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet (and furthermore it seems a bit
diagonal.
Right hand, left foot. Left hand, right foot). Although the first elation (supposing you manage to be elated through the confusion) drains away real fast as you start to wonder if they're talking about a kind of rock, a size of rock, a shape of rock, a color of rock, weight of rock, age of rock, even a hardness of rock, or a kind/size/shape/color/weight/age/hardness of anything, or maybe it's about something else entirely (Where it came from? How it was created? Or if it's a big rock, which way its shadow falls as the sun rises up over it and goes down the other side, and no I am
not
joking) and maybe it's not “rock” at all, but “thing pointed at” or “humans sure are into rocks, I wonder what that's about?” “Hello” in dragon is a sort of short, stylized flash of…something like my first look into Halcyon's dying eye, and it'll knock you over if you're not ready for it.

And there's not a lot you can do about the Headache but try to wait it out. See if you're going to be one of the lucky ones, and that it won't just go on swamping you (flounder flounder squelch squelch), that you'll be able to kind of go with the flow after a while. And that's already supposing that you're one of the (lucky) ones that don't just dissolve into a quaking, gibbering mess the first time you get within hailing (so to speak) distance of a dragon, and, more to the point, don't
stay
dissolved (and gibbering). Almost everybody gets a little melty around the edges on first introduction. But some people can't learn to cope. And you can't blame them—well I can't, anyway. It's the size of three or four Tyrannosaurus rexes,
and
it breathes fire, you know? What's not to be brain-burstingly afraid of?

But despite all the up-against-itnesses, see above, I'd much rather be at Farcamp and Dragon Central because when I'm at the Institute I start to lose faith in my dictionary—and the dictionary has to be what I'm
for
. Maybe I can figure out a way to break the idea of “dictionary” out of words on a page…but even the Son of the Son of the Son of the (okay, Daughter of the) Best Graphics Package in the Human Multiverse—I mean the latest update of the one I was using at the beginning—hasn't shown me a way to do it yet. Maybe because all the graphics packages are designed by humans. I need some kind of three-(or four-, or five-) dimensional Senssurround thingummy. Any major computer whizzes out there who want a
real
challenge?

Us humans, we still think word = word, mostly. I'm still best with Lois partly I think because we're kind of on the same level—young and stupid, and, you know, disadvantaged—we didn't get raised right, in our different ways. I'm second-best with Bud but I think the second-part is because
Bud
is so far beyond me.

Here's another thing you're not going to want to hear: Okay, so, maybe it's because they're so much bigger, maybe their brainwaves are bigger somehow or something, and they can't fit in our tiny skulls (that's aside from the three-or-four Tyrannosauruses
eeeeek
brain-melt aspect). But (you sneer: I can hear you sneering) if dragons are so bright, why are they living in caves instead of out conquering the galaxy and living in penthouses and eating their toasted sheep off jewel-encrusted platinum platters?

Now you just sit there and think that back at yourself for a minute. Why do dragons live quietly in caves and human beings have invented global warming and strip mining and biological warfare and genocide? Who's the real winner here in the superior species competition? What dragons do is
think
. That's what they're really good at. Like it or lump it. And that's why when I get out there in the dragon space, it's okay…except I'm only a stupid human and I can't go very far, and even as far as I can go it's farther than I can bring back with me to all the other humans, who even when they don't want to kill something or pave something over, still tend to think in terms of x = y and only if x and y both take up normal space in three dimensions and can be measured and checked off a list.

Yeah. I'm prejudiced. Sue me. Or take this book back to the bookseller and demand your money back because you don't like my politics. But all right, enough of the woo-woo and the politics. I'm still human, no spinal plates yet, and I guess I kind of need to spend some time at the Institute…and at least that means Martha and I get to sleep in a bed in a house sometimes and the house is
ours
and we can
close the door
. So you can relax now. I'm going to tell you the story you want to hear, about Bud. I'm going to tell you about something that everyone knows happened out here in the human-approved three-dimensional world. Well, let's say something that made the news, which isn't the same thing, but it'll do in this case. And I'm finally going to tell you
why
it happened.

 

This was about twenty months ago as I'm writing now. I was back at the Institute, stoically showing myself to hordes of tourists (we've got a new amphitheater that'll seat one thousand and when I'm scheduled to do the Q&A it gets booked out way in advance) and grinding away at my dictionary. I do the dragon side of the dictionary better at Farcamp, and I do the human side of the dictionary better at the Institute. Caught between two worlds and don't belong to either? You bet.

I knew Martha wanted kids—although I can't remember ever especially hearing her say she wanted kids, it's just always been there, like Paris, since she was seven or so, and yes, when I was trying to explain “marriage” to Bud kids came into it. But she hadn't started talking about babies like maybe
now
till she was pretty sure I was mostly out of my bereft-mom phase. It has to be a little bit strange to have to deal with a twenty-two-year-old husband who's already been through the full pulverizing parental experience, in an all-new Short Intense Variant of the usual scheme, and is kind of off the wall. But Martha took it in her stride. I guess I'd also got over my earlier decision that nothing on Earth or in the outer reaches of the solar system would ever make me have human children if Lois and I lived through our little adventure, although that had something to do with the idea that these human children would be
Martha'
s babies.

Besides, there were babies in the atmosphere. Because I was pretty sure Gulp was pregnant. I don't know how I knew it, other than I'd got it off Bud, Lois and Gulp herself. (Although Gulp's thoughts/telling/sending/being were significantly different from Lois and Bud's, that made it kind of more likely to be what I was guessing somehow, sort of like how some languages you speak slightly differently if you're a man or a woman or a child. You speak pregnancy differently if you're the one who's pregnant, if you're a dragon.)

I hadn't told anyone but Martha because I didn't want to answer any of the 1,000,000 questions that would follow, or waste more time turning down the 1,000,000,000,000 study proposals the news would produce—although to be fair, poor Dad would have to do most of that part. We had a lot more help than we used to (Eric had
four
assistant keepers, for example, which is how he got to spend time at Farcamp, in spite of the renovated and expanded zoo) and Dad had as many graduate students as he wanted—in fact he had to keep turning them away—but no matter how much he delegated, pushy people were still always trying to go over everybody else's heads and talk to the big chief boss of the Institute, which was still Dad. Some things don't change.

Anyway Martha and I had cleared a little time one day to have a Paris morning, which meant we slept in, which is pretty much an alien concept at Smokehill. And we were talking about babies. Again. There's another reason I'd come around to the idea of human children (so long as they were Martha's). Are you with me here? Okay, so
you
get a gold star and a pat on the head: Maybe the next thing was to try to raise some dragon babies and some human babies
together
. Maybe the reason my headaches had been so bad from the beginning was because I was already fourteen and three quarters and like my fontanelles had closed years ago. I had no idea how long dragon gestation was, and my experience with Lois wasn't much to go on about normal dragonlet development, but if there was a human baby around about a year after some dragonlets were born which was maybe when normal dragonlets start spending serious time outside mom's pouch….

So not like we knew what our time frame was or anything, including how long it might take for us to provide the human side of our new equation, but it probably wouldn't hurt to start trying….

It should have been a lovely warm romantic morning—we'd had a few Paris mornings before and they'd been a huge success—but it wasn't, this time. It wasn't, because every time this idea of
children
touched me it was like being shot or hit by lightning. It got worse till I was literally jerking with the jolt of contact. I was too confused and (increasingly) upset to think about what might be causing it (aside from brain tumor redux of course) and it was Martha who said, “Someone's trying to get through to you. One of the dragons. Bud. It has to be Bud.”

And suddenly she was right—or rather as a result of what she'd said I was slowly orienting in the right direction like tuning your aerial, and I could start picking it up. First time, mind you, that anything of the sort had ever happened, long distance messages between us and our dragons, and I was finding it horribly uncomfortable and, you know,
deranging.
We both got out of bed and Martha made coffee, but I kept spilling it, and when I tried to get dressed she had to help me. It took about another hour of shivering and twitching before I could begin to hear it or read it or have a clue about it besides
urg
or whatever you say when someone keeps poking you and the poked place is getting sore. And what it said was:
Coming for you. Be ready.

Coming for me at the
Institute
? Have I mentioned lately that Bud is eighty feet long (plus tail) and his wingspread is easily three times that? And I may not have impressed on you enough that the Institute is pretty much buried among its trees. The only conceivable place for even a medium-sized dragon to touch down is just inside the gate, and even at that he's going to have to be one hell of a tricky flyer—and Bud isn't medium-sized. But if anybody was going to be a tricky flyer it
would
be Bud. Which was okay as far as it goes. Which wasn't far enough.

I did think briefly about some of the more open spaces on the far side of the gate, but I didn't think of them long. In the first place there aren't any wide open spaces on the other side of the gate for at least a couple of miles—sure there's a lot of parking lot but it's full of streetlight stanchions (yes, at our front door—but they're really dim and the fence blocks the light) and the row of garages runs down kind of the middle of it, and beyond that was the first (or last) of the motels and the gas stations.

And “letting the genie out of the bottle” didn't begin to cover what letting one of our dragons fly out through the gate would do to our lovely user-friendly new reputation, no matter how good the excuse turned out to be. And while I was sure
I
would see it as the perfect, ultimate, unchallengeable excuse, I couldn't be sure it would translate that way to all the people who only knew anything about Smokehill from reading about it over their coffee in an apartment building where they have to walk three blocks to see a tree, and their idea of “animals” is the Pekingese next door or the goldfish across the hall. And what had happened once could happen again, which had been the only point worth making about the poacher. So it was going to have to be the little squeezy-by-dragon-standards space inside the front gate.