Grendel (6 page)

Still nothing.

I made my mind a blank and fell, sank away like a stone through earth and sea, toward the dragon.

No use of a growl, a whoop, a roar, in the presence of that beast! Vast, red-golden, huge tail coiled, limbs sprawled over his treasure-hoard, eyes not firey but cold as the memory of family deaths. Vanishing away across invisible floors, there were things of gold, gems, jewels, silver vessels the color of blood in the undulant, dragon-red light. Arching above him the ceiling and upper walls of his cave were alive with bats. The color of his sharp scales darkened and brightened as the dragon inhaled and exhaled slowly, drawing new air across his vast internal furnace; his razorsharp tusks gleamed and glinted as if they too, like the mountain beneath him, were formed of precious stones and metals.

My heart shook. His eyes stared straight at me. My knees and insides were so weak I had to drop down on all fours. His mouth opened slightly. Bits of flame escaped.

“Ah, Grendel!” he said. “You’ve come.” The voice was startling. No rolling boom, as I would have expected, but a voice that might have come from an old, old man. Louder, of course, but not much louder.

“We’ve been expecting you,” he said. He gave a nervous laugh, like a miser caught at his counting. His eyes were heavy-lidded, minutely veined, wrinkled like an elderly mead-drinker’s. “Stand around the side, if you don’t mind, boy,” he said. “I get a cough sometimes, and it’s terrible straight out front.” The high dead eyelids wrinkled more, the corners of his mouth snaked up as he chuckled, sly, hardly hiding his malice. I quickly ducked around to the side.

“Good boy,” he said. He tipped his head, lowering an eye toward me.
“Smart
boy! He he he!” He lifted a wrinkled paw with man-length talons for nails and held it over my head as if to crush me with it, but he merely brought it down lightly, once, twice, three times, patting my head.

“Well, speak, boy,” he said. “Say ‘Hello there, Mr. Dragon!’” He cackled.

My throat convulsed and I tried to get my breath to speak, but I couldn’t.

The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose against the teeth as an ancient dog’s. “Now you know how
they
feel when they see
you,
eh? Scared enough to pee in their pants! He he!” He looked startled by an unpleasant thought, then cross. “You didn’t, did you?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said. “That’s valuable stuff you’re standing on. Boobies, hemorrhoids, boils, slaver (nyeh heh heh) …
Now.”
He moved his head as if adjusting his flaking neck to a tight metal collar and put on what looked like, for him, a sober expression, like an old drunk preparing a solemn face for court. Then, as if involuntarily, he cackled again. It was horrible, horrible! Obscene! He couldn’t stop himself. He cackled so hard a brilliant tear like a giant diamond rolled down his cheek. And still he couldn’t stop. He raised up the taloned paw and pointed at me. His head tipped back, laughing, blowing fire out his mouth and nostrils. He tried to say something, but the laughing got worse. He rolled over on his side, stretching up one vast, wrinkled wing for balance, covering his eyes with one claw, still pointing with the other, roaring with laughter and kicking a little with his two back feet. I felt cross all at once, though I didn’t dare show it. “Like a rabbit!” he brought out. “Nyee he he he! When you’re scared, you look—nyee he he he—exactly … (
gasp!
) exactly …”

I scowled and, realizing I had my hands out in front of me like a rabbit sitting up, I jerked them behind my back. My scowl of rage nearly finished him. He hooted, gasped, sobbed, began to choke with laughter. I forgot myself completely. I snatched up an emerald the size of a fist and pulled it back to throw it at him. He was sober instantly. “Put it down!” he said. He drew in breath and turned his huge head straight at me. I dropped it and fought to keep my bowels from moving down.

“Don’t touch,” he said. The old-man voice was as terrible now as the eyes. It was as if he’d been dead for a thousand years. “Never never
never
touch my things,” he said. Flame came out with the words and singed the hair on my belly and legs. I nodded, trembling all over. “Good,” he said. He stared at me a moment longer, then slowly, slowly turned his head away. Then, old womanish, as if he were, though still spiteful, slightly embarrassed, he got back up onto his treasure pile, stretched out his wings, and settled.

He was in the foulest of moods. I doubted that I could learn anything from him now. I’d be lucky to get away alive. I thought all at once about what he’d said: “Now you know how
they
feel when they see
you.”
He had a point. From now on I’d stay clear of them. It was one thing to eat one from time to time—that was only natural: kept them from overpopulating, maybe starving to death, come winter—but it was another thing to scare them, give
them heart attacks, fill their nights with nightmares, just for sport.

“Fiddlesticks,” the dragon said.

I blinked.

“Fiddlesticks, that’s what I said,” he repeated. “Why
not
frighten them? Creature, I could tell you things …” He rolled his eyes up under the heavy lids and made a noise,
“Glaagh.”
He remained that way, breathing hard with peevish anger. “Stupid, stupid,
stupid!”
he hissed. “The whole damned kit and caboodle. Why did you come here? Why do you bother me?—Don’t answer!” he added quickly, stopping me. “I know what’s in your mind. I know everything. That’s what makes me so sick and old and tired.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Be still!” he screamed. Flame shot clear to the cave-mouth. “I know you’re sorry. For right now, that is. For this one frail, foolish flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity. I’m unimpressed—No no! Be still!” His eye burst open like a hole, to hush me. I closed my mouth. The eye was terrible, lowering toward me. I felt as if I were tumbling down into it—dropping endlessly down through a soundless void. He let me fall, down and down toward a black sun and spiders, though he knew I was beginning to die. Nothing could have been more disinterested: serpent to the core.

But then he spoke after all, or rather laughed, and reality snapped back. Laughed, spoke, and broke my fall not as a kindness to me but because of his cold pleasure in knowing what he knew. I was in the cave again, and his horrible smile was snaking up his wrinkled cheek and his eye was once more half-closed. “You want the word,” he said. “That’s what you’ve come for. My advice is, don’t ask! Do as I do! Seek out gold—but not
my
gold—and guard it!”

“Why?” I said.

“BE STILL!” The cave went white with his fire, and the rock walls roared the echo back. Bats flew like dust in a granary, then returned to their places, a few at a time, until all was still again, motionless, as if lifeless. His wings, which had stretched out slightly, relaxed and settled.

I waited for what seemed hours, huddling, my fingers protecting my head.

Then: “You want to know about the Shaper.”

I nodded.

“Illusion,” he said. He half smiled, then let it go as if infinitely weary, sick of Time. “I know everything, you see,” the old voice wheedled. “The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a
whole different kind of mind.” He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. “We see from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout. Not that we
cause
things to fail, you understand.” He was testy all at once, as if answering an argument that had been put to him so often he was sick of it. “Dragons don’t mess with your piddling free will. Pah! Listen to me, boy.” The dead eye brightened. “If you with your knowledge of present and past recall that a certain man slipped on, say, a banana peel, or fell off his chair, or drowned in a river, that recollection does not mean that you
caused
him to slip, or fall, or drown. Correct? Of course it’s correct! It happened, and you know it, but knowledge is not
cause.
Of course! Anyone who argues otherwise is a stupid ignoramus. Well, so with me. My knowledge of the future does not
cause
the future. It merely
sees
it, exactly as creatures at your low level recall things past. And even if, say, I interfere—burn up somebody’s meadhall, for instance, whether because I just feel like it or because some supplicant asked me to—even then I do not change the future, I merely do what I saw from the beginning. That’s obvious, surely. Let’s say it’s settled then. So much for free will and intercession!”

The dragon’s eye closed to a slit. “Grendel!”

I jumped.

“Don’t look so bored,” he said. He scowled, black as midnight. “Think how
I
must feel,” he said.

I almost said “I’m sorry,” but caught myself.

“Man,” he said, then left a long pause, letting scorn build up in the cave like the venom in his breath. “I can see you understand them. Counters, measurers, theory-makers.

Games, games, games!” He snorted fire. “They only think they think. No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spiderwebs. But they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that! I could tell you a thousand tiresome stories of their absurdity. They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts. Insanity—the simplest insanity ever devised! Simple facts in isolation, and facts to connect them—ands and buts—are the
sine qua non
of all their glorious achievement. But there are no such facts. Connectedness is the essence of everything. It doesn’t stop them, of course. They build the whole world out of teeth deprived of bodies to chew or be chewed on.

“They sense that, of course, from time to time; have
uneasy feelings that all they live by is nonsense. They have dim apprehensions that such propositions as ‘God does not exist’ are somewhat dubious at least in comparison with statements like ‘All carnivorous cows eat meat.’ That’s where the Shaper saves them. Provides an illusion of reality—puts together all their facts with a gluey whine of connectedness. Mere tripe, believe me. Mere sleight-of-wits. He knows no more than they do about total reality—less, if anything: works with the same old clutter of atoms, the givens of his time and place and tongue. But he spins it all together with harp runs and hoots, and they think what they think is alive, think Heaven loves them. It keeps them going—for what that’s worth. As for myself, I can hardly bear to look.”

“I see,” I said. It was to some extent untrue.

The dragon smiled, seemed almost friendly for an instant. “You’ve been very attentive and thoughtful,” he said, “all things considered. So I will tell you about Time and Space.”

“Thank you,” I said, as heartily as I could manage. I had more than enough to think about, it seemed to me.

He scowled, and I said no more. He took a deep breath, shifted his forelegs to a position more comfortable, and, after a moment’s thought, began:

“In all discussions of Nature, we must try to remember the differences of scale, and in particular the differences of
time-span. We (by which I mean you, not us) are apt to take modes of observable functioning in our own bodies as setting an absolute scale. But as a matter of fact, it’s extremely rash to extend conclusions derived from observation far beyond the scale of magnitude to which the observation was confined. For example, the apparent absence of change within a second of time tells nothing as to the change within a thousand years. Also, no appearance of change within a thousand years tells anything concerning what might happen in, say, a million years; and no apparent change within a million years tells anything about a million million years. We can extend this progression indefinitely; there is no absolute standard of magnitude. Any term in this progression is large compared to its predecessor and small compared to its successor.

“Again, all special studies presuppose certain fundamental types of things. (Here I am using the word ‘thing,’ notice, in its most general sense, which can include activities, colors, and all other sensa, also values.) As lower minds function, study, or ‘science,’ is concerned with a limited set of various types of things. There is thus, in the first place, this variety of types. In the second place, there is the determination as to what types are exhibited in any indicated situation. For example, there is the singular proposition—‘This is green’—and there is the more general proposition—‘All those things are green.’ This type of
inquiry is what your usual reasoning takes care of. Undoubtedly such inquiries are essential in the initial stage of any study, for lower minds. But every such study must strive to get beyond it. Unfortunately—”