The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (84 page)

This is the story behind the recent swathe of destruction just south of London.

His name was Jonathan Patek, but his father, Paul, always called him JoBoy. Lydia, his mother, never called him that until his father was dead. Paul Patek, the offspring of an Englishwoman and an Asian father, who was a tall, bulky, jovial man with a passion for cooking and eating curry, very much adhered to his Asian side, while working as a GP from his very English house in Surrey. Lydia, who worked as receptionist for Paul, preferred to be English. She picked at the curries, made a roast every Sunday, and ensured that JoBoy had the most English education possible.

When JoBoy thought of his father, he also always thought of the lovely, hot, throaty feel of swallowing a good curry.

Paul's death was a mystery. He set off one afternoon to visit a bedridden patient. "And I told him." Lydia said, "that doctors don't do home visits these days. It's a waste of their valuable time. And he simply laughed."

Two days later, Paul's body was discovered at the bottom of a nearby quarry. His car had been driven into gorse bushes at the top of the quarry and half overturned. It seemed to be suicide. Except, why was Paul's body as dry and emaciated as if he had starved to death? Nobody ever answered the question.

This reduction of his father to skin and bone troubled JoBoy horribly. He always thought of Paul as "full of juice", as he put it to himself. He could not understand it. There had not been time for Paul to starve.

Lydia made the best of things by selling the large house to a partnership of doctors, where she continued to work as receptionist, and moving into a smaller house nearby. JoBoy, while he finished his education, had to make do with a small glum room at the top of the new house, from which he could see one frail dusty tree and a patch of sky interrupted by television aerials. He was not happy, but this did not stop him growing taller and wider than his father before he had finished school.

"You'll follow in your father's footsteps, of course," Lydia said, and made arrangements. Consequently, JoBoy found himself a student doctor in the same teaching hospital as his father's, complete with white coat and stethoscope, following a consultant round the wards. He accepted this. He thought that perhaps, in time, he might discover the reason for Paul's sudden emaciation.

He had completed nearly a year of his training when he collapsed. It was a disease as mysterious as Paul's death. They thought it was a variant of glandular fever. At all events, JoBoy was now a patient where he had been a student and others studied him. He was there for six months, during which time he became weak as a kitten and nearly as emaciated as his father's corpse.

"I wish they'd let you come home!" Lydia said whenever she visited him.

In the spring, they did let JoBoy go home, out of pure bafflement. Lydia had to help him climb the stairs to his room and help him down again in the mornings. JoBoy's limbs creaked as he moved and his muscles felt to him like slabs of jelly. Worst, to his mind, was the way his brain had become an inert, shallow thing, incapable of any kind of speculation. I must work on my brain, he thought helplessly.

Lydia never let JoBoy be alone for long. She came home at midday and made him curry for lunch every day. Since she had never attended to the way Paul made curry, hers was a weak yellow stuff, full of large squashy raisins. JoBoy ate it listlessly for a week or so. Then he rebelled.

"I'll get my own lunch," he said. "I prefer bread and cheese anyway."

Lydia was possibly relieved. "If you're quite sure," she said. "I can go shopping again in the lunch hour then." She left the ingredients for curry carefully laid out on the kitchen table. JoBoy ignored them. He spent the days reading his father's medical books, trying to revive his brain, and obediently ate the curry when Lydia cooked it in the evenings. He several times tried to ask his mother medical questions while she supported his staggering person upstairs at night, but she always said, "You can't expect me to know anything about that, dear."

JoBoy concluded that he would have to cure himself.

He lay on the sofa downstairs and wondered how this was done. The disease seemed to have permeated every cell of his body, and, as it made him so weak and tired, it followed that he first needed some way of injecting energy into his body. He looked weakly around for some high-octane source. The fireplace was empty and he had no strength to light a fire. But he felt that fire was what he needed. Water too, he thought. Something elemental. But he had no strength. After a while, he tottered over to the patch of sun from the big window and lay down in it.

It worked. Sunlight did seem to infuse him in some way. After three days of lying in the sun, he had sufficient energy to remember that, among the schoolboy possessions randomly stashed in his bedroom, there was an old bunsen burner. He staggered up there and searched. The burner turned up in a black plastic sack rammed into the washbasin he never used. JoBoy looked from it to the taps. "Water," he said. "I have fire and water."

He tottered back downstairs and attached the bunsen burner to the unused inlet beside the fire. He lit it. Then he tottered to the kitchen and turned the cold tap on full. Then he collapsed on the sofa and tried to reconstruct himself.

It went slowly, so slowly that JoBoy sometimes despaired and used his precious energy in bursts of useless rage. And he had at all times not to become so immersed in his own cellular structure that Lydia would come home and find him with these energy sources burning and gushing. It would alarm her. She would think he was mad. She would worry about the gas bill and wasting water. So he set his alarm clock for the time of her return and hurried to turn off the tap and the burner before he heard her key in the door.

Slowly, oh slowly, for the rest of that year, he visualized each part of himself in turn and laboriously rebuilt it. At first, he had to do it cell by cell and it all seemed endless. But by Christmas, he found that he could reconstruct larger parts of himself in one go. He redid his liver, which made him feel much better. But there were strange side effects. The main one was that he kept feeling as if the body he was reconstructing was separate, outside him somewhere. He imagined it as lying beside him in the air next to his sofa. The other side effect was stranger. He found that he could turn off the bunsen burner and the kitchen tap without having to actually go and do it. Odd as this was, it saved JoBoy from having to get up before Lydia came home.

By this time, Lydia was saying, "You do seem better, but you're still so pale. Why don't you go out and get some fresh air?"

JoBoy groaned at first. But eventually, he redid his wobbly legs, wrapped himself in a coat, and crept down to the wood at the end of the road. There it smelt sharply of winter. The bare trees patterned the sky like the branching veins in his new-made eyeballs. He looked up and breathed deeply, sending clouds of breath into the branches. And the wood breathed back. JoBoy thought, This is an even better energy source than fire and water! He turned and crept home, almost invigorated. His legs—indeed, every bone in his body—were creaking in a strange new way. It felt as if they were lighter and more supple than before.

"Must have gone to feed the new body." he murmured as he plodded up his mother's front path. There was a strange feeling to his shoulder blades, like cobwebs growing there. He went to the wood every day after that. It seemed to enlarge his sense of smell. He smelt keenly the softness of rain and even more keenly the sting of frost. When the first intense yellow celandines appeared at the roots of trees, he smelt those too. He was not aware that they
had
a smell before that.

By this time, the way to the wood was less of a journey and more like a stroll. And with every journey, the cobwebby feel at his shoulders grew stronger. One day, as he stood staring at a bush of catkins, dangling yellow-green and reminding him of a Chinese painting, he realized that his shoulders rattled. They felt constricted. Uncomfortable, he spread the wings out. They were big and webby and weak as yet, but he could no longer deceive himself. He was becoming something else.

"I'd better redo my brain at once," he muttered as he walked home. "I need to make sense of this."

He remade his brain the next day. Not that it helped. A confusion of notions and images thundered into his head and left him so entirely bewildered that he found he was rolling about on the floor.

Eventually, he managed to stand up and make his way to the bathroom, where he stripped all his clothes off and studied himself in the mirror. He saw a thin, spindly human body. Definitely human. And so thin that it reminded him forcibly of his father's corpse. As he turned to pick up his clothes, he saw, sideways in the mirror, the large sketchy outline, dense and dark grey, of the thing that he was becoming. It had wings and a long spiked face. It went on four legs. The spines of its head continued in a line down to the tip of its arrow-headed tail. Its eyes blazed at him, through and somehow beyond his human eyes.

JoBoy turned his great spiked head and breathed gently from his huge fanged mouth on to the mirror. Steam—or was that smoke?—gushed out and made a rosy cloud on the glass. There was no question what he was.

That night, Lydia came out of her bedroom several times and implored JoBoy to stop pacing about the house. "Some of us have to work tomorrow," she said.

"Sorry," he said.

Around dawn, he thought that he understood what had happened to his father. Paul, like his son, had two bodies, one of them a dragon. This must account for his fiery relish for curry. When the dragon flew, it left its drained and lifeless human body temporarily behind. Paul's body had been found before the dragon could return to it. It followed then that JoBoy's father was alive still, without a human shape to return to.

JoBoy slept exhaustedly most of the next day. At night, he set out to find his father. He left his fine, thin, new-made body asleep in its bed and went on four legs down the road to the wood. It had come to him that the wood's energies might help him locate Paul.

The energies were tremendous that night. They poured through JoBoy, faintly illuminating his grey-blue dragon outline. He stood with his claws in moist twigs and his wings cocked and sent out great questing dragon calls. Around midnight, he caught a small distant answer. It was definitely a dragon voice. It seemed to be asking, faintly, for help from somewhere a long way south and east of the wood.

JoBoy's clawed feet scrambled as he galloped out into the road to find room to fly in. He spread the great webby wings. But it seemed they were not yet quite developed enough to get him airborne. He flapped hard and angrily, hearing the wind from the wings set the trees threshing, but he remained crouched in the road. His tail stabbed the tarmac in frustration.

Some of the noise he had thought was the trees turned out to be the sound of a neighbor's car returning from a theatre. Before JoBoy could move, he was skewered, dazzled, in the headlights, and, as he tried to move, the car swept through him and on, to turn into a driveway further down the road.

Nobody shouted. Nobody came to look. JoBoy discovered that he himself was quite undamaged. And he had felt nothing as the car went through him. I'm invisible! he thought. Then, I'm made of fog!

He crawled back home thinking that this was probably very useful indeed. He could hunt Paul by daylight. Since he was not in the least sleepy, he spent the hours until dawn strengthening his wings. It felt odd to work on a part of himself that did not seem to exist, but it seemed quite possible. He fell asleep on his sofa.

"Well, really," Lydia said as she hurried past on her way to work. "Are you ill again or just lazy?" She did not seem to expect an answer.

JoBoy made himself a leisurely breakfast and took his dragon form out of the house. He went warily at first, in case he proved to be visible after all. But no one seemed to notice, so he grew bold and rushed down the length of the road, flapping, flapping, until, to his great joy, he found himself in the air, planing above the springing green of the wood. He wheeled around above the trees and pointed himself in the direction the call for help had come from, and flew there.

It was hard work at first, until he discovered how to catch breezes and thermals without needing to flap his wings, and he kept being distracted too by the increasingly rural land that passed underneath him. It was so green, so full of life. Before long, he saw what he took to be an oasthouse, and decided that he must be in Kent. He sent out a long, cautious dragon call.

The reply was instant. "Help! Oh, thank goodness! Help! Here!" It sounded like a female. Puzzled, JoBoy came planing down onto deliciously fragrant new grass, into what felt like an old common. The oasthouse, plainly converted to living space, stood on one side. The rest was surrounded by hedges, fruit trees, and comely old cottages. "Where are you?" JoBoy called.

The reply was piercingly from under his great clawed feet. "Here! Underneath! Let me out!"

JoBoy looked down. In the grass, almost between his talons, there was a small boulder embedded in the turf. He pawed at it dubiously. It felt queer, as if there was more to it than just a boulder—almost as if, he had to admit to himself, there was some kind of magic involved.

"Just move the stone!" the voice implored him from underground. "I've been here so long!"

JoBoy flexed his great claws, dug both feet under the sides of the boulder, and pulled. And heaved. He would never have shifted it, but for a high speed train that went screaming past in the mid-distance, presumably on its way to France via the Channel tunnel. JoBoy thought, Ah! Energy source! and felt power surge into him. He saw his forelegs glow foggy white with it as he heaved at the stone again.

It rolled away on its side. Blue mist instantly filled the earthy depression it had left, bulged, crested, and took form as a blue female dragon, slightly smaller than JoBoy. She put her jagged muzzle up and breathed in the power from the rapidly disappearing train. He saw her glow with it and enlarge slightly. "Oh good!" she said. "I knew there was a lot of power around nowadays, but I never could use it to break that spell. Thank you." She rested, pulsing for a moment, and then asked, "Who are you? You're new, aren't you?"