Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology (29 page)

I looked him in the eye, saw a little glint there, and said, “Are you that desperate for satisfaction these days?”

“Csilla, come on,” he said. “Why do you have to torture me like this?”

“You earned the torture,” I said. “Six times over. And now all you get are these pathetic grope jobs, and I hope it makes you happy.” I plucked his hand from my shirt and bent his pinky back. He gave a little yelp and sat heavily in his chair, nursing his finger.

“Next year you can try again, and maybe I'll be more in the mood,” I said. “But right now I've locked Single Uninterested. Do you want to try persuading the Fönök that the registration is a mistake?”

He turned sullen for a moment, and mumbled to himself, turning back to the board on his desk and swiping his finger from one edge to the upper center.

“That the flight plan?” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the chit. I pressed my thumb to it, and it lit up a pale blue. Satisfied, I put it back.

“Yes,” he said, suddenly all business again. That was Imre. That was also why I was the only Dragonfly who had lasted more than six months with him. He was sweet. When he was thinking about you, that is. When he wasn't, he was sweet on someone else, and ordinarily that went down poorly. I was too old to take much offense, so we alternately Coupled and, when he went after a younger piece of skirt, deCoupled. It was that, as much as anything, that kept him interested. “Your flight plan sends you to Temesvar first, then into the woods from there. You'll have a guide.” He fired me an impish grin, knowing how that would go over.

“I don't want a guide.” I set my mug on the desk with an audible bang.

“Hey, you could break that,” he said, his hands making little circles toward the mug.

“
I don't want a guide
,” I said, staccato.

“Well, you'll
have
one. You know the locals down there. They never let anyone from Euro go into the hills without a Roma guide. I picked someone brand new who you won't have had a fight with yet.” His tone told me we were done discussing it. “And you leave immediately. That carcass will be nothing but bones inside a week.”

“See you in a week, then,” I said. I made sure my boots clacked annoyingly on the rough wood of the station's tower, and mounted the ladder leading down from it. Rigging my boots to either side of the rails, I let go.

Gravity sucked me down and I lit on the floor like a dancer, or so I fancied, though I was sure it didn't look like that to anyone else—not after almost twenty years of falling down that same chute. Along the bright narrow hallway in which all pretense of ancient ranger station gave way to modernity. The hall gleamed white, framed in steel and open windows, natural fall sunshine laying all about. The arch of heaven overhead was mirrored by silver metal archways, designed, I supposed, to mimic Roman design from centuries, millennia ago.

At the end of the hallway was a small enclosure, a vestibule with twelve plasteel lockers and walls that opaqued for dressing, in case one wished privacy for that sort of thing. I didn't care, but I was dressed for flight anyway, except for my true leather flying helmet, perhaps the most precious thing I owned. I donned it, along with my Dragonfly goggles, shouldered my travel pack, and strode through the sliding doors onto the Aerie deck.

The full panorama of the Kopász Forest spread before me, trees beginning to show signs of autumn color. Over the next hill to the west lay the modest town of Nagykovácsi; to the east, behind me and downhill most of the way, was Buda, with its conjoined twin Pest across the river. I could hear none of the bustle, but if I squinted into the rising sun, I could sometimes make out the tall tubes of the solar elevators, rising from the Pesti plain like giant sunflowers. Fifty years ago, just before I was born, the old-timers tell me you could never see that far for the smoke and haze that always collected in the Budapest basin. But now, the smog was gone, like dew before the rising sun, which was actually a pretty good metaphor since it was the sun's power that had done it. Trees had reclaimed much of the sprawl, and I could see no signs of humanity other than the elevators off in the distance.

Except right here, at the Kopász Aerie, where the control tower stuck above the trees fifty meters, and the Aerie deck lay slightly above the tree line, for takeoff purposes.

Six gleaming Dragons lay quiet on the matte green of the deck, soaking up the sunshine like basking lizards.

I strolled to the end of the deck and stood in front of Kodály, the most versatile and cantankerous of all our Dragons. I laid my hands on either side of her pointed snout and leaned forward to let my forehead rest on her cloud-colored nose.

“Vess engem az Érdelybe, te isteni églovás, és ésszegyüljük meg a sárkányos testvéreiddel,
” I said.
Take me to Erdely, godlike rider of the sky, and unite us with your dragon sisters and brothers
. Everyone knows Dragons speak Hungarian, no matter what kind they are.

Kodály, Madeleine, and all the others in the Eyrie were the mechanical kind of Dragon, the kind humans could ride. The others, like the one downed in the forest, were the animal kind, the storied lizards of myth and legend. Undomesticable. Untameable. Unrideable. Still the undisputed masters of sky and mountain, but now in only a few places in the world. The job of the Dragon Corps, Dragonflies and their ground-based partners Dragoneyes, was to make those places larger and more numerous.

Except now one of them was dead. The satellite photo was definitive. What had killed it was a question I needed to answer. Dragons did die of old age, though they were extraordinarily long-lived, but when they did their wings stayed attached.

Kodály rumbled a bit under my hand as I trailed it down her flank to the saddle. She was warm, basking in the sun, soaking up the solar and storing it. Even if we ran into cloud, with the bright morning she'd probably stored enough power to make it all the way there.

I climbed into the saddle, what in cruder times might have been called a cockpit, and laid my satchel in the seat behind mine, closing the low-slung glass over the top. My boots fit into the stirrups, but they were long for my legs; probably Zsolt had ridden last. I pressed my knees to Kodály's sides, put my hands on her flanks, and concentrated.

She is metal and glass, they tell me. She is wire and photovoltaic cells, mesh and gossamer, they say. She cannot hear you. She does not know you. She is a machine, not a living thing.

But I do not believe them. She has not spoken to me, but she would. I knew in my head we humans had designed and built these lovelies, but my heart knew they were more than what we had built. They had souls. They were alive. And one day they would come alive for me.

I concentrated, listening not with my ears but with my skin, my breath, my mind. Speak to me, I said. A tremor ran through the twenty-meter body—was it just the tremor from my own desire?—but nothing more. I sighed and fished out the key, the chit Imre had given me.

I plugged it into the slot in the panel between my legs and the entire machine came to obvious life, emitting a hum that made my grey-dark hair rise off my shoulders and pool around my neck. In front of me figures and maps and data appeared in the air, and a short cowling of glass slid into place at the appropriate level, the stirrups shortening as well, and the skin of the beast folded up to enclose my legs. The wings, already spread wide, buzzed and fizzed, and she rose off the ground, waiting for the signal to gather speed across the deck and vault into the air.

“Hjah!” I leaned forward, and Kodály leapt beneath me, twisting her sinuous tail to turn us into the west wind, blowing lightly, ruffling the leaves, and without much more sound than a breath we were off the Aerie and climbing smoothly into the sky.

But I did not want to climb smoothly. I wanted to soar and weave, for it was in those times the Dragons became closest to flesh and bone, so I gripped handfuls of the pommel and reared back, pointing her snout straight upward. She was no supersonic craft, she could not climb like this forever, but changing the angle of the Dragon bought us more power from the sun, and for a moment she streaked upward, a flashing missile. I rode her as far as her strength allowed, and just at the moment when she began to flag, I pulled her into a barrel roll and let the glowing sun bake her underside while we fell. The trees rushed at us, the wind whistling past my head, and as we brushed the treetops we straightened and I listened closer than ever, straining for any response from Kodály other than the blind and senseless joy of flight itself.

I wished for it more than anything in my life. But there was nothing. Even I could not convince myself of a reaction that did not exist.

So. On to the mission. The whole skin of the Dragon collected and processed power and carried us steadily to the southeast, following the encoded flight plan. The morning was warming, but the autumn chill remained and I reached back for my scarf, stuffed in my pack. With that wrapped around my neck, flapping green and bronze behind me in the wind, I worked my way through the information encoded on the chit.

The dragon had been discovered early this morning, about first light. It was not one of the tracked and chipped dragons of the preserve in Ukraine, just over the border from Erdely—Transylvania, the HUD said, using the global Amerish vernacular—but a wild one from west of the border, from the Carpathian Mountains.
 

There was a large conclave of dragons in those mountains northeast of Kolozsvár (what the Romanians call Cluj), a growing number, one of the largest conclaves of wild dragons in the world. Dragons love mountains, but only a certain kind of mountain. The Alps once had some, but the white ice-breathers of those slopes were long since gone. The Himalayas boasted a fine roost, but they were so inaccessible that even tracking them by satellite was impossible. The Rockies in America. The Andes, mainly on the Chilean side. And the Carpathians, the craggy, forested mountains of what had been Hungary until one of the wars of two centuries ago. My Aerie patrolled three countries, extending well beyond the borders of states that still hated one another, down deep. But the Confederation superseded all, and we were its eyes and ears out here in the wild.

The dragon had gone down a few klicks northeast of Bistrita, near a commune called Telciu, so small I didn't know the old Hungarian name for it. The chit told me my guide would meet me at an inn in Nasaud, a tiny town halfway between the two, where the Dragoneyes had an outpost. By the internal calculations of the lightfibers inside Kodály's skin, we'd arrive there in about two hours.

At the speed we were flying—around 220 kph—my scalp should have been slowly peeled from my skull, were I fully outside. Most Dragonflies operated like pilots, glass and electrons completely enclosing them in their saddles, protected from the elements, but I preferred to operate with the saddle mostly open to the sky, a thin shield before me, and let come what may. How could I hope to wake the soul of the Dragon if I did not feel what she did?

* * *

I set down in an empty wheat field on the edge of the Nasaud commune, after circling it twice to make sure it had already been harvested. At this elevation autumn seized the crops early, and in late September they were already being baled to dry. The farmer came out from his house, tramping across his field to greet me.

“Ola,” he said, warily, but with respect in his eyes. Dragonflies were rare, and benefitted from centuries of tales about dragons, but we knew ourselves to be little more than airborne forest rangers, game wardens, though of the largest land game on earth.

“Ola,” I said, trying the Romanian, which I'm sure I pronounced as if I had cotton stuffed in my cheeks. “
Vă mulțumim pentru că ne- a utiliza domeniul tau.
” That was supposed to be “thank you for letting us use your field,” and it must have been fairly close to correct, because although he grimaced, he also nodded, his beard wagging. He answered in Amerish, though. “You be gone by nightfall. I have flocks.”

My Kodály eats sunlight, not sheep,
I wanted to say, but though she was unlikely to rise up with a roar and carry off his sheep, she did look like she might be dangerous, and when the Dragonflies are out, dragons are usually in the area. I couldn't blame him.

“I will be gone before then,” I said. “I need to go to the bar called Nikolai's to meet someone. Can you direct me?”

In response he swiveled and pointed back over his farmhouse. “You go to the road, you turn left. It is along there.”
 

I thanked him and started off across his field, with him still staring at Kodály. I wasn't concerned about that. She was far less fragile than she looked.

The main road in town was unpaved, packed earth. There was a tractor rolling quietly along it, loaded with hay, the driver sitting with his feet propped up on the engine, a stalk in his teeth. I moved over to let it by, caught my reflection in the wide solar panels along the side. I looked like an aviator from a century past, maybe more, with a fringe of hair falling loose under my leather cap. I remained thin, more from lack of appetite than exercise, though flying kept my arms and legs toned.

The contact's name was Ionescu, which is as popular a name as Nagy in Hungary or Jones in Wales, and I wondered if I might have difficulty identifying the guide. I wished I'd read Imre's brief on the way here.
 

My boots kicked up dust on the pebbly road, and I breathed the clean air of the eastern mountains, redolent of hay and barley, the yeasty smell of brewing beer, and … something else. Just a flash of it, a faint tang, borne on the breeze and carried away on it, a sharp smell like cloves and cinnamon, with a hint of smoke. I knew it, and it made me smile. Dragon country indeed.

I rounded the curve of the road where it crossed a brook, and there on the right was Nikolai's, although there was no sign to tell me so. Two round tables sat at the side of the road, bordered by a fence with a short gate, standing open, as was the door to the building behind it. At one table sat two people, a man and a woman, the man nuzzling the woman's neck, with his hands somewhere under the table. The woman didn't look particularly aroused by this; in fact, she reacted far more to my appearance at the bend in the road than she did to the man's ministrations.