If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again

by Zen Cho

  If at First You Don't Succeed,

  Try, Try Again

  By Zen Cho

  Edited by Joel Cunningham

  Cover art & design by Shirley Jackson

  Originally published on the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog

  ©2018 Zen Cho

  Cover art ©2018 Shirley Jackson

  The first thousand years

  It was time. Byam was as ready as it would ever be.

  As a matter of fact, it had been ready to ascend some 300 years ago. But the laws of heaven cannot be defied. If you drop a stone, it will fall to the ground—it will not fly up to the sky. If you try to become a dragon before your thousandth birthday, you will fall flat on your face, and all the other spirits of the five elements will laugh at you.

  These are the laws of heaven.

  But Byam had been patient. Now it would be rewarded.

  It slithered out of the lake it had occupied for the past 100 years. The western shore had recently been settled by humans, and the banks had become cluttered with humans' usual mess – houses, cultivated fields, bits of pottery that poked Byam in the side.

  But the eastern side was still reserved to beasts and spirits. There was plenty of space for an imugi to take off.

  The mountains around the lake said hello to Byam. (It was always safer to be polite to an imugi, since you never knew when it might turn into a dragon.) The sky above them was a pure light blue, dotted with clouds like white jade.

  Byam's heart rose. It launched itself into the air, the sun warm on its back.

  I deserve this. All those years studying in dank caves, chanting sutras, striving to understand the Way...

  For the first half-millennium or so, Byam could be confident of finding the solitude necessary for study. But more recently, there seemed to be more and more humans everywhere.

  Humans weren't all bad. You couldn't meditate your way through every doctrinal puzzle, and that was where monks proved useful. Of course, even the most enlightened monk was wont to be alarmed by the sudden appearance of a giant snake wanting to know what they thought of the Sage's comments on water. Still, you could usually extract some guidance from them, once they stopped screaming.

  But spending too much time near humans was risky. If one saw you during your ascension, that could ruin everything. Byam would have moved when the humans settled by the lake, if not for the ample supply of cows and pigs and goats in the area. (Byam had grown tired of seafood.)

  It wasn't always good to have such abundance close to hand, though. Byam had been studying extra hard for the past decade in preparation for its ascension. Just last month, it had been startled from a marathon meditation session by an enormous growl.

  Byam had looked around wildly. For a moment it thought it had been set upon, maybe by a wicked imugi—the kind so embittered by failure it pretended not to care about the Way, or the cintamani, or even becoming a dragon. But there was no one around, only a few fish beating a hasty retreat.

  Then, another growl. It was coming from Byam's own stomach. Byam recollected that it hadn't eaten in about five years.

  Some imugi fasted to increase their spiritual powers. But when Byam tried to get back to meditating, it didn't work. Its stomach kept making weird gurgling noises. All the fish had been scared off, so Byam popped out of the water, looking for a snack.

  A herd of cows was grazing by the bank, as though they were waiting for Byam.

  It only intended to eat one cow. It wanted to keep sharp for its ascension. Dragons probably didn't eat much. All the dragons Byam had ever seen were svelte, with perfect scales, shining talons, silky beards.

  Unfortunately Byam wasn't a dragon yet. It was hungry, and the cows smelled so good. Byam had one, and then another, and then a third, telling itself each time that this cow would be the last. Before it knew it, almost the whole herd was gone.

  Byam cringed remembering this, but then put the memory away. Today was the day that would change everything. After today, Byam would be transformed. It would have a wish-fulfilling gem of its own—the glorious cintamani, which manifested all desires, cured afflictions, purified souls and water alike.

  So high up, the air was thin, and Byam had to work harder to keep afloat. The clouds brushed its face damply. And—Byam's heart beat faster—wasn't that winking light ahead the glitter of a jewel?

  Byam turned for its last look at the earth as an imugi. The lake shone in the sun. It had been cold, and miserable, and lonely, full of venomous water snakes that bit Byam's tail. Byam had been dying to get away from it.

  But now, it felt a swell of affection. When it returned as a dragon, it would bless the lake. Fish would overflow its banks. The cows and pigs and goats would multiply beyond counting. The crops would spring out of the earth in their multitudes…

  A thin screechy noise was coming from the lake. When Byam squinted, it saw a group of little creatures on the western bank. Humans.

  One of them was shaking a fist at the sky. "Fuck you, imugi!"

  "Oh shit," said Byam.

  "Yeah, I see you! You think you got away with it? Well, you thought wrong!"

  Byam lunged upwards, but it was too late. Gravity set its teeth in its tail and tugged.

  It wasn't just one human shouting, it was all of them. A chorus of insults rose on the wind:

  "Worm! Legless centipede! Son of a bitch! You look like fermented soybeans and you smell even worse!"

  Byam strained every muscle, fighting the pull of the earth. If only it had hawk's claws to grasp the clouds with, or stag's antlers to pierce the sky…

  But Byam wasn't a dragon yet.

  The last thing it heard as it plunged through the freezing waters of the lake was a human voice shrieking:

  "Serves you right for eating our cows!"

  The second thousand years

  If you wanted to be a dragon, dumb perseverance wasn't enough. You had to have a strategy.

  Humans had proliferated, so Byam retreated to the ocean. It was harder to get texts in the sea, but technically you didn't need texts to study the Way, since it was inherent in the order of all things. (Anyway, sometimes you could steal scriptures off a turtle on a pilgrimage, or go onshore to ransack a monastery.)

  But you had to get out of the water in order to ascend. It was impossible to exclude the possibility of being seen by humans, even in the middle of the ocean. It didn't seem to bother them that they couldn't breathe underwater; they still launched themselves onto the waves on rickety assemblages of dismembered trees. It was as if they couldn't wait to get on to their next lives.

  That was fine. If Byam couldn't depend on the absence of humans, it would use their presence to its advantage.

  It was heaven's will that Byam should have failed the last time; if heaven wasn't ready to accept Byam, nothing could change that, no matter how diligently it studied or how much it longed to ascend.

  As in all things, however, when it came to ascending, how you were seen mattered just as much as what you did. It hadn't helped back then that the lake humans had named Byam for what it was: no dragon, but an imugi, a degraded being no better than the crawling beasts of the earth.

  But if, as Byam flashed across the sky, a witness saw a dragon… that was another matter. Heaven wasn't immune to the pressures of public perception. It would have to recognise Byam then.

  The spirits of the wind and water were too hard to bluff; fish were too self-absorbed; and there was no hope of hoodwinking the sea dragons. But humans had bad eyesight, and a tendency to see things that weren't there. Their capacity for self-deception was Byam's best bet.

  It chose a good point in the sky, high enough that it
would have enough cloud matter to work with, but not so high that the humans wouldn't be able to see it. Then it got to work.

  It labored at night, using its head to push together masses of cloud and its tail to work the fine detail. Byam didn't just want the design to look like a dragon. Byam wanted it to be beautiful—as beautiful as the dragon Byam was going to be.

  Making the sculpture was harder than Byam expected. Cloud was an intransigent medium. Wisps kept drifting off when Byam wasn't looking. It couldn't get the horns straight, and the whiskers were wonky.

  Sometimes Byam felt like giving up. How could it make a dragon when it didn't even know how to be one?

  To conquer self-doubt, it chanted the aphorisms of the wise:

  Nobody becomes a dragon overnight.

  Real dragons keep going.

  A dragon is only an imugi that didn't give up.

  It took 100 years longer than Byam had anticipated before the cloud was finished.

  It looked like a dragon, caught as it sped across the sky to its rightful place in the heavens. In moonlight it shone like mother of pearl. Under the sun it would glitter with all the colors of the rainbow.

  As Byam put its final touches on the cloud, it felt both pride and a sense of anti-climax. Even loss. Soon Byam would ascend—and then what would happen to its creation? It would dissipate, or dissolve into rain, like any other cloud.

  Byam managed to find a monk who knew about shipping routes and was willing to dish in exchange for not being eaten. And then it was ready. As dawn unfolded across the sky on an auspicious day, Byam took its position behind its dragon-cloud.

  All it needed was a single human to look up and exclaim at what they saw. A fleet of merchant vessels was due to come this way. Among all those humans, there had to be one sailor with his eyes on the sky—a witness open to wonder, prepared to see a dragon rising to glory.

  §

  "Hey, captain," said the lookout. "You see that?"

  "What is it? A sail?"

  "No." The lookout squinted at the sky. "That cloud up there, look. The one with all the colors."

  "Oh wow!" said the captain. "Good spot! That's something special, for sure. It's a good omen!"

  He clapped the lookout on the back, turning to the rest of the crew. "Great news, men! Heaven smiles upon us. Today is our day!"

  Everyone was busy with preparations, but a dutiful cheer rose from the ship.

  The lookout was still staring upwards.

  "It's an interesting shape," he said thoughtfully. "Don't you think it looks like a… "

  "Like what?" said the captain.

  "Like, um… " The look-out frowned, snapping his fingers. "What do you call them? Forget my own head next! It looks like a – it's on the tip of my tongue. I've been at sea for too long. Like a, you know – "

  §

  Byam couldn't take it anymore.

  "Dragon!" it wailed in agony.

  An imugi has enormous lungs. Byam's voice rolled across the sky like thunder, its breath scattering the clouds—and blowing its creation to shreds.

  "Horse!" said the lookout triumphantly. "It looks like a horse!"

  "No no no," said Byam. It scrambled to reassemble its sculpture, but the cloud matter was already melting away upon the winds.

  "Thunder from a clear sky!" said the captain. "Is that a good sign or a bad sign?"

  The lookout frowned. "You're too superstitious, captain – hey!" He perked up, snatching up a telescope. "Captain, there they are!"

  Byam had been so focused on the first ship that it hadn't seen the merchant fleet coming. Then it was too busy trying to salvage its dragon-cloud to pay attention to what was going on below.

  It was distantly aware of fighting between the ships, of arrows flying, of the screams of sailors as they were struck down. But it was preoccupied by the enormity of what had happened to it—the loss of hundreds of years of steady, hopeful work.

  It wasn't too late. Byam could fix the cloud. Tomorrow it would try again—

  "Ah," said the pirate captain, looking up from the business of slaughter. "An imugi! It's good luck after all. One last push, men! They can't hold out for long!"

  It would have been easier if Byam could tell itself the humans had sabotaged it out of spite. But it knew they hadn't. As Byam tumbled out of the sky, it was the impartiality of their judgment that stung the most.

  The third thousand years

  Dragons enjoyed sharing advice about how they’d gotten where they were. They said it helped to visualise the success you desired.

  "Envision yourself with those horns, those whiskers, three claws and a thumb, basking in the glow of your own cintamani," urged the Dragon King of the East Sea in his popular memoir Sixty Thousand Records of a Floating Life. "Close your eyes. You are the master of the elements! A twitch of your whisker and the skies open. At your command, blessings – or vengeance – pour forth upon all creatures under heaven! Just imagine!"

  When Byam was low at heart, it imagined.

  It got fed up of the sea: turtles kept chasing it around, and whale song disrupted its sleep. It moved inland, and found a quiet cave where it could study the Way undisturbed. The cave didn't smell great, but it meant Byam never had to go far for food, so long as it didn't mind bat. (Byam came to mind bat.)

  Byam focused on the future.

  This time, there would be no messing around with dragon-clouds. Byam had learned from its mistakes. There was no tricking heaven. This time it would present itself at the gates with its record of honest toil, and hope to be deemed worthy of admission.

  It should have been nervous, but in fact it was calm as it prepared for what it hoped would be its final attempt. Certainty glowed in its stomach like a swallowed ember.

  It had been a long time since Byam had left its cave, which it had chosen because it was up among the mountains, far from any human settlement. Still, Byam intended to minimise any chance of disaster. It was going to shoot straight for the skies, making sure it was exposed to the judgment of the world for as brief a time as possible.

  But the brightness outside took it aback. Its eyes weren't used to the sun's glare anymore. When Byam raised its head, it got caught in a sort of horrible basket, full of whispering voices. A storm of ticklish green scraps whirled around it.

  It reared back, hissing, before it recognised what had attacked it. Byam had forgotten about trees.

  It leapt into the air, shaken. To have forgotten trees… Byam had not realised it had been so long.

  Its unease faded as it rose ever higher. The crisp airs of heaven blew away disquiet. Ahead, the clouds glowed as though they reflected the light of the Way.

  §

  Leslie almost missed it.

  She never usually did this kind of thing. She was indoorsy the way some people were outdoorsy, as attached to her sofa as others were to endorphins and bragging about their marathon times. She'd never thought of herself as someone who hiked.

  But she hadn't thought of herself as someone who'd fail her PhD, or get dumped by her boyfriend for her best friend. The past year had blown the bottom out of her ideas about herself.

  She paused to drink some water and heave for breath. The view was spectacular. It seemed meaningless.

  She was higher up than she'd thought. What if she took the wrong step? Would it hurt much to fall? Everyone would think it was an accident…

  She shook herself, horrified. She wouldn't do anything stupid, Leslie told herself. To distract herself, she took out her phone, but that proved a bad idea: this was the point at which she would have texted Jung-wook before.

  She could take a selfie. That's what people did when they went hiking, right? Posted proof they'd done it. She raised her phone, switching the camera to front-facing mode.

  She saw a flash in the corner of the screen. It was sunlight glinting off scales.

  Leslie's mouth fell open. It wasn't—it couldn't be. She hadn't even known they were found in America.

  The camera wen
t off. Leslie whirled around, but the sky was empty. It was nowhere to be seen.

  But someone up there was looking out for Leslie after all, because when she looked back at her phone, she saw that she'd caught it. It was there. It had happened. There was Leslie, looking dopey with her red face and her hair a mess and her mouth half-open—and in the background, arced across the sky like a rainbow, was her miracle. Her own personal sign from heaven that things were going to be OK.

  §

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  The turning of the worm

  "Dr. Han?" said the novice. "Yeah, her office is just through there."

  Sure enough, the name was inscribed on the door in the new script the humans used now: Dr Leslie Han. Byam's nemesis.

  Its most recent nemesis. If it had been only one offence, Byam wouldn't even be here. It was the whole of Byam's long miserable history with humans that had brought it to this point.

  It made itself invisible and passed through the door.

  The monk was sitting at a desk, frowning over a text. Byam was not good at distinguishing one human from another, but this particular human's face was branded in its memory.

  It felt a surge of relief.

  Even with the supernatural powers accumulated in the course of three millennia of studying the Way, it had taken Byam a while to figure out how to shapeshift. The legs had been the most difficult part. Byam kept giving itself tiger feet, the kind dragons had.

  It could have concealed the feet under its skirts, since no celestial fairy ever appeared in anything less than three layers of silk. But Byam wouldn't have it. It was pathetic, this harking back to its stupid dreams. It had worked at the spell until the feet came right. If Byam wasn't becoming a dragon, it would not lower itself to imitation. No part of it would bear any of the nine resemblances.

  But there were consolations available to imugi who reconciled themselves to their fate. Like revenge.

  The human was perhaps a little older than when Byam had last seen her. But she was still alive—alive enough to suffer when Byam devoured her.