by Neil Clarke
Lucas looked over at his friend and said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I can join under my own signature when I’m eighteen, not before,” Damian said. “No way out of here until then, unless I run away or win the lottery.”
“So are you thinking of running away?”
“I’m damned sure not counting on winning the lottery. And even if I do, you have to be eighteen before they let you ship out. Just like the fucking army.” Damian looked at Lucas, looked away. “He’ll probably bash all kinds of shit out of me, for taking off like this.”
“You can stay over tonight. He’ll be calmer, tomorrow.”
Damian shook his head. “He’ll only come looking for me. And I don’t want to cause trouble for you and your mother.”
“It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“Yeah, it would. But thanks anyway.” Damian paused, then said, “I don’t care what he does to me anymore. You know? All I think is, one day I’ll be able to beat up on him.”
“You say that but you don’t mean it.”
“Longer I stay here, the more I become like him.”
“I don’t see it ever happening.”
Damian shrugged.
“I really don’t,” Lucas said.
“Fuck him,” Damian said. “I’m not going to let him spoil this fine day.”
“Our grand adventure.”
“The wind’s changing again.”
“I think the fret’s moving in too.”
“Maybe it is, a little. But we can’t turn back, L. Not now.”
The bank of cloud across the horizon was about a klick away, reaching up so high that it blurred and dimmed the sun. The air was colder and the wind was shifting minute by minute. Damian put on his shirt, holding the jib sheet in his teeth as he punched his arms into the sleeves. They tacked to swing around a long reach of grass, and as they came about saw a white wall sitting across the water, dead ahead.
Lucas pushed the tiller to leeward. The boat slowed at once and swung around to face the wind.
“What’s the problem?” Damian said. “It’s just a bit of mist.”
Lucas caught the boom as it swung, held it steady. “We’ll sit tight for a spell. See if the fret burns off.”
“And meanwhile the tide’ll turn and lift off the fucking dragon.”
“Not for awhile.”
“We’re almost there.”
“You don’t like it, you can swim.”
“I might.” Damian peered at the advancing fret. “Think the dragon has something to do with this?”
“I think it’s just fret.”
“Maybe it’s hiding from something looking for it. We’re drifting backwards,” Damian said. “Is that part of your plan?”
“We’re over the river channel, in the main current. Too deep for my anchor. See those dead trees at the edge of the grass? That’s where I’m aiming. We can sit it out there.”
“I hear something,” Damian said.
Lucas heard it too. The ripping roar of a motor driven at full speed, coming closer. He looked over his shoulder, saw a shadow condense inside the mist and gain shape and solidity: a cabin cruiser shouldering through windblown tendrils at the base of the bank of mist, driving straight down the main channel at full speed, its wake spreading wide on either side.
In a moment of chill clarity Lucas saw what was going to happen. He shouted to Damian, telling him to duck, and let the boom go and shoved the tiller to starboard. The boom banged around as the sail bellied and the boat started to turn, but the cruiser was already on them, roaring past just ten metres away, and the broad smooth wave of its wake hit the boat broadside and lifted it and shoved it sideways towards a stand of dead trees. Lucas gave up any attempt to steer and unwound the main halyard from its cleat. Damian grabbed an oar and used it to push the boat away from the first of the trees, but their momentum swung them into two more. The wet black stump of a branch scraped along the side and the boat heeled and water poured in over the thwart. For a moment Lucas thought they would capsize; then something thumped into the mast and the boat sat up again. Shards of rotten wood dropped down with a dry clatter and they were suddenly still, caught amongst dead and half-drowned trees.
The damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been—a rip close to the top of the jib, long splintery scrapes in the blue paintwork on the port side—but it kindled a black spark of anger in Lucas’s heart. At the cruiser’s criminal indifference; at his failure to evade trouble.
“Unhook the halyard and let it down,” he told Damian. “We’ll have to do without the jib.”
“Abode Two. That’s the name of the bugger nearly ran us down. Registered in Norwich. We should find him and get him to pay for this mess,” Damian said as he folded the torn jib sail.
“I wonder why he was going so damned fast.”
“Maybe he went to take a look at the dragon, and something scared him off.”
“Or maybe he just wanted to get out of the fret.” Lucas looked all around, judging angles and clearances. The trees stood close together in water scummed with every kind of debris, stark and white above the tide line, black and clad with mussels and barnacles below. He said, “Let’s try pushing backwards. But be careful. I don’t want any more scrapes.”
By the time they had freed themselves from the dead trees the fret had advanced around them. A cold streaming whiteness that moved just above the water, deepening in every direction.
“Now we’re caught up in it, it’s as easy to go forward as to go back. So we might as well press on,” Lucas said.
“That’s the spirit. Just don’t hit any more trees.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Think we should put up the sail?”
“There’s hardly any wind, and the tide’s still going out. We’ll just go with the current.”
“Dragon weather,” Damian said.
“Listen,” Lucas said.
After a moment’s silence, Damian said, “Is it another boat?”
“Thought I heard wings.”
Lucas had taken out his catapult. He fitted a ball-bearing in the centre of its fat rubber band as he looked all around. There was a splash amongst the dead trees to starboard and he brought up the catapult and pulled back the rubber band as something dropped onto a dead branch. A heron, grey as a ghost, turning its head to look at him.
Lucas lowered the catapult, and Damian whispered, “You could take that easy.”
“I was hoping for a duck or two.”
“Let me try a shot.”
Lucas stuck the catapult in his belt. “You kill it, you eat it.”
The heron straightened its crooked neck and raised up and opened its wings and with a lazy flap launched itself across the water, sailing past the stern of the boat and vanishing into the mist.
“Ritchy cooked one once,” Damian said. “With about a ton of aniseed. Said it was how the Romans did them.”
“How was it?”
’Pretty fucking awful you want to know the truth.”
“Pass me one of the oars,” Lucas said. “We can row a while.”
They rowed through mist into mist. The small noises they made seemed magnified, intimate. Now and again Lucas put his hand over the side and dipped up a palmful of water and tasted it, telling Damian that fresh water was slow to mix with salt, so as long as it stayed sweet it meant they were in the old river channel and shouldn’t run into anything. Damian was sceptical, but shrugged when Lucas challenged him to come up with a better way of finding their way through the fret without stranding themselves on some mudbank
They’d been rowing for ten minutes or so when a long, low mournful note boomed out far ahead of them. It shivered Lucas to the marrow of his bones. He and Damian stopped rowing and looked at each other.
“I’d say that
was a foghorn, if I didn’t know what one sounded like,” Damian said.
“Maybe it’s a boat. A big one.”
“Or maybe you-know-what. Calling for its dragon-mummy.”
“Or warning people away.”
“I think it came from over there,” Damian said, pointing off to starboard.
“I think so too. But it’s hard to be sure of anything in this stuff.”
They rowed aslant the current. A dim and low palisade appeared, resolving into a bed of sea grass that spread along the edge of the old river channel. Lucas, believing that he knew where they were, felt a clear measure of relief. They sculled into a narrow cut that led through the grass. Tall stems bent and showered them with drops of condensed mist as they brushed past. Then they were out into open water on the far side. A beach loomed out of the mist and sand suddenly gripped and grated along the length of the little boat’s keel. Damian dropped his oar and vaulted over the side and splashed away, running up the beach and vanishing into granular whiteness. Lucas shipped his own oar and slid into knee-deep water and hauled the boat through purling ripples, then lifted from the bow the bucket filled with concrete he used as an anchor and dropped it onto hard wet sand, where it keeled sideways in a dint that immediately filled with water.
He followed Damian’s footprints up the beach, climbed a low ridge grown over with marram grass and descended to the other side of the sand bar. Boats lay at anchor in shallow water, their outlines blurred by mist. Two dayfishers with small wheelhouses at their bows. Several sailboats not much bigger than his. A cabin cruiser with trim white superstructure, much like the one that had almost run him down.
A figure materialised out of the whiteness, a chubby boy of five or six in dungarees who ran right around Lucas, laughing, and chased away. He followed the boy toward a blurred eye of light far down the beach. Raised voices. Laughter. A metallic screeching. As he drew close, the blurred light condensed and separated into two sources: a bonfire burning above the tide line; a rack of spotlights mounted on a police speedboat anchored a dozen metres off the beach, long fingers of light lancing through mist and blurrily illuminating the long sleek shape stranded at the edge of the water.
It was big, the sea dragon, easily fifteen metres from stem to stern and about three metres across at its waist, tapering to blunt and shovel-shaped points at either end, coated in close-fitting and darkly tinted scales. An alien machine, solid and obdurate. One of thousands spawned by sealed mother ships the UN had purchased from the !Cha.
Lucas thought that it looked like a leech, or one of the parasitic flukes that lived in the bellies of sticklebacks. A big segmented shape, vaguely streamlined, helplessly prostate. People stood here and there on the curve of its back. A couple of kids were whacking away at its flank with chunks of driftwood. A group of men and women stood at its nose, heads bowed as if in prayer. A woman was walking along its length, pointing a wand-like instrument at different places. A cluster of people were conferring amongst a scatter of toolboxes and a portable generator, and one of them stepped forward and applied an angle grinder to the dragon’s hide. There was a ragged screech and a fan of orange sparks sprayed out and the man stepped back and turned to his companions and shook his head. Beyond the dragon, dozens more people could be glimpsed through the blur of the fret: everyone from the little town of Martham must have walked out along the sand bar to see the marvel that had cast itself up at their doorstep.
According to the UN, dragons cruised the oceans and swept up and digested the vast rafts of floating garbage that were part of the legacy of the wasteful oil-dependent world before the Spasm. According to rumours propagated on the stealth nets, a UN black lab had long ago cracked open a dragon and reverse-engineered its technology for fell purposes, or they were a cover for an alien plot to infiltrate Earth and construct secret bases in the ocean deeps, or geoengineer the world in some radical and inimical fashion. And so on, and so on. One of his mother’s ongoing disputes was with the Midway Island Utopians, who were using modified dragons to sweep plastic particulates from the North Pacific Gyre and spin the polymer soup into construction materials: true Utopians shouldn’t use any kind of alien technology, according to her.
Lucas remembered his mother’s request to take photos of the dragon and fished out her phone; when he switched it on, it emitted a lone and plaintive beep and its screen flashed and went dark. He switched it off, switched it on again. This time it did nothing. So it was true: the dragon was somehow suppressing electronic equipment. Lucas felt a shiver of apprehension, wondering what else it could do, wondering if it was watching him and everyone around it.
As he pushed the dead phone into his pocket, someone called his name. Lucas turned, saw an old man dressed in a yellow slicker and a peaked corduroy cap bustling towards him. Bill Danvers, one of the people who tended the oyster beds east of Martham, asking him now if he’d come over with Grant Higgins.
“I came in my own boat,” Lucas said.
“You worked for Grant though,” Bill Danvers said, and held out a flat quarter-litre bottle.
“Once upon a time. That’s kind, but I’ll pass.”
“Vodka and ginger root. It’ll keep out the cold.” The old man unscrewed the cap and took a sip and held out the bottle again.
Lucas shook his head.
Bill Danvers took another sip and capped the bottle, saying, “You came over from Halvergate?”
“A little south of Halvergate. Sailed all the way.” It felt good to say it.
“People been coming in from every place, past couple of hours. Including those science boys you see trying to break into her. But I was here first. Followed the damn thing in after it went past me. I was fishing for pollack, and it went past like an island on the move. Like to have had me in the water, I was rocking so much. I fired up the outboard and swung around but I couldn’t keep pace with it. I saw it hit the bar, though. It didn’t slow down a bit, must have been travelling at twenty knots. I heard it,” Bill Danvers said, and clapped his hands. “Bang! It ran straight up, just like you see. When I caught up with it, it was wriggling like an eel. Trying to move forward, you know? And it did, for a little bit. And then it stuck, right where it is now. Must be something wrong with it, I reckon, or it wouldn’t have grounded itself. Maybe it’s dying, eh?”
“Can they die, dragons?”
“You live long enough, boy, you’ll know everything has its time. Even unnatural things like this. Those science people, they’ve been trying to cut into it all morning. They used a thermal lance, and some kind of fancy drill. Didn’t even scratch it. Now they’re trying this saw thing with a blade tougher than diamond. Or so they say. Whatever it is, it won’t do any good. Nothing on Earth can touch a dragon. Why’d you come all this way?”
“Just to take a look.”
“Long as that’s all you do I won’t have any quarrel with you. You might want to pay the fee now.”
“Fee?”
“Five pounds. Or five euros, if that’s what you use.”
“I don’t have any money,” Lucas said.
Bill Danvers studied him. “I was here first. Anyone says different they’re a goddamned liar. I’m the only one can legitimately claim salvage rights. The man what found the dragon,” he said, and turned and walked towards two women, starting to talk long before he reached them.
Lucas went on down the beach. A man sat tailorwise on the sand, sketching on a paper pad with a stick of charcoal. A small group of women were chanting some kind of incantation and brushing the dragon’s flank with handfuls of ivy, and all down its length people stood close, touching its scales with the palms of their hands or leaning against it, peering into it, like penitents at a holy relic. Its scales were easily a metre across and each was a slightly different shape, six- or seven-sided, dark yet grainily translucent. Clumps of barnacles and knots of hair-like weed clung here and there.
Lucas took
a step into cold, ankle-deep water, and another. Reached out, the tips of his fingers tingling, and brushed the surface of one of the plates. It was the same temperature as the air and covered in small dimples, like hammered metal. He pressed the palm of his hand flat against it and felt a steady vibration, like touching the throat of a purring cat. A shiver shot through the marrow of him, a delicious mix of fear and exhilaration. Suppose his mother and her friends were right? Suppose there was an alien inside there? A Jackaroo or a !Cha riding inside the dragon because it was the only way, thanks to the agreement with the UN, they could visit the Earth. An actual alien lodged in the heart of the machine, watching everything going on around it, trapped and helpless, unable to call for help because it wasn’t supposed to be there.
No one knew what any of the aliens looked like—whether they looked more or less like people, or were unimaginable monsters, or clouds of gas, or swift cool thoughts schooling inside some vast computer. They had shown themselves only as avatars, plastic man-shaped shells with the pleasant, bland but somehow creepy faces of old-fashioned shop dummies, and after the treaty had been negotiated only a few of those were left on Earth, at the UN headquarters in Geneva. Suppose, Lucas thought, the scientists broke in and pulled its passenger out. He imagined some kind of squid, saucer eyes and a clacking beak in a knot of thrashing tentacles, helpless in Earth’s gravity. Or suppose something came to rescue it? Not the UN, but an actual alien ship. His heart beat fast and strong at the thought.
Walking a wide circle around the blunt, eyeless prow of the dragon, he found Damian on the other side, talking to a slender, dark-haired girl dressed in a shorts and a heavy sweater. She turned to look at Lucas as he walked up, and said to Damian, “Is this your friend?”
“Lisbeth was just telling me about the helicopter that crashed,” Damian said. “Its engine cut out when it got too close and it dropped straight into the sea. Her father helped to rescue the pilot.”
“She broke her hip,” the girl, Lisbeth, said. “She’s at our house now. I’m supposed to be looking after her, but Doctor Naja gave her something that put her to sleep.”