by Tom Holt
On B deck mankind spent the voyage bickering, going to work and fighting a few small wars over the possession of the deck quoits area. There was no point, Osiris argued, saving the human race just to have it die of culture shock thirty-six hours into the voyage.
In the engine room, black-faced, sweaty and up to their elbows in grease, Odin, Thor and Frey argued the whole time about whose job it was to lube the main drive shaft bearing. On the blueprint of the ship, Osiris had crossed out the words Engine Room and written in Valhalla.
On the third day, the waters subsided.
The dove circled.
It was confused. It had only nipped out to gorge itself on oil seed rape, crap all over a few parked cars and sit on a telegraph wire. All the sudden blue wet stuff was distinctly unfamiliar.
Doves have pretty near three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, so their eyes have, properly speaking, no corners out of which to spot tiny specks of darkness in vast blue horizons.
After a few wary approaches to make sure the target area didn’t in fact conceal two men in camouflage clothing with shotguns and a flask of coffee, the dove put its wings back, glided down, turned into the wind and pitched on the branch of the olive tree that was, as far as it could tell, the only bit of perch space left in the whole world. It sat for a while, smugly congratulating itself, and then stretched out its neck and nibbled a leaf.
Yuk. Salty.
Don’t like it here.
With the leaf still in its beak, it spread its wings and flew away.
When the waters had all subsided, B deck awoke to find that, apart from a certain degree of residual dampness, the world was exactly as it had been; which was nice.
Except that it was clean. It had been a last-minute inspiration on Osiris’ part to dump sixteen billion tons of concentrated non-biological washing-up liquid over the side on the evening of day one, and an equivalent amount of fabric conditioner twenty-four hours later. By the time the oceans had receded back into their proper confines, you could have eaten your dinner off the pavement in Trafalgar Square without the unpleasant necessity of being a pigeon.
Behold, said the god to himself, I don’t make a new heaven and a new earth, because that would be wasteful and extremely traumatic for the inhabitants. I make the old heaven and the old earth, only rather less grubby.
Not that that’ll last; but one does one’s best, just as a mother always washes and irons regardless of a world full of mud, oil and chocolate. And this time, the god resolved, a little dirt and grime won’t matter very much.
This time, we will run things, but there’ll be a difference. We won’t let them know we’re doing it.
There were some gods, however, who had no wish to go back; and that wasn’t a problem, because there were always too many of them, even from the very beginning.
Understandable. It goes without saying that running the world is the ultimate in rotten jobs. It’s a god’s life, running the world.
For those gods who wanted out, behold he created a new Sunnyvoyde, far above the clouds in the temperate uplands of the Glittering Plains. The post of matron he gave to Sandra, who understood about gods (who are only people with an immunity to death, when all is said and done), shortly before sealing it off from the world below for ever. No reports ever filter down any more, except in very garbled form; but observers at the University of Chicopee Falls Department of Integrated Theology report that there is a seventy-nine-point-six per cent chance that rice pudding was reintroduced within six months of start of business, at the request of the residents.
Where am I?
The cloud wobbled slightly under him, and he grabbed at it. It was nothing but cloud. It righted itself and floated.
‘And what the fuck,’ Lundqvist demanded, ‘have you bastards done to my feet?’
Perfumed winds moved the cloud along, and there was a faint suggestion of the music of stringed instruments. Below, the world lay still and fresh, the sleep of the newborn.
‘What is this?’ Lundqvist wailed. ‘Leprosy?’
‘They’re your scales, mate,’ replied the Dragon King of the South-East, steering his cloud alongside. ‘Have a beer?’
Lundqvist shook his head. ‘What scales?’ he said. ‘Why have I got claws on the ends of my legs? And what are . . . ?’
He rose six inches or so into the air, panicked and flopped back on to the cloud.
‘Wings,’ replied the Dragon King. ‘You use them for flying and gliding mainly, though if you lie sort of on your side they make a really ace surfboard.’
‘Wings?’
‘What you need, my old mate,’ said the Dragon King, ‘is a mirror.’
Let there be a mirror. Lundqvist looked in it, blinked, closed his eyes and groaned.
‘I dunno,’ sighed the Dragon King, ‘bloody whingeing mortals. It’s really good being a dragon, you’ll see.’
‘How soon till it wears off?’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘Shit.’
‘I think,’ asserted the Dragon King, ‘this is your reward for, like, saving the universe and allowing the powers of darkness to be defeated. You ought to be pleased, you ungrateful bastard.’
‘Pleased.’
‘Suit yourself, pal.’ The Dragon King frowned and spurred on his cloud. Lundqvist panicked.
‘Hold on,’ he shouted.
‘G’day again.’
Lundqvist allowed his eyes to open again. ‘Just exactly what does this dragon thing involve?’ he asked. ‘I mean, what are dragons, for Chrissakes?’
The Dragon King preened himself and opened another can. ‘Dragons,’ he said, as if reciting a slowly learned lesson, ‘are the spirits of the blessed, endowed with the wings and the fish-arse cozzie and sent forth to supervise the smooth running of their alloted sector. I cover Australia,’ he added.
‘No kidding.’
‘Among my duties,’ the Dragon King continued, ‘are the dispensation of rain, particularly on cricket fields where the Aussies are losing, the regulation of the seasons and the protection of cattle against airborne diseases. Sort of like the Flying Doctor.’
‘How about zapping perjurors?’ Lundqvist enquired.
‘Nope.’
‘Incinerating bearers of false witness? Carbonising blasphemers and worshippers of false gods?’
‘Not our job, sport. The lighter fuel up the hooter is purely ceremonial.’
Lundqvist frowned, a difficult thing to do when your forehead is covered with thousands of interlapping molybdenum gold scales. ‘That’s all you do, is it? Water the garden and worm the dog?’
‘You could put it like—’
‘The hell with that, man. I’m a trained killer, not a gardener. You know, fingers not so much green as red to the elbow. If they think I’m going to piss about growing things for the rest of . . .
The Dragon King looked at him down a runway of glistening snout. ‘Steady on, cobber,’ he said mildly. ‘You’ve finished with all that stuff now; you’ve attained Enlightenment. ’
‘I have?’
‘Yeah, no worries.’
‘Oh shit!’
For the first hour, Lundqvist sulked.
Then it occurred to him that since he was a dragon, he had a right to breathe fire even if only for purely peaceful ends. He tried it. Good fun.
And if he was a dragon, he ought to be able to swoop dizzyingly out of a clear blue sky. Once you’d got used to the reverse G-forces trying to scoop your brain out through your ears, it was easy.
Add a nicely balanced lashable tail, claws which (he noticed) were two feet long and sharp as surgical instruments, teeth like cavalry sabres and little round red eyes that could pick out a fieldmouse at a mile and a half and, all told, it was a pretty neat package. Something you could grow to love, given time. An F-111 would have been preferable, but never mind.
And down there, even among the brassicas and legumes and Merinos and Charolais, there were still the good guys and the bad guys. Greenfly to exterminate
. Coltsfoot and deadly nightshade to bring in, dead or alive. Colorado beetles to track down and destroy. Tapeworms to hunt through the labyrinthine entrails of the lowing kine. Seen in the right light, from a sufficiently raked and refracted angle, there is true heroism in pesticide.
Pesticide. Getting rid of pests. The first thing we’ll do, we’ll kill all the lawyers.
No? Pity. Never mind; because while there’s mildew and blackspot and blackfly and ants, let’s face the music and dance.
In the warm radiance of the newly polished sun, the Dragon Without Portfolio opened his wings, hiccuped green fire and headed downwards.