by Tom Holt
Gordon woke up at two a.m. with a blinding headache and various other symptoms consistent with acute alcohol deficiency. Fortuitously, he had a bottle or two of homoeopathic medicine about the place, and was able to prescribe himself a suitable dose; but he was realistic enough to accept that he wasn’t going to be able to squeeze any more sleep out of that night. That meant he needed something to do for the next few hours.
The silly website, he suddenly thought, the one with the dragons; nothing like a little goofball comedy to help pass the time. He turned on the computer, waded through the preliminary garbage, and clicked on a promising-looking link headed The Phantom Menace.
The page took a long time to load, as if it wasn’t happy about being woken up in the early hours of the morning. When it finally came through, however, Gordon was disappointed. The only thing on the screen was a big picture of a dragon, one of those Chinese New Year efforts, framed by the cross-hairs of an optical sight, and underneath, the words PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, in eerily flickering blue and gold lettering. This struck Gordon as marginally too obsessive to be funny - up till then he’d still had a vague, lingering suspicion that it was all a very delicate and subtle spoof - and he was about to get rid of it when the picture disintegrated and re-formed as something rather more humanoid: a black-and-white mugshot of someone who looked like a fusion of God (as depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), Big Brother and Colonel Sanders.
Gordon was staring at this striking image and wondering why the words underneath hadn’t changed when it too dissolved into a bee-swarm of pixels and came back together again as a large goldfish.
Gordon blinked three times. In an earlier, less jaded phase of his life (Marilyn, who to the best of his recollection had been after Louisa but before Trudy) he’d owned a fish tank that from time to time had contained fish. True, they’d tended to have the life expectancy of a second lieutenant in the trenches in 1914, but in between ice-cream-tub funerals he’d learned to tell the difference between, say, a bog-standard fairground-issue goldfish and a pedigree Japanese Koi - the latter had particularly stuck in his mind because of their rigid adherence to the samurai code, which led them to expire melodramatically whenever their honour was impugned by, say, a dirty water filter or economy-grade ants’ eggs - and the thing on the screen, while undoubtedly a goldfish, wasn’t like any other make, brand or marque of goldfish he’d ever come across.
And still the caption at the bottom of the screen stayed the same:
PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE
- which was in itself a contradiction in terms; the most any one of the three images could be was Public Enemy Number l (a), (b) or (c). Likewise he found it hard to imagine how a goldfish, even a bizarre mutant Ninja Koi, could be a public enemy of any description. It could die petulantly at you or it could swim backwards away from you while opening and shutting its mouth; that aside, it was as powerless and ineffectual as an MEP.
While he was trying to puzzle it out, the picture changed back into the New Year dragon, followed by a repeat of the humanoid version, with the fish bringing up the rear. Rather than sit through the show another time, Gordon clicked the kill button and turned the computer off. For some reason, though, the images stayed behind in his mind, like the forgotten guests who suddenly appear from behind the sofa on the morning after a really serious party. The human in particular; something familiar about that face - he was sure he’d seen it, or something very like it, not so long ago.
It wasn’t long before the face was chasing him down a long, dark tunnel whose walls and floor were lined with viewscreens on which a goldfish in SS uniform threatened the world with storms, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, followed by a warm front coming in from the south-west and the possibility of black ice in Hell. Fortunately, all this turned out to be a dream, from which Gordon woke with a stiff neck and a jackhammer headache five minutes after he should have left the house if he didn’t want to be horrendously late for work.
All that witters isn’t guilt; but a nagging conscience could be an uncomfortable companion, especially when you hadn’t got much else to occupy your mind. After a day spent in making tiny, meaningless jobs for herself to do while keeping out of Paul’s and Susan’s way as best she could in a small, open-plan office, Karen was getting to the point where she couldn’t hear herself think over the incessant muttering of the small, sharp voice inside her head -
. . . don’t know how you could’ve been so thoughtless, going off like that without a word to anybody, they’ll be worried sick, your poor father, he must be frantic, not knowing where you are, if someone did that to you you wouldn’t like it, not one bit, the least you could have done was leave a note or something but oh no, you just took it into your head to go swanning off without a care in the world, typical of you, no consideration for other people, for all we knew you could have been lying bleeding to death in a ditch somewhere, most of the time you just don’t think . . .
- which in turn had set off the other little guilt goblins, the ones who went -
. . . look at the state of this place, that carpet hasn’t seen a Hoover in six months, dirty laundry just left lying about, it wouldn’t kill you to wash up the cups and plates after you’ve used them, now would it, is this really what you want to do with your life, it’s just as well your poor mother isn’t around to see how you’re frittering your time away like this. it’d break her heart. and will you just look at the dust on these shelves . . .
- in a continuous unholy counterpoint, until she’d have gone out and had her head amputated if the NHS waiting lists hadn’t meant that death from extreme old age was a rather more probable outcome.
Since surgery wasn’t an option, there was only one thing she could do to get rid of the nuisance. She’d have to call home and talk to her father. This would be both traumatic and extremely risky, since her father was nobody’s fool and wouldn’t have much difficulty in having the call traced; and before she knew what day of the week it was, she’d be scooped up by a couple of extremely polite, utterly ruthless dragons in grey suits and dark glasses, and find herself on the wrong side of the desk in her father’s study being asked to explain herself; something which, for various reasons, she didn’t want to do.
The trick, then, was to find a way of phoning home without being too obvious about it. Karen wished now that she’d paid more attention in class when they were doing ninja field operations at school; but she’d found all that stuff unbearably tedious, and had tended to sit at the back of the room, staring out of the window and creating entirely gratuitous rainbows to confuse and delight the world below . . . There were, she knew, many ways of bouncing signals off clouds and threading them through the eyes of storms and plaiting them into sun-beams until nobody stood a chance of figuring out where they’d come from, but she simply couldn’t remember enough of them to do any good. The only technique she was sure she’d be able to get right (embedding a message in a satellite TV broadcast, with a built-in fragmentation code to separate it from the carrier wave once it hit the orbiting satellite) was so elementary that young dragons in Sixth Grade were set examples to decode for homework; there was also an inherent danger of uncontrollable secondary defragmentation, which would result in her message ending up on twenty million TV screens while her father got the second half of that day’s Melrose Place.
But she couldn’t think of any other way of going about it; so she resolved to keep the message short and sweet, stick to the point and hope for the best. She jotted down a rough draft on the back of some sales particulars -
Hi, Dad. Sorry I haven’t been in touch before. I’m perfectly all right, so please don’t worry. This is something I’ve got to do; I know you don’t understand, but please just bear with me. I’m taking good care of myself; promise . . .
She stopped and read back what she’d written; it seemed hopelessly banal, almost meaningless, as if she’d copied out a set form of letter from a book of precedents. It was, however, the best she could do
for now, and if she thought about it any longer she’d get cold claws and not do anything at all . . .
Karen closed her eyes - her two human eyes, that was. Her third eye scanned the air above the roof of the building, looking for the shapes and colours of a suitable broadcast signal. Most of the time, she kept her third eye firmly shut for fear of being hopelessly distracted - her human brain interpreted the messages from her dragon retina as the most dazzlingly strange and beautiful firework display imaginable, bewildering symphonies of tones and shades of colour swirling and flowing in ever-changing ripples and eddies -
Stop it, she told herself. Behave. No time for any of that. It was Indulgence of the worst possible sort to sit staring at pretty patterns in the sky; just because she happened to be wearing a human skin at the moment, that was no justification for falling into sloppy, small-minded human habits. Fancy dress or no fancy dress, she was still herself. Mustn’t lose sight of that, ever.
She concentrated, and fairly soon caught sight of a suitable-looking signal with a hole in it about the right size. It had been a while since she’d done anything like this, even as a dragon - obviously it was harder to do with only a human body to work with, rather like trying to power an electric fence off a torch battery. But she managed in the end (she even remembered to double-fold the hem of the carrier wave and tie off the sonic wake with a Turk’s head reef knot; her fourth-grade teacher would’ve been proud of her) and watched the tiny data packet spiralling upwards in a shower of amber, rose and emerald sparks and flares, until the distinctiveness of each shape and colour soaked away into the background and was lost. She closed her third eye, waited for a moment until the colours behind her other, more mundane eyelids had subsided to tolerable levels, opened her human eyes and blinked twice. The whole process had taken about three seconds, so it was highly unlikely that either of her colleagues would have noticed , ‘Are you all right?’ Susan asked.
‘Fine,’ Karen replied, pulling out a piece of Kleenex and dabbing at her face. ‘Just got something in my eye, that’s all.’
‘You looked like you were miles away’
‘I was.’
Susan frowned and shrugged with a fluency born of long practice - ever so many things seemed to strike Susan as reprehensibly odd, and she was ever so good at conveying her bemused tolerance for all of them - and went back to telling Paul about the man her cousin’s brother-in-law’s niece in Redditch had just moved in with. To judge by the fixed, snake-watching-a-mongoose expression on his face he found all that stuff utterly entrancing - a human thing, obviously, since Karen tended to find her attention wandering like Little Bo-Peep’s lambs after a few minutes of similar narrations.
She stopped to think about that for a moment. Clearly, nothing fascinated humans more than the activities of other humans, and on balance that was probably an admirable trait of their species. Dragons weren’t like that at all. When they talked to each other for extended periods of time (which was rarely), the subject was usually the bewitchingly perverse and unpredictable behaviour of subatomic particles, the unfathomable relationship of speed and time, the flavour of light and the many different sounds of darkness. It was almost as if dragons only discussed things with each other as a way of marshalling and evaluating their own thoughts and observations, only talked so as to think aloud. Dragons didn’t bother with dragons very much, partly because most of them were pretty much alike, partly because there were so many more intriguing things to see and learn about than a bunch of flying lizards. Not so with these people. If a story didn’t have human interest, it didn’t interest humans, and - Karen found this bizarre to the point of perversity, but who was she to judg? - in spite of having discovered and invented a fairly creditable range of wonders and amusements (for a groundling bipedal species), what they seemed to enjoy doing most was sitting around a table talking to each other about each other. They could do it for hours. It was what they chose to do on their days off. Crazy.
(Except that she’d left Home to be with them, and all because what she wanted most of all was to be with one particular special human, for ever, always . . . Of course, it had never occurred to her to wonder what, in the event of this dream coming true, she and the wonderful human would ever find to talk about during those endless shared hours and days and months and years. Presumably, when the time came, the topics of conversation would suggest themselves naturally. Or they could just lie on their backs on the roof and count the stars.)
The telephone on her desk rang, and she pounced on it like a hungry cat.
‘Hello?’ The voice at the other end of the line said a name; but the entire budget for both Star Wars trilogies would be small change compared to the cost of typesetting it. ‘Is that you?’
It took Karen a moment to recover from the shock. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’ s me. How did you . . .?’
‘Give me some credit, please.’ The voice laughed, but there were only a few residual traces of amusement in the sound. ‘What the hell are you doing down there? We’ve been going frantic. More to the point, he’s been going frantic. I’ve had my work cut out just keeping him from flooding the whole damned planet just to - if you’ll pardon the expression - flush you out.’
Karen couldn’t help smiling. ‘That sounds like Dad,’ she said, looking round to make sure the others weren’t watching or listening. ‘So he was upset?’
‘It’s a pity there’s no real commercial use for understatement, because if there was, we could found a whole industry on you. Yes, he was upset.’
‘Oh.’ Karen hesitated. ‘I’m sorry about that. But I’m not coming back.’
The voice on the other end of the line, which belonged to her father’s chief adviser and officially designated Bearer of Vicarious Guilt, clicked its forked tongue sharply. ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘that’s the least of my problems. You do know he’s vanished, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Obviously not.’ The voice dropped by a decibel or so. ‘He went off to look for you over a week ago. We haven’t heard a peep out of him since. I’ve bent my brain into right angles thinking up plausible lies to keep the King happy; he wants to know where his weekly returns are, and if he finds out your father is MIA—’
Karen shuddered. ‘Don’t,’ she said.
‘It’s all very well you coming over all squeamish, but that’s what he is. And if I was a nasty, cruel person I’d point out just whose fault that is; but I’m not, so I won’t.’ A pause. ‘So you obviously haven’t seen him,’ the voice continued.
‘No.’
‘Silly question, really. You can tell I’m starting to lose my grip, which is hardly surprising in the circumstances. Oh, and while I think of it, what’s the big idea behind all this completely unauthorised rain you’ve been spraying about the place? His Majesty’s been asking about that, too.’
Karen winced. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘You’re sorry. Oh, hooray. That makes all the difference.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Oh, the usual. Fire drills. Systems checks. Dumping outdated stock before the end of the financial year. The insulting thing is, he’s believed me, so far at least. What that says about his idea of how we run things up here I’ll leave you to figure out for yourself.’
Karen sighed. ‘So what do you want me to do? Shall I come home?’
‘Only if you want to be told your fortune by the entire Legate Assembly. No, if I were you I’d stay right where you are for now and try and do something useful to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused. Like finding your father, for a start.’
‘Oh.’
‘“Oh,” she says. Well, you were a bloody nuisance when you were little, so at least you’re consistent. Come on, you’ve been down there for weeks, you must have the whole place pretty well sussed by now. I mean, it can’t be complicated.’
‘Well—’
‘And besides,’ the voice went on, ‘exactly how many dragons do you think there are down there? I’ll tell
you. Two. Not counting you, one. In this context, I find the expression pathetically simple describes the task that awaits you pretty well.’
It’s not like that, Karen thought, not like that at all. ‘I expect you’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘Oh joy,’ the voice said unpleasantly, ‘oh bliss. Oh yes; when all this is over, remind me to skin you alive and use your hide for a doormat, would you?’
‘Of course,’ Karen replied.
‘That’s all right, then,’ the voice said. ‘Goodbye.’
Karen put the phone down and leaned back a little in her chair. Damn, she thought. If there’s one thing that gets in the way of overcoming an obsessive guilt complex, it’s finding out that everything really is your fault after all.
Something else for her to do; more duty. It’d mean having to take time off from this job (leaving him alone with her), probably packing it in altogether; and by the time she got back (assuming she got back and wasn’t immediately whisked off Home by the DIA) they would probably be living together, possibly even married, and everything she’d hoped for would have come to nothing, leaving her to face the dreadful consequences—
Indeed. And the hell with that - what on earth could have happened to her father? Dragons don’t just vanish. More to the point, dragons can’t just vanish - not unless they want to; but her father wouldn’t want to, there was no conceivable reason why he should want to disappear, especially if he’d come Down on purpose to look for her. The only possible explanation was that something really, really terrible had happened to him, something so dreadful and unspeakable that it had made him impossible to locate Such as—
She could only think of one such-as likely to have that effect.
Karen thought about that. She thought about it for quite some time; and, because (in spite of everything she’d done and everything she’d been responsible for) she was still a dragon, when her tears began, they trickled hard and hot down every window-pane in the city.