by Tom Holt
‘Can’t you order them in?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ The spokesman frowned, as if having trouble coming to terms with the concept. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘Are you sure? We’d pay cash, if that’d help.’
The pet-shop man took a deep breath. ‘How about a nice kitten?’ he said. ‘Or two kittens? I can do you two kittens.’
‘Thanks, but we’ve got that covered.’ The spokesman thought for a moment. ‘In that case, can you suggest anywhere else we could try?’
The pet-shop man grinned. ‘A zoo, maybe,’ he said.
‘All right. Where’s the nearest zoo to here?’
‘I was joking.’
‘Were you? I see. How about a serious suggestion?’
The pet-shop man could think of several things to suggest, some of which could easily prove very serious indeed. ‘What do you boys want all these animals for, anyway?’ he asked.
The spokesman took a step backwards. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘that’s none of your business. This is a shop. We want to buy. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Like hell.’ The pet-shop man’s attitude had changed; even the spokesman could see that, and this was his first extended mission among humans. ‘You know what? I wouldn’t sell an animal to you people even if I had what you wanted. I don’t trust you.’
‘Really? That’s sad. Why not?’
‘Did we mention we’re willing to pay cash?’ added the senior aide.
‘In fact,’ the pet shop man said, ‘I think I’d like it if you nutcases got out of my shop, before I call the RSPCA. Understood?’
The spokesman looked away and his lips moved, as if he was trying to figure out what the acronym stood for. ‘If that’s how you feel, we’ll be on our way,’ he said. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’ He took three paces towards the door and then stopped. ‘Oh, one last thing,’ he added. ‘Has anybody been in here recently trying to sell you a goldfish?’
‘What?’
‘Goldfish. Little orange bugger with fins and a face like William Hague. You see, a friend of ours had one stolen recently, and we just thought we’d ask—’
The question seemed to offend the pet-shop man, because he went a funny reddish colour. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m in the habit of buying stolen goldfish from people who walk in off the street. That’s precisely the way I run my business.’
‘Is it? Ah. In that case, the next time someone comes in with one, could you possibly ring this number—?’
‘Get out.’ The pet-shop man was snarling now. ‘Go on, bugger off, before I set the rabbits on you.’
‘Actually,’ said the senior aide, ‘we’re pretty well off for rabbits right now. In fact—’
‘Out!’
I will be good, Karen promised. I will control my emotions. Big girls don’t rain.
Hard enough to say that immediately after the phone call, when guilt and shock were fresh enough in her mind. Harder still, now that she was looking out of a train window, rattling away from all the reasons she’d come down here in the first place. Wingless bipeds, of course, didn’t rain when they were sad. The closest they could get was a slight seepage from the eyes, a token shedding of water, as vestigial and useless as the human appendix. But she hadn’t quite worked out how to do that yet, so all she could do was sit still and try not to think about it. Concentrate on the job in hand, the work that was still to do, and you forgot about the things that were outside your control, no matter how all-encompassingly awful they might seem; that was what a dragon would say, her father would say, if he was here, which he wasn’t.
And if that didn’t work, get on a train and go to Wolverhampton.
Simple draconian logic; Wolverhampton was near as made no odds, the centre of England, and if you were planning on conducting a thorough search, it made sense to start at the centre and work outwards. As to how one went about looking for a missing dragon, she hadn’t the faintest idea. Obviously he wasn’t in dragon shape, or a search wouldn’t be necessary, which meant he was either a human or a goldfish. There were quite a lot of both of those in England, rather too many for a straightforward process of elimination to be practical. As far as alternative strategies went, she didn’t even know if there were any. To put it another way, she hadn’t a clue what she was supposed to be looking for, where it was likely to be, or how she’d recognise it if she did happen to stumble across it. Hardly scientific; but very human. After all, it was precisely the technique humans used when looking for a prospective mate, the one special person in the whole world who was meant for them, and if the bulk of human literature (up to and including the chocolate and perfume commercials) was to be believed, the technique worked for most people.
When on Earth, do as the humans do.
And it had worked for her, as far as finding that one special person was concerned. All she’d had to do was glance sideways out of the corner of her eye, as she was seeding a low cloud directly above the office where he worked. All she’d seen was a tall, rather angular human shape scurrying from the office doorway to the bus shelter, a newspaper held over his head to ward off the rain; that was all she’d needed to see. The odds against it - all the computers in Silicon Valley couldn’t handle such a complex calculation, or even work out the formula needed to do the maths. But it had happened, just as it happened for millions upon millions of others.
(Nor was it particularly relevant that she was now leaving him behind, with That Bloody Woman poised like a dog begging at table to snap him up as soon as she was safely out of the way. Finding and winning were two separate operations. The fact that she’d failed in one of them didn’t invalidate her success in the other. Stranger still, the finding stage was apparently the easy bit, which meant that the winning ought by rights to be so impossibly difficult that only the really clever, diligent humans ought to be able to manage it. Looking around the train compartment, however, and reflecting that each of her fellow passengers was the result of both a successful search and a successful outcome, she was amazed that there were so many brilliantly intelligent people on Earth; and if that was really the case, how come that in every other aspect of their lives they gave the impression of being so unbelievably dumb? The only explanation was that they used up so much of their reserves of cleverness on finding and winning their partners in life that they didn’t have any left over for trivia such as fixing the economy or keeping out of wars. It followed that a non-human, who hadn’t been trained from birth in these exceptionally difficult arts, didn’t stand a chance. Sometimes, Karen mused unhappily, it’s hard to be a dragon, giving all your love to just one man.)
Beyond the train window it was bright and hot, and that started her thinking. It was, after all, June. This was England, not California. Bright, hot, cloudless sky; something was definitely wrong. The obvious conclusion was that, wherever her father was, he wasn’t doing his job; and she knew her father well enough to be sure that if he wasn’t doing his job, it was because something was preventing him - death, injury, capture. Karen had learned long ago that Providence was easy to tempt as an ex-smoker on the fifth day after giving up, so she made a conscious decision not to speculate about the first possibility. Injury? What could possibly injure a dragon? In order to be damaged in any way, he’d have to be in one of his other two shapes. What about the third option? If he was being held prisoner somewhere, what possible motive could the captor have?
(Well, that question was easily answered. Brewers; the English Tourist Board; the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club; the National Farmers’ Union; every sad-eyed optimist who felt a vocation towards a dry activity and then tried to make a living doing it in England - any or all of them would have an all too obvious motive.)
Nevertheless, she felt that she was getting somewhere, even if her rate of progress wasn’t much better than that of the train she was sitting in. Just suppose for a moment that someone with enough at stake to take the risk had found out the truth about dragons. Capturing a dragon in hi
s mortal guise wouldn’t be terribly difficult, provided you managed to take him by surprise. Keeping him caught was another matter; probably impossible, if the dragon was determined to get free, since even in human shape any dragon would be ten times as strong as a human, seven times faster and infinitely more resourceful. As a goldfish, however, completely surrounded by hostile, energy-depleting water, he’d be virtually helpless.
Well, it was a place to start from; as, by the same token, was Wolverhampton. Now all she needed was a way of locating all the goldfish in (initially) the West Midlands, and checking them to see if they were metamorphosed dragons. At first, the scope of the problem daunted her a little, until she reflected that it was the proverbial slice of Victoria sponge compared with the statistically far harder task she’d accomplished so easily back at the start of this whole sorry adventure.
Goldfish, she thought.
Accordingly, the first thing she did after getting off the train at Wolverhampton was to find a post office and look up pet shops in the Yellow Pages. Having written out a list and bought a street map, she rehearsed in her mind what she was going to say. The words wouldn’t be a problem. Pretending to be a ruthlessly single-minded public servant might be a little harder, but not hopelessly so. (After all, she was a ruthlessly single-minded public servant, at least when she was back home and had her regular skin on.) By the time she reached the first shop on her list, she had it all pat in her head.
‘Hello,’ said the man in the pet shop cheerfully. ‘How can I help you?’
Karen flashed her library card under his nose. ‘I’m an inspector from the Ministry of Agriculture,’ she said. ‘As you probably know, we’re compiling a complete goldfish database, so what I need from you—’
‘Excuse me.’ There was something in the pet-shop man’s eyes that suggested he’d already had a long and tiring morning, which she was about to make longer and significantly worse. That made her feel bad, but it couldn’t be helped. ‘What do you mean exactly, a goldfish database?’
Karen stuck a suffering-fools expression on her face. ‘As the basis for the National Goldfish Register,’ she said. ‘You know, as part of the government’s new initiative to get illegal goldfish off the streets—’
The man sagged, like a suit that had fallen off its coat-hanger. ‘Illegal goldfish?’
‘You don’t know about the goldfish initiative? For heaven’s sake, you run a pet shop. You must have got the booklet.’
‘No,’ the man said wearily. ‘No booklet.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s still no excuse. As part of the drive to eliminate fin-rot by the year 2006, as from the first of April next year all privately owned goldfish must be registered and inspected three times a year by Ministry ichthyologists. So,’ she went on quickly, before the pet-shop man could say anything, ‘it stands to reason we need to know who’s got goldfish, how many, where they live, the height, width and breadth of the tank, details of any relevant pondweed usually kept with the fish, the serial number of the water filter, which direction the tank points in during feeding, the colour of any walls visible from inside the tank - you know, all the obvious stuff. I’ll start by taking a look at your register.’
‘Register?’
Karen frowned ominously. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t tell me you haven’t got a register.’
‘I don’t know anything about any—’
‘A register,’ Karen went on, ‘of all sales of goldfish within the last seven years, consisting of one master copy for permanent reference, a duplicate copy for official use and a third copy to verify the other two copies by. Which you should have been keeping all this time, but obviously haven’t. Oh dear.’
‘Nobody told me anything about a—’ The pet-shop man didn’t bother to complete the sentence. The crushed look in his eyes suggested that he’d been there before, many times. He looked away. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘My mistake. I suppose you’re going to report me.’
Karen clicked her tongue. ‘I should,’ she said. ‘Really I should. But . . .’
The man looked up sharply. ‘But?’ he said, and the expression on his face was that of a fly caught in a web, unexpectedly told by the spider to get the hell out of there before it changed its mind. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help—’
‘Let’s see,’ Karen replied. ‘If you can put together a list of everybody who’s bought goldfish, pondweed, fish food, anything like that over the past few weeks, I might just be able to turn a blind eye, this one time.’
The man might have considered pointing out that he didn’t have that sort of information; if so, he thought better of it. Gift-horse dentistry is an unrewarding hobby; and he had bank and credit card counterfoils in his records, with names and addresses on them. ‘It may take a while,’ he said cautiously.
‘I quite understand,’ Karen replied. ‘These things can take time. Tell you what; I’ll give you four hours, while I make some more calls in this area. How does that sound?’
‘Wonderful,’ the man muttered. ‘That’s really very kind of you.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Karen said, gauging to perfection the amount of patronising contempt needed to make the statement sound truly authentic. ‘I’m a human being, you know, not some kind of fire-breathing monster.’
After a long time in the white-walled windowless detention cell, they were led down a mile or so of ceramic-tiled tunnels and up and down another mile or so of stairs to a steel door with a four-figure number stencilled on it. The guard knocked four times, and the door opened automatically, making a very soft wheezing noise.
‘You two,’ said the man behind the desk ‘All right, you’d better come in.’
It didn’t look as if they had much say in the matter, so they did as they were told. The room’s furnishings were as sparse as the audience at a poetry reading; one desk, one chair behind it, two in front of it, a light-bulb dangling from a bare flex, nothing else. Although he made it a rule always to be as optimistic as possible, Gordon couldn’t help feeling that they probably hadn’t been brought here to star in This Is Your Life, after all.
‘Don’t stand there like a couple of prunes,’ the man snapped at them. ‘Sit down.’
He was somewhere between thirty and fifty, slab-faced, blue-eyed, bald and not much wider across the shoulders than your average Mack truck. There was no reason to believe he wasn’t capable of smiling, if given a direct order by a superior officer.
‘You’re the telly people, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Which one of you is Smelt?’
Gordon hesitated for a moment, then raised his hand a little. ‘Me,’ he squeaked.
‘Fine. So you must be Wilson. Do you know why you’re here?’
Neville, who hadn’t said a word since they’d been captured, stuck his tongue out. The man didn’t seem to notice. ‘No,’ Gordon said. ‘Is it something to do with—?’ He could-n’t bring himself to say the word, the one that began with D. ‘Weather,’ he concluded.
‘Dragons,’ the man said. ‘It’s all right, we all know the score here, there’s nothing to be gained by coming over all bloody coy. Of course you know why you’re here. Now I’m going to explain it to you. Would you like that?’
‘Very much,’ Gordon said.
‘That’s all right, then. Shut up and pay attention.’ He leaned back a little, and put his hands behind his head. ‘Now then, let’s start at the beginning. Which of you can tell me what made Britain great?’
Gordon blinked. ‘Excuse me?’
‘What made Britain great?’ the man repeated. ‘What was it that made it possible for a small cluster of islands at the unfashionable end of Europe to build an empire on which the sun never set? Well?’
Gordon bit his lip. ‘Sea power?’ he hazarded. ‘The industrial revolution? Parliamentary democracy? Kindness to animals? The longbow?’
The man breathed out through his nose, like a Mad Cow Disease bull. ‘Let me put it another way,’ he said. ‘What do you think prompted generations of Englishm
en to leave their homes and families and set off for the furthest reaches of the globe, exploring, trading, conquering? What drove the best and brightest of the British race to quit these shores and colonise the New World, annex India, colonise Africa, settle Australia, conquer the Caribbean, plant the flag right across Asia from Egypt to Burma?’ No reply. He sighed. ‘All right, let’s make it easier for you. Think about all those places I’ve just mentioned. What’ve they got in common?’
Gordon tried to think of an answer. ‘Indigenous populations who didn’t get out of the way fast enough?’ he hazarded.
‘Good answer,’ the man replied, ‘but wrong. Think harder. America. India. Africa. Australia. The West Indies. The Far East. Come on, it’s not exactly difficult.’
A tumbler clicked into place in Gordon’s brain. ‘They’re hot,’ he said.
‘Took you long enough, didn’t it?’ The man nodded. ‘Correct, they’re hot. Hot and dry. As opposed to the old country, which is—?’
‘Cold and wet.’
‘Exactly.’ A thin wisp of smile residue appeared briefly on the man’s face. ‘The British conquered the world in order to get away from their rotten bloody climate. It wasn’t just that, of course,’ he added, with a slight wave of his left hand. ‘The rotten bloody food had something to do with it, as well. But mostly it was the weather. The snow. The fog. The damp. The rain. All the filthy wet stuff that drops on our heads out of the sky. That’s what shaped the British people, what defines us as a nation. More so than any other country in the world, in Britain the people and the climate are as one.’
‘Wet and miserable?’