Nothing But Blue Skies

by Tom Holt

  In retrospect, that moment of insight was the closest she’d yet come to understanding the suckers; and there was a part of her mind that could just about follow the logic. The purpose of the self-inflicted burden was to make you feel confident and happy and strong when you took it off again; thus, the purpose of forming relationships or living under government was to make you fully appreciate your freedom once you’d got it back. Neat trick. But even so, it struck Karen as a rather roundabout way of achieving a fairly simple objective. Surely you didn’t have to get yourself soaking wet before you could appreciate being dry.

  Or maybe not. Maybe you had to, if you were human.

  Maybe - this one made her wince and curl her toes - you had to spend time as a human (or, in extreme cases, a goldfish) in order to realise how lucky you were to have been born a dragon.

  She sat up, ignoring the agonised sounds of wood and metal under intolerable stress that proceeded from the bed, and stared at the wall for a while.

  ‘All right,’ she said aloud, ‘I get the message. Now, will somebody please get these things off me?’

  It was meant to be a decisive moment, a point in her life where she achieved clarity, faced up to the mistake she’d made, took the implications to heart and in return was discharged and allowed to go home. Somehow, though, it didn’t work quite the way it should have. She closed her eyes and waited for a minute or so; but when she opened them again, she was still there, staring at the delaminating vinyl wallpaper with the revolting stain halfway up it, whose genesis she really didn’t want to think about. She was still in human shape. And, when she closed her eyes a second time, she caught herself gawping at a two-dimensional memory of Paul’s face, shielded by a thick sheet of non-reflective glass.

  She wondered what she’d done wrong. ‘Please?’ she added. That didn’t work, either.

  So; it wasn’t as simple as that. Why was she not surprised?

  Her feet were aching, and she felt depressingly sleepy. Not only that, but she was sure there was something else she’d forgotten to do; something human, routine and trivial and unavoidable. Ah yes, food. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.

  (It was like keeping some small, helpless animal as a pet; when you weren’t feeding it or mucking out its cage, you were combing its fur or clipping its claws or trying to persuade it to run round and round in its cute little wheel. All this routine maintenance humans had to do, occupying so much of their lives - so how come they still had time to be infinitely more complicated than the eternal, almost omnipotent dragons?

  They were small, no doubt about that; but they were small and intricate, like a Swiss watch).

  Another yawn rippled through her, starting in her midriff and working its way methodically up to her mouth. Not her problem, she decided. As far as she was concerned, she was happy to let hunger and fatigue fight it out between themselves to decide which of them had first call on her instincts. While they were doing that, she was just going to lie down on the bed and close her eyes for five minutes . . .

  When she woke up, it was broad daylight and her watch had stopped. That was annoying; she’d mapped out the day’s schedule in careful detail and, if she’d lost an hour or so to hoggish slumber, it’d mess everything up. She rolled off the bed, rubbed her bleary human eyes, and reached out for the controls of the ancient (late Victorian or early Edwardian) TV set that perched on top of the dresser.

  She didn’t have to wait long for a time check (8.45, dammit) to set her watch by. Before she could switch off, however, the irritating continuity person said something like ‘And now back to that drought story we mentioned earlier’, and she hesitated.

  Drought?

  She frowned and paid attention to the screen, on which a long, stringy blond youth in a C & A suit was interviewing a fat man, with a reservoir in the background.

  ‘. . . One of the longest rain-free periods in a British summer since records began,’ the fat man was saying.

  ‘Seventy-two hours,’ said the interviewer.

  ‘Seventy-four,’ the fat man replied, holding up his watch. ‘And twelve minutes. Obviously, if this state of affairs continues, the government will have to take steps to conserve water reserves and prevent a drought crisis.’

  The interviewer pulled his microphone back level with his chin. ‘What kind of steps?’ he asked, then jabbed the mike at the fat man’s nose. ‘Hosepipe bans?’

  ‘Definitely hosepipe bans,’ the fat man replied. ‘Also bans on car-washing, window-cleaning, paddling pools and ornamental fountains. That’s the first step, which we’re going to introduce within the next—’ (another watch check) ‘—thirty seconds. Phase two, which will come into effect if the drought continues past twelve noon GMT—’

  (A caption flashed up under the fat man’s picture, giving his name and credentials: Norman Ryder, Spokesman, Ministry of Drought, Famine, Pestilence & Death.)

  ‘—Will consist,’ Mr Ryder went on, ‘of slightly more stringent measures; the contents of all swimming pools to be handed in to the police within six hours; baths to be restricted to no more than three centimetres in depth; the percentage of water in orange squash, barley water and similar concentrated beverages not to exceed ten per cent by volume. Basic common-sense provisions like that. In the longer term, we’re looking into desalination plants, a substantial increase in artesian-well research and, of course, massively increased subsidies to EC cactus farmers.’

  For a few seconds, the interviewer seemed lost for words. ‘How would you respond,’ he managed to say, ‘to criticisms that the government may be overreacting slightly?’

  Mr Ryder looked grave. ‘I have to say that that’s a rather irresponsible attitude,’ he replied. ‘At the present time, we have no idea how long this crisis is going to last. It’s the government’s responsibility to take positive action now to safeguard the public in case the position deteriorates any further. After all, for all we know, it may not rain again for days. It’s a matter of weighing the inconvenience to the public against the potential risk, especially to handicapped people, the elderly and children. Let me ask you, which are you going to put first: washing your hair when you feel like it, or a child’s life?’

  Karen frowned and turned the television off. She’d been human long enough to know that they were entirely capable of getting into a hysterical panic about pretty well anything, so none of what she’d seen was impossible, or even unlikely. Something told her, however, that there was more to it than that. Generally speaking, governments only started panics that were likely to win them points in the polls. Making people take baths in an inch and a half of water, on the other hand, didn’t really fit the usual definition of bread and circuses. They were up to something.

  She stopped and listened to that last thought, and realised unhappily that she’d never sounded so human. They were up to something: you’d never catch a dragon saying that. There was a reason for that, of course. In the unlikely event that a superior officer gave an order you didn’t like or couldn’t understand, you asked him about it and got a straight answer. That wasn’t the human way. It wouldn’t work for humans, for the simple reason that there were too many of them. When you simply didn’t have time to explain, you were forced to develop ways of making people do as they were told for reasons other than informed consent: fear, greed, bigotry, misdirection in all its many-hued splendour. That was why humans automatically assumed that those who controlled them were up to something; because they invariably were. The art of ruling people lay in making them believe you were up to something else.

  She sat down on the bed and tried to concentrate. Apparently, the people who were running the country had reason to believe they were in for a long, hard drought. Coincidentally, the dragon in charge of bringing rain to the British Isles was missing; now that she thought about it, all the rain that had fallen here since he had disappeared had been her doing, the result of her inability to control her emotions.

  At the very least, it implied that they kne
w the dragon wasn’t doing his job. Draconian intuition told her it went further than that; they knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t be going to rain for a long, long time because they knew where the dragon was, or what had happened to it. And the likeliest way they’d know would be if—

  The peal of thunder that split the air terrified her, until she realised where it had come from. Her first instinct was to stop it - someone’ll see you, don’t make an exhibition of yourself; oh, so human - and she’d got to the point now where she might just be able to do that, if she really tried hard. But she didn’t want to. The hell with that. If there was any chance at all that these people, these little, overcomplicated creepy-crawly little humans, had somehow managed to kidnap her father, thunder was going to be the least of their problems. The very thought of it made it hard for her to keep a grip on her human shape. She could feel her wings and tail, the way an amputation victim can still feel the missing limb. Her scales were pressing hard against the inside of her skin, trying to force their way out as if they were green shoots in the spring. There was lightning behind her eyes, desperately eager to earth itself, and the strain of keeping it back was almost more than she could bear. The hell with it; just one little abdication of control, and she’d give them more rain than they’d know what to do with . . .

  Sudden clarity cooled her anger, the way cold water quenches white-hot iron. Just suppose they were holding her father, in the sure and certain knowledge that it couldn’t rain without him. In which case, what would they be likely to make of this?

  The force of the downpour rattled the windows, filling the nasty little room with the sound of rain. For Karen, it was like hearing her own language in a foreign country. She ran to the window and heaved at it till it opened, for the first time in years. Rain splashed onto her face, neck, hands and arms; it was like coming home and being greeted by an overjoyed, wet-tongued puppydog, bounding up to lick her face. The rain was a friend she’d missed far more than she’d realised; but now that friend was here again, there was a chance that everything would be all right. An enormous grin split her face, just as the sky was split by an enormous bolt of blue forked lightning, and the roll of thunder that immediately followed it was just the echo of her own laughter. She felt an utterly basic, sensual delight in the feel of her wet hair plastered to her face and neck, of the rain soaking through her clothes to her skin. She laughed again, filling the air with static electricity—

  —Which somehow contrived to jerk the ancient television into life, because it switched itself on and presented her with a vision of a weather forecaster, standing in front of a big map of the British Isles and solemnly assuring everybody that today would be another dry day in all parts of the country, with temperatures rising in some places as high as thirty-two degrees centigrade (‘That’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit’), with no prospect of any rain for the foreseeable future—

  Karen collapsed in a fit of the giggles, which blew the TV screen out into the room in a shower of glass and wires, and fused all the electrics in the building. She was still giggling helplessly when someone came hammering at the door. It was, of course, the desk clerk.

  ‘I knew it,’ he yelled at her, pushing into the room. ‘Told you I knew. You’re trying to bloody electrocute yourself, and now look what you’ve gone and done!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen burbled through a haze of giggles. ‘It was an accident—’

  ‘Out,’ the clerk was shouting. ‘Go on, get out of here. You want to fry yourself, go and do it somewhere else. God knows what this is going to do to my insurance premiums.’ He’d grabbed her jacket and thrown it at her; and the angrier he got, the more she couldn’t help laughing, and the harder it rained.

  Singing in the rain, she thought, as she sauntered down the street with her jacket over her arm, its saturated lining pointing upwards. Well, maybe she wouldn’t go that far. Fairly soon she’d have to call a halt to this indulgence - dropping a hint was one thing, taking a stand directly under a huge, neon-lit sign saying HERE I AM was something else - but for now, she reckoned she owed herself a little pure pleasure, as a reward for remembering exactly who she was. Everywhere she looked, she could see the humans hating the rain; they were scurrying into doorways, crouching under umbrellas and newspapers, or trudging sullenly with their sopping-wet collars hugged tight around their necks. She felt sorry for them, but only because they didn’t know what they were missing. It was like watching a small boy squirming as a girl kisses him on the cheek. Silly humans, she thought, the day will come when they’ll want it to rain, and maybe then it won’t—

  —If she couldn’t get her father back. Abruptly, she cut the rain and muted out the thunder, while her human skin crawled under the wet cloth.

  A bus trundled past, crammed with humans, their strange round faces staring at her through the rain-streaked glass. Like a mobile goldfish bowl, Karen thought.

  ‘This is all your fault,’ Neville snarled.

  Gordon lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, wondering what the weather was like outside. Wherever they were (he guessed they were some way underground, but that was just intuition) they didn’t have a window to look out of, just four walls painted hospital-waiting-room blue and a sand-coloured lino floor. No weather in here of any kind, good or bad; and that was hugely disorientating for a man who’d spent most of his life locked in a tempestuous, destructive, Heathcliffe-and-Cathy relationship with the British climate. He was used to it spitting in his face and kicking him in the nuts; not being there at all, though, that was something he simply couldn’t handle.

  ‘They’ll have that clown Julian doing my six o’clock spot,’ he said aloud. ‘He’ll just stand there and read it off the prompt, like it’s his lines in a play. Like it’s fiction. What way is that to do the weather?’

  Neville shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters. Julian doesn’t believe. It’s like having an atheist vicar taking evensong.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Neville turned his back on him. ‘You know, you make less sense sober than drunk sometimes.’

  ‘I only get drunk when it rains,’ Gordon replied. ‘When it rains and it’s my fault.’

  ‘Definitely less sense when you’re sober. They’ll have to invent a whole new category of crimes to charge you with. Sober driving. Sober and disorderly. Sober in charge.’

  Gordon sighed. ‘Any idea how long we’ve been down here?’

  ‘Up here,’ Neville replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Up. We’re somewhere up high, like on the top floor of a tall building. Barometric pressure,’ he explained. ‘I can feel it through the wax in my ears.’

  ‘Oh.’ Gordon nodded respectfully. ‘Useful trait for someone in our line of business.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Neville rolled over and faced the wall. ‘High and low pressure, cold fronts moving in from the continent, isobars, cumulo-nimbus, the Gulf Stream, El Niño - it’s all bullshit, as well you know. In the end it all comes down to dragons. It’s nothing but big scaly lizards flying about above the clouds, pissing on our heads. Which is why it’s all your fault.’

  ‘Ah,’ Gordon said wearily. ‘Thank you for explaining it to me.’

  ‘All your fault,’ Neville went on, ‘because you couldn’t bring yourself to believe me. All I wanted to do was share the truth with you, because I knew how much they were hurting you. You were drinking yourself to death, and it was all their fault—’

  ‘I thought you said it was all my fault.’

  ‘It is. If you’d only believed in me when I first told you, we could have been out of there long before these lunatics tracked us down. We’d be free, and we’d have the dragon. Just think, will you, all the things we could’ve done . . .’

  ‘Fed him ants’ eggs? Watched him swimming round and round? Besides,’ Gordon said firmly, ‘nothing is going to make me believe that your goldfish was a dragon. Sorry.’

  Neville spun round and stared at him. ‘But for God’s sake, yo
u heard him—’

  ‘All right.’ Gordon held up his hand. ‘Yes, I heard, or I thought I heard, your goldfish talking. Obviously you had a hidden tape recorder and some kind of proximity-operated speaker system. But even if I were naive and gullible enough to believe in a talking goldfish, how the hell is that supposed to make me believe in dragons? There is no logical connection—’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Neville replied. ‘I suppose it’s all my fault, for thinking you could possibly understand.’

  ‘Make your mind up, please.’

  Neville didn’t reply; he curled up on his bunk, making himself as small as he could, while Gordon went back to staring at the ceiling. There was no light switch anywhere in the room and the light bulb was too high up to reach, even standing on a bunk. One of the first things Gordon had done when they’d been brought here was look for a thermostat or some other way of turning the heating down, because it was uncomfortably warm; at least seventy-five, quite possibly over eighty. Gordon hated it.

  He must have dozed off, because he wasn’t aware of the door opening or closing. The tray was suddenly there, lying on the ground near the doorway.

  ‘Food,’ Gordon said. ‘Well, at least that’s something. Can’t remember the last time—’