It’s been and still is all totally hard sweating diafreakingbolical work after that—in fact in a way it’s been worse because that’s when I started to believe in what we were doing, Bud and me, talking to each other—here we go again, like when I first began to realize what raising Lois was really going to be like. But this time—this time I was going to let myself know how hard it was going to be, and do it anyway. I know how dumb this sounds, but I wanted to be a grown-up for Bud. This was different from what had happened with Lois. Duh.
But if you’ve hung on this long because you think I’m going to Explain Everything—stop now. Put this down, go away, wash the car, look up the horoscope for your goldfish, and I’m sorry I’ve wasted so much of your time. Give this book to your library (if they want it). But it was a big thing, that day, for me anyway. Back there in the dark Bud had been patiently holding the dragon space for me—while I mostly cowered in my niche. (Of course I couldn’t cope, any more than I could have coped with a dragonlet, which was clearly impossible.) But out here in the light I could see that that is what he had been doing—that it wasn’t all just being in the dark surrounded by dragons and making stuff up to make myself feel better. It was happening in daylight too. Bud was listening. Bud wanted to listen. To me.
I think the last few days had been pretty intense for the dragons too. I may be unbelievably weeny in dragon terms but that I was there was epoch making. And look what trouble one really weeny new germ can do somewhere it’s never been before.
The point is that that was the first day it seemed to me possible—a human talking to a dragon. That it wasn’t just craziness and desperation and darkness. The craziness and desperation may have started it…but it had a future. Talking to each other had a future. There is pretty much no bigger wow than that.
So I told him—them—because Gulp had moved to lie down by Bud and was obviously “listening” too—about finding the dying mother dragon who’d only just given birth, and how Lois was the only one of her dragonlets still alive. How I’d tucked her down my shirt without thinking about it, and run away. How I’d made myself doolally trying to keep her alive, and without knowing how to keep her alive, and my only excuse was that she’d survived. I told them about the Institute—I can’t begin to imagine what my pictures of the inside of the Institute must have looked/felt/smelled/something-else/whatever to them—and about the human laws that made what I’d done so dangerous. That part didn’t go in pictures so well, but I tried. (So you try making a picture in your head of laws. All I could think of was that big famous picture of the Constitution, with John Hancock’s signature taking up half the space. So, I skipped over the law thing a little.)
I told them that the Institute existed only because they, the dragons, existed, and that we were doing the best we could and knew how and although that wasn’t very good it was the best we could, and that we were probably losing too, and that if anyone ever found out about Lois that would probably be the end of the line because the people who were against the Institute kept imagining that we were doing something like Lois, although we never had before, and that if they did find out, and especially if they figured out who her mother was, they’d say that she was the daughter of a rogue killer dragon and genes will tell and she had to be destroyed twice, first because she was illegal anyway and second because of her mom.
What I didn’t try to tell them about was the dragon dreams. And that’s funny too, because I planned to, to the extent that any of this was planned. Once I was telling the story I would’ve told them about the dragon dreams, how I felt that especially at the beginning they were helping hold me together, like rope, or a straitjacket—and I sort of hesitated on the brink, with a tentative picture of Lois’ mom as I saw her in my dreams, and there was almost this pause where I swear everyone understood everyone else, two dragons and one human—I don’t suppose even Bud got even 10 percent of all the rest of it, the question was what fragments were he and Gulp fishing out of the nutso deluge and what were they doing with them??—and it was about this thing I knew was crazy, about Lois’ mom, this is the place where we understood each other—and then while it was over in just long enough for it to have been a pause, it was like that was all that was necessary. I didn’t have to tell them. Lois’ mom in my head, keeping me together. Yes. Of course. Oh….
I was losing it pretty bad with the pictures by now but they probably picked up the hysteria. I told them I didn’t know why Lois had survived, and I sure as hell didn’t know why I was able to talk to dragons, even the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest bit, or they to me, to the extent that I or they were talking, but we were, weren’t we, communicating, even though it was kind of messy, and we were probably creating a new all-singing all-dancing Day-Glo definition of “blunderbotchandscrewup.”
But I’d got it that Gulp was sending me trees, right? I assumed it—the communication—that it was happening—had something to do with Lois—with Lois and me. Something to do with having to be so all-berserkingly involved with her to keep her alive—probably it was just standard op for a mother dragon and her dragonlets, but it was whopping-meganormous-vast, incomprehensible new ground for a dragonlet and a human. I wasn’t even a grown-up, you know? Although maybe that meant I was like squishy enough to adapt, when a grown-up would have been all stiff and solid and filled up and couldn’t. Maybe the success of the involvement though was why she survived—either that I didn’t know that I instinctively knew what she could or couldn’t eat, for example, or that the bonding to Mom—and any mom would do—is as important as what a dragonlet eats—or who the mom was.
So her side of the adaptation process was why she made so much noise—why she tried to talk like humans talk. I’d pretty much always secretly believed that she was, you know, intelligent, more like humans are intelligent than like dogs (or mynah birds) are intelligent, but I also knew I was loopy from the strain of the relationship that was keeping her alive…. But I also thought about Mom and Katie and I figured it’s just part of momming that you think your kid’s wonderful. Even if you’re a human and your kid’s a dragon.
So I’d kept a low profile about certain aspects of just how Lois might be wonderful. That she might be dorky-checklist-human-IQ-test-intelligent wonderful. Which would presumably mean that dragons were dorky-checklist-human-IQ-test intelligent. Which is way too scary, you know? Well, you do know, because a lot of people out there now are reacting like we’ve declared the earth is flat after all, or that being a heroin dealer is a life-affirming socially responsible career choice, by suggesting that dragons will talk back to us as soon as we get the common language problem sorted out better. My suspicion about Lois could just have been that I was suffering from momness, and maybe that would have been a good thing, or at least easier, simpler, and a whole lot less scary.
Till now. Till the last five days. Since Gulp had brought us here. No, before that. Since Gulp had apologized for almost killing me. I’d known then, beyond any so-called rational doubt, but I hadn’t taken it in. My taking-it-in faculty was fully occupied with the daily fact of Gulp’s visits. And I was probably too used to not facing this with Lois, in case I was wrong. Or maybe in case I was right. Martian lichen or no Martian lichen—vervets with language or no vervets with language—philosophies of humanness and that Earth is a community, not a police state, or no philosophies of etc.—it was still too big, too strange, too far away from the way I was used to thinking. Too impossible. It wasn’t just being underground with a cavern full of dragons that had freaked me out so badly, you know. At least the guys who found out about the lichen on Mars, it was happening on Mars. This was happening here.
And now comes the show-stopper, the super-jackpot question, the one if you get it right they don’t just give you a huge ugly new house and an even huger uglier new car, you will also be expected to solve world hunger, kiss babies and walk on water, so think carefully before you answer: If dragons are intelligent like humans—or more like humans than like dogs or mynah birds or vervets�
��and just by the way, dragons are up to eighty feet long and can spout fire at will—why are dragons a dying race and humans dominate the planet in a sawing-off-the-tree-limb-you’re-standing-on kind of way?
I still don’t know the answer to why dragons are dying out, just to get that over with since it’s usually the first thing that pro-dragon people ask me. (The anti-dragon people all still keep saying, How do you know they’re intelligent?) I think I don’t know because it isn’t an answer like that there’s something in the water that shouldn’t be or isn’t that should be, or like that. I don’t think it’s even the restriction of usable territory. They could’ve expanded a lot more than they have in Smokehill and while, no, okay, I don’t know how intelligent they are (How intelligent are you? How intelligent am I? At what point does this become a dumb question?), I think they’re quite intelligent enough to have been clandestine about it if they wanted to be. Okay, maybe they have been, and presently unknown underground mazes all over Smokehill are stuffed with dragons. But I don’t believe it. (Or anyway not unless they’ve also bred a sheep that lives in the dark and eats rocks.)
Maybe their intelligence doesn’t run that way. I think it probably doesn’t. Because this is one of the things I think about dragons, when I try to think about the way they think: they didn’t evolve to be paranoid the way we did. They didn’t need to. They evolved to be huge and very difficult to kill. Yes, they’re meat eaters, so their prey wouldn’t be too fond of them, but prey tends to survive by running away (and by breeding like crazy), not attacking. And most other predators a dragon can just laugh at. Or whatever they do. They do have a sense of humor. I think. Lois’ sense of humor could be just from hanging around me too much, but I don’t think so.
(I think there’s humor in the way Gulp collapses when she’s inviting me to walk up her shoulder and up [and up and up and UP] her neck and sit behind her head. You know how a dog you’re scolding may suddenly go all limp, when what they’re saying is “Yes, yes, you’re right, I’m sorry, you’re the boss”? If it’s a dog, the next thing it does is roll over on its back and offer you its tummy, which isn’t practical in a dragon, with the spine plates. But I think Gulp is having a little dragon joke that goes, “Walk on me, master, I am as dirt beneath your feet.” And she means it about as much as the dog means it, who is watching you closely and is going to start wagging its tail the moment your face starts to smile.)
Anyway. The point is, dragons never learned to take threats to their existence seriously, and it’s too late now.
I also think, by the way, that because they live so long—I’m pretty sure Bud remembers Old Pete—and don’t waste energy being paranoid that their sense of time is a lot different from ours. I don’t believe Bud kept us—me anyway—underground for five days to intimidate us—me—I think he thought we were just having a nice chat, trying to have a nice chat, here finally was the perfect opportunity for a nice chat, he was really interested in the chat, and it hadn’t occurred to him till—maybe—he began to read/guess from all that “trees and sky and sunlight and despair” stuff in my head, that I wasn’t finding it as interesting as he was, that I didn’t have the attention span that he did. Maybe he was picking me up well enough to notice that my ability to make pictures in my head was starting to get worse, not better, and he figured I was getting like tired.
Meanwhile humans succeeded in the evolution game partly because they learned to be paranoid so successfully. To hit first before the other guy hits you. It worked with sabertooth tigers. Who’s extinct? But who’s bigger, meaner, faster, and has longer teeth? The tiger. Humans are soft little things. The only weapon they have is their brains.
Dragons are going under because they don’t understand how to fight back. Maybe they could have evolved to be able to fight back, a long time ago, if they or some of their genes realized it was going to be necessary some day. But it’s too late now. Sure, they’ll fry the occasional human who tries to murder them, but they don’t get it about extermination or war. As soon as the Aussies really organized to get rid of them, they didn’t have a chance.
Okay, okay, enough with the cheezy philosophy, you want me to get to the famous story about Bud and the helicopters, right? My great moment? My great moment, crap, I was just totally, totally lucky that the major in charge was brighter than some career military types and didn’t automatically believe that you shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe the kind of gunnery you can carry on a helicopter is limited, and they didn’t want to blow me up—but even that’s lucky, that they didn’t decide the possible death of one civilian would be just an unfortunate friendly fire incident—an acceptable loss in a battlefield situation.
Because outside Smokehill, by the time I disappeared, the anti-dragon lobby was lashing the populace into a frenzy, and the Searles had just about won. Congress was about to pass legislation to kill all of Smokehill’s dragons because they were a danger to humanity—and Smokehill had THOUSANDS of them! And each and every one of them was TEN MILES LONG!—which is what had been going on back at the Institute while Gulp and Lois and I were getting acquainted, and why Dad had lately found himself under something a lot like house arrest. All because of one crummy stinking little poacher who thought he was going to look like a big guy by, what, bringing home a dragon’s eye? Selling slices of her adrenals for enough money to buy Hawaii (as long as he did it fast enough)? And who happened to have parents who were millionaires (so what did he need more money for?) and would much rather blame the dragon than the fact that their son was an evil creep.
The irony is that it was my disappearance that almost gave the final victory to the Searles. It’s so almost an almost that of all the almost moments I’ve told you about, that’s probably the almostest of all.
But the amazing thing was Bud. He’d got enough of my story to know that something had to be done. I think he’d been worrying about what was happening ever since Lois’ mother died—what it meant besides the loss of six dragons. I understand worry. His worry engine cranked up a gear.
I’m not sure about this, but dragons just obviously don’t breed very often, or there’d be more of them. I don’t myself get it why you want a situation where there’s only one mom who has a litter of babies instead of several moms with one or even two each, but hey, there’s so much I don’t get that sometimes I almost want to be put down someone else’s shirt and let them take care of everything for a while. Like I wonder if Bud is in communication somehow with the dragons in Kenya and Australia—that they all know they’re dying—dying out. And the humans are so clueless they just killed a mom?
Presumably everyone (everyone in Smokehill or even everyone everywhere) knew that Lois’ mother was about to have her babies. This was an important event. Killing any dragon is going to upset the rest of them—just like murdering humans upsets us. But a mom and her dragonlets must be a community tragedy—and a major tragedy for a declining community. Which is probably why Gulp lost it when she saw Lois and me in the meadow. And maybe why Gulp’s first appearance underground with me on board as well as Lois was not greeted with hallelujahs. Even dragons, under extreme stress and grief, can be a little crabby. And their sense of time is probably why it took them so long to react at all—by human time measurement.
Anyway. So the afternoon we heard the helicopters coming there were five of us outside—Bud, Gulp, Lois, me, and another grown dragon, because I seemed to be beginning to pick her up too, in my head I mean, I don’t know how she got chosen or if she chose herself, but she seemed to be another one who remembered Old Pete.
(By then I was beginning to learn that dragon language has stuff in it that translates into sounds—like human language—more than into pictures, and that includes that they have names, and that their names are mostly soundy rather than picturey. Most of it’s still pictures—at least most of what I can pick up is pictures—what dragon words I can “hear” are full of brrrrrry nonnoises that make your skull buzz, if you’re human, which makes me wonder if mayb
e there’s a lot of talking going on after all, just below a pitch I can hear. I named her Zenobia because that’s a little like what her name really is. Zzzzzzzzznnnnnnmmmm is closer, but harder to say with a human mouth and throat. Once I’d started again I couldn’t stop trying to talk. And, after all, if they were going to try to “talk” to more humans than me, they’d better get used to it.)
This was at least another week after the first time they’d brought me outdoors; I know, I’d make a rotten Robinson Crusoe or one of those people, I just didn’t keep track. I meant to. But I didn’t. And time felt so funny in the dragon caverns anyway that I was never sure it was the next day when they brought me up again, or how long we’d been below. Talking to Bud also seemed to make my own time sense go funny—more so as I got better at it, if you want to call it better, but let’s say more so when I didn’t keep falling asleep/passing out so often. Like when we made the connection—because it was a bit like that; it wasn’t like you say a sentence and then shut up, it was more like going into the room with the person you’re talking to so you can hear each other—when I went into the same “room” with Bud I moved into dragon time or something.
What I was definitely aware of was that I really had to get back to the Institute soon, that I should have gone back a long time ago already—if the dragons felt like letting me, which wasn’t a question I’d asked yet. Or figured out how to ask. But I also knew that the more, um, dragon communication I’d learned by the time I went back, the more persuasive I’d be able to be (I hoped) about what I had learned and how important it was. One more reason I didn’t know how much time passed is because the process of trying to stuff myself with Practical Demonstratable Dragonese was different above-and belowground. Belowground it was easier to pick up the pictures and the brrrrrs. Aboveground it was easier to make sense of the pictures I’d picked up. Easier is a relative concept though, because none of it was easy, and I was dizzy and headachy all the time. I wondered if Bud ever got a headache talking to me. But if he did, did he notice? Like that there’s this eensy weensy alien pebble rolling around in the bottom of his tourist-bus-sized skull?
Dragon Haven Page 27