Dragonhaven

CHAPTER TEN

 

  The rest of the story everybody knows. The whole world knows. They ran that first TV news shot with a thirty-second delay because they weren't sure they weren't going to find themselves running live footage of a brainless seventeen-year-old boy being made into dragon canapes during prime time. The Searles actually did us a favor about this. They pulled all the stops out to get us off the air after that first live broadcast, and the head of NYN got so pissed off that he said nothing would prevent him running it - and ran it at the top of every hour as a news update on every one of his 1,000,000 local stations all that day, just to spite the Searles. It's possible that what he was really pissed off about was the amount of money he'd been spending on having several of his camera guys at the Institute waiting for something to happen, but when Carol Domanski started transmitting what she was watching out of Major Handley's helicopter all was forgiven in a really big way. (You probably know Carol later got a Pulitzer for what she's done on dragons, but she's actually done it well, so good for Carol. And the Pulitzer committee. )

  If you saw it that first time, you know that it looks pretty bad that's our fence tangling up the transmission - and the beginning is a big grainy blur. (The picture would cut in at the worst possible moment in terms of me looking like a deranged lunatic. ) But they cleaned it all up later, so that the Searles couldn't get anywhere claiming it was faked. Not that they didn't try.

  I'm not sure they aren't still running all our live programs with delay, in case of accidents. There haven't been any accidents and Gulp has got quite blas?? about all the people and lights and wires and fuss that TV programs create - especially a lot of fuss, because of what our fence does to the equipment, and the Wilsonville garage isn't a plausible alternative if you want to film a dragon. Although even if you really desperately want to film a dragon and have the best fence-resistant gear going, you still have big problems because you have to get it to the dragon. We go to them.

  Dad flatly refuses to let more road be cut into Smokehill - and some suggestion about motocross-type bikes or three-wheelers made him apoplectic. Noises have been made about pack ponies, which Dad would consider, but first they have to come up with a solution to the fact that every pony, horse, burro, donkey, and whatever else they've tried so far has instantly lost its training at the first whiff of dragon. (They haven't tried camels yet. ) Sometimes they go nuts before they're even taken off the truck. Horse van drives through gate, sound of meltdown in back of van, van drives back out through gate. Meanwhile the sky would be black with helicopters - if Dad would allow that either, which he won't. Fortunately Smokehill's Friends tend to the eco-loony fringe, so Dad's got some help.

  Gulp was our first star, more than Bud or even Lois, although Lois is a close second, and anybody who even half understands what all this has been about loves Lois best (I'm not partial, of course not) - but fifty feet (plus tail) of Gulp is impressive. Gulp, of all the big dragons, is the only one who really cooperates with being filmed, although there are snaps and crackles of several of the others. Gulp doesn't really get it, about people being fascinated by her. As far as she's concerned - at least this is how I read it - she's just doing her penance for almost frying me, that day we met. Want to imagine how fast a dragon holding a human baby would have got itself killed (supposing someone just happened to have a lightning rifle in his back pocket)? Especially if the kid's mom had recently been made into kabobs?

  Lois, I swear, was made to go on TV though. She is interested in everything, and as long as I'm still somewhere relatively nearby, she is a shameless flirt with everything else human, or that's how it comes over. She figures that humans are her family, and she's just thrilled any time another of her strangely shaped relatives wants to meet her. For some reason people carrying blinding lights and trailing leads and yelling are included - even the ones whose first reaction, on seeing a great scaly lump on little bent legs lolloping briskly toward them while making extraordinary noises that allow a too-clear view of teeth several inches long, is to run away. Lois has a very generous heart as well as a lot of energy.

  Anyway Gulp didn't fry me that first day and she hasn't fried anyone since and she's not going to, but even I, who spends, and who has already spent, more intensive time with dragons than any other human ever has, I've still never got over how big they are, so I can hardly blame the TV crews - as well as what are now our rivers of visiting scientists - for being a little jumpy. Gulp, fortunately, doesn't run at people the way Lois does. I suspect even some of the TV people pick up her fatalistic stoicism, even if they don't know that's what they're picking up. They're probably just telling themselves that anything that large is kind of oppressive by definition.

  Maybe that's why they usually end up liking Lois so much. She's still small, comparatively, and she seems to have the gene or the pheromone or something for being fetching. It can't be her big deep soft brown shining long-lashed eyes because she has small poppy greeny-reddy eyes increasingly surrounded by knobbly spikes and eyelashes like stilettos. There is just no way to make out a baby dragon as cute. Lois is cute anyway, and her energy level, if you don't have to live with her, is pretty appealing. You know how charming it is when some dog you've never met before comes rushing up to you like you're his long-lost best friend. The enthusiasm is contagious. For a few minutes you think maybe you are best friends. Then you begin to wonder what the dog must be like at home. I don't think most of the TV people ever get this far thinking about Lois because she is, you know, a dragon. I suppose I can't have it both ways, expecting people who've never met a dragon to get it about dragons and then feeling crabby (or superior) when they don't.

  We don't have mere rivers of ordinary tourists, of course, we have oceans of them - galaxies - Avogadro's numbers of tourists. They still rarely see any dragons but it doesn't stop them coming, and we now have loops of some of Gulp's and Lois' finest video moments on big screens in the tourist center, as well as the one of me being spastic on Bud's head. I can't risk just going into the tourist center any more myself, it's like being a pop star or something, and don't laugh, because it's ghastly.

  Lois and I hide out in this fortress a little beyond where the Rangers' cottages all are. When we first came back to the Institute we were guarded twenty-four hours a day by some of Major Handley's guys - from our new fans, sure, but also from the Searles and their goons, who were not good losers - and then the fortress got built. I didn't know anything could go up that fast - it was like watching time-lapse photography. It was amazing. It also must have cost a fortune. Dad is still pretty protective about me in some, sometimes weird, ways, and he seems to think it would blight me or something if I knew what it cost. With everything else that's happened I think this is pretty funny. Maybe it's just something he can protect me from.

  And where's the fortune coming from, you're asking, or maybe you're not. After all, the galaxies of tourists not only buy tickets but they now all buy ye olde genuine Smokehill souvenirs by the barrowload - most of 'em stagger out of here now carrying shopping bags like they've just bought the week's groceries for a family of eight. It's mostly just the usual souvenir junk too, only with dragons on it, plus a few Smokehill specials, like real dragon scales, and the only place you can buy our dragons' scales is at our tourist center gift shop, and while it dragon scale is only sold as a dragon scale, I'm sure a lot of tourists go home telling themselves that really theirs is one of Gulp's or Bud's (Lois doesn't shed proper scales yet). This isn't necessarily tourists being blind and stupid either - dragon scales are all the same color after they've been off the dragon for a little while, whatever color they were on the dragon, so why not imagine yours is from your favorite dragon?

  Everybody wants scales though, so it's a good thing we now have lots of dragons to provide them. I mean, we've always had lots of dragons, but after I collected a few bagfuls at Dragon Central and went through a really amazingly silly nonconversation with Bud
about whether it was all right if I took them away, the dragons started collecting them for me. I don't think anyone has a clue what I want them for; it's just another of those inexplicable peculiarities of humans.

  It's funny about the scales. Dad always said it was a bad idea, our Rangers have better things to do with their time than haul trash for tourists, tourists are just fine with coffee mugs and mouse mats that say GREETINGS FROM Smokehill. And I remember the flap when Mom and Katie and the latest noise of consultants (okay, what's the collective noun for consultants - a fire sale of consultants? ha ha ha) brought him around, saying that it was something tangible about our australiensis that visitors could not only see but touch and take home with them. Not to mention scales being about the only things attached to dragons that don't disintegrate within a few months: Maybe it's something to do with the fact that scales don't actually stay on the dragon long. Dad did have to admit they made us money - and even a big bag of them doesn't weigh much, so they're not a burden to carry back to the Institute. Since Lois the sanctuaries in Kenya and Australia have started selling scales too, but all their scales are just from any old dragons, and they don't do anything like the business we do.

  Then the postcard from that first TV documentary-filmed at the Westcamp meadow, so there is a lot of hushed, dopey voiceover narration of the and this is where IT FIRST HAPPENED variety - of Gulp prostrate at my feet sold like nearly enough for a down payment on Smokehill II. You can't see most of her, of course, just a bit of her neck and her head, with her face tipped down enough for her nearer eye to be looking straight at me, very much like the first afternoon, when she was apologizing. The panorama version - where you can see all of her - sold even better. And then there's our patent on Dragon Dolls. And Dragon Squadron was last Christmas' biggest seller - in both its computer and its board game formats - the sort of scene where parents were pulling each other's hair out in front of FAO Schwarz. They had to call in some kind of riot police in Denver, I think it was, when a shipment got hijacked to somewhere else.

  And, okay, yes you can buy an autographed copy of the panorama postcard of Gulp and me, and Gulp doesn't sign autographs.

  It's true that they built our fortress before the money really started rolling in, but maybe the bank manager Dad got the loan from could smell that it was going to. Or maybe he just had a sense of humor. Or maybe Dad made up the idea for Dragon Squadron on the spot (actually, it was Dad's idea - I didn't know he even knew what a game was, let alone a computer game) and promised him first editions for his kids.

  And speaking of people who were born to go on TV (the spinyridged ones that peep and the two-legged ones that bellow), Eleanor also made a huge difference in how the whole story went over at the beginning, when a lot of the country was still mostly on the Searles' side and the Searles were trying to make out, oh, I don't know exactly, it all made me so angry I couldn't think about it, just like at the beginning when there was a dead dragon and a dead stupid evil jerk and Lois was a secret - the Searles tried to make it out there was some kind of child abuse going on with my dad sort of giving me to the dragons as a sacrifice or something, or like that famous psychologist who raised his kids in a box to keep out bad influences (and I think my dad is a control freak). Seems like poor Dad was always getting whacked for the way he raised me - last time it was for handing me over to the Rangers. (Nobody ever tried to argue that the dragons had handed Lois over. Dull. )

  So some enterprising reporter started looking for other kids and there are only Martha and Eleanor and Eleanor took over immediately and said that they'd known about Lois from the beginning and like sue her, she's eleven years old. This took the wind out of a lot of political sails, especially when Eleanor told the story of how it was Martha who found out that Lois liked her tummy rubbed, you just had to wear gloves to do it. Hardened senior Republican senators watching on the video link were going "awwwww" and then trying to pretend they were coughing.

  Then the Searles tried to make it out that someone had taught Eleanor what to say, but the same enterprising reporter managed to convince Katie to let Eleanor have what amounted to a press conference, with questions from the floor and stuff. By the time Eleanor, perfectly self-possessed and articulate, had explained that it maybe wasn't true that I was the only human who'd ever tried to mom a dragonlet - there were one or two old Australian folk tales about it (they're in one of Mom's books) but they were so bizarre that the white guys that translated them thought they were about taking too many drugs, the Searles had lost. And without the Searles goading them nobody wanted to look bad by trying to put me or Dad in jail. So it was Gulp and Lois and Smokehill to a landslide victory. Just like Eleanor's is going to be when she runs for president in forty years or so.

  I've gotten ahead of myself again. But this is sort of the happy ending part - or at least the cautious if a trifle shaky happy beginning ?C and also I didn't think the story was going to go on this long and I'd like to get it over with. But there's some other stuff I want to tell you the real version of. Like the animal rights activists breaking into Smokehill and letting all the things in the zoo out and how one of them (the zoo critter, not the activist) tried to eat Eleanor. There's a lot that happened in those last few weeks, after Lois and I fled west and the Searle army closed in, but I can't be bothered sorting out most of it, and there are already millions of people writing magazine articles and thumping great books on everything to do with Lois and dragons and Smokehill now so you can read them. I'm mostly only writing this at all to make Dad and Martha happy, and a little bit to try to get in some of the stuff all the other great thumping books leave out, or get wrong. Like the animal activists - there weren't any, okay? - and anything even trying to eat Eleanor.

  They'd started having regiments or units or whatever you call them of the National Guard (let me see, a noise of consultants, maybe a Saruman of National Guard?) moving in on Smokehill. The president hadn't quite declared a state of national emergency but I guess he'd allowed as how there was at least a clear and present danger of something or other. (All of those thousands of ten-mile-long dragons are hungry. ) You remember a busload of tourists had actually seen a dragon flying about half a mile away - so just how much obviously threatening behavior are we going to put up with from this final handful of a nearly extinct creature, anyway? The Searles' spin doctors made it sound like it was like an armada of kamikaze bomber dragons and the tourists on that bus were all in the hospital being treated for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. So the guys in camouflage with funny hats rolled a couple of helicopters in.

  You remember that helicopters are the only things that can fly in here, and even they have instrument difficulty, and first you have to get 'em through the gate, but after one of our dramatic rescues about twenty years ago we got a little tiny extra driblet of congressional money to build a garage outside the gates where all the garages and the parking lot are, to hold a flatbed truck that would carry a helicopter with folded up blades through the gate. We couldn't afford a helicopter but we had our very own flatbed helicopter-carrying truck, which I suppose at least saved transporting it, since it went about five mph and made our solar buses look sporty.

  There wasn't any place to put everybody so at first the Guard and their helicopters were camped outside the gate, and there was a lot of shouting about that, because the gate was so (comparatively) small and if they had to "mobilize" quickly, there'd be a bottleneck. Also the tourists objected to their parking spaces being taken up by heavies in uniform, since Smokehill was still open for business. Eventually Dad got semi-overruled and most of the people still stayed outside the gate but the first two helicopters and three guys to look after them got brought through. Our new tourist attraction. Not. (But it freed up some of the parking lot. ) Well, that made everybody in our party really nervous, because the last thing they wanted was any of this gang being able to move anywhere fast, so people began to think of creative ways to make sure this didn't ha
ppen.

  Martha started chatting up one of the guard Guards - have I mentioned that she'd started getting really cute when she hit her teens? - and he showed her a lot more about his helicopter than he should have, but then she's just a dumb girl, isn't she? So when the order finally came that they were going to start Operation Dragon Vanquish (I am not kidding) by finding out what had happened to me, there was a flurry of people putting plans of action into action. I don't know exactly what Martha did to her helicopter (when I asked her she said demurely that she "disrupted the synchronization between the front rotor and the rear one. " With a little help from a wrench. "Oh," I said) but that still left one. Now pay attention, because this is where it gets exciting.

  Eric opened one of the cage doors at the zoo. Just think about that for a minute. Eric. Opened. One. Of. The. Cages. Eric. But we were looking at the possibility - no, the likelihood of losing Smokehill, so last ditch efforts were in order. I'm still really impressed. But this is the best part if you're going to do something like let something out of its cage to make an uproar, you want to let the one that's going to cause the most uproar out, right? Like, you might say, the biggest stink. So guess who he let out. You get three guesses and the first two don't count.

  So then he came screaming up to the Institute, which was by then buzzing with Guards doing moving-out things, and all these great horrible (Martha said) army super jeeps and things were rolling through the gate like Grond at the siege of Gondor, and Eric had a tantrum of, I guess, epic proportions even for Eric (even Eleanor was almost impressed), and nearly brought the entire National Guard to its knees single-handed, between the tantrum itself and - well, you guessed it, right? - odorata, who was cavorting around having a high old time doing what odorata does.

  It just happens that this was all going on during odorata mating season, so all the males would have been trying out their courting steps anyway, and while the young males had all been too crestfallen (so to speak) while they were all crammed in the same cage with the big guy, once they got let out they decided to have a stab at the show themselves, so we had mating-dance odorata pretty much all over the landscape - I'm sorry I missed it - and big strapping members of the National Guard passing out from the smell right and left (have I mentioned that odorata is especially smelly during mating season? Because the males are proving to the females that they can protect them) and Eric trying to kill anyone in a Guard uniform, claiming that some damned soldier had opened the cage door and that he was going to have the entire Guard court-martialed unless they brought the guy who did it forward and let Eric kill him. And, you know, one of the reasons Eric was so convincingly off his rocker was that he was worried sick about the possibility that odorata might get hurt. He'd decided that it was worth the risk, but he still hated doing it. And it made it really easy for him to channel that hatred at the guys who were making it necessary.

  Dad had been on the phone at that point for about forty-eight hours straight, trying to get hold of somebody who could cancel the order to do this big search for my dead body - I mean, where's a nice little international incident when you need one? If there'd been any real news going on even all the Searles' money couldn't have turned our dragons into a civil war - because he knew that as soon as they found anything they could pretend was evidence that I or anyone else had come to some kind of harm, they'd start killing dragons. Don't ask me how they were managing to discount my twice-daily check-ins - that the dragons were holding a gun to my head and making me say I was okay?

  I asked Dad about this when I was trying to write this part, and was sorry then, watching it in his face as he went back to that terrible time. Finally he said, "Nobody sounds too great on our two-ways and the one you were using was worse than usual. Somebody decided that maybe it wasn't really you. That I'd rigged it somehow. That's when they started. . . keeping a watchful eye on me. " Jesus. If I knew who it was I'd . . . hang him out to dry and then give him to the dragons for their fire.

  So everything had gone seriously wrong enough that Dad - and Eric - thought it was worth it to tell me to get out - the way the party politics were being driven, finding Lois would be even worse than finding me dead - gee, thanks - but whatever they were going to find (or whatever they were hoping to find) they were still going to start looking at Westcamp. Of course back at the Institute they didn't know about Gulp. Dad has said since - and I did not ask - that he got ten years older for every day after I disappeared and there was no news of me of any kind. . . .

  Anyway. Even odorata couldn't make the second helicopter dematerialize, of course, although they were doing a very good job of razing troop strength and creating rampant chaos - and the big strapping guys keeling over weren't later on going to admit that it was just a bunch of smelly lizards, so that's where the violent, club-wielding animal activists got shoved into the story. Okay, there'd been some animal rights guys - way too low-key to call activists - hanging around, but they only wielded banners and they never made it through the gate. (Although they did spray-paint one or two of Saruman's jeeps. )

  But meanwhile Eleanor was also on the case. While Eric and odorata were doing their various dances, Eleanor was hitting herself over the head with a shovel - you know how scalp wounds bleed - and staggering in to the Institute covered in blood and crying for Katie. (Martha says she really was crying and she really was staggering but Eleanor says she wasn't, that it was all planned. Martha says that it wouldn't have worked if she hadn't really been crying and staggering and that she was paying her a compliment so please relax but it was also the stupidest thing she'd ever heard of, and I say amen to that, also that she's amazingly brave and maybe that's all that counts, since it worked, aside from the fact that it was an utterly idiotic thing to have done and she's lucky she didn't give herself permanent brain damage. )

  Katie understandably pretty much had a heart attack on the spot and gathered up her freely bleeding child and demanded the remaining helicopter to fly them out to the hospital now. Dad - who is very capable with needle, thread, sutures, staples, and those butterfly things, as most of us can vouch for - instantly backed her up, and so that's what happened. Martha says she couldn't be sure that the reason the helicopter crew volunteered so fast didn't have something to do with the rapidly-spreading odorata smell, but the point is that was two helicopters out of two (they never did figure out exactly what went wrong with the other one: ninja chipmunks maybe?), and it took another six hours to get more helicopters "mobilized" to Smokehill, and that's when they started hunting me. That last conversation with Dad was with the new helicopters rolling through the gate but he couldn't just tell me that with Saruman monitoring him and that last shout from Eric was only because even Saruman was a little leery of him after his odorata performance, and he'd managed to snitch a two-way.

  But all of this had given Gulp and me a few more days to make some kind of a relationship, and who's to say if I'd put my hand on her nose the day before or even six hours before and started thinking pictures at her, it would have worked?

  The new helicopters flew directly to Westcamp, and found no me, of course, but all my gear - including all the stuff that would let me stay alive in Smokehill - was still there. And of course there were signs of some big animal having been around a lot and a lot of recently-shed dragon scales, if any of them were clever enough to recognize them, which, since it was Handley and his guys, they probably were.

  (Dad certainly was, when they brought some of the scales back to the Institute. He says he kept telling himself that we'd all made the best decisions we could have right along from the beginning - from the moment I put Lois down my shirt the first time - and that if it was now all going horribly wrong we still couldn't have done anything else. But that's one of the worst things about this whole story, what those fifteen days I was missing did to Dad. It didn't do anything good for Martha and Billy and everybody else but Dad was, ultimately, responsible, and I was h
is son . . . and I really was the only family he had left. And even if you counted Lois - which I did - she was missing too. )

  I don't know if they commented on the vomit but I do know that the glaring lack of blood and guts gave them some pause (nobody had told them dragons generally don't leave crumbs). My stuff had made them decide it was me that was missing after all, no impostors necessary, the lack of blood and guts made them willing to assume that I was still alive, and Dad's phone marathon had eventually put some brakes on the whole gone-bananas spectacle of Dragon Vanquish but since they had all this hardware flying around already they decided while they were out there they might as well look for me. So they did. And they had some kind of fancy infrared dingle-dangle and some high-tech bozo to read it, so they could keep looking for human-shaped things of the right temperature, since there would only be one of them out there.

  Unless another poacher had got in, of course. And unless I was dead after all and the dingle-dangle wouldn't find me.

  I wonder, now, if it was just accident that Bud took us outdoors the afternoon that the choppers were due to fly over that meadow. Because even infrared gizmos can't read dragons through rock. Let alone small human visitors.

  And Eleanor has an interesting new scar under her hair, and Eric got odorata rounded up again - which wasn't as hard as it might have been because the local landscape doesn't really suit them and they were beginning to drift uncertainly back toward their cages like sozzled party-goers stumbling home at dawn - and there was a record-breaking number of odorata babies the following season, so much so that we had to negotiate with some other zoos to build odorata cages and take some of them off our hands. But by that time we were golden and any zoo lucky enough to have anything to do with us would do pretty much whatever we said.

  I doubt Lois is ever going to get as big as she would have, if she'd stayed with her mom, if her mom hadn't died. And she's still a lot paler than any of the rest of the dragons I've met, although it's become a kind of pinky-coppery-tawny-iridescent pale and - okay, never mind everything I've said about how ugly she is - is really kind of pretty, although I don't know if any of the guy dragons are going to think so when she gets older, and I don't suppose chances are she'll be let (is "let" the right word?) breed, unless the dragons decide that the bond she and I have is the sort of thing that might get passed on somehow - or would be worth passing on. (No, I don't know if dragons have sex for fun too. And I probably wouldn't tell you if I knew. )

  Sometimes thinking that I've ruined Lois' life really bothers me and sometimes it doesn't. I mean, she's alive, isn't she? And it's horrible that her mom died, and her brothers and sisters. But at the same time if all that hadn't happened the Institute would still be worrying about how to keep the government from readjusting our status so the oil drillers and the gold diggers and the country-getaway builders and all the other greedy villains could come in and ruin our dragon haven - the only dragon haven left on the planet where the dragons are thriving - and now certainly the only one where they hang out with humans.

  And yet the millionaire parents of that utter total absolute piece of dog crap that killed Lois' mom nearly got their evil law blasted through Congress (with a little help from the oil drillers) to kill off all our dragons. And if they'd succeeded, I don't think the Kenya sanctuary would have lasted much longer, or the Australian park. I've told you, the dragons besides ours aren't doing too well, which in a weird way gives people the excuse to make them do worse. And they may not want to admit it, but some of them are glad of the excuse. (We're still waiting to see what effect what's happened here may have on the other two parks. We're waiting hopefully. )

  Dragons make people very, very nervous. You think the panorama of Gulp and me sells so well because it's cute? It sells so well because it gives people a cold feeling in their throats and a flutter around their hearts. Dragons are, as everyone knows, so big. They make Caspian walruses look small. And they aren't safely in the ocean like whales, or Nessie in those lochs - you can't stay on the shore and keep away from them. Dragons belong on land. And they fly. And they breathe fire. And real dragons aren't beautiful, at least not like the paintings of Saint George. Those dragons may be dying on the point of some dumb hero's spear, but they're also gorgeous. The real ones are just BIG. And strange. And pouched, of course. And smelly. All the photo shoots and TV documentaries can't make them romantic. Just real. Which is a mixed blessing. And why, even though we're golden right now, we know we have to work at staying golden. Not to mention that the side effect of all this popularity is keeping me out of jail, which is good too.

  I keep away from arguments on dragon intelligence. In the first place I can't be bothered, and in the second place I have a good line in being young and dumb myself I didn't mean to, but you try waking up one morning to discover you're an overnight sensation - especially when you've been tired and scared half out of your remaining half a mind for most of the last two years - and see how well you come across in your first big national interviews. (I should have got Eleanor to write my lines. ) The first big national interviews that are, as well, going to make the difference between whether your dad and your friends and your entire world gets prosecuted into oblivion or not, for something you did. Sure I agreed to be interviewed - I was desperate.

  Well, we won. But most of it hasn't been much fun. Wildly exciting, some of the time, and fascinating, but rarely fun. There's been a lot of pressure on us from the beginning to go on tour, Lois and me. Gulp's too big and also too scary and also practically speaking impossible to transport. Just one kid sneaking back to watch Gulp take off from the Wal-Mart parking lot in East Styrofoam and getting a broken head from being caught in the backdraft would destroy all the good we'd done, not to mention the wear and tear on poor Gulp even if nothing went wrong. (It probably bothers me the most that she'd try to do it, if I figured out how to ask her. ) And I won't risk it with Lois either - I wouldn't even when she was still small enough to squeeze in the back of a big station wagon, and the Searles still looked like they might win, and I was still desperate.

  Dad backs me up, every time, when I say No tours. And he's still the head of the institute, as well as my dad. Dad says that I'm the real expert, and he's right, of course, except that "expert" is not what I am, but it takes a really big person, it seems to me, to sit back and let your barely-eighteen-year-old son take the lead in your life's work, which is essentially what my dad has done. (Have I mentioned recently that he's the real hero? The human real hero. ) And yet he's as happy as a puppy in a closet full of shoes, because he can finally study his beloved dragons up close - although he's still at the early "ow ow ow" Stage of the Headache, which gets in the way. Turns out all humans get it, sometimes even some of the TV crews and they're not even trying to communicate anything except "please do something that will get me a bigger budget. "

  (And just by the way, Dad and I had the worst roaring and thundering argument of my entire life when he found out about my Headache. I know what it was, of course - he'd been feeling like a Bad Father all along, about everything, and especially about the eczema, even though I'd managed never to let him see it, which probably made him even more suspicious, and the truth is there are more bits of me that will never be beautiful because of Lois, and while Dad kept uneasily letting me make that decision, he didn't like it, and he was pretty sure I wasn't telling him the whole truth, which I wasn't. I never told anyone about the Headache. Because I didn't have to. And that pushed him over the edge. I kept yelling at him, "So, what were you going to do? Make me send her back?" Stupid of me maybe to tell him at all, but it was going to come out anyway as soon as he read about it here. )

  I might as well be writing this as working on my dictionary because my dictionary is getting nowhere fast. Not that in some ways we aren't - getting somewhere - or I hope we are. It's pretty funny watching Lois - often now with Martha - giving Gulp her talking lessons, for example. I've told you t
hat dragons mostly don't seem to talk out loud - or anyway what we'd call words are only maybe a quarter of dragon language and it's a support quarter, not a leading quarter. It seems to me there's a fifth fifth or sixth sixth in there somewhere that I don't even know what it is, and I think there's some kind of layers action too. . . . But meanwhile Gulp is learning to burble. What we're going to do with the burble - or the cheep, chortle, peep and whatever else - I don't know yet. But you know, why do dragons have the vocal cords and the larynxes if they don't use them? Maybe they fell out of the habit of talking out loud as they got good at the head stuff. Or maybe they stopped talking out loud after the Australian "war" with chatty, deadly humans. So we're going to begin a new habit. I hope.

  But the stuff that is the most translatable into human word facsimiles is surface stuff, like where the food is, and bees go back to the hive and tell each other that, you know? And nobody gets into screaming contests about how intelligent bees are. If you were only using your ears and eyes, a dragon sentence like "There is a valley north of that hill that you can see from here, and then west of the hill beyond that which you can't see from here, but you could if you flew up a few [tree lengths? Dragon lengths? I still don't have much grip on dragon measurement and yes this is another problem] which has a good spring at the bottom of it" would come out something like "There is beyond [something] and beyond [something else] [something] of [something] good [something]. " And they don't "speak" in "sentence" shapes anyway. You see why I keep getting mixed up.

  I'm guessing that Bud and Gulp are still the only ones on the dragon side who are working more or less from the same page (of the dictionary, ha ha) that I am - we're the ones who had our little/big epiphanies, that first day aboveground after Gulp had brought us to Dragon Central. We're the ones who thought "Right. Here's the starting line. . . . Uh, where's the track?" Gulp is learning to talk out loud. Bud watches over my shoulder a lot when I'm using my laptop, and he's seen that graphics program. Maybe it's just as well I don't know what a dragon laugh is. And speaking of intelligence, I think that the dragons, as we go on yattering and yammering at them (and squeezing our skulls and saying "ow ow ow"), are beginning to feel about us kind of the way we feel about dogs. (And when your dog goes "roooaaaaoooow" at you don't you sometimes go "roooaaaaoooow" at him back?) And we've been living with dogs for forty thousand years and are still arguing about how best to get our point across to them.

  Dad, by the way, doesn't disagree when - usually I've just come away from a particularly frustrating session with some member or members of the white coat brigade, which tends to put me in a ranting sort of mood anyway - when I say that dragons are more intelligent than humans. He says I'm prejudiced, but he doesn't disagree. He just says we don't know yet. He likes not knowing. He likes the process of finding out. It makes him happy. It's the first time since Mom died he's been happy.

  And we're actually talking about her for the first time. Or not talking about her so much as just letting her be part of the conversation. Mom said this, Mom said that. (And I wish I had more of her humor when the white coats start sticking me with their specimen-impaling pins, which is what it feels like sometimes. The scientists who can't stand the headaches but don't give up easily study me. ) But it's like she's part of our family again. The door's been opened. It was like nailed shut for six years but it's open now. I knew something important had happened when I heard him call her Mad, one evening, at dinner with Billy and Grace. Up till then if he mentioned her at all he called her Madeline, which he'd never used when she was alive.

  It makes both of us miss her more in some ways but . . . well, it's the way it is. Somebody you loved dying isn't something you get over, you know? You get used to it because you have to. You carry it around with you - because you have to. And even after I stopped scratching my cheeks and playing Annihilate all the time and became something more like normal again from the outside, missing Mom was still in there doing stuff to me.

  Since Dad and I started talking about her again I've stopped dreaming about her. This is mostly a relief, but I miss it a little bit too. And since Lois has dragons to teach her how to be a dragon I don't dream about Lois' mom either. I miss those dreams a little too. I just don't like people dying, you know? And Snark would have been way jealous of Lois, but he'd've got over it. And at least Snark was old, for a dog. It wasn't exactly okay that he died, but it so wasn't okay in any way that my mom and Lois' mom died.

  So the short answer to that question I asked way back at the beginning is . . . yes. If Mom had still been alive and I'd still been more or less, you know, sane, I probably wouldn't have noticed the dying dragon's eye, not the momness of it. I would have been horrified and sorry - and I'd've got on the two-way as soon as I got clear of the remains of the poacher, and called Billy, and the story would have been a lot different because there would have been no Lois. Even if I'd noticed that one of Mom dragon's babies wasn't quite dead yet, that would have just been one of the horrible things, that it took a little while to die, that I had to watch the last one die while I waited for Billy. It would never have occurred to me to do anything about it - what could I possibly do? Eric's got incubators, but a fetal squodge wouldn't anything like make the journey back - and of course an incubator would never have worked on a dragonlet anyway.

  Or back up a little farther yet - if I hadn't been a jerk about my first overnight alone in the park - if I hadn't been determined to make that twenty miles - I would never have seen the dying dragon in the first place. But why was I so determined? What was Mom dragon putting out on the airwaves as she lay there dying - about being a mom and dying and leaving her babies behind? And why was it me that picked it up instead of another dragon? And I wouldn't want to bet against it that it was partly frenzy that helped keep Lois alive - that I COULDN'T BEAR her dying - because of what her and her mom reminded me of.

  So is Lois, and just maybe the entire future of Draco australiensis, worth Mom's life? I don't have to answer that. It's what happened. Anyway. I pick up some of the head stuff. Yeah. It's there, I'm not imagining it, and I'm not going to argue about it any more. But I think the only reason I pick up even as much as I do is because I'm picking up some of the dragonness of it, and I can do that because of Lois - and her mom. Which isn't something I call pass on to anybody else. Yet. But the possibility that there's some kind of osmosis going on also gives me the best excuse to go on living with dragons, which I do, a lot of the time now, although even I have to take a break sometimes. Also the weather sometimes has something to say about where you are and where you stay in Smokehill.

  There are fancy new premises (built by more Dragon Squadron money) out near where the dragon caves are - the dragon caves I stayed in, that is, since I (and Dad) aren't making any statements about whether they're the only dragon-inhabited caves in Smokehill or not - we're pretty sure not. It's still hard, counting dragons - and those caves go on and on and they all have spooky gremlin things-moving-around-in-the-dark noises. Now that we're meeting our dragons face-to-face it should get easier though, shouldn't it? Well, we still never see more than a few of them at a time, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only human who's ever seen more than the same half dozen that are the human liaison committee (sorry, little joke here - dragons do not do bureaucrat language).

  I'm pretty sure now that Billy was worried that the caves up by the Institute we were going to open to the public had dragons in them somewhere, or were connected to caves that had dragons in them somewhere, or at least spooky gremlin noises in the dark. Although he's never said so. And part of that fear would be the suspicion he and Dad both had that we weren't going to go on stopping australiensis from going extinct for much longer, and what if the tiny little additional pressure of lopping off the tailest tail end of the Smokehill cave network was the tiny little additional pressure too far?

  And somehow once the money started pouring in, the plans for the Institute caves changed.
Only the first couple of caverns got opened to the public after all - and all the ways out of them have been very, very, very, very, very, very thoroughly sealed off although it's like having won the main issue, there was a kind of hands-washing-of, right okay, now go ahead and do your worst declaration and the pointy-head designer from Manhattan or Baltimore did, and those two caves, which are good big ones, are a kind of Madame Tussaud's of dragons with a little Disneyland thrown in. I can't bear the place myself but tourists cram in there in their gazillions.

  But it makes me wonder what the Arkholas know that they still aren't telling us. There were always a lot more of them and only one of Old Pete - and he's the only one who wrote anything down, and while he couldn't be bothered most of the time talking about humans, he did often write about how he couldn't have done what he did without Arkhola help, and how much he admired them. What the Arkholas do instead of keeping journals is make songs. There's one I think I haven't told you about, about dragons flying. And the most interesting thing about it is that it's really old - long before Old Pete brought any dragons here. I'm so horrible at learning languages. But I'm going to have to try to learn Arkhola. Billy says Whiteoak would teach me. Uh-oh.

  Anyway. We've got these fancy new premises pretty near Dragon Central - that's Bud's caves - which we call Farcamp. We had some trouble deciding where to put it. I didn't want the dragons to feel that we were harrying them by getting too close to where they lived, but as Dad and Billy pointed out, us feeble little humans can't actually commute very far in a day, and we need to be somewhere close enough to get there and back, especially in less-than-optimal weather (in bad weather you don't go anywhere) since except me nobody's ever been invited to stay, if you want to call what Gulp did inviting. I said that if the dragons wanted to talk to us, they could do the commuting. We finally compromised on a place near a biggish opening aboveground of a series of caves not too far for feeble humans, which are some kind of wing of Dragon Central, but not dead close to where the helicopter found me standing on Bud's head and screaming.

  There was a lot of grumbling when the plans for Farcamp were presented because of all the tactical problems (see: no more roads and limited helicopter usage and they still haven't got anywhere with the pack ponies, but we've now got college kids and off-season athletes doing two-legged bearer stuff which is a hoot, like something out of an ancient Stewart Granger movie about Darkest Africa) and then when they get there, there still aren't any dragons??, but Dad and Billy and our ecoloony Friends had worked up some heavy environmental impact stuff that made it necessary not to be any closer to Dragon Central, and since we were now the hottest topic around nobody grumbled too loudly for fear of not getting clearance to visit.

  But the dragons do come, to us, to the Farcamp caves. There's always at least a couple of members of the human liaison committee waiting for us politely at the cave entrance - which I call Nearcamp, another of my feeble human jokes. Although the whole business of working this out really made me want to go "neener neener and who says dragons aren't intelligent?" I also saw the caves before the dragons started using them a lot, and I've seen them now that they do use them a lot, and I can tell you that they've put in a latrine. And I can't actually swear to this, but I think the rock is getting blacker and redder and shinier and silver-threadier too. And the gremlin noises get more resonant.

  But I'm the only human who's got in that far - to see the latrine, or listen to the gremlins in the corridors. This makes more of the white coats nuts, but they can't do anything about it. In the first place, most of them, the headaches make 'em so sick they have to flee back to Farcamp, in the second place, it's in the new dragon-contact rules (and guess who helped write them), and in the third place, who is going to get around a dragon lying across the entrance of his or her cave? Even if you had the nerve to tiptoe up to one and maybe pretend you didn't want to disturb it and would just creep past, the moment it turns that eye on you, and it will. . .

  The human reception area at Dragon Nearcamp is still pretty minimal. This was my idea first, but not only my dad but also a few of the brighter ethologists and sociologists that the new, expanded Institute was already attracting were saying the same thing. When us humans want human stuff, we'd go back to Farcamp and decompress. But it's turned out to be totally practical as well as sensible because I'm still the only human so far who can hack the headaches for more than a few hours, although Dad and Martha are beginning to learn. Nobody but me has ever picked up a mental image they can use (although I wonder about Martha, with her empathy, which seems to me almost telepathic, but she says it never comes in anything you could call pictures), but they sure do get the headaches. Real howlers, sometimes, and with visual disturbances, sometimes really graphic hallucinations, and a good bit of vertigo and nausea thrown in.

  I don't know if I put up with the headaches better because I'm getting something out of them, or because they're not as bad as what everybody else gets or because I sort of grew into them. If it's that they're not as bad, I'm really sorry. Maybe we'll get over this eventually, or find a way around it. We've only just started after all. I figure we have the time. I hope we have the time. I'm worried that some ruthless impatient human is going to decide that the only way - or the fastest way - would be to raise a dragonlet the way I raised Lois, which I can't believe any dragon mom would agree to. Would any human mom - ? Exactly. But there's still a little problem sometimes convincing the rest of the human world that dragons aren't still just animals.

  I've also tried to find out - mostly from Bud - if trying to talk to humans, well, not if it gives them headaches, exactly, because I wouldn't expect it to be the same thing, but if there are any drawbacks to trying to talk to humans - anything that goes wrong with the dragon because of talking to humans. I can manage to get the idea of pain across - I think - and I'm pretty sure Bud is blowing me off. I'm such a master at being blown off. My impression, for what it's worth, which is probably nothing, is that there is some kind of recoil, for dragons, but physical pain isn't it. This worries me too. But it might explain why there aren't too many of the human liaison committee, and why the rest of them tend to stay out of our way.

  We've just been so LUCKY in a lot of ways. Major Handley was maybe our first piece of brilliant luck - at that black bleak moment when it looked like the Searles and their gang of crooked creeps were going to win. A career military guy capable of independent thought when his orders were to shoot first (as I found out, although not from him) and ask questions later. You don't get luckier than that. But a bright career military guy who obeys orders still had to stop and think about how to obey his order. I wasn't running away, you remember - I was running toward the big black scaly monster of all the Searles' bluster - and then Bud did his extension-ladder trick and the major looked at me standing on the top of Bud's head and waving and shouting and figured that while I looked pretty upset, I didn't look like it was the dragon that was upsetting me. At that moment, I think, is when our luck turned.

  There are a few things that haven't gone according to plan. They still haven't repealed the law that makes my saving Lois' life a life-sentence felony. They've changed pretty much all the other bad laws about dragons but they can't seem to shift that one. Don't ask me why. The human world makes less and less sense to me. But that's one of the reasons we need to stay an internationally trendy soap opera with rare endangered animals: And me a pop star that no one dares prosecute.

  Some of the other reasons are lying around me like medium-sized mountains as I write this, in the dragon Nearcamp. I'm the only human here tonight. Katie doesn't let Martha come as often as either of us would like - she thinks the headaches might stunt her growth or something. If they stunted mine, I'm grateful: Being loomed over by dragons makes me really dislike looming over other humans - and there's a really nice ethologist from Illinois who's been here most of this week. She's done almost all her work with horses but she gets it about
dragons, I think because she doesn't assume her horses are just dumber than humans. They're horses. But she had to go back to Farcamp because of the headaches - and in fact I had to lead her out of the cavern because she was seeing so many starbursts and whirligigs. What people see varies - she's a starbursts-and-whirligigs type. She'll probably be back in a day or two after she's had a lot of sleep and a large bottle of aspirin.

  It's getting late and almost everybody here is asleep. Lois is the nearest to me - only a small hillock, maybe the size of a big pony - a rosy, bronzy hillock in the purply reddish firelight, snoring into my shoes. (Most dragons don't snore either. )

  I don't think dragons have a written language - although I've started to wonder about some of the scratches on the walls here and at Central: I started out thinking they were geological, and then I thought they were about the dragons hollowing out their living quarters to suit them, but lately, hmmm - anyway I still don't think dragons have a written language, exactly, maybe they're just doing a dragony Lascaux thing. Maybe they make songs, like the Arkhola. Hmmm. . . But Bud spends so much time (as now) watching over my shoulder when I'm using my laptop (he doesn't seem to have any trouble staying awake) that I'm not so sure about that any more either.

  And then sometimes I think he's just doing some kind of experiment in communication when he knows I'm concentrating on something else, because when he's looking over my shoulder I usually have this really strange, low-down headache, almost a throat - or a chest - or a stomachache. . . I admit I'd just as soon not wake up some morning and discover I'm growing scales and spinal plates. I mean, if it's necessary, okay, but I'd rather not.

  You're trying to be as objective as you can when you take notes. Mom and Dad - Mom in particular - had this whole rant about There Is No Such Thing as True Objectivity - but then she was a very Bad Scientist - and for ordinary lock the-lab-and-go-home-at-night scientists, maybe how they are is not so important, but in my dragon notes I almost always start out by mentioning what sort of a state I'm in - which is something I learned from Mom. If you've been up all night feeding orphans, it shows, next day, in your work (she said) and it's just arrogant of you not to make note of it. Pretty much everything I ever wrote in the first year of Lois' life starts SOS, which stands for Short of Sleep. How can it not be important to how reliable my notes are when I'm so tired I'm hallucinating dragons hiding behind the trees around Billy and Grace's house?

  My notes now start with H, HH, HHH, or, occasionally, HHHH, which is about headache intensity. XH is the new Bud headache. This that I'm writing now is headed XH, and I'll look over all the H headings when I get back to Farcamp or the Institute and probably try to even them out a little. And I have an increasing series of symbols for moods and feelings and stuff, although that's partly because I think some of the moods are actually dragon-language-background-layer and not me at all.

  I have trouble reading some of my early notes about Lois because I was still trying to make up a shorthand that wouldn't get me slapped in jail and Smokehill turned over to developer piranhas if anyone found one of my notebooks, or broke the password on my computer (I am not a computer genius). I can read most of them, but not all of them. But everything, up till I started this, was still all notes, daily fragments and questions with no answers and unconnected details and ravings (lots of these). Dad's the one who told me that how I felt about all of it is valid too. Maybe our first conversation about it, when he started really leaning on me about writing this, went like this: "Valid for what?" I said. "Who cares? Lois is who's important - and now all the other dragons. "

  Dad made scritchy noises running his fingers through his beard. (I don't think I'm just being whatever-my-old-man-is-I'm-not-going-to-be although maybe I am, since it's obvious that unless I'm kidnapped by aliens and even if I don't ever get any PhD's I'm going to be head of the Institute some day too, but I shave. Actually one of the reasons why I shave may be the scritchy noises Dad makes when he's thinking about something. )

  "You're the human," said Dad finally. "Sure, it's about our dragons, but most humans are mostly interested in other humans. You're a way for the ones who aren't so interested in dragons to get it. By tuning into you. And I know you don't want to hear this, but it's your story too. "

  Actually this freaked me out. I can just about stand having Bud staring over my shoulder all the time and Lois glued to me (almost) all the time, but they're my friends. I don't want a lot of strange humans staring at me for a clue. Not me, boss.

  But then I thought about what Dad had done, keeping the Institute going - have I reminded you recently that he's the real hero of this story? - and I thought about Eleanor on national TV . . . and then my mind did a sort of somersault and I thought about all those books I read when I was a kid about ordinary kids who lived in towns with streetlights and movie theaters, who went to school and played football and ate at McDonald's. The way I'd sucked them down, because I wanted to know. And okay, they were fiction, but they were real fiction, if you follow me, and how did the authors know how to make them up?

  So then I thought about how I had felt about all of it. I thought about what had been going on behind the notes, as I reread my notes. And then I thought, okay, maybe I'll try it. And then I got the worst case of writer's block you can imagine, and I buried myself in dragons in the hopes that the Headache would hammer it all out of me. Either the writer's block or, preferably, this idea of Dad's (and, it turned out, Martha's too) about writing about how I felt.

  And how I feel, here, in a cavern full of dragons, is that it's all so interesting. Which maybe you're thinking is an anticlimax, but in that case I feel sorry for you because that just means you don't really know about interesting. Interesting is as good as it gets - and no I'm not getting all masculine, here, okay? I can say the word "love" and not throw up or turn blue. It if makes you happy, you can say that interesting is part of love - and if you'd like me to say I love my dragons, fine, here we go: I love my dragons.

  But it's turned out to be so much more than just (!) raising one baby critter no human has (probably) ever raised before. I'm still scared to death too - not of the dragons any more (except in terms of the fact that they're still BIG and I wouldn't survive being stood on, however accidentally, and however sorry they were afterward), but for them. Every now and then I heave this huge sigh like my lungs are going to burst before I get enough oxygen in and out of them, and it's all about everything.

  I have to kind of get up and give myself a shake every now and then, like a snoozing dog, or one of those cartoon characters rattling himself back into shape after a piano or a brontosaurus falls on him, if the dragons and I are in the caverns. But if we're outdoors and we've started early and it's a nice day, I'll suddenly wonder why it's getting dark and why I'm so hungry and I'll realize we've been at it for twelve hours or more. (Dragons eat about every third day, I think. ) Part of this is the headaches - they're confusing - Martha calls it fuzzying, and she's right, it's like they rub up your brain till it looks like a sweater a cat's been clawing - it's not just that they hurt, although pain can make you stupid too, even if it's a pain you're used to. I wish I could figure out what Bud isn't telling me about not getting headaches.

  And I guess I've grown up strange, probably as strange as Lois, in my own way. But I was already strange four years ago when I met her, when she wasn't quite as long as my hand. But - if you're asking - I wouldn't have any other life. (There. That's how I feel. ) I wanted to work with dragons, and you can't get any more working with dragons than this. Some of the old lifers here are about the only people who still treat me like I'm normal - without thinking about it, I mean. Even a lot of the Rangers are a little, I don't know how to put it, awkward. Wary maybe. I should be a freshman at some college this year, hanging out at the student union and drinking beer. I was too young to drink beer much when I met Lois, and I can't now, because of the headaches. You could say that while Lois ha
s finally got to return to her people, my reward has been to leave mine. But it is a reward, even if it's a little complicated.

  Hey, it's late. The fire's dying and I think my battery is too. Even Bud's eyes are almost closed: just a glint where the lids meet in the middle. I'm going to shut up now and get some sleep myself.