Kitabı oku: «The Book of Dragons», sayfa 6

Worth the climb, isn’t it? I come up here almost every day just for the view. The police tell us to stay away, but I can’t imagine them hurting anyone. They sure look better tempered than the turkeys that clog the streets every fall. When I’m up here, I don’t worry about the SRATs, school gossip, Dad’s nagging, Grandma’s lawn that needs mowing—it’s just nice knowing that there are these beautiful creatures in the world whose concerns we’ll never understand and who’ll never care about our troubles. The universe feels just a little bit bigger, you know?

I ask myself: Why have the dragons come here? Why?

But seeing that view, it almost doesn’t matter.

JUNE

INGRID

[Children are playing in a field.

The focus of the lens changes to be on a towering tupelo in the background. There’s something odd about the branches: they seem too bent, too laden with foliage.]

The mood in town has definitely shifted. Not nearly so many are talking about all the money we’ll make from selling land to the developers, and also not nearly so many are scared about all the changes. I’d say we are getting used to the dragons.

[A baseball crashes into the tupelo tree, and the scene explodes. What but a moment earlier had seemed to be mere clumps of leaves transforms into shimmering scales, unwinding limbs, unfolding wings, unfurling whiskers, snapping nictitating membranes. The camouflaging green gives way to reds, golds, brilliant swatches of blue and indigo as a cloud of dragons, disturbed from their chameleon-like rest, take to the air. The flock is a mix of North American elk-horns, Siberian zmeys, Mesoamerican feathered serpents, wingless East Asian loongs, flare-tailed South Asian nagas, European gossamer-wings, and other species. None of them are bigger than a peacock, and most are much smaller.

For a moment, the children admire the aerial display, but soon lose interest. A girl runs up to the foot of the tree and gingerly steps among the droppings until she recovers the ball. The children resume their game. One by one, the disturbed dragons land back on the tree, settle in, and take on their camouflage.]

They are cute, aren’t they? Some people are disappointed; most are relieved. These dragons are nothing like the giants in Widener Library that power Boston or even the smaller ones that drive the jumbo jets crossing the Atlantic and the continent.

Oh, I don’t mean to sound like a dragon expert. I didn’t see a dragon in person until I was eighteen, the day I showed up at Wellesley, a wide-eyed first-year.

[Archival photos of Wellesley College, presented Ken Burns style.]

Back then, the Wellesley endowment numbered only five: three American bison-horns, a Welsh wyvern, and an English wyrm. It couldn’t possibly compete with the five-hundred-strong endowment of Harvard-Radcliffe, but to me, it was wealth and power beyond imagination.

While the other girls were still settling in, I took a walk around Lake Waban, where the smallest bison-horn, Deliriousborne, made her home. It was evening, and I wasn’t expecting to see anything. The dragons, I knew, were very busy and rarely home. Although they, like most university dragons, came to Wellesley because they were attracted to the hoard of learning in its libraries and lecture halls, Wellesley’s compact with the Commonwealth meant that the university had to persuade the dragons to power the factories and mills in the surrounding towns with their fire breath.

But the professors also knew that the dragons needed time at home to recuperate. Dragons didn’t live on grain and meat alone: their spiritual well-being required them to be steeped in the academic atmosphere of the college, to have time to be alone and to think—I know modern experts say this is all nonsense, but I believed it back then, and I believe it still.

Not a bad metaphor for the life of a college student, I think.

The shoreline trail was shrouded in mist and fog, as was the lake itself. As I continued my stroll, energized by the excitement of being on my own, away from the eyes of parents and chaperones, I imagined myself a hero in the ballads of old, hiking through vale and dale, traversing swamp and bog, hot on the trail of a dragon guarding treasure. The heavy mist made it impossible to see the other shore of the lake, and it seemed to expand in size until it was as large as an ocean—I didn’t know then that loss of spatial sense and judgment was said to be a common psychological effect of proximity to a dragon.

Abruptly, the air was rent by a loud trumpeting, the way I imagine a jet engine sounds. I turned and was greeted by the sight of the water in the lake erupting like a volcano. The mist parted for a moment to reveal a long, sinuous neck, like in the drawings of the brontosaurus in books, topped by a massive horned and furry head. Sunlight, refracted by the mist, haloed that head with a thousand colors I could not name and had never seen. The head turned toward me, and those eyes, blue orbs that seemed to glow with an inner light, locked with mine.

Then, almost casually, Deliriousborne opened her mouth a crack and let out a gentle hiss, like a whisper; the mist swirling around her maw glowed a faint blue, like an iceberg. My heart was in my throat.

She looked away and up, turning heavenward. The jaws opened wide, and out shot a widening tongue of flame, a fiery flower blossoming in the middle of the lake.

I don’t think I ever understood the literal meaning of breathtaking until that moment. I had seen plenty of scientific illustrations and photographs of dragons curled inside power plants, using their fire to generate the steam that spun the turbines that produced the electricity that was the lifeblood of the mechanized world. But those illustrations made dragons seem tame and controlled, organic components of the machinery of the modern metropolis.

Coming face-to-face with a dragon was indescribably different: sublime, as the Romantic poets would have said. Instantaneously, I understood why so many explorers and engineers of old would brave lightning-filled storms, ice-bound Arctic waters, pathless deserts strewn with skeletons, and swamps covered in poisonous vapors—just for a chance to glimpse one of these magnificent creatures.

Years later, after I had Julie, that was one of her favorite stories, and she demanded I tell it again and again. As a little girl, she was obsessed with dragons, and she used to draw all these pictures—just like Zoe. She always left the eyes till last, and when she painted in the brilliant bits of blue, with shiny streaks bleeding into the misty air, the dragons seemed to come alive.

HARIVEEN

For all our modern dependence on dragons, most people never see one. The trend to deprive people of the knowledge of the reality of our energy policy has only accelerated in recent decades. In the same way we keep death out of sight in hospitals, we keep the dragons out of people’s view behind concrete walls and steel doors, behind secretive employment contracts and ironclad NDAs, maintaining the illusion that modernity is cost-free.

If dragons are so safe, as the government and the energy companies keep on insisting, why the thick prisonlike fence around Harvard Yard and the high-security isolation barriers that gave Wall Street its name? Makes you wonder what they aren’t telling us, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the problem isn’t limited to the Commonwealth of Maine and Massachusetts, or even to the other countries in North America. Everywhere in the world, from the Hibernia Republic to the city-states of the Sinitic League, people are content to let mysteries be mysteries.

You can find a hint of this modern state of affairs even in antiquity.

[Animation of an aeolipile revolving, with jets of steam shooting out.]

The first person in recorded history to harness draconic energy was Hero of Alexandria. He constructed a brass sphere with two bent pipes coming out, pointing in opposite directions. The sphere was free to rotate about an axis perpendicular to the pipes.

Hero then lined the inside of the sphere with pieces of amber, carved into intricate mythological scenes. A handful of fireflies were trapped inside the sphere to provide illumination, like shooting stars revolving in this inner empyrean. The intent, evidently, was to create a piece of temple art, whose hidden beauty could be appreciated only by the gods and imagined by the worshippers.

However, to the surprise of everyone, Hero’s creation aroused the curiosity of local Egyptian dragons, and two juvenile specimens slithered into the device through the pipes, asplike. Pleased by the art they found inside, the dragons filled the interior with heated steam. The scalding steam, jetting out of the bent pipes, spun the sphere as though it were a living thing, bringing joy and wonder to all viewers.

Hero went on to create more and more elaborate versions of the aeolipile, and died relatively young, raving mad. Few writers in antiquity drew any connection between his work and his death.

LEE

Of course I’m disappointed. I thought the little dragons were going to be the appetizers for the main course, not the whole meal!

The one good thing is that the “Knights of Mannaport” are no longer bugging me all the time to “do something” about the safety of the town. I guess even the anti-dragon conspiracy videos they watch online don’t consider little dragons much of a threat.

One by one, the corporations stopped calling.

So I called them.

“Our engineers have done the feasibility studies. It’s just not economical to exploit the little dragons you have,” they’d tell me. Then they’d drone on and on about megawatts and gigawatts and ROI and capitalization and utility rates and depreciation.

Turns out that the dragons in Mannaport are barely in the kilowatt range. Back in the days when James Watt used to strap a pair of kaleidoscopic goggles on a donkey-sized nessie and call that a steam engine, such low output might have been commercially acceptable. But now? Not so much.

“Little dragons will grow into big ones, right?”

“Not always,” they’d say. Full-grown dragons come in all sizes, even within the same species. And our miniature dragons, according to the biologists they sent, are already done with growing.

“But we have so many of them!” I’d say. “Can’t you corral a bunch of them to do something useful together?”

They’d lecture me on the biology and habits of dragons, the lack of qualified dragon-whisperers, and the dangers of “overengineering.”

Turns out that dragons rarely, if ever, work well in teams. And they can only be enticed, not coerced, to work. The last time anyone tried to force a bunch of small dragons to work together was at Chernobyl, and that was a disaster no one wants to repeat.

“I’ve heard of places that make single-person vehicles and household power plants that run on small dragons,” I’d plead. “Surely there’s some way to make that work?”

“The only places where that’s economical are kibbutzim and big, dense metropolises where the rich might want to show off,” they’d say. “Remember, dragons like to stay where they are, or migrate between fixed points they pick themselves.”

“But the dragons may start migrating.”

“Who wants to go to Mannaport unless you already live there?”

Then they stopped taking my calls altogether.

I’m not giving up, though. Someone told me that over in Japan, they’ve made big strides in miniaturization that we can only dream of. There has to be a way to make a profit from our tiny dragons. Has to be.

ALEXANDER

I tell people to stay as far away as possible. The dragons look cute and harmless, but I know the truth.

Joey was the smart one in the family. Went to an exam school. He had the grades and test scores to get out of Mannaport, to be anything he wanted.

But the only thing my brother wanted was to be a dragon-whisperer, to work with the dragons up close, not just to “bask in the glory of the fruits of their labor from afar”—yep, that was how he talked, like an old novel they made you read in school. Used to make me want to punch him. Talk properly, you doofus!

“Lawyers, bankers, coders—they’re all parasites, mere leeches,” he used to say. “What do they do except manipulate symbols to generate more symbols? But a whisperer is someone who coaxes the breath of life out of the dragon, who makes civilization possible.”

He left home for the DRACOGRID plant in Boston Harbor the day he turned eighteen. They pay dragon-whisperers well, but that’s because the job is so dangerous, and so few have the talent for it.

Joey told me that you cannot force a dragon to work; you have to beguile it. He told me how a czarina in Saint Petersburg once built a whole room in her palace out of amber in order to tempt the dragons into breathing fire—I think she was imitating some hero in Alexandria?—and she got badly burned. That gave me nightmares as a kid.

Let’s see, my mother kept Joey’s scholarship essay around here somewhere … There it is. “Howard Hughes ended up in Las Vegas because he thought the bright lights and endless glamour would keep the flight of dragons that kept his aviation empire aloft entertained. During the Cold Race, NATO and GEAIA both secretly funded artists to try to entice the Warsaw Pact dragons to defect. But hundreds of years after Newcomen and Watt, dragon-whispering is still more art than science.

“I intend to become a great artist.”

Dragons are fickle, lazy, and easily bored. Even if you manage to lure them to settle in a city with treasure, books, or novelty, they’d rather nap near the hoard than work. That last bit, getting a dragon to breathe fire while remaining docile, is where they need the dragon-whisperer.

No one knows how dragon-whispering works. There’s a code of silence among the whisperers, a secretive guild passing their wisdom down the generations by word of mouth. When we were boys, Joey and I used to play games where I’d be the dragon, and he’d try to get me to do chores—usually by promising me time on the game console he built himself.

Maybe that really is how they do it. Didn’t old-time railroad engineers out west strap kaleidoscopes over their locomotive dragons? Wouldn’t surprise me if they now make dragons live in virtual reality headsets. On talk radio, Teddy Patriot said they make the whisperers in power plants stroke the dragons in a weird way, almost like sex, turning them on. I don’t know if I believe that. In school, they’re still teaching children that dragons enjoy music, literature, and art. Joey used to mock that one as the “Scheherazade theory of dragons.”

I’ll never know the real answer. Dragon-whisperers, if they aren’t torched to charcoal in the line of duty, retire only when their minds have been burned away, which is almost worse.

Joey came home at thirty, but he looked like a man twenty years older. He didn’t recognize me or Mom; he didn’t laugh or cry; he ate when food was held to his mouth, and wasted away when it wasn’t. His mind was like a sieve dipped in water. No matter how many times I showed him old family photos or Mom made his favorite dishes, his eyes remained blank and his speech a nonsensical babble. His heart stopped beating eight months after he got home, but he was really dead long before that.

I have no idea what horrors he had suffered; what he had seen and could not unsee.

There was a generous pension, of course, but no way to make the dragons or the company that sucked the life out of him pay what they really ought. The contract and the laws were impenetrable. Assumption of risk. Willing suspension of rights.

Attacking a dragon is a crime. And I won’t ever do anything illegal. But short of that?

JULY

ZOE

[The camera is on her as she walks, keeping pace. From time to time we see tourists gathered around some empty lot, necks craning, phones ready. Uniformed officers stand behind police tape to keep the crowd at a distance.]

The tourists want to see it happen again, up close. Now that we have a bona fide attraction in town, the selectmen are terrified. They want the President to send in the minutemen. (Shakes head.)

No, I still don’t know why the dragons have come to Mannaport.

But, I think I’ve made a new friend, or maybe two.

It started before Independence Day. The town manager and the selectmen, still trying to figure out a way to make some profit from our “useless” dragon infestation, had settled on tourism. They sent a photographer around to take pictures and hired a consulting company to brand the town as the “Dragon Garden on the Bay.” Tour buses came to town twice a day from Boston and Portland, and there was talk of partnering with the cruise ship companies too.

I didn’t like the idea. I was afraid that the tourists would scare the dragons. Most had settled around abandoned lots and foreclosed houses, living off insects and vegetation. Some of them had even learned to leave their dung in one place, where the sanitation company could cart it off in weekly rounds. I thought the dragons and the people of the town were figuring out how to live together in peace. I didn’t want that process interrupted.

But there was an even bigger threat than tourists.

An anti-dragon group had been organizing: parents worried about dragons rotting their children’s minds, bored people looking for something to do, property owners fed up with the mess. They called themselves the Knights of Mannaport and shared ideas online about how to drive the dragons out.

I lurked in their forum under a made-up name. When they decided to use the Fourth of July celebration for “Operation St. George,” I made plans of my own.

Near sunset, while many families were heading to Skerry Field for the fireworks display, the Knights got into pickup trucks and minivans. From all around town, they drove toward the abandoned lot on Hancock, home to one of the largest flocks of little dragons.

I got there just before sundown. The yard was covered in thick, lush grass as tall as my chest, while the house, half of its roof gone and gaping holes in three walls, sat quietly in solitary decay. Dozens of little dragons were already roosting in the ruin or the yard. While a few flapped their wings and opened their eyes, cooing at my approach, most remained asleep.

I ducked down among the grass, out of sight. The soil gave off an acrid odor, not unlike feral cat colonies. As the dusk faded, more bird-sized dragons returned from foraging. They found places to perch, tucked their heads under a wing or a clump of grass, and went to sleep.

I could hear the snores of those nearest me, a faint, even wheezing. A cool breeze whisked away the sweat on my forehead and brought some relief from the stifling summer air. I shivered involuntarily, suddenly remembering this was the house where a man had been shot a couple years ago over an opioid deal gone wrong. The sirens and the flashing blue lights rushing down the street had woken me up.

Pain gripped my heart like a fist. I couldn’t breathe. I fought hard to keep the darkness that threatened to awaken in my mind, to burst through the locks on the mental vault I had sealed it in, the piles of psychic rubble I had piled on.

I couldn’t think about her couldn’t just couldn’t couldn’t.

Bright beams pierced the darkening evening, sweeping through the air above me like luminous lances. The humming of electric engines subsided; the lights went out. Slamming doors and footsteps. Urgent whispers. The Knights had arrived.

I heard the sounds of heavy objects being unloaded. The vehicles were filled with extra power cells, spools of wire, and home-defense electric prods. Their plan was to cover the lot with a net of charged wires and then wake the sleeping dragons with a few well-placed firecrackers.

The more of those nasty creatures electrocuted, the better, someone had posted in their forum.

Poetic justice to use dragon-generated electricity to kill dragons!

My cousin is a lawyer. He thinks that if we do it this way, we can argue to the judge that the dragons flew into the wires on their own, so it wouldn’t count as assault.

I got up from among the thick grass.

“You can’t do this,” I said. I was so scared and riled up that my body shook as much as my voice.

The startled Knights, lit only by the glow of a distant streetlight, stopped. After some confusion, a man stepped out from the crowd. I recognized him from his picture on the forum: Alexander.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Stopping a mistake,” I said.

“The dragons don’t belong here,” he said. He stepped closer so that I could see the grief and rage on his face. “They hurt people. You don’t know.”

“Not these,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm.

“Yes, these.” I heard the pain in his voice, the helplessness of loss and the inability to explain.

I felt equally helpless. I didn’t know how to describe seeing the dragons forage over a park in late afternoon. I didn’t know how to explain why I felt like smiling and crying when I heard the dragons chirp and cheep at night.

So I picked up the whistle hanging around my neck and blew into it, as hard as I could. It was so loud I thought I was never going to stop hearing it, like the sirens in my nightmares.

Around me, the yard and ruined house disintegrated into a maelstrom. The little dragons, awakened by my shrill whistling, bolted into the air. Wings darkened the stars; claws trampled the grass. A cacophonous chorus joined my whistle, and the pungent smell of wild urine saturated the air.

Moments later, the agitation subsided, almost as quickly as it had begun. The dragons were gone. I took the whistle out of my mouth, sucking in a deep breath. Alexander stood rooted to the spot, looking stunned.

A rustling at my feet. We both looked down.

A creature was struggling among the grass. I knelt down: it was about the size of a puppy, though slenderer and a little longer. A calf-shaped head; a pair of tiny, curved horns; whiskers like those on a Maine lobster; a collar of bright, colorful feathers; silver scales over the back; leathery belly; four clawed, birdlike feet; a long, serpentine tail—it was a mutt, descended from the many dragon species that had followed the people here and adapted to life on this continent.

The batlike wings, however, were torn. It couldn’t take off. Gently, I picked it up and cradled it in my arms like a kitten. It trembled against my skin, a little whirling dynamo.

It opened its eyes hesitantly. They were a bright, shining blue. I shuddered, almost dropping the dragon. That was the last color I wanted to see.

“Drop it!” Alexander shouted. I looked up and saw that he was holding an electric prod, the kind that would kill a home invader in one wallop.

I turned to shield the dragon from him with my back. “Shhhh. It’s okay. I won’t abandon you.”

The little dragon keened like an injured rabbit, a sharp, almost unbearably painful scream. It trembled even harder against my arms. I tried to stroke its back the way I’d pet a cat, the way my mother used to stroke my hair when I was little to get me to sleep. The scales felt warm and soft to the touch, not at all what I expected.

“Listen to that!” said Alexander. He sounded horrified as he raised the prod. “It’s going to breathe fire! You’ve got to drop it now or you’ll die!”

“No! It’s screaming only because you are frightening it.” No one had ever seen the little dragons in our town breathe fire—I was sure they couldn’t. I tried to cover the dragon’s eyes with one hand, hoping to keep it from seeing the approaching Alexander, hoping I wouldn’t lose my courage from that piercing, bright blue.

He stumbled another few steps, looming over me. “You killed Joey! You killed Joey!”

I looked up into his eyes. They were wild, unreasoning, unseeing. Was that how I looked when I woke up from my nightmares and Grandmother had to hold me down?

“No! It didn’t do anything!” I shouted with all my strength. “You got the wrong dragon! The wrong—”

Alexander raised his prod. I had no doubt he was ready to plunge it into me if that was what it took to slay the dragon in his mind.

The dragon lurched in my arms. I strained to hold it down. But the diminutive dragon was too strong for me. With a quick flick of its head, it threw off my covering hand. I felt a sudden wave of heat as I instinctively leaned back. Time seemed to slow down. My vision grew hazy, indistinct.

I saw the dragon’s jaws open. I saw the prod’s tip suspended, barely inches away. I saw the dragon lock eyes with Alexander. Could I interpret what I saw in those bright blue, inhuman orbs?

Then it looked away, as though the threat of imminent death was of no more consequence than the trail of a distant shooting star. The little dragon, moving as ponderously as though it were the Three Gorges, the largest dragon ever verified, gazed up at the stars, and a blinding plume of light and fire shot up and out of the wide-open maw.

It was like watching a flowing river of liquid gold and silver, a kaleidoscope of migrating butterflies, a galaxy of dew-dappled gossamer and pearl-studded tulle unfurling across the heavens. At the apex of the superheated plasmic stream, the cooling flames ramified, arced, took on new colors: September indigo, blood-of-martyrs red, marigold yellow, dragon-whisper blue …

My mouth was agape, an unconscious imitation of the dragon’s jaw. It was the greatest fireworks display I had ever seen.

I was again in the aisles of the art supply store, a girl of six. My mother and I were racing around, laughing, throwing tubes of paint and watercolors into the shopping cart. We didn’t like the names the manufacturer gave to the colors, so we came up with our own. We were going to spend all day doing nothing but painting and being together. We were going to paint the dragon that Grandmother had seen.

“You’ll always be with me, right, Mama?”

“Of course. You’ll never be rid of me, baby drake.”

Tears drowned my eyes; everything was a blur. I had not dared to recall this memory in years.

Next to me, Alexander’s upturned face was bathed in the shifting liquid light of the magnificent display overhead. The prod lay on the ground. “I never imagined …” I heard him mutter. “So this was what you saw …”

The dragon keened again and let forth a new eruption of sparkling, fiery wonder.

Heat passed over my face—or rather, into my face. I don’t know how to describe it, really, except it felt like a hand stroking my mind, soothing away something painful, something obstructing, like a rock just beneath the surface of the water. For a moment, something dark and hard and full of jagged edges, an underwater shoal, threatened to thrust through the placid surface, but then, as the invisible hand caressed my mind again, the shoal dissipated and dissolved, carried away by the stream of light and heat.

[We are at the abandoned lot. Zoe holds up a hand to indicate that the camera crew shouldn’t disturb the roosting dragons camouflaged in the grass. She pulls out her phone to show us a picture.]

I’ve been trying to paint what I saw. Not very successfully.

Follow my finger. Just by that broken slat in the fence, do you see it? Yes, that green hump in the grass. That’s Yegong. I don’t think it’s going to come out, though, not with so many people around.

I named it after a man in an old fairy tale my mother told me. It’s a bit of a joke, see, because in the story, the man thought he liked dragons and painted dragons all the time, but then, when a real dragon showed up one day, he was terrified. Do you see—never mind.

It’s recovering well. A dragon doctor from Wellesley—well, that’s what I call her; her real title is Endowment Maintenance Specialist or something like that—told me that the tears in Yegong’s wings will heal on their own in another week. I bring it raspberries; Yegong really likes them.

The Knights still post in their forum, complaining about the dragons. But I haven’t seen Alexander post there.