Kitabı oku: «The Book of Dragons», sayfa 7

NOVEMBER

LEE

I’ve been talking to Zoe.

After the video of the dragon fireworks went viral, there was an influx of tourists like you wouldn’t believe. Took a while to sort out the security and cost us a lot of overtime pay to the police so no one got hurt. All the publicity also brought in a few companies interested in hiring Zoe as a dragon-whisperer. She turned them down flat.

I was just about to work out how best to take advantage of Mannaport’s newfound fame when little dragons began to show up at a few other towns in the Commonwealth: Brockton, Plymouth, Lowell, Falmouth … No one knows how many more dragon-rushes there will be.

Overnight, we lost our competitive advantage.

But that got me thinking. We still have Zoe.

I’m thinking of hiring her to run a training program to teach people how to behave around dragons, maybe do some demonstrations for the other towns—I’ll get Beacon Hill to pay for the program. She’s at least open to the idea, but she told me she won’t make the dragons do fireworks again. “Too much of a good thing is bad,” she says.

She told me that the little dragons, if treated right, can make people happy. I called around and found some specialists who want to talk to her about the feasibility of “dragon-therapy” for depression, both kids and adults. She seems really excited about that.

It’s not the goldmine that I was hoping, but we’ll get something for Mannaport yet, just you wait.

INGRID

[A Thanksgiving meal is being prepared: siblings and spouses squeezed into a too-small kitchen; dishes clattering against serving spoons; in-laws fussing over grandchildren; cousins arguing and laughing; the TV blaring.

Alexander is also in the house, trying to help and looking awkward. But the others are making an effort to make him feel welcome.

Zoe is showing a group a video on her phone. Everyone is rapt. She’s smiling.]

Zoe is a big star now. I hear videos of her and Yegong get millions of views. She never makes it breathe fire, though—says it’s too dangerous.

Alexander helps her out as the cameraperson. He was telling me earlier that Zoe, him, and Hariveen are planning to partner up to raise awareness about the plight of dragon-whisperers and raise money for their care.

I’m just glad to see her happy. Haven’t seen her smiling like that since the night she found Julie.

HARIVEEN

Here’s a question for you: How do you think dragons breathe fire?

Think back to your high school physics and biology classes. You probably learned that dragon power plants are essentially heat engines, which convert the thermal energy from dragon breath into mechanical energy to perform useful work. You probably also learned that dragons, like other living organisms, generate energy by breaking down food via chemical processes. But your teacher probably glossed over the math, which would have shown you that the berries, insects, hunks of beef, and bushels of corn eaten by a dragon could never be enough to generate the heat output of dragon fire.

If your teacher was particularly conscientious, they probably also mentioned Maxwell’s demon.

In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell, in the course of formulating the laws of thermodynamics, found the puzzle of dragon breath nigh insoluble. The demon was a thought experiment he used to explain how dragons could seemingly generate energy out of nothing, defying the laws of physics.

Imagine a chamber filled with gas at a certain temperature, divided into two halves thermally insulated from each other. In the middle of this barrier is a tiny, frictionless door, operated by a demon of great cunning. Since temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of gas molecules bouncing around inside the chamber, it follows that some of the molecules are moving much faster than the average, while others much slower. The demon observes the motion of the molecules and opportunistically opens the door so that fast moving molecules from the right side would be allowed into the left side, while slow moving molecules from the left side would be allowed into the right side.

Over time, this would shift the average kinetic energy inside the two separate halves such that the right side would cool down while the left side would heat up. You could then use this temperature differential to drive a traditional heat engine until the temperatures in the two halves equalized, at which point the demon could start the process again.

Maxwell’s demon turns information about the motion of the molecules of gas into “free” energy without increasing entropy, creating a sort of perpetual motion machine out of the two dragons chasing each other in the yin-yang symbol, a perfect heat engine that defies the second law of thermodynamics.

For more than a century, theoreticians and experimenters labored to find a satisfying way to reconcile the demon with the laws of thermodynamics, and they finally reached the conclusion that the key is the information possessed by the demon. The system of demon plus container must increase in entropy because the demon must erase old information in order to record new information.

If dragons are indeed Maxwell’s demons, converting information into heat, then it follows that to do what they do, they must erase information.

No one ever said that the information erased must be inside the dragon’s own brain.

Have you ever wondered why so many dragon-whisperers retire young with dementia, their brains like Swiss cheese? Or why dragons are always attracted to places with lots of people, books, inventions, novelty? Or why every major advance in our use of dragon energy has been accompanied by a revolution, a massive forgetting of traditions, of folklore, of history?

I think dragon breath is powered by mass amnesia, by the erasure of memories, both painful and joyous. In our grand dragon-powered metropolises, books decay, collective memory rots. Dragon-whisperers, closest to the dragons, also bear the brunt of such damage.

I know, I know. You want to hand me a tinfoil hat now and book me on Teddy Patriot’s show. But try, just try for a moment: Isn’t there just the slightest chance that I’m right?

Ever since we became addicted to dragon energy, wars have become less frequent, and former enemies quicker to let bygones be bygones. Forgetfulness isn’t the same as forgiveness, but it helps.

As our civilization has grown ever more complex, have we created new forms of pain, and the need to forget grown more convoluted? Maybe that is why the little dragons have appeared, a kind of adaptive radiation in response to the lush, entropic jungle of our multiplying desires.

If dragons destroy, they do so in the name of creation.

Friends tell me that I’ve mellowed out and grown more philosophical in the past year. I don’t know about that … but the little dragons sure are cute.

INGRID

My daughter was a good mother, or she tried to be. But she was always kind of dreamy, had trouble making and sticking to plans. She tried to make it in California after high school as an artist, but she didn’t have much luck—she told me that the critics who supposedly had the ear of the dragons never seemed to respond to anything she did—and had to come back. After she and Ron had Zoe, things got harder. But anyone could see how much they loved one another.

[The camera moves into the upstairs hallway, around a corner, into a part of the house rarely seen by outsiders. Framed pictures of dragons line the walls: watercolors, oils, pastels, markers, pencils. Some show a mature style and are signed by Julie. Others, more childish, are signed by Zoe. There’s one showing a mother and a little girl as stick figures, riding a powerful winged dragon together. The dragon has bright blue eyes, like the spinning light on top of police vehicles.]

They ran into money problems, and Ron and Julie separated. Every time I went over, the house was a mess. Julie started drinking to make herself feel better. When that stopped working, she turned to something stronger to stop the pain.

Zoe, just seven then, woke up that night, probably from the sirens of police cars responding to the killing of the man down the road—he was Julie’s dealer. Zoe went into her mother’s room and found Julie not moving, her body rigid.

She called me, and all she could get out through the sobs was “Mama’s lips are blue! They’re blue!” I called 911. By the time they got to the house, it was too late.

When Zoe lived with me, she’d have nightmares all the time, but she wouldn’t talk about them. For a while, she drew pictures of dragons, the way her mother and she used to do, but she would never use the color blue. I tried to get her help, but she wouldn’t go to the therapists. “They’ll try to make me forget,” she used to say. “I don’t want to.”

There are many forms of addiction, and one of the most insidious is a helpless devotion to the pain of memory, a self-imposed punishment to be chained to a jagged shoal made up of one moment in time. Her memory of Julie on that night—grief, betrayal, rage, guilt—dominated her life. It was a scar that consumed everything, one that she couldn’t help but pick at again and again.

Oblivion isn’t solace, but sometimes healing does require erasure, as does forgiveness.

ZOE

Alexander thinks that the dragons came to Mannaport first because of our pain.

I don’t think that’s true. Like I said, there’s nothing special about Mannaport. We have an average amount of heartache and grief, of abandonment and betrayal, no more and no less.

But the little dragons are special. They can’t be harnessed to do useful work, at least not the way the adults want. But just because a scalpel can’t be used to chop down a tree doesn’t mean that it can’t help.

I made this bowl of cranberry sauce for Yegong, and I’ll bring it over later. See how I put blueberries in it? Not quite the same shade as its eyes, but it’s the best I can do. Blue is such a pretty color.

Author’s note: For more on Maxwell’s demon and the thermodynamic properties of information erasure, see Charles H. Bennett, “The Thermodynamics of Computation—A Review,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 905–40.

NIDHOG

Jo Walton

First of all and last of all

And gnawing at the root

Beside the wall, beneath the hall,

In darkness absolute.

Far below feasts and fighting

Far from the folk of Earth

Relentless in her biting

At courage, love, and mirth.

The deepest dragon coils and curls

Nose twitches, ears flick

Through all the noise of all the worlds

She hears the mistle trick.

Light and the gods are far away

Bound fire will never bend

So broken promises today

Mean worlds and trees will end.

She learned the lore so long ago,

She silently keeps score,

The dragon in the shadow,

The worm at the world-tree’s core.

For when the new world comes to be

She’ll spread her wings and rise

And fill the world with dragons free

It is her promised prize.

Then dragon wings will crease the sky

Humans and gods will learn

That dragons speak, and dragons fly,

And dragonfire will burn!

Deep down impatient Nidhog toils

Until the tree shall fall

Around the root she curls and coils,

First of all, last of all.

WHERE THE RIVER TURNS TO CONCRETE

Brooke Bolander

Brooke Bolander’s (brookebolander.com) fiction has won the Nebula and Locus awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy awards. Her work has been featured on Tor.com and in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently resides in New York City.

As one of Raymond Sturges’s hired goons finally forced his muscle car off the road—as the Dodge Super Bee jounced through the weeds, rolled over the high bank, and did a final handstand on its high beams—the rest of Joe’s memory came roaring back, and he knew himself.

The smell of sage and sewage. Shopping trolleys, dirty diapers. Styrofoam takeout clamshells bobbing along in the current, jaws flapping. The gleaming eyes of a roadrunner, herky-jerking down to the water’s edge for a drink.

Feathers like a gasoline spill. Ripple and rush from snout to tail tip. Oily fur. A girl’s kind eyes as she reached out, brave as anything, and—

Joe’s big hands clenched the steering wheel so hard there was an audible snap. The Super Bee landed nose first. The desert night splintered into shards.

The Super Bee had been a gift from Raymond, as if fishing Joe out of the gutter and giving him a name and a job hadn’t been gift enough. Most big important fellas, they came across a confused guy huddled in the farthest corner of a parking garage, naked as the day God made him, they didn’t stop until a valet, a bodyguard, and the shining black shell of a limo door were between them and the Public Disturbance. Raymond was not most big important fellas. The way he told the story, he’d done a mid-stride double take, said something along the lines of “Holy Jesus God, you’re a big son of a bitch,” and hustled a couple of his boys over to get the big son of a bitch in question covered up before anybody else more inclined to call a security guard happened along. Raymond Sturges knew an opportunity when he saw one. Any man planning on building a condo across a damn riverbed, mostly dry or otherwise, had to have some kinda damn vision. Either that or a screw loose.

Joe couldn’t remember any of it. Everything before the moment he woke up in Raymond’s clubhouse squeezed into a too-small dressing gown was the darkness beyond headlights on a two-lane mountain road. No clothes, no ID, no memory. No name. The rest of it hadn’t bothered him too much, but the lack of a name had felt important in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint. He needed that. Not so much for other people, but as a way of grounding himself.

“Too scary-looking to be a Chaz or a Don,” Raymond had pronounced loftily. “Not blond enough to be a Brad, too pretty for a Vince. You got honest eyes, though. Weird color, but honest. Good square jaw. We’ll just call you … Joe. Had a dog named that when I was a kid. Very all-American. You got any problem with that?”

No, he didn’t have a problem with that. Something way back in his skull had rattled the blinds and hissed, but he ignored it and he was Joe. Easy as that. Big Joe Gabriel, one of Raymond Sturges’s boys. The one quietly summoning you to court above the nightclub downtown. The one stepping out of the darkness to Raymond’s left with a ball-peen hammer clutched in one long-fingered hand, mitts so big they made the tool look like a toy, a joke. Until it wasn’t a joke.

Nothing personal, his eyes always said. They were the color of a starling’s feathers, iridescent. One of Raymond’s ex-wives had sported a ring with a black opal inset as big as a quarter. That’s what Joe’s eyes looked like, he said, that gaudy piece-of-shit ring of Tina’s. Girls must go gaga when you flash those at ’em.

Joe didn’t get a lot of opportunity to flash his eyes at anybody. Mostly he just did as Raymond told him to do. He loomed. He punched. He broke what needed breaking, picked up whatever needed picking up, and dumped whatever required sawing apart and dumping in the farthest dusty canyons of Out East. Raymond got him set up in a little fleabag apartment property he owned called the Riverview and only took 10 percent out of Joe’s wages each month to make up the rent. The cheap doorknobs and drawer handles came off in Joe’s hands so regularly he learned other uses for a toolbox besides the ones his boss occasionally set him.

He wanted for nothing. Joe owned six tailored suits, a couple of the kind of white T-shirts that came in packs, two stained pairs of blue jeans, and a pair of swim trunks he had been told were “alarmingly tight” by a lifeguard at the city pool where he swam laps. As the days melted into weeks and months, and the years bred like jackrabbits, and his stature in Raymond’s organization grew, he was offered a lot of other things—money, houses, new cars—but he couldn’t see or feel the appeal in any of it. He politely declined and kept right on flowing down the same path he had worn for himself in the world.

Until the day Raymond took him by the wrist and walked him outside to meet the Super Bee. He was told he couldn’t keep driving that piece-of-shit Buick to and from work. Stay at the Riverview if you gotta, wear the same six suits until the crotches wear outta all of them, but you are taking this car. Don’t insult me by arguing. Don’t even start.

Turned out the warning wasn’t needed. It was love at first sight.

She was the deep blue of the sky right after sunset and just before moonrise, a sapphire cut like a predatory animal. Like a river with jagged rocks just below the surface. You’d most likely die if you were stupid enough to jump in, but it might be worth it to get your skin wet. It reminded Joe of something. Something like—

a homesick ache, gone, gone and never the same

—an emotion he had forgotten. Want. Maybe it was the shape of the old muscle car. Maybe it was how no modern build held itself like that, ready to tear the road to pieces. He had opened the door with something approaching reverence and crammed himself inside while Raymond chuckled, just like he always did when Joe had to angle his limbs into a driver’s seat. He turned the key and the engine roared snowmelt and flash flood. It was like someone saying his name. His real name. The thought swirled by and was gone, inexplicable, a dead tree headed for the ocean.

He became a little more himself the moment that ignition rumbled to life. That was the end of it, really. The end of Raymond Sturges, Big Joe Gabriel, and, unfortunately, the end of the cobalt-blue 1970 Dodge Super Bee.

There was a pool in the Riverview’s central courtyard, surrounded by a rusting wrought-iron fence and a handful of patio tables with listing umbrellas. As apartment pools went, it was a decent size, long enough that you could get a good workout doing laps from one end to the other. Raymond hadn’t seen fit to budget for a pool guy when he acquired the place, though, and so the water was a murky take-your-chances green. In the spring it collected jacaranda blossoms. In the summer it got a nice furring of dead leaves and ash from distant fires. Every other season it was mostly dust, pollen, and the occasional drowned possum. In another kind of complex, it might’ve been a thing to complain to the landlords about. The Riverview was not that sort of complex. Folks came and went as car engines, low-wage jobs, and arrest warrants allowed. Neighbors did not exchange gossip or meatloaf recipes or anything other than sidelong glances.

Not long after he got the Super Bee, a strange interest in the state of the pool awoke in Joe. Swimming had always been the one thing he allowed himself outside of his job. Something about being in the water felt right in a way he could never recapture on land. He wasn’t a big son of a bitch underwater. The water was just part of him, like a bird’s feathers or a horse’s legs. The other swimmers gaped at how fast he was. Lifeguards looked up from their magazines or mobile phones in wonder. Kids scampered up to ask him how he did it. It seemed like the funniest question in the world to Joe, like being asked to give lessons on how to breathe or grow hair. He always smiled and shrugged apologetically. “Dunno,” he’d say softly, if pressed. “I just … do it.”

Joe didn’t talk much. He had very little to say with words that couldn’t be said with actions. Other people talked too damn much as it was.

He had noticed the Riverview’s pool before but hadn’t given it much thought. Then one fine spring morning he was walking to the parking lot and he smelled it. Algae and frogs’ eggs. Waterlogged purple petals. It smelled familiar in a way that made something in his chest twinge painfully. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the dirty pool like he’d never really seen it before. Maybe he hadn’t.

All day he thought about that moment, through the usual daily grind of fingers snapped and kneecaps crushed into eggshell fragments through surgical use of a baseball bat. When he got off work, he went to the local library branch, signed up for a card (the biddy behind the front desk looked him up and down dubiously), and checked out every book he could find on pool maintenance. They stayed in a neat stack beside the stained, bare mattress where he slept until he’d pretty well memorized all the ins and outs. Then he returned them, much to the palpable relief of Front Desk Biddy.

Some fellas kept gardens, or goldfish. Raymond had a few of those gnarled little mini trees you could sculpt into weird shapes. Joe had his job, his car, and the pH balance of the Riverview’s pool. It was more than he had started out with, naked and blank-eyed in a parking garage.

Under Joe’s care, the water grew glossy. He bought nets, chemicals, skimmers, and suckers, all the other filthy-sounding devices one needed. Pretty soon it started looking like something you’d see in a brochure for the kind of apartments where the rent bought you a gym and a doorman. Summer rumbled to a halt at the curb. Joe didn’t bother renewing his membership to the city rec pool. Swimming outside felt better, especially early in the morning and late at night. Grackles squabbled over predawn turf disputes in the oaks. Warm yellow light shone down on the pool’s surface through smeary rectangles of sliding glass. He could always feel eyes watching him as he rippled through the water, but nobody ever came down to chat.

Nobody adult-sized, anyways. Eventually he gained a single admirer: a black-eyed, black-haired kid, couldn’t have been older than six or seven. The way he crept closer every day reminded Joe of the stray cats who hung around the complex. First he watched from the door of his family’s apartment. Then, when his babysitter presumably wasn’t looking, he sneaked down to the wrought-iron fence, where he played with Matchbox cars and pretended to do anything other than pay attention to the big man in the water. By the end of the week, the toys and the ruse were both abandoned somewhere in the bleached-grass jungle of the courtyard. The boy sat with his face smashed between the fence’s bars, watching the oily ripple and flow of Joe. He never said anything or tried to get any closer. Watching was apparently enough. Occasionally whoever was looking after him that day would notice he was gone and call him from the balcony, and he’d run on back upstairs, brown cheeks smeared with lines of rust.

Kids weren’t supposed to get in the pool without adult supervision, but the kid had never even come inside the fence, so Joe didn’t bother scolding or ratting him out. He also didn’t bother latching the gate behind himself as securely as he maybe should’ve. Those two facts didn’t connect at first when he heard the mother screaming. That came a few seconds later, stepping out of his apartment to see her crouched by the poolside, fully clothed and dripping wet, boy laid out unconscious in front of her. Puddles of water from the both of them stained the concrete in slowly widening circles. The pool gate creaked lazily in the breeze.

He covered the distance between his front door and the pool in record time, the faces of other tenants peering cautiously from their windows blurring as he passed. The woman didn’t look up at the sound of Joe’s footsteps. She just squatted next to her boy, wailing like a coyote. Water trickled from his nostrils. His eyes were closed. Joe pushed the mother out of the way as gently as he could—she barely seemed to notice, eyes locked on her child—and took the boy in his arms. He didn’t know what to do. The kid looked tiny and breakable cradled in Joe’s big mitts. He also looked dead. His chest was still, black hair slicked to his head like motor oil.

Vaguely Joe remembered a thing called CPR, where you pumped at the drowning victim’s chest and breathed into their mouth and hoped like hell they’d wake up. He didn’t know how to do it properly, had never taken a lesson in his life far as he could remember, and would’ve worried immensely about smashing the boy’s ribs to matchsticks even if he had known the trick. He decided to start with the mouth-breathing part, crouching down to place his lips against the child’s blue ones. He huffed into the eggshell delicacy of the boy. Nothing. Again, as the seconds ticked downhill like pebbles splashing into a stream. No change.

Joe placed his hands on the kid’s thin chest. He glanced at the mother, still rocking and crying and praying. A thought traveled down his arms and into his damp fingers as he leaned down to give the breathing method one last shot, garbled and nonsensical: God dammit, come outta there. You got no business being trapped in some little kid. The hell’s wrong with you?

(—water is free, he is free, he goes where he pleases flashing beneath the desert sun, minnows and crayfish dart in the bubbling green spaces between his scales and all is rush and slither and it’s a hundred years before the first full diaper, the first beer can bobbing, the first net of concrete laid to catch and control—)

There was a noise beneath his hands and lips like a drain clog letting go. Joe felt something pull, then pop!, then his own throat and lungs were full of water, so eager to get out of the kid and into him it spilled from his mouth as he pulled away. It tasted like chorine. Weirdly, it didn’t make him choke, despite the fact that there seemed to be a river’s worth of it. All the world’s coughing was saved for the boy, suddenly sputtering and gasping to life beneath him like a flooded engine coming back from the dead.

And Joe got a little more human, with that young mother sobbing her thanks at his elbow. He learned their names and evicted a tributary straight from Lucian’s lungs to save the kid’s life. Even with all the things that happened, he never regretted that part a damn bit.

She found him a few days later. Petite as her son, tiny, really, but blond where he was dark. Joe opened his front door and there she stood, a store-bought chocolate cake in her hands, eyes turned way up to find his a couple feet overhead. “Brought you something,” she said. “For saving his life. I know it’s not much, it’s really kinda silly, but—”

Joe had always done his best to have no truck with the neighbors. For years he had succeeded admirably at this, not that it was hard in a place like the Riverview, working the hours he did. All it took to bring that record crashing to earth, it turned out, was a near-drowning, a pretty face, and free food. He found himself inviting her inside, pulling chipped plates the previous tenants had left from the cabinets and setting them on the tiny dining table he never used. When he tried to sit down at it across from his guest, his knees lifted the entire thing a half inch off the ground. Plastic takeout forks and chocolate cake skated dangerously across cheap maple, saved at the last minute by his neighbor’s quick hands.

Joe sat at an angle after that.

Her name was Rita. She worked as a maid at the Eaz-E-Rest out by the interstate. A teenage girl from next door was supposed to watch Luce while she picked up shifts, but sometimes the girl got distracted—by the phone, by the television, by her own reflection in the mirror—and he wandered off. He was a good kid, smart kid, knew better than to talk to strangers or go playing in traffic, but he was drawn to water like some kind of duck or something, couldn’t keep away from it. If there hadn’t been a high fence between the complex and the concrete bed of the river out back, she knew she would’ve found him ankle-deep in that nasty run-off ages ago, chasing minnows or frogs or whatever else managed to survive in the stream. Not that she hadn’t been the same way at his age. She had ruined a lot of shoes and gotten chewed out a lot for playing in that same river, back when twenty-three seemed like the kind of birthday they handed you black balloons decorated with cartoon vultures for.

Joe listened and ate his cake, happy to let her talk. It meant he didn’t have to, and that was his favorite kind of conversation. Too often Raymond wanted him to respond, or laugh, or most horrible of all, to share his own thoughts on a matter. This was fine. Occasionally he smiled, or nodded. She seemed satisfied with that, even when they made eye contact and she lost track of her words for a moment or two.

Rita didn’t think the boy would go near the pool even if the gate did somehow get left open again (Joe reassured her that wouldn’t happen, feeling plenty guilty), but she worried. She worried about a lot of things: rent, her job, health insurance, making sure Luce ate his veggies, the size of the water bugs in their apartment, you name it. She stared at the crumbs on her plate and tugged at a strand of her short hair as she reeled off this list. If he had known how to swim, none of this would’ve happened in the first place. She should’ve taught him, but the pool had been so nasty before and there was no time, there was never any time—