Dragonhaven (37 page)

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 can 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 eco-loony 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
.