Authors: S. Andrew Swann

Dragons & Dwarves (16 page)

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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His face went stony. “No, I do not.”

“Thanks,” I turned and left him there.

He was probably lying about Faust, but I
knew
he was lying about the land. I don’t know why. Whatever was going on about that, it wasn’t an investment. I had researched the site. The land was miles from anywhere and had no road or water access. It was the size of three or four counties, and from all accounts it was mountainous and uninhabitable. Short of some miraculous mineral deposits—large enough to justify mining there—Aloeus, Inc., would be lucky to unload it for half of what they paid.

I suspected that there was more to Aloeus’ connection to the end of Valdis’ reign. It just smelled too convenient in retrospect.

I also had trouble buying the dragon as a selfless messianic figure. That went counter to everything Theophane told me about dragon kind. Dragons were supposed to be motivated by power. That was right in line with all the political maneuvering that Aloeus did, while Friday’s angle was almost completely opposed.

Then, again, I wondered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
DON’T know if Mr. Friday would approve of my story, but I did give a fair bit of ink to his point of view. It certainly gave a different perspective on the decedent. I left out, for the time being, any speculation over the cause of death, even though the murder of the County Coroner at the hands of Bone Daddy gave me ample grounds to speculate.

That speculation took me down to University Circle, to the brand new wing of the Natural History Museum. More than a wing, it was an entirely new building somewhat removed from the old center of science and paleontology, as if the trustees wanted to make a point of separating the two. In front of the old building was a life-size fiberglass statue of a stegosaurus, in front of the new building was a life-size statue of a dragon in flight.

The old building couldn’t help but be upstaged.

I walked up the crushed gravel walkway and looked at the statue. From recent experience, I could tell that the rendering was accurate. I could also tell the subject wasn’t either Aloeus or Theophane. A small plaque named the dragon Phlegethon.

You walked under Phlegethon to get into the new wing, and the sensation was somewhat disconcerting. The dragon was suspended with no obvious support, hovering, its wings outstretched from one side of the facade to the other. The only sign of what kept it up there was a series of white stones carved with elaborate runes hidden in the landscaping.

I entered the building and paused a moment in the lobby to get my bearings. A small ticket window stood off the cavernous lobby to the right, flanked by a rearing griffin and a rearing unicorn. The display was designed to be reminiscent of some sort of heraldic device.

I walked over to the window.

It was fifteen bucks to get into the place, including the lecture by Dr. Shafran. I used my
Press
American Express Card. The guy behind the counter swiped my card and gave me a ticket. I felt like I was walking into a theme park.

In a way I was.

Cleveland has always had a fair number of museums. However, even before the Portal a noticeable fission had begun. For three quarters of the twentieth century, we had places of genuine scientific, historical, and artistic value. The old Natural History Museum had genuine paleontologists doing original work in the field. The Cleveland Museum of Art had a nationally recognized collection and the best collection of Medieval and Renaissance armor and weaponry on the continent. The Western Reserve historical society was a place of genuine scholarship.

Then we went and built the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as interested in Janis Joplin’s psychedelic Porsche as anyone else. But there’s a reason they built it on the lakefront and not in University Circle. It has about as much to do with scholarship and education as P.T. Barnum’s original American Museum. Then there was the Great Lakes Science Museum, which I don’t think has ever employed a genuine scientist.

By the time the Portal opened, we already had two sets of museums in this town. The old style places run by stuffy Ph.Ds and paid for by grants and donations, and the new style run by marketing MBAs and paid for by tourism.

The old Natural History Museum was the former. The new Natural History Museum was most aggressively the latter. It had been a shrewd decision on the part of the board, since the whole complex, old and new, was now self-sufficient based on the income the new wing generated.

Dr. Shafran was lecturing in one of the auditoriums to the rear of the main building. To get there, I walked past displays illustrating the flora and fauna unique to our Portal-influenced environment. I also passed a large swirling display describing the atmospheric effects caused by the Portal itself. The three-dimensional animation filled half of the room before the auditoriums. Central to it was a tiny model of the Portal. Even though it wasn’t the real thing, the sight of an alien world reflected in a thing the size of a small Christmas ornament made me stop for a moment. They even had a breeze coming from the faux Portal’s direction, a breeze that reversed as they illustrated temperature and pressure changes.

I slipped past the display and into the auditorium. The lecture was just about half over, and Dr. Shafran was speaking to room about half full. I took a seat in the back. The heavily accented voice was familiar, but he didn’t resemble Bela Lugosi. He had, in fact, a very innocuous appearance. Something like a German watchmaker, or Gepetto. He was a small man with a fringe of white hair surrounding a balding crown. He had a mustache a half-shade darker than his hair, and he wore thick, round bifocals that he had a habit of taking off his nose and gesturing with.

“. . . is a failure of reason,” he was saying. “Even those in the scientific community can be guilty of such a failure. I believe that the fault lies in our semantics. We called this thing ‘magic,’ so therefore no rules apply. Wrong, very wrong . . .” He walked back and forth behind the podium. “The application of scientific principles, the scientific method, is as valid here as anywhere else.”

He looked up into the audience. “I see incredulous stares. You do not believe this? Shall I make an analogy for you. Cooking? You understand that an egg that will boil in sixty seconds here will need to boil longer in Denver, Colorado. Do we say that the laws of the kitchen are in anarchy? Do we expect our souffleé recipe to behave the same at whatever altitude we cook. Of course not.” He looked around, and I could see a few blank stares myself.

“A starker example. You light a match. Do you expect that match to light just as well underwater? On the moon. In an atmosphere of pure carbon dioxide? Of course not. But the same laws of physics apply to each match.” He made a grand gesture with his glasses and then replaced them. “Just because a chant, a ritual, a
spell
works here and does not work elsewhere, that does not mean the suspension of the laws of nature here. The local conditions are
different.
Energies flow here that flow nowhere else on the planet. Just as a match will not light in the absence of oxygen, a
spell
will not work in the absence of these energies.”

Dr. Shafran had me thinking, again, why Aloeus, Inc., would be interested in a huge plot of mountainous Mexican land. I couldn’t see why anyone, much less someone who was limited to a geographic area about a hundred and fifty miles around Cleveland, would be interested in that land. It seemed to me that this had to be an obvious counterexample to Friday’s protests that Aloeus wasn’t interested in human politics. That land could only be of interest to people in the mundane would, people who could use it.

Power by proxy, Theophane called it. To Aloeus, the property wasn’t a physical object. It was a symbol, only meaningful for the value that others placed in it. The dragon wanted the land, not for itself, but as a leverage with someone who
was
interested in it. Once I discovered who had interest in that land, I had a gut instinct that I’d be a lot closer to what Aloeus was trying to do. Perhaps a lot closer to why he had died.

The way things would turn would prove me half right, and half
very
wrong.

Dr. Shafran was wrapping up his lecture. “The scientific mind should not shrink before this time and place. Never has such a broad category of unquantified and unanalyzed phenomena been presented to a civilization with the tools to explain it. There are such . . . possibilities.” The doctor looked down at his watch and said, “I’m afraid I’ve run over, but I will take a few questions. Yes?”

A woman stood up. She wore a necklace of chunky amber crystals and an orange sundress with a Navaho motif. “You’ve mentioned nothing about the spirit, Dr. Shafran.”

“No, I have not.”

“But isn’t that what the point is, here. This place is where the spirit of man is closest to the spirit of nature—”

“I am not a theologian, madam. I am a scientist. I see no reason to introduce unmeasurable forces into an environment that does not require them.”

“But you’ve said that the human mind controls these forces—”

“I have said that these forces can be influenced by human mental activity. Repeated and ritualized mental activity. You may call that spirit if you like, but in my opinion that is simply an old human prejudice. Our brain is no more the center of the universe than our planet is. There is no reason that a properly programmed computer, or even a well-trained monkey, could not perform the same ‘spiri- tual’ feats as a human mage.”

The woman sat down, looking unconvinced.

Another man stood up and asked a more interesting question. “Is it impossible then, for any magical effect to influence the world outside this Portal’s influence?”

“That is a good question,” Dr. Shafran took off his glasses and pointed at the questioner. “It depends on what you term a ‘magical effect.’ It should be obvious that any change in the physical world will persist outside the realm of the Portal. The world outside doesn’t care if a rock was carved by magic or by a chisel. It becomes more complicated as the mage tries to influence the world outside directly. But the existence of the Portal itself shows that it
is
possible.”

Dr. Shafran smiled, probably because he’d gotten a bit of a reaction from a relatively dead audience.

“This land was empty of any magical force, and yet, the Portal—the quintessential magical effect—opened here. Therefore it is possible. For that reason, if no other, we must study the Portal. Once that mechanism is understood, and we know what forces created it, we will be able to channel this power where we will. Perhaps even generate it.

“If there are no more questions, I should dismiss you. The museum closes in five minutes.”

I walked up to the podium after most of the audience had filed out. Dr. Shafran was picking up papers and putting them in a briefcase. “Good lecture, Doctor.”

“Thank you,” he said without looking at me. Now that he wasn’t speaking publicly, his accent had grown thicker. His brows furrowed a moment, and he turned to face me. “The voice is familiar. We have spoken?”

I nodded and held out my hand. “Kline Maxwell,
Cleveland Press
, we spoke yesterday.”

Dr. Shafran smiled broadly, put down the case, and grabbed my arm with both of his.. “
Yes.
The newspaperman. You do me a great service.”

“You did me a service, Doctor.”

“Nonsense,” he gave my arm a vigorous shake and let it go. “It is you who helps my work.” He waved at the auditorium. “Mine is not a popular study.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe me.” He picked up his case. “No one wants to hear what I have to say. The scientific community,” he shook his head sadly. “Too many people dismissed what was happening here as rampant fantasy before it was documented. I’m afraid that the whole generation will have to die off before one can get an impartial jury to judge a scientific paper on the subject. And the public . . .”

“I saw the woman.”

“I am doing serious work here, and what kind of questions do I get? Spirits, angels, demons, God and the devil. Do they not hear what it is I am saying?” He patted me on the shoulder. “We must leave before they lock us in this place.”

He led me out of the auditorium and back through the halls of exhibits. “You do me a great service by quoting me accurately. Perhaps I can use the attention in a grant request.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions for me?”

“Certainly.”

We took a seat outside the entrance, under the dragon’s looming effigy.

“What concerns you tonight, Mr. Maxwell?”

I looked up at the abdomen of the dragon above us. We were lucky that Aloeus had hit in the Flats. The kind of damage that might have happened elsewhere was frightening.

“I wanted to know if it is possible that what happened to the dragon might not have been an accident.”

“How exactly do you mean? Certainly the dragon could have ended his own life in such a way, intentionally aiming to an area of fatally low power.”

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