Slippage (40 page)

The Dragon On the Bookshelf

written in collaboration with

Robert Silverberg

He was small; petite, actually. Perhaps and inch shorter—resting back on his glimmering haunches—than any of the mass-market paperbacks racked on either side of him. He was green, of course. Blue-green, down his front, underchin to bellybottom, greenish yellow-ochre all over the rest. Large, luminous pastel-blue eyes that would have made Shirley Temple seethe with envy. And he was licking his front right paw as he blew soft gray smoke rings through his heroically long nostrils.

To his left, a well-thumbed Ballantine paperback edition of C Wright Mills's THE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR III; to his right, a battered copy, sans dust jacket, of THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE by Sinclair Lewis. He licked each of his four paw-fingers in turn.

Margaret, sitting across the room from the teak Danish Modern bookcase where he lived, occasionally looked up from the theme papers she was correcting spread out across the card table, to smile at him and make a ticking sound of affection. "Good doughnuts?" she asked. An empty miniature Do-Nettes box lay on the carpet. The dragon rolled his eyes and continued licking confectioners' sugar from under his silver claws. "Good doughnuts," she said, and went back to her classwork.

Idly, she brushed auburn hair away from her face with the back of a slim hand. Completing his toilette, the little dragon stared raptly at her graceful movement, folded his front paws, sighed deeply, and closed his great, liquid eyes.

The smoke rings came at longer intervals now.

Outside, the afreet and djinn continued to battle, the sounds of their exploding souls making a terrible clank and clangor in the dew-misty streets of dark San Francisco.

So it was to be another of those days. They came all too frequently now that the gateway had been prised open: harsh days, smoldering days, dangerous nights. This was no place to be a dragon, no time to be in the tidal flow of harm's way. There were new manifestations every day now. Last Tuesday the watchthings fiercely clicking their ugly fangs and flatulating at the entrance to the Transamerica Pyramid. On Wednesday a shoal of blind banshees materialized above Coit Tower and covered the structure to the ground with lemony ooze that continued to wail days later. Thursday the resurrected Mongol hordes breaking through west of Van Ness, the air redolent of monosodium glutamate. Friday was silent. No less dangerous; merely silent. Saturday the gullgull incursion, the burnings at the Vaillancourt Fountain. And Sunday—oh, Sunday, bloody Sunday!

Small, large-eyed dragons in love had to walk carefully these days: perils were plentiful, sanctuaries few.

The dragon opened his eyes and stared raptly at the human woman. There sat his problem. Lovely, there she sat. The little dragon knew his responsibility. The only refuge lay within. The noise of the warfare outside was terrifying; and the little dragon was the cause. Coiling on his axis, the dragon diminished his extension along the
sril
-curve and let himself slip away. Margaret gasped softly, a little cry of alarm and dismay. "But you said you wouldn't—"

Too late. A twirling, twinkling scintillance. The bookshelf was empty of anything but books, not one of which mentioned dragons.

"Oh," she murmured, alone in the silent pre-dawn apartment.

"Master, what am I to do?" said Urnikh [Pronounced
"Oower-neesh."
], the little dragon that had been sitting in the tiny San Francisco apartment only moments before. "I have made matters so much worse. You should have selected better, Master...I never knew enough, was not powerful enough. I've made it terrible for them, and they don't even know it's happening. They are more limited than you let me understand, Master. And I..."

The little dragon looked up helplessly.

He spoke softly. "I love her, the human woman in the place where I came into their world. I love the human woman, and I did not pursue my mission. I love her, and my inaction made matters worse, my love for her helped open the gateway.

"I can't help myself. Help me to rectify, Master. I have fallen in love with her. I'm stricken. With the movement of her limbs, with the sound of her voice, the way her perfume rises off her, the gleam of her eyes; did I say the way her limbs move? The things she thinks and says? She is a wonderment, indeed. But what,
what
am I to do?"

The Master looked down at the dragon from the high niche in the darkness. "There is desperation in your voice, Urnikh."

"It is because I am so
desperate!”

"You were sent to the Earth, to mortaltime, to save them. And instead you indulge yourself; and by so doing you have only made things worse for them. Why else does the gateway continue to remain open, and indeed grow wider and wider from hour to hour, if not on account of your negligence?"

Urnikh extended his head on its serpentine neck, let it sag, laid his chin on the darkness. "I am ashamed, Master. But I tell you again, I can't help myself. She fills me, the sight of her fills my every waking moment."

"Have you tried sleeping?"

"When I sleep, I dream. And when I dream, I am slave to her all the more."

The Master heaved a sigh very much like the sigh the little dragon had heaved in Margaret's apartment. "How does she bind you to her?"

"By not binding me at all. She is simply
there;
and I can't bear to be away from her. Help me, Master. I love her so; but I want to be the good force that you want me to be."

The Master slowly and carefully uncoiled to its full extension. For a long while it studied the contrite eyes of the little dragon in silence.

Then it said, "Time grows short, Urnikh. Matters grow more desperate. The djinn, the afreet, the watchthings, the gullgull, all of them rampage and destroy. No one will win. Earth will be left a desert. Mortaltime will end. You must return; and you must fight this love with all the magic of which you are possessed. Give her up. Give her up, Urnikh."

"It is impossible. I will fail."

"You are young. Merely a thousand years have passed you. Fight it, I tell you. Remember who and what you are. Return, and save them. They are poor little creatures and they have no idea what dangers surround them. Save them, Urnikh, and you will save
her...
and yourself as well."

The little dragon raised his head. "Yes, Master."

"Go, now. Will you go and do your best?"

"I
will try very hard, Master."

"You are a good force, Urnikh. I have faith in you." The little dragon was silent.

"Does she know what you are?" the Master asked, after a time.

"Not a bit. She thinks I am a cunningly made toy. An artificial life-form created for the amusement of humans."

"A cunningly made toy. Indeed. Intended to amuse." The Master's tone was frosty. "Well, go to her, then.
Amuse
her, Urnikh. But this must not go on very much longer, do you understand?"

The little dragon sighed again and let himself slip away on the
sril
-curve. The Master, sitting back on its furry haunches, turned itself inward to see if there was any hope.

It was too dim inside. There were no answers.

The dragon materialized within a pale amber glow that spanned the third and fourth shelves of the bookcase. Evidently many hours had passed: the lost day's shafts of sunlight no longer came spearing through the window; time flowed at different velocities on the
sril
-curve and in mortaltime; it was night but tendrils of troubling fog shrouded everything except the summit of Telegraph Hill.

The apartment was empty. Margaret was gone.

The dragon shivered, trembled, blew a fretful snort. Margaret:
gone!
And without any awareness of the perils that lurked on every side, out there on the battlefield that was San Francisco. It appalled him whenever she went outside; but, of course, she had no knowledge of the risks.

Where has she gone?
he wondered. Perhaps she was visiting the male-one on Clement Street; perhaps she was strolling the chilly slopes of Lincoln Park; perhaps doing her volunteer work at the U of C Clinic on Mt. Parnassus; perhaps dreamily peering into the windows of the downtown shops. And all the while, wherever she was, in terrible danger. Unaware of the demonic alarums and conflicts that swirled through every corner of the embattled city.

I will go forth in search of her,
Urnikh decided; and immediately came a sensation of horror that sent green ripples undulating down his slender back. Go
out
into that madness? Risk the success of the mission, risk existence itself, wander fogbound streets where chimeras and were-pythons and hungry jack-o'-lanterns lay in waiting, all for the sake of searching for
her?

But Margaret was in danger, and what could matter to him more than that?

"You won't listen to me, ever, will you?" he imagined himself telling her. "There's a gateway open and the whole city has become a parade-ground for monsters, and when I tell you this you laugh, you say, 'How cute, how cute,' and you pay no attention. Don't you have any regard for your own safety?"

Of
course
she had regard for her own safety.

What she
didn't
have was the slightest reason to take him seriously. He was cuddly; he was darling; he was a pocket-sized bookcase-model dragon; a cunning artifact; cleverly made with infinitesimal clockwork animatronic parts sealed cunningly inside a shell-case without seam or seal; and nothing more.

But he
was
more than that. He was a sentinel; he was an emissary; he was a force.

Yes. I am a sentinel,
he told himself, even as he was slipping through the door, even as he found himself setting out to look for Margaret.
I am a sentinel... why am I so frightened?

Darkness of a sinister quality had smothered the city now. Under the hard flannel of fog no stars could be seen, no moon, the gleam of no eye. But from every rooftop, every lamp post, every parked car, glowed the demon-light of some denizen of the nether realms, clinging fiercely to the territory that it had chewed out, defying all others to displace it.

The dragon shuddered. This was
his
doing. The gateway that had been the merest pinprick in the membrane that separated the continuums now was a gaping chasm, through which all manner of horrendous beings poured into San Francisco without cease; and it was all because he, who had been sent here to repair the original minuscule rift, had lingered, had dallied, had let himself become obsessed with a creature of this pallid and inconsequential world.

Well, so be it. What was done—was done. His obsession was no less potent for the guilt he felt. And even now, now that the forces of destruction infested every corner of this city and soon would be spreading out beyond its bounds, his concern was still only for Margaret, Margaret, Margaret, Margaret.

His beloved Margaret.

Where was she?

He built a globe of
zabil-
force
about himself, just in time to fend off the attack of some hairy-beaked thing that had come swooping down out of the neon sign of the Pizza Hut on the corner, and cast the
wuzud-
spell to seek out Margaret.

His mental emanations spiraled up, up, through the heavy chill fog, scanning the city. South to Market Street, westward to Van Ness: no Margaret. Wherever his mind roved, he encountered only diabolical blackness: gibbering shaitans, glassy-eyed horrid ghazulim, swarms of furious buzzing hospodeen, a hundred hundred sorts of angry menacing creatures of the dire plasmatic void that separates mortaltime from the nightmare worlds.

Margaret?
Margaret!

Urnikh cast his reach farther and farther, probing here, there, everywhere with the shaft of crystalline
wuzud-
force.
The swarming demons could do nothing to interfere with the soaring curve of his interrogatory thrust. Let them stamp and hiss, let them leap and prance, let them spit rivers of venom, let them do whatever they pleased: he would take no mind of it. He was looking for his beloved and that was all that mattered.

Margaret, where are you?

His quest was complicated by the violent, discordant emanations that came from the humans of this city. Bad enough that the place should be infested by this invading horde of ghouls and incubi and lamias and basilisks and psychopomps; but also its own native inhabitants, Urnikh thought, were the strangest assortment of irritable and irritating malcontents. All but Margaret, of course. She was the exception. She was perfection. But the others—

What were they shouting here? "U.S. out of Carpathia! Hands off the Carpathians!" Where was Carpathia? Had it even existed, a month before? But already there was a protest movement defending its autonomy.

And these people, four blocks away, shouting even louder: "Justice for Baluchistan! No more trampling of human rights! We demand intervention! Justice for Baluchistan! Justice for Baluchistan!"

Carpathia? Baluchistan? While furious armies of invisible ruvakas and sanutees and nyctalunes snorted and snuffled and rampaged through the streets of their own city? They were blind, these people. Obsessed with distant struggles, they failed to see the festering nightmare that was unfolding right under their noses. So demented in their obsessions that they continued to protest in ever-thinning crowds and claques even after nightfall, when all offices were closed, when there was no one left to hear their slogans! But a time was coming, and soon, when the teeming manifestations that had turned the subetheric levels of San Francisco into a raging inferno would cross the perceptual threshold and burst into startling view. And then—then—