Dragonhaven (36 page)

I wonder, now, if it was just accident that Bud took us outdoors the afternoon that the choppers were due to fly over that meadow. Because even infrared gizmos can't read dragons through rock. Let alone small human visitors.

And Eleanor has an interesting new scar under her hair, and Eric got
odorata
rounded up again—which wasn't as hard as it might have been because the local landscape doesn't really suit them and they were beginning to drift uncertainly back toward their cages like sozzled party-goers stumbling home at dawn—and there was a record-breaking number of
odorata
babies the following season, so much so that we had to negotiate with some other zoos to build
odorata
cages and take some of them off our hands. But by that time we were golden and any zoo lucky enough to have anything to do with us would do pretty much whatever we said.

 

I doubt Lois is ever going to get as big as she would have, if she'd stayed with her mom, if her mom hadn't died. And she's still a lot paler than any of the rest of the dragons I've met, although it's become a kind of pinky-coppery-tawny-iridescent pale and—okay, never mind everything I've said about how ugly she is—is really kind of pretty, although I don't know if any of the guy dragons are going to think so when she gets older, and I don't suppose chances are she'll be let (is “let” the right word?) breed, unless the dragons decide that the bond she and I have is the sort of thing that might get passed on somehow—or would be worth passing on. (No, I don't know if dragons have sex for fun too. And I probably wouldn't tell you if I knew.)

Sometimes thinking that I've ruined Lois' life really bothers me and sometimes it doesn't. I mean, she's alive, isn't she? And it's horrible that her mom died, and her brothers and sisters. But at the same time if all that hadn't happened the Institute would still be worrying about how to keep the government from readjusting our status so the oil drillers and the gold diggers and the country-getaway builders and all the other greedy villains could come in and ruin our dragon haven—the only dragon haven left on the
planet
where the dragons are thriving—and now certainly the only one where they hang out with humans.

And yet the millionaire parents of that utter total absolute piece of dog crap that killed Lois' mom nearly got their evil law blasted through Congress (with a little help from the oil drillers) to kill off
all
our dragons. And if they'd succeeded, I don't think the Kenya sanctuary would have lasted much longer, or the Australian park. I've told you, the dragons besides ours aren't doing too well, which in a weird way gives people the excuse to make them do
worse.
And they may not want to admit it, but some of them are glad of the excuse. (We're still waiting to see what effect what's happened here may have on the other two parks. We're waiting
hopefully
.)

Dragons make people very, very nervous. You think the panorama of Gulp and me sells so well because it's cute? It sells so well because it gives people a cold feeling in their throats and a flutter around their hearts. Dragons are, as everyone knows, so
big
. They make Caspian walruses look small. And they aren't safely in the ocean like whales, or Nessie in those lochs—you can't stay on the shore and keep away from them. Dragons belong on land.
And
they fly.
And
they breathe fire. And real dragons aren't beautiful, at least not like the paintings of Saint George. Those dragons may be dying on the point of some dumb hero's spear, but they're also gorgeous. The real ones are just BIG. And strange. And pouched, of course. And smelly. All the photo shoots and TV documentaries can't make them romantic. Just
real
. Which is a mixed blessing. And why, even though we're golden right now, we know we have to work at
staying
golden. Not to mention that the side effect of all this popularity is keeping me out of jail, which is good too.

I keep away from arguments on dragon intelligence. In the first place I can't be bothered, and in the second place I have a good line in being young and dumb myself. I didn't mean to, but you try waking up one morning to discover you're an overnight sensation—especially when you've been tired and scared half out of your remaining half a mind for most of the last two years—and see how well
you
come across in your first big national interviews. (I should have got Eleanor to write my lines.) The first big national interviews that are, as well, going to make the difference between whether your dad and your friends and your entire world gets prosecuted into oblivion or not, for something you did. Sure I agreed to be interviewed—I was desperate.

Well, we won. But most of it hasn't been much fun. Wildly exciting, some of the time, and fascinating, but rarely fun. There's been a lot of pressure on us from the beginning to go on tour, Lois and me. Gulp's too big and also too scary and also practically speaking impossible to transport. Just one kid sneaking back to watch Gulp take off from the Wal-Mart parking lot in East Styrofoam and getting a broken head from being caught in the backdraft would destroy all the good we'd done, not to mention the wear and tear on poor Gulp even if nothing went wrong. (It probably bothers me the most that she'd try to do it, if I figured out how to ask her.) And I won't risk it with Lois either—I wouldn't even when she was still small enough to squeeze in the back of a big station wagon, and the Searles still looked like they might win, and I was still desperate.

Dad backs me up, every time, when I say No tours. And he's still the head of the Institute, as well as my dad. Dad says that I'm the real expert, and he's right, of course, except that “expert” is
not
what I am, but it takes a really big person, it seems to me, to sit back and let your barely-eighteen-year-old son take the lead in your life's work, which is essentially what my dad has done. (Have I mentioned recently that he's the
real
hero? The
human
real hero.) And yet he's as happy as a puppy in a closet full of shoes, because he can finally study his beloved dragons up close—although he's still at the early “ow ow ow” stage of the Headache, which gets in the way. Turns out all humans get it—sometimes even some of the TV crews and they're not even trying to communicate anything except “please do something that will get me a bigger budget.”

(And just by the way, Dad and I had the
worst
roaring and thundering argument of my entire life when he found out about
my
Headache. I know what it was, of course—he'd been feeling like a Bad Father all along, about everything, and especially about the eczema, even though I'd managed never to let him
see
it, which probably made him even more suspicious, and the truth is there are more bits of me that will never be beautiful because of Lois, and while Dad kept uneasily letting me make that decision, he didn't like it, and he was pretty sure I wasn't telling him the whole truth, which I wasn't. I never told
anyone
about the Headache. Because I didn't have to. And that pushed him over the edge. I kept yelling at him, “So, what were you going to do? Make me send her
back
?” Stupid of me maybe to tell him at all, but it was going to come out anyway as soon as he read about it here.)

I might as well be writing this as working on my dictionary because my dictionary is getting nowhere fast. Not that in some ways we aren't getting
somewhere—
or I hope we are. It's pretty funny watching Lois—often now with Martha—giving Gulp her talking lessons, for example. I've told you that dragons mostly don't seem to talk out loud—or anyway what we'd call words are only maybe a quarter of dragon language and it's a support quarter, not a leading quarter. It seems to me there's a fifth fifth or sixth sixth in there somewhere that I don't even know what it
is
, and I think there's some kind of layers action too…. But meanwhile Gulp is learning to burble. What we're going to do with the burble—or the cheep, chortle, peep and whatever else—I don't know yet. But you know, why do dragons have the vocal cords and the larynxes if they don't use them? Maybe they fell out of the habit of talking out loud as they got good at the head stuff. Or maybe they stopped talking out loud after the Australian “war” with chatty, deadly humans. So we're going to begin a
new
habit. I hope.

But the stuff that is the most translatable into human word facsimiles is surface stuff, like where the food is, and bees go back to the hive and tell each other that, you know? And nobody gets into screaming contests about how intelligent bees are. If you were only using your ears and eyes, a dragon sentence like “There is a valley north of that hill that you can see from here, and then west of the hill beyond that which you can't see from here, but you could if you flew up a few [tree lengths? Dragon lengths? I still don't have much grip on dragon measurement and yes this is another problem] which has a good spring at the bottom of it” would come out something like “There is beyond [something] and beyond [something else] [something] of [something] good [something].” And they don't “speak” in “sentence” shapes anyway. You see why I keep getting mixed up.

I'm guessing that Bud and Gulp are still the only ones on the dragon side who are working more or less from the same page (of the dictionary, ha ha) that I am—we're the ones who had our little/big epiphanies, that first day aboveground after Gulp had brought us to Dragon Central. We're the ones who thought “Right. Here's the starting line…. Uh, where's the
track
?” Gulp is learning to talk out loud. Bud watches over my shoulder a lot when I'm using my laptop, and he's seen that graphics program. Maybe it's just as well I don't know what a dragon laugh is. And speaking of intelligence,
I
think that the dragons, as we go on yattering and yammering at them (and squeezing our skulls and saying “ow ow ow”), are beginning to feel about us kind of the way we feel about dogs. (And when your dog goes “roooaaaaoooow” at you don't you sometimes go “roooaaaaoooow” at him back?) And we've been living with dogs for forty thousand years and are
still
arguing about how best to get our point across to them.

Dad, by the way, doesn't disagree when—usually I've just come away from a particularly frustrating session with some member or members of the white coat brigade, which tends to put me in a ranting sort of mood anyway—when I say that dragons are
more
intelligent than humans. He says I'm prejudiced, but he doesn't disagree. He just says we don't know yet. He likes not knowing. He likes the process of finding out. It makes him happy. It's the first time since Mom died he's been happy.

And we're actually
talking
about her for the first time. Or not talking about her so much as just letting her be part of the conversation. Mom said this, Mom said that. (And I wish I had more of her humor when the white coats start sticking me with their specimen-impaling pins, which is what it feels like sometimes. The scientists who can't stand the headaches but don't give up easily study
me.
) But it's like she's part of our family again. The door's been opened. It was like
nailed
shut for six years but it's open now. I knew something important had happened when I heard him call her Mad, one evening, at dinner with Billy and Grace. Up till then if he mentioned her at all he called her Madeline, which he'd never used when she was alive.

It makes both of us miss her more in some ways but…well, it's the way it is. Somebody you loved dying isn't something you get over, you know? You get used to it because you have to. You carry it around with you—because you have to. And even after I stopped scratching my cheeks and playing Annihilate all the time and became something more like normal again from the outside, missing Mom was still in there doing stuff to me.

Since Dad and I started talking about her again I've stopped dreaming about her. This is mostly a relief, but I miss it a little bit too. And since Lois has dragons to teach her how to be a dragon I don't dream about Lois' mom either. I miss those dreams a little too. I just don't like people
dying
, you know? And Snark would have been way jealous of Lois, but he'd've got over it. And at least Snark was old, for a dog. It wasn't exactly okay that he died, but it so
wasn't
okay in
any
way that my mom and Lois' mom died.

So the short answer to that question I asked way back at the beginning is…yes. If Mom had still been alive and I'd still been more or less, you know, sane, I probably wouldn't have noticed the dying dragon's eye, not the
momness
of it. I would have been horrified and sorry—and I'd've got on the two-way as soon as I got clear of the remains of the poacher, and called Billy, and the story would have been a lot different because there would have been no Lois. Even if I'd noticed that one of Mom dragon's babies wasn't quite dead yet, that would have just been one of the horrible things, that it took a little while to die, that I had to watch the last one die while I waited for Billy. It would never have occurred to me to
do
anything about it—what could I possibly do? Eric's got incubators, but a fetal squodge wouldn't anything like make the journey back—and of course an incubator would never have worked on a dragonlet anyway.