The VMR Theory (v1.1) (26 page)

“Oh, dear.” Bucky put his paws to his face. “Not very much at all. Nearly everyone’s busy with the rose harvest, I’m afraid. The roses are in full bloom, and you know what they say, gather ye rosebuds while ye may!” There are moments when I think that there might be a little too much lead acetate in the royal waistcoat.

We were interrupted by an underling who handed a message to Cheeves. Cheeves read it silently.

“What does it say, Cheeves?” Bucky asked.

“Very disturbing news, I am afraid, your awesomeness.” Cheeves folded the message and stuffed it in his pocket. “Another dozen spaceships have appeared in the atmosphere over !Plixxi*.”

“It’s Mordred and the Macdonald invasion fleet!” I exclaimed.

“I fear so,” Cheeves replied.

“Oh, dear!” Bucky’s whiskers twitched. “We must come up with a plan immediately! Am I making myself clear, Cheeves?”

“Perfectly clear, your highness. I find you quite lucid.” Cheeves paused to consider. “Inasmuch as Mordred’s first objective will be to seize the palace and capture you, it would be prudent for us to depart.”

“Indeed, Cheeves, we should do so immediately.” Bucky then added something in !Plixxi*. “That was my esteemed father’s motto, friend Ken. It translates as ‘I did not stop to smell the roses,’ or ‘I did not inhale.’ In either case, we should leave quickly.”

I grabbed his arm. “Hold it! Xhia’s frigates are already in position overhead. While Mordred obviously doesn’t want them shooting up things indiscriminately, they have good detection equipment, and I’m sure they have orders to destroy any aircraft or ground vehicle they see leaving the palace.”

Cheeves nodded. “An excellent point.”

I happened to glance out the window and saw two shuttles set down in the courtyard and begin disgorging Macdonald troops. Mordred, resplendent in a crimson generalissimo’s uniform with silver epaulets and a lavender sash, stepped out and began directing traffic. “Does this place have any secret passageways?”

“I fear not.” Cheeves shook his head solemnly. “Mordred was .always rather fond of the tunnels, and I doubt they hold any secrets for him.”

“This is most distressing, Cheeves. We shan’t get very far on foot. It would be a shame for our adventure to end here.” Bucky drew himself up to his full height. “But, ah, well, I suppose that’s the way the egg roll crumbles.” Cheeves’s whiskers twitched. “I believe that you are thinking of a cookie, sir.”

“Oh, right you are! Those biscuity things, eh, Cheeves?” Bucky reached out and pumped my hand (irmly. “Please don’t feel that our abject defenselessness is all your fault, friend Ken. After all, your tenure as minister of defense was distressingly brief. As Bucky says—”

From outside, Mordred tittered through a megaphone, “All right, Bucky, we have you surrounded! Come out with your paws up, or I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down!”

“Ah, sir.” Cheeves coughed. “There is one option that I might suggest at this juncture.”

“A plan? Capital, Cheeves! Capital!” Bucky rubbed his paws together. “What is it?”

A satchel charge rattled the windows. “I presume that must be the door,” Cheeves commented coolly. “Minister Ken, am I correct in assuming that the detection equipment on board the Macdonald vessels is less than fully efficient at detecting organic matter?”

“Yeah, they’d have it set for aircraft and vehicles.”

“Then I would ask you both to please follow me to the west wing,” Cheeves said, opening a cupboard and pointing to a stairway. Bucky and I followed him up the stairs, down a corridor, and up another flight of stairs.

“Cheeves, I hate to be nosy,” I said, checking my pockets to see if maybe I’d tucked away one of Muffy’s submachine guns and forgotten about it, “but what’s the plan?”

“Minister Ken, are you familiar with certain small flying reptilian creatures that natives of Schuyler’s World refer to as dumbats?”

“Yeah. Little lizards with wings. I kept one as a pet for a few days. He threw up on my shirt. They’re cute little guys. Dumber than wood. They get blitzed on overripe berries and fly into things a lot. What of it?”

“The first economic mission that his majesty’s grandfather sent to Schuyler’s World mentioned their existence, and his majesty’s grandfather arranged for a number of them to be shipped here.”

“I’m sure this is fascinating, but—”

“Trust me, Minister Ken, this does have relevance to our plight,” Cheeves said firmly. “His majesty’s grandfather was looking for a way to open up IPlixxi* to the tourist trade, and at that time the Confederation government was offering us substantial inducements to utilize genetic engineering to improve our standard of living.”

“Oh, now I see what you’re up to, Cheeves! Capital idea! Capital!” Bucky said. “Friend Ken, we were planning on opening a theme park as soon as we finish working out all of the bugs and find someone willing to offer us insurance. You can’t imagine just how much of a phenomenal success our genetic engineering program has been!”

Yes, I could. Having had a dumbat throw up on me, it didn’t take much for me to imagine their potential. “Oh, no.” I stopped and leaned against a wall. “Oh, no.”

“His majesty wishes to call the theme park ‘Dragon-land.’ “ Cheeves tugged ineffectually on my arm in an unsuccessful effort to keep me moving. “Minister Ken. Please.”

“Oh, no,” I moaned.

“Is something wrong?” Bucky asked solicitously. “Violence and sex make the universe go round. I’m getting way too much of one and not nearly enough of the other.” I tried to will my legs to move. “I’m allergic to big lizards. Especially ones that fly. I have religious scruples against becoming a chew toy.”

“I am afraid that the dragons would appear to present our only possible means of escape. Your highness,” Cheeves instructed Bucky, “if you would perhaps get behind him and push.”

As we mounted the stairs to the west wing, I sniffed a familiar raw reptilian odor. It smelled like the elephant house at the zoo on a muggy day.

“Perhaps it is time we changed the litter boxes,” Cheeves commented.

The breathing mask I wore on Alt Bauernhof was back on the
Hunting Snark
next to the submachine guns. “I can see why you stuck them on top of the castle.”

“Oh, yes,” Bucky assured me, misunderstanding my comment. “Dragons do ever so much better at getting airborne with a long running start, and the updraft from the courtyard helps immensely.”

Truthfully, up this high, I wasn’t half as worried about getting airborne as I was about staying that way. Most flying animals have the sort of sleek, stripped-down bodies that say speed and power. These guys had physiques that said, “Make mine a Michelob.”

“Cheeves,” I whispered as Bucky went over to confer with his dragon handlers, who immediately began rousing their slumbering charges. “Are you
sure
this genetic engineering project of yours is a success? These animals don’t exactly look aerodynamically stable.”

“Our bioengineers tell us that bumblebees have an equally awkward design,” Cheeves responded. “I have withheld judgment on the matter until I am able to determine whether this is a compliment to dragons or a reflection upon bumblebees.”

The sleeping dragons ranged in color from purple, like the little dumbats I was used to, to turquoise green. “We have been attempting to work on the color selection, with, thus far, mixed results,” Cheeves confessed, seating himself on a convenient bale of brussels sprouts. “We can only boast of brown, blue, and green dragons.”

I cocked an eye at him. “Blue?”

“There is no precedent in literary sources for a purple dragon,” Cheeves said stiffly. “Therefore, our dragons which are not brown or green are blue.”

I counted nineteen. “Is this all of them?”

“All of the adults. We have them breeding true, but the female dragons haven’t quite adjusted to laying their eggs from a proportionally greater height. Nature is indeed cruel. In this instance it is quite accurate to say that only the tough survive. I do propose that we take all of the animals with us so that Mordred cannot use them to follow us.”

“Good idea,” I said, nodding. Chase scenes on dragon-back belong in tacky sword-and-sorcery novels, and more dragons meant other potential targets for Mordred’s flak guns. “What’s the sand for?”

Bucky overheard me as he returned to us. “Oh, we heat it up and let them roll around in it a bit. They much prefer nice, gooey mud baths—dragons can wallow for simply hours at
&
 time—but it’s not especially healthy for their skin. They’re rather delicate, really.”

“I’m sure. Ah, which dragon is mine?”

Cheeves briefly consulted one of the handlers. “I believe that Susan would suit you best.” He went over and gently patted the largest dragon’s snout. “Dear old Susan, are you ready to wake up and meet Minister Ken?”

You can take the dumbat off of Schuyler’s World, but you can’t take Schuyler’s World out of the dumbat. As the handlers began coaxing dragons into wakefulness, Susan, a “blue,” opened her purple beak, looking for a quick handout. I reached into my pocket, found one last chocolate bar that Catarina had put there, and popped it into her mouth.

“I would not recommend this, Minister Ken,” Cheeves cautioned, a second too late. “Dragons are easily impressed by a forthright manner and novel foodstuffs.”

“Is this a problem?”

Susan opened both her eyes. She quickly chewed the chocolate. Then she scuttled over and laid her head in my lap.

“It can be,” Cheeves opined.

“How did Susie here get her name?” I asked lamely, stroking her horny brow. She sighed blissfully.

“Her full name is Susan B. Anthony.” Cheeves took my tie from me and handed it to a servitor. “Quite early in the breeding program, we ran out of authentic dragon names—Fafner, Tarasque, Smaug, Glaurung, Ancala-gon, and so on—whereupon we switched to using names of humans who were merely described as dragons.” Three underlings humped out what was presumably a riding harness and began fitting it to Big Susie, “Is that the saddle? Where are the reins?”

“Regrettably, due to the elongated necks of the dragons, a system of reins is inappropriate. There is also some doubt as to whether the animals could be taught to comprehend the principle behind them.” Cheeves ignored an annoying rattle of gunfire as he gestured for the attendants to bring over a stepladder so that he could mount his own beast. “When you consider skull capacity and the portions of the brain set aside for sight and smell, there is not a great deal of space left. There are, after all, limits to genetic engineering.”

“So what you’re really saying is that dragons are even dumber than dumbats.” Big Susie liked having her brow stroked and bumped me a couple of times to make sure I understood. She then yawned, exposing several rows of large teeth. “How do we control them? Telepathy?”

Cheeves mulled this over. “Perhaps empathy would be more descriptive. ‘Telepathy’ implies a certain cognitive capacity. In guiding Susan, however, you should take exceptional care to think calm, collected thoughts. If she should become flustered, she might try to fly
between.”

I didn’t like the sound of this. “What do you mean ‘between’?”

“Between buildings, or trees, or fence posts, or similar objects. A difficulty we are still attempting to iron out is the animals’ tendency to regard themselves as much smaller than they actually are, which makes them relatively ineffective at gauging the relative size of spaces.”

“If a dragon tries to go
between
, I presume that the operative term for the rider is ‘pancake city.’ “

Cheeves nodded approvingly. “Aptly phrased. The dragons become rather despondent about it afterward, so we always try to caution our riders.”

“I’ll kefep that in mind. Getting back to the saddle—”

“Regrettably, !Plixxi* anatomy does not lend itself to the use of saddles, and riding a dragon sitting up, as a human being would ride a horse, would present aerodynamic difficulties. The recommended procedure is to position one’s stomach on the nineteenth vertebrae. I would advise against riding on a full stomach.” Cheeves examined me with concern. “Minister Ken, are you all right with all of this?”

I thought for a few seconds. “This isn’t so bad.” Then Big Susie licked my face.

Three handlers brought the stepladder over, helped me up, and then strapped me in place on Susie’s back. “I notice you keep calling them ‘dragons.’ They don’t actually breathe fire, do they?”

“Oh, dear me, no. That would be a physiological impossibility.
Breathe
fire, oh, no, friend Ken!” Bucky exclaimed.

I noticed the handlers running a strap around the base of Susie’s tail. “What’s the strap for?”

“Oh, that’s for the pilot light,” Bucky said as an attendant handed him a leather flying helmet, goggles, and a long white scarf.

“The
what?”

“The pilot light. It lights when the dragon’s abdominal muscles contract.” Cheeves maneuvered his dragon into the number two position as the handlers began coaxing the sleepy dragons into line. “Tourists would expect our dragons to produce fire, and as his majesty noted earlier, there are inherent anatomical difficulties in attempting to produce a dragon that
breathes
fire. Happily, dragons naturally tend to flatulence, and a much simpler solution suggested itself. Whenever the dragon passes gas, the pilot light ignites the methane produced in abundance by the dragon’s digestive processes, and the result is a rather impressive flare.”

“It’s very convenient when you want to burn off dead vegetation,” Bucky chirped, “but accuracy is something of a problem.”

“Swell,” I said.

The Rodent dragon handlers opened one wall. As Susie ambled forward into place, her stomach rumbled. Mine rumbled in sympathy. She looked back at me with an expression of doglike devotion.

“Swell,” I said again.

“I believe that we are ready, your highness,” Cheeves commented.

Bucky slid his goggles into place. “Tally-ho, Cheeves!”

“Minister Ken, are you ready? If we delay further, we are likely to be captured and immediately executed.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so tempting.”

Cheeves looked me straight in the eye. “We have a large compost heap piled at the base of the tower in the event that any of our dragons experience difficulties with takeoff.”