Nothing But Blue Skies (14 page)

The dragon concentrated. The scientist's words were tugging at his compassion almost as forcefully as the ants' eggs pulled his head round. Only by concentrating, putting all his weight behind the door of his mind and heaving, could he keep control. It was almost more than fin and scale could bear, far worse than any threats or actual pain could ever be. After all, what harm could it do, just one tail-flick . . .?

Harm beyond all measure, more damage than he could ever hope to imagine. He knew that; or at least, the dragon knew that. The goldfish believed that he'd known it once.

‘Please . . .?'

He cleared his mind of the visions of air and cloud and flight; they were starting to get cloudy and vague, as the blue skies merged with blue water, the fluffy clouds became indistinguishable from hazy clouds of pondweed fronds, the currents - Instead, he thought about his daughter, and was immediately strong again. Picturing her in his mind, he knew who he was.

‘All right, fish.' The scientist's voice had changed. ‘This is your last chance. You're a small fish in a small pond, fish. Now, we can do this the hard way - God, I never thought I'd see the day when I'd say something like that. It's all your fault, dammit, you're turning me into the sort of person who can say ‘We can do this the hard way' and not get a terminal fit of the giggles. That's
sad
, fish. I don't like it. So—'

The dragon relaxed. He could feel every part of his body now.
It's amazing
, he reflected,
how therapeutic a few vague threats can be
. One moment he was a prisoner inside a body inside a bowl; the next he was in control, able to resist, able to think clearly again. As the last few ants' eggs drifted past, he ignored them easily. As for the threats; he couldn't wait. What he really wanted, most of all, was for this silly woman to try something - anything - in the way of violent action; because in order to do anything to him, she'd have to take him out of the water first, and the moment she did that, he'd be ready.

‘This is your last chance, fish.'

By concentrating really hard, calling on muscles and nerves that had never been designed for such a manoeuvre, mostly by sheer will-power, the dragon managed to curl back the edges of his lips in a teeny, tiny smile. His last chance, maybe; but he was ready.

Planning on going fishing, huh? You should have seen the one that got away
.

 

‘Just the one night?' the desk clerk asked suspiciously.

Karen nodded. ‘That's right.'

‘Then where's your luggage?'

‘What?' Karen was too tired to be able to handle difficult concepts like luggage on the spur of the moment. ‘Oh yes, right, luggage. I haven't got any.'

‘None at all?'

‘Everything I need is in my handbag. I'm only stopping the one night.'

Which, if the reception area was anything to go by, would probably prove to be one night too many. Admittedly, she was a trifle more fastidious than the average human (the same, of course, is true of all cats, most dogs and the leading brands of pig) but she didn't think it was totally unreasonable to object to carpet that crunched underfoot and cobwebs strong and thick enough to stand the weight of the knuckle-sized chunks of plaster that had flaked off the walls since the place was last dusted. On the other hand, it was all she could afford.

‘One night, huh?' The clerk scowled. ‘I know your game.'

‘You do?'

‘Too right I do. You're going to kill yourself.'

Not for the first time during her dealings with humans, Karen had the distinct impression that she was getting the pictures from one programme and the words from another. ‘I beg your pardon?' she said.

‘We get loads of your sort in here,' the clerk went on. ‘You can spot 'em a mile off. No bloody consideration, that's your problem.'

‘What on earth,' Karen said, ‘makes you think I'm about to kill myself?'

‘Oh please,' the clerk said. ‘Give me some credit. I mean, look at you. No luggage. Miserable look on your face. Slumped up against the desk like that because you've lost the will to live. You might as well have a sign round your neck saying
farewell, cruel world
, it's that obvious. Well, not here you don't, because I'm sick and tired—'

‘Really,' Karen said ‘I'm not going to kill myself. Promise.' She smiled. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.'

‘Huh! Told you—'

Karen took a deep breath. ‘I give you my sacred word of honour as a—' She managed to stop herself before she said ‘dragon'; then she was going to say what she really did for a living, but even as a part-time Johnny-come-lately human, she could see that ‘on my sacred word of honour as an estate agent' didn't quite have the right ring to it. ‘—Pet-shop inspector that I'm not going to commit suicide. If it makes you feel any better, I won't even trim my toenails while I'm here, just in case I accidentally nick an artery with the nail scissors and bleed to death. Satisfied?'

The man sneered. He was very good at it, just like Elvis Presley. ‘Huh,' he said. ‘They all say that.'

‘Really? You get a lot of pet-shop inspectors passing through here, do you?'

‘They all say they aren't going to snuff themselves,' the man explained irritably. ‘Then, soon as your back's turned, they're standing on chairs tying bits of rope to the light fittings. You got any idea how much it costs to get the wiring right again after some bugger's hung himself from the light flex?'

Karen thought for a moment. ‘You could change over to those fluorescent tubes,' she said. ‘Nothing on those things that you could get a good anchor on.'

‘Yeah, and pull half the ceiling down on top of you an' all,' the clerk growled. ‘No fear.'

‘Hey, it was just a suggestion.' Karen breathed slowly, in, out and in. ‘Look, are you going to give me a room, or do I go somewhere else? I know,' she added, ‘tell you what: how'd it be if I gave you a deposit? And then, if I'm still alive at half past eight in the morning, you give me my money back. If I've gone and done myself in, you keep it. How does that sound to you?'

The man's eyes narrowed. ‘How much?' he asked.

‘Oh, I don't know - thirty pounds?'

‘Seventy.'

‘Forty.'

‘Fifty,' the clerk said. ‘And that's just covering paint and disinfectant.'

‘All right, fifty it is,' Karen sighed. ‘After all, you can't take it with you.'

‘
Hey
—'

‘Joke,' Karen snapped. ‘Gee, if that's typical of your idea of a sense of humour in these parts, no wonder you're all in such a hurry to depart this life.'

A few minutes later, she turned the key in the lock of her room and pushed the door. It moved unwillingly, as if being asked to do unpaid overtime. The rest of the room wasn't much better, and Karen found herself wondering whether the high mortality rate among the hotel's guests wasn't just a straightforward reaction to their environment.

She sat down on the bed (slowly and carefully; it made an alarming creaking noise if you put any weight on it at all, and Karen was painfully aware that she had fifty pounds deposit at stake here) and reviewed her progress to date in the quest she'd assigned herself. That didn't take long.

Oh, she'd kept busy, no doubt at all about that. She'd walked miles and miles and miles on these quaintly impractical human feet. She'd told a lot of lies, frightened a lot of shopkeepers and fish-owners, seen one hell of a lot of goldfish. That was the problem; she'd been working flat out all day long, and she'd only just scratched the surface of goldfish ownership in one medium-sized city. At this rate, it could take decades, centuries to conduct a methodical search and that was assuming that her whole approach to the problem wasn't based on an entirely false premise. The more she thought about it, the more remote the logic seemed to be. Karen believed (on rather tenuous grounds) that her father must be trapped in the form of a goldfish, so she was looking for goldfish-owners to see if one of them had him. But (logic whispered maliciously in her ear) it wasn't goldfish-fanciers she needed to look for, it was dragon-fanciers. The nearest she could get to a firm connection was the hypothesis that whoever was holding her father in goldfish form would need to buy things like fish-food, and pondweed and air-filter cartridges and all the million-and-one other things that underprivileged fish in seas and rivers somehow struggle on without. It was, she reckoned, a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack by searching for the cotton it was threaded with.

She yawned like a cross-channel car ferry and lay back on the bed, kicking off her shoes with atypically human slovenliness. She was learning more about the critters all the time - how short their lives were, how long it took them to do anything, how hard they contrived to make things for themselves . . . She remembered something she'd seen in the park once, on one of the rare occasions when she'd been alone with Paul, strolling away the stub end of a lunch hour; a determined-looking woman in a designer tracksuit puffing along at a brisk trot with what looked disconcertingly like small sandbags Velcroed to her ankles and wrists. Karen found this so bizarre that without stopping to think that this was the sort of thing she was supposed to know already, she asked Paul what those funny things were that the woman had on. He replied that they were small sandbags, Velcroed to her ankles and wrists; and he'd gone on to explain that their purpose was to make the act of jogging even harder work than it was already.

In retrospect, that moment of insight was the closest she'd yet come to understanding the suckers; and there was a part of her mind that could just about follow the logic. The purpose of the self-inflicted burden was to make you feel confident and happy and strong when you took it off again; thus, the purpose of forming relationships or living under government was to make you fully appreciate your freedom once you'd got it back. Neat trick. But even so, it struck Karen as a rather roundabout way of achieving a fairly simple objective. Surely you didn't have to get yourself soaking wet before you could appreciate being dry.

Or maybe not. Maybe you had to, if you were human.

Maybe - this one made her wince and curl her toes - you had to spend time as a human (or, in extreme cases, a goldfish) in order to realise how lucky you were to have been born a dragon.

She sat up, ignoring the agonised sounds of wood and metal under intolerable stress that proceeded from the bed, and stared at the wall for a while.

‘All right,' she said aloud, ‘I get the message. Now, will somebody please get these things off me?'

It was meant to be a decisive moment, a point in her life where she achieved clarity, faced up to the mistake she'd made, took the implications to heart and in return was discharged and allowed to go home. Somehow, though, it didn't work quite the way it should have. She closed her eyes and waited for a minute or so; but when she opened them again, she was still there, staring at the delaminating vinyl wallpaper with the revolting stain halfway up it, whose genesis she really didn't want to think about. She was still in human shape. And, when she closed her eyes a second time, she caught herself gawping at a two-dimensional memory of Paul's face, shielded by a thick sheet of non-reflective glass.

She wondered what she'd done wrong. ‘Please?' she added. That didn't work, either.

So; it wasn't as simple as that. Why was she not surprised?

Her feet were aching, and she felt depressingly sleepy. Not only that, but she was sure there was something else she'd forgotten to do; something human, routine and trivial and unavoidable. Ah yes, food. She hadn't eaten anything since breakfast.

(It was like keeping some small, helpless animal as a pet; when you weren't feeding it or mucking out its cage, you were combing its fur or clipping its claws or trying to persuade it to run round and round in its cute little wheel. All this routine maintenance humans had to do, occupying so much of their lives - so how come they still had time to be infinitely more complicated than the eternal, almost omnipotent dragons?

They were small, no doubt about that; but they were small and intricate, like a Swiss watch).

Another yawn rippled through her, starting in her midriff and working its way methodically up to her mouth. Not her problem, she decided. As far as she was concerned, she was happy to let hunger and fatigue fight it out between themselves to decide which of them had first call on her instincts. While they were doing that, she was just going to lie down on the bed and close her eyes for five minutes . . .

When she woke up, it was broad daylight and her watch had stopped. That was annoying; she'd mapped out the day's schedule in careful detail and, if she'd lost an hour or so to hoggish slumber, it'd mess everything up. She rolled off the bed, rubbed her bleary human eyes, and reached out for the controls of the ancient (late Victorian or early Edwardian) TV set that perched on top of the dresser.

She didn't have to wait long for a time check (8.45, dammit) to set her watch by. Before she could switch off, however, the irritating continuity person said something like ‘And now back to that drought story we mentioned earlier', and she hesitated.

Drought?

She frowned and paid attention to the screen, on which a long, stringy blond youth in a C & A suit was interviewing a fat man, with a reservoir in the background.

‘. . . One of the longest rain-free periods in a British summer since records began,' the fat man was saying.

‘Seventy-two hours,' said the interviewer.

‘Seventy-
four
,' the fat man replied, holding up his watch. ‘And twelve minutes. Obviously, if this state of affairs continues, the government will have to take steps to conserve water reserves and prevent a drought crisis.'