Nothing But Blue Skies (20 page)

‘Come
on
. Or I'll leave you here.'

Gordon thought about it for a moment. On the one hand, he really didn't like the thought of getting out of there because Neville had been able to decipher a secret access code using his third eye. On the other hand . . . as the old adage goes, if you're starving in the desert and a headless skeleton riding a winged fiery camel swoops down out of thin air and hands you a cheeseburger, eat the cheeseburger.

‘Coming,' he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

W
aiting for your enemies to come and find you was all very well, assuming your enemies had the necessary level of competence. If your enemies couldn't find a haystack in a packet of needles, a somewhat more proactive strategy might be called for.

It would also probably help, Karen thought as the train pulled out of Wolverhampton, if she were to stay put for a while; but if she was going to do that, she might just as well go back (for want of a better word) home. There at least a few people knew her by sight, so that as and when the enemy started going from door to door waving photographs and asking ‘Have you seen this woman?' there was at least a moderate chance someone would say ‘Yes.' Maybe she was worrying over nothing; after all, with surveillance cameras in practically every shopping precinct and at nearly every traffic junction she went past, computers able to pinpoint her every time she used a telephone or a cashpoint card and an army of blue-sweatered thugs cruising the streets in souped-up Discoveries, surely it was impossible for somebody to stay hidden long enough to blow her nose. In practice, she guessed, every spy network was only as good as the deadheads sitting in front of the monitors - in which case, from what she'd seen of this particular strain of humanity, it was up to her to make herself as conspicuous as possible.

Which went against the carefully acquired grain, of course. How long had she been human? Not all that long, but she was starting to have trouble remembering ever having been anything else; institutionalised, they called it, when humans stopped fighting their environment and started thinking of themselves as part of it. Maybe when they got to thinking of one particular corner of it as home, just as she was doing now.

Home, according to one prevalent human definition, is where the heart is; was that why she was scurrying back, because the strain of being away from the human she loved was beginning to get to her? The thought made her frown. Karen simply didn't know enough about the way the human subconscious worked and, without a wiring chart or a workshop manual, she had no way of finding out except by having one for long enough to be able to observe its habits. Maybe that was all it took to trigger a powerful homing instinct; if so, she wasn't bothered. She had to be somewhere, and home (whatever that meant) was as good a place as any.

Fortunately, sleep overwhelmed her not long after that, which saved her from having to look at Bedfordshire as it slunk past the train window. If she dreamed at all while she was asleep, she couldn't remember any of it when she woke up. But she did have a good idea about what she was going to do next.

It would only take her a moment or so; just long enough to fill in the time before the train crept into Euston. Karen closed two of her eyes, opened the third, and concentrated—

 

‘You'll break eventually,' the scientist said. ‘I know you will. The only thing that's keeping you going at the moment is twenty million years' accrued cussedness. But it won't do you a bit of good in the long run. Do yourself a favour and give in now.'

‘No.'

The scientist took a deep breath. ‘Please?' she begged.

Hard to tell which of them was suffering most, the human or the dragon; but only because the dragon's pride was keeping him afloat. Break down in front of a human? Never! Even so, he knew it could only be a matter of time. Never in all the centuries of his existence had he suffered like this.

‘Don't make me do this,' the human was pleading. ‘Goddamit, it'll probably kill you, and what the hell am I supposed to do with a dead dragon - start a handbag factory? Assuming I survive it myself,' she added. ‘And a dead scientist's no use to anybody.'

‘You're pathetic,' the dragon sneered. ‘Which is why you're bound to lose.'

The scientist dragged herself onto her feet, swaying as she did so. She'd worked hard, no question about that. After the family photo albums, the excerpts from her paper - that had been a mistake: not only had the dragon followed every word, he'd gleefully pointed out several mistakes in both the reasoning and the maths - three hours reading out the ‘S' section from the phone book, three even longer hours reading pages at random from the latest Lynda LaPlante, a two-hour game of I-Spy that she'd had to abandon once it became clear that the only possible outcome was mutually assured destruction . . . After that it had all turned into a messy red blur in her mind, as the effects of acute tedium poisoning soaked into her system, leaving her dazed and light-headed. It wasn't a matter of torturer and victim any more; they were both victims of the dragon's mindless intransigence.

‘You asked for it,' the scientist said, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. ‘God knows, it'll probably kill us both, but it's your fault. I just wanted to make sure you knew that.'

‘Pathetic,' the dragon repeated, trying desperately not to slur the word, and failing.

The scientist shook her head. She was all out of words, in any case. Instead of saying anything, therefore, she fumbled a TV remote out of her pocket and pointed it at the television set mounted on a bracket on the wall, perfectly adjusted to be directly on the dragon's line of sight.

‘Satellite Sport channel,' she mumbled. ‘Semi-finals of the World Snooker Championship.' She giggled shrilly before adding, ‘In black and white.'

‘What's snoo—?' The dragon didn't have enough strength to finish the sentence.

‘You'll find out,' the scientist replied, pointing the remote and hitting the button.

The screen flashed into life; the tail end of the news, with a disembodied continuity voice saying that the snooker was up next, after the weather. The scientist frowned and glanced at her watch, then shrugged. ‘In just a few minutes,' she murmured. ‘You'll see.'

‘You know what?' The dragon managed to lift his head a degree or two. ‘I feel sorry for you. All of you,' he added. ‘These terrible things you've been doing to me,' he explained, ‘you're right, they make a truly cruel form of torture. So much mindlessness.' He yawned, unable to control the spasm. ‘So much waste of life, when you poor little things have so little of it to spare. But you can't hurt me with it, because all it makes me do is feel sorry for you.' He laughed. ‘Because for every bit of it you're doing to me, you're doing a million times more to yourselves. And that's sad.'

‘Oh, be quiet,' the scientist said.

The picture changed; there was a large map of the country, decorated with abstruse symbols. ‘What's that supposed to be?' the dragon asked, curiosity cutting the paralysis like lemon juice in milk.

‘The weather forecast.'

‘Really? How . . .' The dragon stopped abruptly. There was a human on the screen now; a young human female with short, dark hair and a round face. She was saying hello.

‘That's . . .'

The scientist looked up. ‘What?'

‘Never mind,' the dragon growled. ‘Shut up, I want to listen to this.'

‘You do?' Tomorrow, the human female was saying, it was going to rain. She paused, and smiled. That, she went on, was putting it mildly. It was going to rain a
lot
. Not just Bank Holiday Monday, Wimbledon Week, Second Test at Headingley rain. Not just blocked-gutters and lorries-aquaplaning-roof-high, monsoon-season-in-Delhi, thank-God-for-the-Thames-Barrier rain. (She stopped, and smiled evilly.) Tomorrow, it was going to rain like you never knew it could; so be warned, move all the stuff you value up to the attic now, steal a boat and moor it to the TV aerial, and get ready to find out just what the sky can do when it feels like it, because it's going to rain.

That was as far as it went; a moment later, the screen went blank and a worried TV voice muttered something about not knowing what had gone wrong there, normal service would be resumed as quickly as possible—

‘Your daughter,' the scientist said quietly.

‘Quite right,' the dragon replied. ‘How did you guess?'

‘Intuition,' the scientist said thoughtfully. ‘That and a certain family resemblance. Can she really do that? Tap into someone else's broadcast and hijack it?'

The dragon chuckled. He was feeling much better now. ‘You'll have to wait and see, won't you?' he said. ‘And no, I'm not just being perverse. Really, I don't know. But if you want me to hazard a guess, I'd say yes, probably she can. If she gets angry enough.'

‘Oh.' The scientist sat down on the arm of her chair. ‘Excuse me,' she said, ‘I've got a few calls to make. While I'm gone,' she added, ‘you can watch the snooker.'

The dragon laughed; and this time there was real depth and texture to his laughter it was strong and vigorous, like a wilted plant revived by rain. ‘I'm looking forward to it,' he said.

 

By the time they realised what she was doing and pulled the plug, Karen was exhausted. She let her head fall back hard on the seat cushion, and closed her eyes.

Big words
, she thought,
for a little wingless biped
. Exactly how much substance there was to those confident-sounding threats remained to be seen. The main thing was, though, that they were bound to have noticed her. Must've done. Couldn't help but.

The train slid neatly into place beside the platform - that was something humans were good at, lining things up and fitting them together - and she climbed out, her knees feeling weak after the effort she'd been through. What she needed now was somewhere to rest and pull herself together, have a bath, probably drink plenty of fluids. She only hoped that she hadn't done the job of alerting her enemies to her presence too well, since she wasn't really in fit state to fight them right now.

She got a taxi and told the driver where to go; it was a long way, and he wanted money in advance, so she gave it to him. That made Karen smile - human lack of trust, how careful they always had to be, since they couldn't trust each other even in the little things.

Could she really make it rain like she'd threatened? More to the point, could she bring herself to do it? Personal quarrels, vendettas, wars: how much more human could she risk becoming, before she went so far that she could never get back? If she really went ahead with the threat and sent a flood, she'd be likely to do terrible damage to these fragile, feckless creatures; she'd wreck their homes, ruin their livelihoods, quite possibly kill a few of them here and there . . .
Like a human nation
, she realised guiltily,
making war on another nation over some matter of principle
. She tried to imagine what her father's reaction would be to that.
Go away, you don't belong here. You aren't my daughter any more. You aren't even one of us
. . .

Yes
, she imagined herself saying,
but they started it. Dragons declaring war on humans is unthinkable, yes, but so is humans kidnapping dragons. We have the right to defend ourselves even - in the most extreme cases - even against those who are smaller and weaker than ourselves. It's all very well saying
pick on someone your own size
in that superior tone of voice, but what if the tiny, fragile psychopaths won't leave us alone? What if they're bullying us relentlessly and refuse to give it up and go away? Must the strong always be trampled underfoot by the weak?

Karen scowled with her third eye.
Is that all you've got to say
, she demanded,
yes? What kind of natural selection is that, the domination of the weak, the survival of the weediest?

It's what makes humans the dominant species on this planet. They've played us at the game of evolution and won. You've got to give the little buggers credit for imagination; it's an extremely clever idea
.

Karen felt her hands clench.
But it's not fair
, she yelled to herself.