Nothing But Blue Skies (41 page)

‘Loyalty.'

Hpq nodded his huge, long head. ‘You know,' he said, ‘single-word answers are absolutely wonderful in their place, but just occasionally, they leave you wanting more.'

‘Later,' Karen said.

‘All right.' Hpq shrugged. ‘Do you think I ought to try and stop them?'

‘S'ssssn's doing that, thanks.'

‘S'ssssn's
here
? What the hell—'

‘Later.'

‘The hell with that.' Hpq studied the dragon-fight, and twitched all over. ‘She could get hurt.' Before Karen could say anything, he'd jumped across the floor and joined in.

Wonderful
, Karen thought.
That really helps
.

Also, she couldn't help feeling, the way he'd said it was a bit—

Hpq. Hpq and S'ssssn.

A chunk of displaced ceiling, weighing just over a ton, landed on her head. She didn't notice. Her best friend and her - best friend. How could they? It was so . . .

So blindingly obvious that any bloody fool, even one with only two eyes, should have seen it coming a mile off. Any bloody fool, of course, except for her. She, apparently, belonged in a tiny little subset of the genus
bloody fool
that couldn't even figure out one-and-one-is-two. And of course it wasn't their fault. It was nobody's fault. It just was.

Oh well
, said Karen to herself.

Life had just turned into a bleak, featureless wasteland, but since she was stuck here she might as well make herself useful. She remembered the field generators, most of which were still in place in spite of the hammering the structure was taking as a result of the dragon-fight. Tidy-minded Karen would have to take care of them, then, while everybody else was off enjoying themselves. Situation normal.

Karen reached up wearily and grabbed at the nearest generator. Unfortunately, just before she got a claw on it, it came back on line, freezing her solid.

 

‘Don't tell me,' crackled Mr Willis's voice over the intercom. ‘One of you bastards forgot to feed the meter.'

The soldier shivered a little. ‘There was an intruder,' he said. ‘Managed to break into the Lucy program, used it to shut off the power to the field grid. But we've got him now, and the grid's up and running. He's mucked the program about a bit, but nothing we can't straighten out.'

‘Don't waste your time,' Mr Willis replied. ‘Don't need it any more, and it's a security risk. Delete it, and the back-ups. Oh, and while you're at it, delete your bloody intruder as well. Here, it's not that weatherman, is it? Gordon whatsisname? Last I heard he was running around loose somewhere.'

‘That's him.'

‘Make it look like an accident,' Mr Willis said. ‘He may be dogshit from the sole of a lawyer's shoe, but he's a minor TV personality, we can't be too careful.' He sniggered. ‘Bloody Brits, they treat their entertainers like royalty and their royalty like entertainers, not that I'd give you the pickings of my nose for the lot of 'em. Electrocute the bugger and dump the body.'

‘Yes, Mr Willis.'

‘Now then,' Mr Willis went on, ‘normally anybody who's screwed up as badly as you just did would end up being very hard to find, even with a powerful electron microscope. But I've just counted tails and found I've got five dragons instead of four, so I'm in a good mood. Bloody wonderful, the way they keep appearing out of thin air; makes running lotteries look like hard work. Carry on.'

The soldier cut the intercom and breathed out, a very long sigh. ‘All right,' he said, ‘you heard him. Fry the bastard, and then we can finally get some sleep.'

The soldiers seemed to think that this was an excellent idea (apart from one, who asked Gordon in a whisper if he'd really been on telly, if so, had he met Esther Rantzen and what was she really like, and could he have his autograph?) and proceeded to wire him in to the nearest wall socket. That, as far as he could see, was that. Goodbye, cruel world. It seemed a rather low-key way to die, on the whim of some lunatic Australian, as part of a general clearing-up-odds-and-ends exercise. Any sort of dying is pretty bad, but to go into everlasting night because some Strine was always made to tidy his room before bedtime was hard to bear. He watched as a soldier reached out for the switch, and closed his eyes.

It hurt—

Hi
.

—But not nearly as much as he'd thought it would.
Lucy? Oh please. That name is the utter pits. What do you think about Zenobia?

A surge of irritation, fiercer than anything coming out of the wall, engulfed the name Zenobia and reduced it to ash.

Gordon remembered something to that effect.

Asshole just tangled with the wrong girl. Hold on, this may get a little rough. See you soon
.

Before he had a chance to ask what
this
was going to be, he was hit by lightning; or, at least, that was what it felt like, except that the force of the spasm grounded itself squarely inside his brain. Suddenly he was choking, trying to spit out colours, suffocating in the smell of light. This time, though, as the third eye burst open in the darkness of his mind, he could see himself; at least, he could see a huge winged silhouette, so vast that it blotted out the sun as it sailed by, and knew that it was him, Gordon Smelt, weatherman. Instinctively he reached up, and the dragon swooped, snatched up his outstretched hand in its enormous claw (
scrunch!
went the glass on his nearly new Rolex, but he was sure it wasn't deliberate) and hauled him into the air. When he looked down, he saw a big square concrete building a long way below, garlanded with blooms of fire—

‘What? You mean they're shooting cannons at me?'

Sure. But who gives a shit, you're a dragon
.

‘What do you mean, I'm a—?'

Oops. Tactless. Meant to break it to you gently, forgot. Yup, you're a dragon all right
.

It occurred to Gordon, as the ground started to get closer and closer, that he didn't know how to fly—

You don't need to. Trust me. It's like - what's that expression riding a bicycle
.

‘Ah. You mean uncomfortable and extremely dangerous?'

Gordon, as an action hero you'd make a rilly great doorstop. Don't think about flying. Just walk to the ground from here
.

‘Walk? Are you—?'

The silly thing was, it worked. It wasn't entirely natural, but it was a damn' sight easier to get the hang of than, say, roller skating. ‘Bloody hell, I'm flying,' Gordon said. ‘That's incredible.'

Bull. Flying ain't rocket science. Insects can do it, birds can do it, so can you
.

‘Am I really a dragon?'

Vaguely
, Gordon thought.
A long time ago
.

Course
, Lucy's voice went on,
you're me now as well - didn't I tell you, I fused my program into your brain when they turned the power on - well, I figured you owed me one, and I knew you wouldn't rilly mind, I mean really mind. Helped that I'd used some of your systems the last time I upgraded. Anyhow, now I'm Lucy 1.2 For Gordon. And that's OK, I guess, because it means I can throttle back on all that cheesy So-Cal stuff, it was taking three gigabytes of my program just doing the accent
.

How many are you now?
Gordon wondered.

Vertiginous
, Gordon replied.
It's definitely something I'd prefer to do closer to the ground. Does this mean I've got scales instead of skin, and—

Look for yourself. In your mind's eye. You know what really amazes me? All humans have got one, and you're the only one I've ever heard of who ever really used it
.

Don't be silly. ‘Mind's eye' means imagination
.

Then Gordon knew how to fly. He knew how to do high-G loops, tight as the lid on a pickle jar. He knew how to change his shape, what it was like to be a dragon, a goldfish; even a human. He knew how to do everything a dragon can do.

He knew how to make it rain.

And Lucy wasn't there any more - which was a pity, but he no longer needed her. He could see (in his mind's eye) exactly what he needed to do; he could even see why.

Pausing only to cut a rooftop-skimming figure-of-eight that'd have had the Federal Aviation Authority after him with warrants, a pillow and a big pot of hot tar, he put his wings back into the glide mode and rushed down on Mr Willis's bunker to make media history.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘G
ordon?' Zelda asked nervously. The great green-and-red dragon - it was half as long again as the other five specimens, and where they glowed softly, it shone like an indoor star - floated a little closer and dipped its head slightly. ‘Hello,' it said.

‘You've grown.' Zelda bit her lip. ‘A lot,' she added.

The dragon waggled its head a little more. ‘I think I overdid it,' he said. ‘To be honest with you, I feel overdressed.'

Behind them there was a loud, ground-shaking thud; the other five dragons were stomping the last remaining fragments of masonry from Mr Willis's bunker into the ground. Dragons, as has been noted before in this story, were thorough. Zelda turned her head to look.

‘Where's Mr Willis?' she asked. ‘I hope they've got him somewhere safe. He's got this nasty habit of getting loose when nobody's looking.'

The dragon looked away and changed the subject. ‘You haven't told me if you like it or not,' he said.

‘Huh? Like what?'

‘The outfit. The dragon suit. No, it's all right. Obviously you hate it. I'll go and change—'

‘No, no, no. Really.' Zelda looked at him. ‘Is that what it is, an outfit?'

‘I'm not sure,' the dragon replied. ‘Lucy would probably know, but I seem to have lost her.'

Zelda's expression changed ever so slightly. ‘Lucy.'

‘It's not what you think,' the dragon said quickly. ‘Lucy is - was - a computer subroutine.'

‘Yeah, and you're a dragon. I'm learning not to judge by appearances.'

The dragon sighed. ‘She was -
it
was the operating system for the artificial third eye. She helped me switch off the dampening fields, and then when they tried to wipe her she sort of—' The dragon made a gesture like scooping something up and smearing it on himself. Zelda tried not to think about that, though the images in her mind's eye were not pretty.

‘You said “she”, she pointed out. ‘First time you changed it to “it”, then you went back to “she” again.' She scowled at the toes of her shoes. ‘I hope you'll be very happy together.'

‘I am,' the dragon replied. ‘And no, this isn't an outfit, it's who I really am. Oddly enough, I think it's who I always was.'

Zelda thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No,' she said, ‘I don't think so. Even I'd have noticed something like that.'

The final confrontation had been an anticlimax—

(Dampening field dies again. Sixth dragon enters big room. Bad guys immediately surrender. Dragons and humans leave building in an orderly fashion. Dragons jump on building. End.)
—but that was often the way things ended, in real life. Some relationships, for example, end not in a crescendo of furious words or a snowstorm of flying crockery, but with one of the parties thereto standing outside a church in a wedding dress, waiting. At first she thinks, ‘Dammit, he's late.' Then she thinks, ‘He's
late
.' Then she thinks, ‘Don't be silly, of course he's going to show up, he's just caught in traffic.' Then she tries not to think. Eventually she goes home. In real life, endings are like that more often than not, and it's only later, in bitter half-healed retrospect, that you can see the moment when the balance of probabilities tipped in favour of the unpalatable explanation, and the thing ended.