Читать книгу The Book of Dragons - Группа авторов - Страница 22

INGRID

[Children are playing in a field.

The focus of the lens changes to be on a towering tupelo in the background. There’s something odd about the branches: they seem too bent, too laden with foliage.]

The mood in town has definitely shifted. Not nearly so many are talking about all the money we’ll make from selling land to the developers, and also not nearly so many are scared about all the changes. I’d say we are getting used to the dragons.

[A baseball crashes into the tupelo tree, and the scene explodes. What but a moment earlier had seemed to be mere clumps of leaves transforms into shimmering scales, unwinding limbs, unfolding wings, unfurling whiskers, snapping nictitating membranes. The camouflaging green gives way to reds, golds, brilliant swatches of blue and indigo as a cloud of dragons, disturbed from their chameleon-like rest, take to the air. The flock is a mix of North American elk-horns, Siberian zmeys, Mesoamerican feathered serpents, wingless East Asian loongs, flare-tailed South Asian nagas, European gossamer-wings, and other species. None of them are bigger than a peacock, and most are much smaller.

For a moment, the children admire the aerial display, but soon lose interest. A girl runs up to the foot of the tree and gingerly steps among the droppings until she recovers the ball. The children resume their game. One by one, the disturbed dragons land back on the tree, settle in, and take on their camouflage.]

They are cute, aren’t they? Some people are disappointed; most are relieved. These dragons are nothing like the giants in Widener Library that power Boston or even the smaller ones that drive the jumbo jets crossing the Atlantic and the continent.

Oh, I don’t mean to sound like a dragon expert. I didn’t see a dragon in person until I was eighteen, the day I showed up at Wellesley, a wide-eyed first-year.

[Archival photos of Wellesley College, presented Ken Burns style.]

Back then, the Wellesley endowment numbered only five: three American bison-horns, a Welsh wyvern, and an English wyrm. It couldn’t possibly compete with the five-hundred-strong endowment of Harvard-Radcliffe, but to me, it was wealth and power beyond imagination.

While the other girls were still settling in, I took a walk around Lake Waban, where the smallest bison-horn, Deliriousborne, made her home. It was evening, and I wasn’t expecting to see anything. The dragons, I knew, were very busy and rarely home. Although they, like most university dragons, came to Wellesley because they were attracted to the hoard of learning in its libraries and lecture halls, Wellesley’s compact with the Commonwealth meant that the university had to persuade the dragons to power the factories and mills in the surrounding towns with their fire breath.

But the professors also knew that the dragons needed time at home to recuperate. Dragons didn’t live on grain and meat alone: their spiritual well-being required them to be steeped in the academic atmosphere of the college, to have time to be alone and to think—I know modern experts say this is all nonsense, but I believed it back then, and I believe it still.

Not a bad metaphor for the life of a college student, I think.

The shoreline trail was shrouded in mist and fog, as was the lake itself. As I continued my stroll, energized by the excitement of being on my own, away from the eyes of parents and chaperones, I imagined myself a hero in the ballads of old, hiking through vale and dale, traversing swamp and bog, hot on the trail of a dragon guarding treasure. The heavy mist made it impossible to see the other shore of the lake, and it seemed to expand in size until it was as large as an ocean—I didn’t know then that loss of spatial sense and judgment was said to be a common psychological effect of proximity to a dragon.

Abruptly, the air was rent by a loud trumpeting, the way I imagine a jet engine sounds. I turned and was greeted by the sight of the water in the lake erupting like a volcano. The mist parted for a moment to reveal a long, sinuous neck, like in the drawings of the brontosaurus in books, topped by a massive horned and furry head. Sunlight, refracted by the mist, haloed that head with a thousand colors I could not name and had never seen. The head turned toward me, and those eyes, blue orbs that seemed to glow with an inner light, locked with mine.

Then, almost casually, Deliriousborne opened her mouth a crack and let out a gentle hiss, like a whisper; the mist swirling around her maw glowed a faint blue, like an iceberg. My heart was in my throat.

She looked away and up, turning heavenward. The jaws opened wide, and out shot a widening tongue of flame, a fiery flower blossoming in the middle of the lake.

I don’t think I ever understood the literal meaning of breathtaking until that moment. I had seen plenty of scientific illustrations and photographs of dragons curled inside power plants, using their fire to generate the steam that spun the turbines that produced the electricity that was the lifeblood of the mechanized world. But those illustrations made dragons seem tame and controlled, organic components of the machinery of the modern metropolis.

Coming face-to-face with a dragon was indescribably different: sublime, as the Romantic poets would have said. Instantaneously, I understood why so many explorers and engineers of old would brave lightning-filled storms, ice-bound Arctic waters, pathless deserts strewn with skeletons, and swamps covered in poisonous vapors—just for a chance to glimpse one of these magnificent creatures.

Years later, after I had Julie, that was one of her favorite stories, and she demanded I tell it again and again. As a little girl, she was obsessed with dragons, and she used to draw all these pictures—just like Zoe. She always left the eyes till last, and when she painted in the brilliant bits of blue, with shiny streaks bleeding into the misty air, the dragons seemed to come alive.

HARIVEEN

For all our modern dependence on dragons, most people never see one. The trend to deprive people of the knowledge of the reality of our energy policy has only accelerated in recent decades. In the same way we keep death out of sight in hospitals, we keep the dragons out of people’s view behind concrete walls and steel doors, behind secretive employment contracts and ironclad NDAs, maintaining the illusion that modernity is cost-free.

If dragons are so safe, as the government and the energy companies keep on insisting, why the thick prisonlike fence around Harvard Yard and the high-security isolation barriers that gave Wall Street its name? Makes you wonder what they aren’t telling us, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the problem isn’t limited to the Commonwealth of Maine and Massachusetts, or even to the other countries in North America. Everywhere in the world, from the Hibernia Republic to the city-states of the Sinitic League, people are content to let mysteries be mysteries.

You can find a hint of this modern state of affairs even in antiquity.

[Animation of an aeolipile revolving, with jets of steam shooting out.]

The first person in recorded history to harness draconic energy was Hero of Alexandria. He constructed a brass sphere with two bent pipes coming out, pointing in opposite directions. The sphere was free to rotate about an axis perpendicular to the pipes.

Hero then lined the inside of the sphere with pieces of amber, carved into intricate mythological scenes. A handful of fireflies were trapped inside the sphere to provide illumination, like shooting stars revolving in this inner empyrean. The intent, evidently, was to create a piece of temple art, whose hidden beauty could be appreciated only by the gods and imagined by the worshippers.

However, to the surprise of everyone, Hero’s creation aroused the curiosity of local Egyptian dragons, and two juvenile specimens slithered into the device through the pipes, asplike. Pleased by the art they found inside, the dragons filled the interior with heated steam. The scalding steam, jetting out of the bent pipes, spun the sphere as though it were a living thing, bringing joy and wonder to all viewers.

Hero went on to create more and more elaborate versions of the aeolipile, and died relatively young, raving mad. Few writers in antiquity drew any connection between his work and his death.

LEE

Of course I’m disappointed. I thought the little dragons were going to be the appetizers for the main course, not the whole meal!

The one good thing is that the “Knights of Mannaport” are no longer bugging me all the time to “do something” about the safety of the town. I guess even the anti-dragon conspiracy videos they watch online don’t consider little dragons much of a threat.

One by one, the corporations stopped calling.

So I called them.

“Our engineers have done the feasibility studies. It’s just not economical to exploit the little dragons you have,” they’d tell me. Then they’d drone on and on about megawatts and gigawatts and ROI and capitalization and utility rates and depreciation.

Turns out that the dragons in Mannaport are barely in the kilowatt range. Back in the days when James Watt used to strap a pair of kaleidoscopic goggles on a donkey-sized nessie and call that a steam engine, such low output might have been commercially acceptable. But now? Not so much.

“Little dragons will grow into big ones, right?”

“Not always,” they’d say. Full-grown dragons come in all sizes, even within the same species. And our miniature dragons, according to the biologists they sent, are already done with growing.

“But we have so many of them!” I’d say. “Can’t you corral a bunch of them to do something useful together?”

They’d lecture me on the biology and habits of dragons, the lack of qualified dragon-whisperers, and the dangers of “overengineering.”

Turns out that dragons rarely, if ever, work well in teams. And they can only be enticed, not coerced, to work. The last time anyone tried to force a bunch of small dragons to work together was at Chernobyl, and that was a disaster no one wants to repeat.

“I’ve heard of places that make single-person vehicles and household power plants that run on small dragons,” I’d plead. “Surely there’s some way to make that work?”

“The only places where that’s economical are kibbutzim and big, dense metropolises where the rich might want to show off,” they’d say. “Remember, dragons like to stay where they are, or migrate between fixed points they pick themselves.”

“But the dragons may start migrating.”

“Who wants to go to Mannaport unless you already live there?”

Then they stopped taking my calls altogether.

I’m not giving up, though. Someone told me that over in Japan, they’ve made big strides in miniaturization that we can only dream of. There has to be a way to make a profit from our tiny dragons. Has to be.

ALEXANDER

I tell people to stay as far away as possible. The dragons look cute and harmless, but I know the truth.

Joey was the smart one in the family. Went to an exam school. He had the grades and test scores to get out of Mannaport, to be anything he wanted.

But the only thing my brother wanted was to be a dragon-whisperer, to work with the dragons up close, not just to “bask in the glory of the fruits of their labor from afar”—yep, that was how he talked, like an old novel they made you read in school. Used to make me want to punch him. Talk properly, you doofus!

“Lawyers, bankers, coders—they’re all parasites, mere leeches,” he used to say. “What do they do except manipulate symbols to generate more symbols? But a whisperer is someone who coaxes the breath of life out of the dragon, who makes civilization possible.”

He left home for the DRACOGRID plant in Boston Harbor the day he turned eighteen. They pay dragon-whisperers well, but that’s because the job is so dangerous, and so few have the talent for it.

Joey told me that you cannot force a dragon to work; you have to beguile it. He told me how a czarina in Saint Petersburg once built a whole room in her palace out of amber in order to tempt the dragons into breathing fire—I think she was imitating some hero in Alexandria?—and she got badly burned. That gave me nightmares as a kid.

Let’s see, my mother kept Joey’s scholarship essay around here somewhere … There it is. “Howard Hughes ended up in Las Vegas because he thought the bright lights and endless glamour would keep the flight of dragons that kept his aviation empire aloft entertained. During the Cold Race, NATO and GEAIA both secretly funded artists to try to entice the Warsaw Pact dragons to defect. But hundreds of years after Newcomen and Watt, dragon-whispering is still more art than science.

“I intend to become a great artist.”

Dragons are fickle, lazy, and easily bored. Even if you manage to lure them to settle in a city with treasure, books, or novelty, they’d rather nap near the hoard than work. That last bit, getting a dragon to breathe fire while remaining docile, is where they need the dragon-whisperer.

No one knows how dragon-whispering works. There’s a code of silence among the whisperers, a secretive guild passing their wisdom down the generations by word of mouth. When we were boys, Joey and I used to play games where I’d be the dragon, and he’d try to get me to do chores—usually by promising me time on the game console he built himself.

Maybe that really is how they do it. Didn’t old-time railroad engineers out west strap kaleidoscopes over their locomotive dragons? Wouldn’t surprise me if they now make dragons live in virtual reality headsets. On talk radio, Teddy Patriot said they make the whisperers in power plants stroke the dragons in a weird way, almost like sex, turning them on. I don’t know if I believe that. In school, they’re still teaching children that dragons enjoy music, literature, and art. Joey used to mock that one as the “Scheherazade theory of dragons.”

I’ll never know the real answer. Dragon-whisperers, if they aren’t torched to charcoal in the line of duty, retire only when their minds have been burned away, which is almost worse.

Joey came home at thirty, but he looked like a man twenty years older. He didn’t recognize me or Mom; he didn’t laugh or cry; he ate when food was held to his mouth, and wasted away when it wasn’t. His mind was like a sieve dipped in water. No matter how many times I showed him old family photos or Mom made his favorite dishes, his eyes remained blank and his speech a nonsensical babble. His heart stopped beating eight months after he got home, but he was really dead long before that.

I have no idea what horrors he had suffered; what he had seen and could not unsee.

There was a generous pension, of course, but no way to make the dragons or the company that sucked the life out of him pay what they really ought. The contract and the laws were impenetrable. Assumption of risk. Willing suspension of rights.

Attacking a dragon is a crime. And I won’t ever do anything illegal. But short of that?