Читать книгу The Book of Dragons - Группа авторов - Страница 24

LEE

I’ve been talking to Zoe.

After the video of the dragon fireworks went viral, there was an influx of tourists like you wouldn’t believe. Took a while to sort out the security and cost us a lot of overtime pay to the police so no one got hurt. All the publicity also brought in a few companies interested in hiring Zoe as a dragon-whisperer. She turned them down flat.

I was just about to work out how best to take advantage of Mannaport’s newfound fame when little dragons began to show up at a few other towns in the Commonwealth: Brockton, Plymouth, Lowell, Falmouth … No one knows how many more dragon-rushes there will be.

Overnight, we lost our competitive advantage.

But that got me thinking. We still have Zoe.

I’m thinking of hiring her to run a training program to teach people how to behave around dragons, maybe do some demonstrations for the other towns—I’ll get Beacon Hill to pay for the program. She’s at least open to the idea, but she told me she won’t make the dragons do fireworks again. “Too much of a good thing is bad,” she says.

She told me that the little dragons, if treated right, can make people happy. I called around and found some specialists who want to talk to her about the feasibility of “dragon-therapy” for depression, both kids and adults. She seems really excited about that.

It’s not the goldmine that I was hoping, but we’ll get something for Mannaport yet, just you wait.

INGRID

[A Thanksgiving meal is being prepared: siblings and spouses squeezed into a too-small kitchen; dishes clattering against serving spoons; in-laws fussing over grandchildren; cousins arguing and laughing; the TV blaring.

Alexander is also in the house, trying to help and looking awkward. But the others are making an effort to make him feel welcome.

Zoe is showing a group a video on her phone. Everyone is rapt. She’s smiling.]

Zoe is a big star now. I hear videos of her and Yegong get millions of views. She never makes it breathe fire, though—says it’s too dangerous.

Alexander helps her out as the cameraperson. He was telling me earlier that Zoe, him, and Hariveen are planning to partner up to raise awareness about the plight of dragon-whisperers and raise money for their care.

I’m just glad to see her happy. Haven’t seen her smiling like that since the night she found Julie.

HARIVEEN

Here’s a question for you: How do you think dragons breathe fire?

Think back to your high school physics and biology classes. You probably learned that dragon power plants are essentially heat engines, which convert the thermal energy from dragon breath into mechanical energy to perform useful work. You probably also learned that dragons, like other living organisms, generate energy by breaking down food via chemical processes. But your teacher probably glossed over the math, which would have shown you that the berries, insects, hunks of beef, and bushels of corn eaten by a dragon could never be enough to generate the heat output of dragon fire.

If your teacher was particularly conscientious, they probably also mentioned Maxwell’s demon.

In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell, in the course of formulating the laws of thermodynamics, found the puzzle of dragon breath nigh insoluble. The demon was a thought experiment he used to explain how dragons could seemingly generate energy out of nothing, defying the laws of physics.

Imagine a chamber filled with gas at a certain temperature, divided into two halves thermally insulated from each other. In the middle of this barrier is a tiny, frictionless door, operated by a demon of great cunning. Since temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of gas molecules bouncing around inside the chamber, it follows that some of the molecules are moving much faster than the average, while others much slower. The demon observes the motion of the molecules and opportunistically opens the door so that fast moving molecules from the right side would be allowed into the left side, while slow moving molecules from the left side would be allowed into the right side.

Over time, this would shift the average kinetic energy inside the two separate halves such that the right side would cool down while the left side would heat up. You could then use this temperature differential to drive a traditional heat engine until the temperatures in the two halves equalized, at which point the demon could start the process again.

Maxwell’s demon turns information about the motion of the molecules of gas into “free” energy without increasing entropy, creating a sort of perpetual motion machine out of the two dragons chasing each other in the yin-yang symbol, a perfect heat engine that defies the second law of thermodynamics.

For more than a century, theoreticians and experimenters labored to find a satisfying way to reconcile the demon with the laws of thermodynamics, and they finally reached the conclusion that the key is the information possessed by the demon. The system of demon plus container must increase in entropy because the demon must erase old information in order to record new information.

If dragons are indeed Maxwell’s demons, converting information into heat, then it follows that to do what they do, they must erase information.

No one ever said that the information erased must be inside the dragon’s own brain.

Have you ever wondered why so many dragon-whisperers retire young with dementia, their brains like Swiss cheese? Or why dragons are always attracted to places with lots of people, books, inventions, novelty? Or why every major advance in our use of dragon energy has been accompanied by a revolution, a massive forgetting of traditions, of folklore, of history?

I think dragon breath is powered by mass amnesia, by the erasure of memories, both painful and joyous. In our grand dragon-powered metropolises, books decay, collective memory rots. Dragon-whisperers, closest to the dragons, also bear the brunt of such damage.

I know, I know. You want to hand me a tinfoil hat now and book me on Teddy Patriot’s show. But try, just try for a moment: Isn’t there just the slightest chance that I’m right?

Ever since we became addicted to dragon energy, wars have become less frequent, and former enemies quicker to let bygones be bygones. Forgetfulness isn’t the same as forgiveness, but it helps.

As our civilization has grown ever more complex, have we created new forms of pain, and the need to forget grown more convoluted? Maybe that is why the little dragons have appeared, a kind of adaptive radiation in response to the lush, entropic jungle of our multiplying desires.

If dragons destroy, they do so in the name of creation.

Friends tell me that I’ve mellowed out and grown more philosophical in the past year. I don’t know about that … but the little dragons sure are cute.

INGRID

My daughter was a good mother, or she tried to be. But she was always kind of dreamy, had trouble making and sticking to plans. She tried to make it in California after high school as an artist, but she didn’t have much luck—she told me that the critics who supposedly had the ear of the dragons never seemed to respond to anything she did—and had to come back. After she and Ron had Zoe, things got harder. But anyone could see how much they loved one another.

[The camera moves into the upstairs hallway, around a corner, into a part of the house rarely seen by outsiders. Framed pictures of dragons line the walls: watercolors, oils, pastels, markers, pencils. Some show a mature style and are signed by Julie. Others, more childish, are signed by Zoe. There’s one showing a mother and a little girl as stick figures, riding a powerful winged dragon together. The dragon has bright blue eyes, like the spinning light on top of police vehicles.]

They ran into money problems, and Ron and Julie separated. Every time I went over, the house was a mess. Julie started drinking to make herself feel better. When that stopped working, she turned to something stronger to stop the pain.

Zoe, just seven then, woke up that night, probably from the sirens of police cars responding to the killing of the man down the road—he was Julie’s dealer. Zoe went into her mother’s room and found Julie not moving, her body rigid.

She called me, and all she could get out through the sobs was “Mama’s lips are blue! They’re blue!” I called 911. By the time they got to the house, it was too late.

When Zoe lived with me, she’d have nightmares all the time, but she wouldn’t talk about them. For a while, she drew pictures of dragons, the way her mother and she used to do, but she would never use the color blue. I tried to get her help, but she wouldn’t go to the therapists. “They’ll try to make me forget,” she used to say. “I don’t want to.”

There are many forms of addiction, and one of the most insidious is a helpless devotion to the pain of memory, a self-imposed punishment to be chained to a jagged shoal made up of one moment in time. Her memory of Julie on that night—grief, betrayal, rage, guilt—dominated her life. It was a scar that consumed everything, one that she couldn’t help but pick at again and again.

Oblivion isn’t solace, but sometimes healing does require erasure, as does forgiveness.

ZOE

Alexander thinks that the dragons came to Mannaport first because of our pain.

I don’t think that’s true. Like I said, there’s nothing special about Mannaport. We have an average amount of heartache and grief, of abandonment and betrayal, no more and no less.

But the little dragons are special. They can’t be harnessed to do useful work, at least not the way the adults want. But just because a scalpel can’t be used to chop down a tree doesn’t mean that it can’t help.

I made this bowl of cranberry sauce for Yegong, and I’ll bring it over later. See how I put blueberries in it? Not quite the same shade as its eyes, but it’s the best I can do. Blue is such a pretty color.

Author’s note: For more on Maxwell’s demon and the thermodynamic properties of information erasure, see Charles H. Bennett, “The Thermodynamics of Computation—A Review,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 905–40.