Ghosts of Engines Past

by McMullen, Sean

  On the British side of the Channel Tunnel everything seemed just as normal, but that did not last for long. The train stopped on the edge of Greater London, and there was an announcement that St Pancras station had been eaten. Nobody seemed to know what to do with the passengers from my Eurostar train, which was meant to terminate there. After a dozen attempts to phone my brother, I finally got through.

  “Scott, you're alive!” he shouted into the mouthpiece.

  “Alive, yes, and I don't suppose I need to tell you about Paris?”

  “No, course not. Big hero, you are, taking those vids from right under the dragon when it ate the Eiffel Tower. It's been on the television. They even interviewed me.”

  Someone must have found my name and email address etched on the underside of the camera, I realised.

  “Charles, can you get on your scooter and pick me up?”

  “You're not in Paris?”

  “No, I'm back in London, somewhere near the Orbital. There are no trains, the busses and cabs are crammed solid, and even if I could get onto something with a motor, the roads are gridlocked.”

  “Why not just tell me where you are and they'll send a helicopter.”

  “A helicopter? And who are they?”

  “Defence people, they're here now, in the house. “

  “What do they want with me?”

  “You got the best close-up pictures of the dragon eating the Tower. That makes you an expert on it.”

  I was flown to some small, secure military base to the south of London, but was told nothing by those in the helicopter. Once on the ground I was taken straight to a briefing room. Here a team of interrogators questioned me very closely, going over the same questions again and again, each time phrasing them a little differently.

  “So you arrived in Paris yesterday morning?”

  “Yes, by train.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “I got my doctorate in art history last week, I was going to spend a weekend in Paris, looking at art for fun instead of study for a change.”

  “You have a PhD in art history, yet you drive a delivery truck for a living?”

  “Well you try getting any other job with a PhD in art history.”

  “Why were you taking videos of the Eiffel Tower at the very moment that the dragon appeared?”

  My patience snapped.

  “Well, you know how it is. Don't get to spend much quality time with the dragon, so I thought I'd vid some of those little domestic moments, like mealtimes.”

  “Mr Carr—”

  “Dr Carr to you.”

  “Your flippant attitude is not going to achieve anything.”

  “Neither are your damn aggressive questions! Are you saying that I summoned a two mile golden dragon with a silly grin from Dragonland, or wherever dragons come from?”

  “Er... well, did you?”

  I was finally given a break, and was shown into a room where my brother was waiting. We were left alone, and I flopped into a chair and closed my eyes.

  “Charles, just what happened in London, apart from St Pancras?”

  “You're kidding! You don't know?”

  “I've been told nothing.”

  “Well, a lot of stuff is gone. The station, the big museums and galleries, the Tower Bridge, the Boadicea statue... oh, and it scoffed Buckingham Palace, how could I forget? The British Library got pretty well trashed too, but they think that was an accident. You know, St Pancras was so close.”

  “Where is the dragon now?”

  “Last saw it in Amsterdam on the tele, just before the spooks arrived and asked about you.”

  We were being monitored, that was certain. Doubtless our conversation was a great disappointment to those listening.

  “So what happens now?” asked Charles.

  “The bad cop has had words with me, so I imagine it's the turn of the good cop.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I'll say what the bad cop did not give me a chance to say. I hope he gets a kick in the arse and a demotion.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “Well Charles, funny you should ask. The dragon is eating art.”

  “Art? You're daft. It's just doing a Godzilla on the big cities. If it weren't real, I'd say it was just a cheap movie. Did you see its silly grin? Spoils the whole effect.”

  “It's not only attacking works of art, it's choosing those of the greatest symbolic value and highest visibility. Just you watch. In every city that it visits, only the great cathedrals, palaces, galleries and monuments will go.”

  “But why?”

  “If I knew that, Charles, the spooks bugging this room would be treating me a lot more politely.”

  As it happened, the treatment given to me improved anyway, and I soon realised that I had been declared someone important. The dragon was eating art, I was some sort of authority on art, and I had been closer to the dragon than any other art authority who was still alive. I was taken to an operations room, where I was given a very detailed briefing while real-time pictures of the dragon eating bits of Berlin played on large screens. In the days that followed I spent much of my time here, being briefed about the dragon's position, and watching live coverage of what it was doing. The pattern was always the same. It arrived at a city, methodically munched its way through whatever prominent artistic works that took its fancy, then flew on.

  St. Peterberg suffered terribly, and there were tears on my cheeks as I watched the dragon devour the Church of the Saviour. From there it left for Moscow, and it was about halfway there and five miles above open farmland when it was it was struck by a missile with a one megaton warhead. The explosion had no effect whatsoever. By then I had been coopted onto a group of experts called the Dragon Advisory Committee, and within the hour we were shown coverage of the attack taken from a monitor jet that had been shadowing the dragon at a safe distance. Nobody tried to stop it after that.

  Weeks passed, and I was astounded at how very quickly humanity adjusted to the idea of a two mile dragon touring the world and eating artwork. Museums and galleries were avoided by everyone with any sense and general tourism dropped off as well, but airlines continued with reduced schedules. In some cities there were mass bonfires of paintings, while the prices of designer houses plunged. Martial arts academies were renamed martial skills academies, academies of fine arts just got their signs taken down, and universities expanded other faculties into empty arts buildings. Jackhammers were applied to pavement mosaics, murals were painted over, and public sculptures were either smashed or loaded onto dredging barges to be dumped at sea.

  All the while the Dragon Advisory Committee studied the dragon, but the few facts that had been gathered together about it made little sense. All attempts to communicate, negotiate or fight had been ignored. It was two miles long, with a wingspan of three. Measurements of the footprints put its weight at only a million tons. When the thing moved it had a metallic, booming sound. The conclusion was that it was both hollow and metal. The nature of the metal was a mystery. It looked like gold. If it was metal and hollow, then what was inside? Air, according to computer models. It was an immense shell over not very much. The dragon did not digest the debris of what it had eaten, it pulverised them, then exhaled the dust. This was determined by the way that its weight remained constant.

  My next contribution was to compare our immense visitor to the dragon ships of the Vikings. During the centuries that politically correct historians no longer call the Dark Ages, the dragon ships brought fearsome Norse warriors to Britain. They looted treasures, took slaves, burned much of what could not be carried, and killed anyone who tried to stop them.

  “So you think it's a ship?” asked the secretary of the Dragon Advisory Committee. “A spaceship, perhaps, shaped like a dragon?”

  “It could be.”

  “Not a robot? Not a real dragon with metal armour?”

  “You wanted theories, I am just giving you another theory.”

&nb
sp; “A dragon full of alien Vikings, perhaps?” asked a sociologist named Glenda.

  “I can't say. It might be just an art-hating dragon.”

  “Does that mean it will go away once all the art has been eaten?” asked a major from the Special Air Service who always wore sunglasses and was only known by a serial number.

  “I don't know. Some Vikings sailed away, but some settled here.”

  “A dragon? On Earth? Forever?” he gasped.

  “Not the ship, but its crew,” suggested the secretary.

  “So where are they?” asked the major. “The dragon is empty.”

  “They might be beings of disembodied data, who can experience artwork as its totality, not just form, colour, texture, and whatever else,” I ventured.

  “So they don't hate art, they just do a bit of damage when they appreciate it?” asked the major.

  “Perhaps,” I guessed.

  “So where are they?” Glenda asked me.

  “I don't know.”

  “Well how do you know they exist?”

  “How do you know the dragon's power plant exists?”

  “It flies and eats,” said the secretary. “That takes a lot of energy.”

  “Well something is choosing what it eats, whether it's a crew or—or a dragon brain,” concluded the major.

  True, aesthetic judgements were indeed being made. It had flown over Los Angeles, looked about, apparently decided that nothing was worth eating, then flown on without landing. Gradually it worked its way south in a zig-zag spiral that encircled the earth several times. Finally it stopped, settled itself on a beach in Australia's southeast, and apparently went to sleep. Within a half hour of that news arriving, I had been put onto a jet for Melbourne with the rest of the Dragon Advisory Committee—which had been renamed the British Dragon Advisory Committee.

  The dragon was lying stretched out along a beach bordered by sheer cliffs near Cape Otway. It was one of those locations that would have been called wild and desolate until it became fashionable to call them beautiful and unspoiled. Boats that normally took tourists to watch whales were offering tours of the dragon, but the British Dragon Advisory Committee was taken to the beach by helicopter, where we joined several dozen other groups of experts. None of those with me had yet seen the dragon directly, and they were understandably nervous as we approached. We knew that it did not kill deliberately, but that was of little comfort to anyone who got under its feet. Fifteen hundred people had been killed by the dragon. Two thirds of those had died in Paris and London on the first day, and after that, people learned to stay away from anything resembling art when the dragon was known to be approaching.

  I stood on the beach beside an Australian military engineer, watching through binoculars as two men wearing camo balaclavas and overalls entered a nostril from a platform at the top of a mobile crane. They were trailing communications cables and carrying assault rifles.

  “Dragon Team Reccon,” said the engineer. “They're wired for sound and visuals.”

  “What do they hope to achieve?” I asked.

  “Exploration. We know that the nostrils are not used for breathing. Our instruments show there's no airflow in or out of them.”

  “Except when it's snorting out pulverised artwork.”

  “It could be a robot, that's my theory. If so, we might find a soft spot.”

  “A soft spot? In a thing that survived a direct hit from a hydrogen bomb?”

  “You don't understand. If that dragon was built by engineers, there's bound to be an access hatch somewhere for maintenance and repairs.”

  I noticed that various teams of people were pointing equipment at the dragon, and through my binoculars I could see a woman who was pressing her forehead and fingertips against the immense curve of golden metal that was its jaw.

  “Who is the woman standing beside the mouth?” I asked.

  “She's a psychic. She says she's channelling the aliens who are the crew.”

  “So what are they saying?”

  “She doesn't understand the language.”

  “Do your instruments say anything more constructive?”

  “Afraid not. Use whatever instrument you like, it's like taking a sounding of deep space. I think we—smoke!”

  I immediately looked back to the nostrils, where a cloud of dark smoke had been puffed out. Cursing softly, the engineer keyed his phone into life.

  “Scope 6, this is Major Dekker. What was that smoke?”

  I looked back to the dragon, where someone at the top of the crane was withdrawing the communications cables. The men were no longer attached to them.

  “Well what do your spectrographs say?” shouted the engineer into his phone.

  I stood waiting as he listened. Presently he rang off.

  “The spectrograph team has made a preliminary analysis of that puff of smoke,” he said, more to himself than me. “It was mainly steam mixed with carbon, with some iron and lead, and traces of other elements like chlorine, calcium and silicon.”

  “Was the estimated mass that of two humans, their weapons, and their surveillance gear?”

  “He didn't say. There was about ten metres of cable played out when—when the team vanished.”

  I caught myself just as my mouth opened to ask whether or not they were virgins. It was a stupid question, yet was it any sillier than the idea of a metal dragon two miles long that ate art? Were those two men the first human sacrifices that the dragon had accepted?

  “I think anything that gets inside the dragon will be pulverised,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “What's that you say?”

  “We are like members of some stone age tribe, trying to enter a battleship by climbing down the funnels. Its insides are incomprehensible to us. I think that if you tried to drill into the belly, you would probably find that the end of the drill has sheered off and vanished.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  “How so?”

  “We did try drilling into it, this morning. We were successful, after a fashion.”

  “So not entirely?”

  “No. The drill went straight in, but when it was withdrawn there was no hole. Most of the drill bit was missing as well.”

  “Did you have the shavings analysed?”

  “There were no shavings. As I said, the drill went straight in.”

  At this point he walked away to some people gathered around a truck bristling with equipment that I did not understand. I began to walk in the direction of the dragon. At first I thought one of the many guards with stubby assault rifles and helmets jammed full of communications gear would stop me, but I was allowed to keep walking. Distances can be deceptive where something as large as the dragon is involved, and my walk turned out to be half a mile.

  Being the token expert from the arts, I had the rather contradictory title of generalist specialist. I was one of those people who had to devise theories for the utility specialists to check, and at this stage I was very short on theories. The one thing that I could do was touch the dragon. Why must humans touch? Before me was the most dangerous being ever to fly the skies or walk the earth, yet I wanted to touch it.

  The last few steps were the hardest. About fifty feet to the left, the medium was still alive and well, pressing her head and hands against the dragon. What would it make of me? The dragon ate art, and while I was no artist, I was an art historian with qualifications to prove it. Was I the first art historian to touch it? Could it read minds?

  Trying to hold my mind blank, so that my better judgement would not be aware of what I was doing, I approached the immense jaw, extended my hand and ran my fingers along the surface. It was like touching the hull of a large ship. The impression was not at all rational, it was as if I had decided that it would feel that way, and that I had been right. I rapped at it with my knuckles, but there was only the slightest suggestion of an echo. I stepped back, looked up, and tried to... to appreciate the monster, as if it were a work of art. I failed. As I wa
lked away from the dragon I was met by a group of several dozen people. They were dressed in assault fatigues, suits, lab coats, and even parade uniforms. Most of the British Dragon Advisory Committee was with them.

  “What was it like?” asked the SAS major.

  “Like a huge ship: hard, cool, absolutely unyielding.”

  Because I had not been reduced to a cloud of my component elements, most of the others now walked forward to touch the dragon for themselves. I had become friendly with Glenda, the sociologist, by now. She had a hard, pragmatic bearing, and a tendency to stand apart from other people as if determined not to follow the herd. Thus it was that we stood back together, watching the others having their photographs taken in front of the jaw.

  “Just what is so special about art?” she asked, sounding as if she were tired of asking questions without answers.

  “It can move people by being beautiful or confrontational,” I replied. “It can make our surroundings more pleasant, it can even be enjoyable to create. Sometimes it's inspirational, but often it's manipulative.”

  “That tells me nothing. Why is it special?

  “Well... only humans produce it.”

  “Some birds decorate their nests with bright and colourful things like broken glass and plastic bottle caps.”

  I had not known that. I thought about it for a while.

  “But is that art or decoration? Some apes use broad leaves to keep the rain off, but is that clothing? Birds use twigs to tease insects out of holes, apes and sea otters use rocks to break things open for food, but you can hardly say they make tools. Monkeys throw stones: does that mean they have invented projectile weapons?”

  “Well, you're the expert in art history. When did humans invent art?”

  “Necklaces go back about a hundred thousand years, but they are just ornaments. Cave paintings and sculptures have only been around for half that time.”

  “So that's real art?”

  “Yes. I'd say art either evolved or was invented around forty thousand years ago.”

  “Then art is relatively new—no, wait! Chimps, birds, even elephants can learn to paint.”