Nothing But Blue Skies

by Tom Holt

  Karen closed her eyes and concentrated. It should have been easy, because all she had to do was think STOP—

  (But that was when she was in her own body, not this cramped, largely unfamiliar right-hand-drive contraption; somehow it worked so that her instincts interfaced with the controls just fine, whereas her conscious thoughts had to stop and grind their way through the Owner’s Handbook and the Help files in order to get the simplest thing done—)

  —Which raised the questions, ‘How do you think?’ and ‘What’s the proper Think command for Stop?’ and ‘Which of these is the Send button, anyway?’; and struggling with all that nonsense made her feel so uptight and irritable—

  At which point, someone grabbed her by the arm and dragged her, quickly and with humiliating efficiency, back into the shelter of the museum doorway. ‘You’re soaked,’ said a familiar voice.

  Sheet lightning filled the sky, thunder rattled the window-panes, drains and soakaways within a five-mile radius gave up and went into denial - indications that Karen wasn’t entirely pleased to see the person who’d just pulled her in out of the rain. ‘Yes,’ Karen muttered, ‘I am, rather.’

  ‘You were just standing there, getting wet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Any particular reason?’

  ‘I like getting wet.’

  Her rescuer - imagine the Botticelli Venus dressed in a sensible waterproof jacket, of the kind they sell in camping shops - curved her lips slightly in a small, bewildered-contemptuous smile. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Next time you might want to try swimming, though. Same net effect but your clothes stay dry.’

  Karen tightened her scowl up by a click or so. ‘Actually,’ she said truthfully, ‘I can’t swim.’ (Now why on earth had she gone and told her that? No idea; it had just slipped out, like a coin falling out of her pocket when she pulled out her handkerchief.)

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ Karen replied. Not in this body, anyway, she didn’t explain.

  ‘Well, well. I’ll have to teach you one of these days. I learned to swim when I was two.’

  Too what? Karen didn’t say. Another odd thing; it had nearly stopped raining, even though Karen was so livid she could cheerfully have sunk all twenty claws into the bloody woman’s face.

  Hard to understand, that. She could only assume it was something to do with the crushing weight of inferiority she always felt whenever she was in Ms Ackroyd’s company. ‘I bet,’ she muttered. ‘Came naturally to you, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, as it happens. Of course, it’s always easier to learn something if you start young.’ Not a drop, not a single molecule of water appeared to have lodged anywhere on Susan Ackroyd’s super-polymer-monofilament-this-that-and-the-other-upholstered person. Dry as a yak bone in the Gobi Desert, she was. Typical. ‘How come you never learned to swim, then?’

  ‘Never got round to it.’

  ‘Ah. Look, it’s stopped raining. A bit late as far as you’re concerned,’ Ms Ackroyd added. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  Karen watched her walk away without saying a word, mostly because the things she really wanted to say couldn’t readily be expressed in the effete languages humans used. If, as she asserted, she’d never really understood what love meant until she’d turned her back on the cloud-capped battlements of Home and come down to live among the humans, the same also went for hate, redoubled in spades. Oh sure, she’d felt the odd negative emotion or two in her time - she’d disapproved of evil and disliked the dragon senators who’d criticised her father’s handling of various issues and taken against some of her more obnoxiodus relatives and been annoyed by several of her contemporaries at school - but hate, the real hundred per cent proof matured-in-oak-vats stuff, had taken her completely by surprise. She hated Susan Ackroyd with a pure, distilled ferocity she hadn’t believed possible a few months ago. She hated her for her straight blonde hair, her unflappable calm, her brilliantly incisive mind, her knack of being abominably insulting while not actually saying anything rude, her ability to wear a potato sack and still look like a refugee from a Paris catwalk, the shape of her ears, her unshakeable common sense, her dry, understated sense of humour, her weakness for fresh vanilla slices, her skill at mental arithmetic, her hand/eye coordination, her rare and beautiful smile, the way she could open difficult bottles and jars with a bare flick of the wrist, her taste in shoes, the easy way she could admit it when she came up against something she couldn’t do, the evenness of her teeth, her excellent memory for telephone numbers, the fact that she could swim.

  Because she was the Competition.

  For the sake of the unharvested crops and the water table and the already over-abused sewage systems of three counties, Karen made a mental effort not to think about that. It was, after all, her day off, when she should be happy and relaxed and at ease; nothing but blue skies. It was her day off, when she shouldn’t be here at all, or anywhere, on her own . . . or where the hell was the point in having run away from Home and come here in the first place?

  Humans, she decided, were much, much better at unhappiness than dragons could ever be; it came naturally to them, like swimming did to Susan Ackroyd. But, since they still retained the vestiges of a survival instinct, they’d found ways of coping with it; none of them so unfailingly effective, so elegantly simple, as the cream doughnut. Dragons had nothing like that. Thinking about it, she almost felt sorry for her tediously contented species.

  The woman in the cream-cake shop recognised Karen at once, which was hardly surprising, but at least she had the tact not to make an issue out of it; she simply looked blank, as if drowned rats who asked for three cream doughnuts were something that happened every day. Once Karen was out of the shop and comfortably relaxed on the warm steps of the square - just the sight of the exuberant cream bubbling up out of the fissured doughnut had been enough to haul the sun out from behind the clouds - she felt like a completely different person. Like, to take an example entirely at random, a red-lacquer-and-gold dragon bursting through the clouds into the pure blue above, the exact opposite and equivalent of a diver plunging into deep blue water.

  Homesick? After all the trouble she’d been to, getting away from there in the first place? Not likely.

  Perhaps it was the doughnut; possibly it was pure logic, quietly working away at the problem like penetrating oil gradually seeping into a rusted joint. Possibly it was a flash of insight, the mental equivalent of a double six and a quick trip up a ladder; most likely that, because the conclusion arrived complete and ready to wear, batteries included. If Susan Ackroyd was here just a moment ago, it followed that she was not with Paul. If she wasn’t with Paul on the morning of the Spring Bank Holiday, didn’t that suggest that the two of them weren’t the stone-cold definite Item she’d been assuming they were? Maybe they were nothing more than Just Good Friends. In which case (she mused excitedly, biting vigorously into the second doughnut) the game wasn’t over and she was still in with a sporting chance, straight blonde hair or no straight blonde hair. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became. If she was a man-eating vampire blonde (and amphibious into the bargain) with her hooks into some poor unsuspecting male right up to the knuckles, would she let him out of her sight on a sunny Bank Holiday morning? Would she hell as like. She’d have had their day together mapped out and precisely scheduled well in advance, with back-ups and fail-safe options in the event of unexpected obstacles and complications, all drawn tightly together into a unified game plan designed to advance the relationship to the next level of the overall strategy - she’d have drawn it all up on graph paper, neatly plotted on the X and Y axes, with each variable charted in a different colour of felt-tip pen. Wouldn’t anybody, if they were truly serious about a relationship? Surely it stood to reason.

  As she licked cream and sugar residues off her fingertips, the sun flipped open the lid of its paintbox and started filling in the numbered spaces with rich, glowing shades of yellow and gold. It was all fearfully symbolic
, as the warmth of insight evaporated the damp residues of anger; and it had never been like this, at Home, where there simply weren’t any such extremes. Maybe it was a terrestrial thing, something to do with being limited to three dimensions, one shape, one set of senses and one perspective. If they could fly like birds or swim like fish, would mortal humans still retain the ability to feel things so intensely, to concentrate so ferociously on a single issue, to love or hate a single person so passionately? Highly improbable, to say the least. Oh, but if only Daddy and all the rest of them could just have a taste of what they were missing, love and hate and cream doughnuts too, wouldn’t they all be down here, on the other end of the rain, instead of up there in the monotonous, unending blue?

  She’d closed her eyes at some stage. Now she opened them again, and immediately saw two very familiar faces, no more than twenty yards away. It was as if someone with a nasty sense of humour had done it on purpose.

  The female - well, she was just as blonde as she had been when Karen last saw her, all of twenty minutes ago, if not blonder. And he - oddly enough, he seemed a bit shorter and somehow more meagre than he was in her mind’s eye, but even so she felt the same lurching shock as always, a feeling that you get only when you see your beloved or unexpectedly bite hard on tinfoil. There they were, together - didn’t they make a lovely couple, as natural a pairing as knife and fork or cod and chips, perfectly matched as if they’d been cut from the same blank. Suddenly, Karen regretted the idiotic limitations of a human body, with no proper teeth to bare or claws to spread. They were walking together towards the museum, side by side and in step like a very small column of soldiers, both of them eyes front, chins up, hands level at their sides (as if butter wouldn’t melt; who were they trying to fool?) He was holding a Tesco’s bag; she’d taken off her sensible coat and was carrying it folded under one arm. She said something. He laughed.

  All right, Karen thought, so I’m not really human; I am what I am, and if that’s not good enough for some people, that’s their hard luck. Then it occurred to her that being what she was did have a few useful fringe benefits, and that it was the end of May, and she was by right of birth and appointment the Dragon Marshal of Bank Holidays.

  What was it the humans said? When things go wrong in your private life, sometimes it helps to throw yourself body and soul into your work.

  She began with a bolt of lightning that set dogs barking and nervous people skipping on the spot, followed by a stupendous rumbling belch of thunder that seemed to come from way down inside herself, followed in turn by the very latest Rapier-class air-to-surface anti-personnel rain, the kind that slices through cloth as if it wasn’t there and impacts against your skin so hard you can practically hear it. This wasn’t a time for gradually winding out the handles and slowly increasing the feed; if ever there was a situation that called for cracking the throttles wide open and delivering the full payload in the first volley, this was it. Maximum wetness, total viscosity, optimum drench and squelch factors, saturation bombardment; instantaneous metamorphosis from bone dry to sopping wet in the twinkling of a small, round red eye.

  Daddy would have been proud of her. Faster than the eye could follow, Susan’s hair went from golden waterfall to matted thatch, without any mucking about in the intermediate stages of moist, damp, sodden. Smart raindrops turned the exposed lining of her unfair-to-dragons sensible coat into a portable reservoir, so that putting it on would be the only possible way she could make herself wetter than she already was. Mortals - she’d noticed it before and for some reason it bothered her - mortals couldn’t help looking ridiculous when they got wet with all their clothes on. They wore the rain like a custard pie jammed in their faces; the joke was unmistakably on them, they were the straight men and the dragons were the comics. Even Paul looked silly - endearingly, adorably silly, but still silly - with his hair plastered down over his forehead and a scale model mountain rill cascading down the slopes of his nose.

  And if that didn’t spoil the mood, Karen added to herself with grim satisfiaction, nothing would. If half what she’d heard about the sovereign effects of a cold shower was true—

  They were laughing. Both of them. He was saying something like ‘God, you’re wet!’ and she was saying ‘So are you,’ or words to that effect, and they were giggling like a couple of schoolchildren. Instead of scurrying for cover like startled rabbits - no point, since they were drenched already - they were just standing there, sniggering their silly heads off, laughing off the worst, the best she could do as if it didn’t matter, as if a drop of rain never hurt anybody. It was sacrilege. It was an affront to everything that dragons stood for. It was so unfair.

  Then Karen, who was also sitting out in the pouring rain without hat, coat or umbrella, realised that she was every bit as wet as they were, so wet that she could feel the rain dribbling down inside her underwear, and she wasn’t laughing at all.

  As soon as she woke up the next morning, Karen knew something was desperately wrong.

  First, she couldn’t breathe. It was as if someone had crept in during the night and stuffed cotton wool up her nose. (Her stupid, inefficient human nose; compared to the plumbing fitted to the ultra-evolved dragon body, with its multiple back-ups and bypasses, human pipes, ducts and conduits were downright primitive. It was a miracle the species had survived so long.)

  As if the breathing problem wasn’t bad enough, she was leaking. There was moisture of some kind streaming from her eyes and nose. What the stuff was - lubricant or hydraulic fluid or coolant, maybe - or where it had come from she had no idea, but it stood to reason that if it had been inside her head to start with, it was there for a purpose and she couldn’t afford to lose much more of it. If the state of her pillow was anything to go by, she’d already been drained of close on a quarter of a pint; what if it was brake fluid or two-stroke oil, and when she next tried to stop suddenly her muscles were to seize and send her toppling headlong to the ground? To make matters even worse, there was something wrong with both her ears and an absolutely foul taste in her mouth, which tended to lend weight to the midnight-assassin theory.

  The main thing, of course, was not to panic. First, she took a moment to check and rally those few remaining systems that hadn’t been knocked out or severely curtailed by the attack. She found that she could just about breathe through her mouth (though this brought to her attention another malfunction, this time in the back of the throat, which led to convulsive coughing attacks if she wasn’t very careful about precisely regulating the air flow), and that most of the motor functions in her arms and legs were just about operational, though with something like a twenty-five per cent reduction in efficiency. She dragged herself out of bed and managed to stagger as far as the bookshelf before subsiding onto the floor in a disorderly heap of limbs.

  Even before Karen had made her escape from Home she’d had the foresight to realise that once she was down there among the mortals, she was going to have to cope with any injuries or illness by herself. The version of human shape assumed by dragons was believed to be a pretty faithful copy of the original in most respects, but the simple fact was that where a lot of the trivial detail was concerned, it was a case of best-guessing and figuring out from first principles. It was like trying to build a twentieth-century computer with nothing to go on except the design specifications for a twenty-fifth-century model and a photograph from a Sunday-supplement advert: no problem with getting the exterior looking just right, but the internal workings probably wouldn’t fool an expert for very long - intestines the wrong colour or wound with a right-hand instead of a left-hand thread, metric instead of imperial bone-socket sizes, or something equally revealing to the trained eye. Visits to the doctor, in other words, were out of the question; which was why one of the first things she’d acquired on her arrival had been a big, fat medical dictionary.

  She listed the symptoms and considered all the possible diagnoses, and came to the conclusion that what she was suffering from was something called a co
mmon cold. Terrifyingly, the book assured her that there was no known cure, and the thought of spending the rest of her life as a wheezing, gasping, seeping wreck nearly brought on a terminal panic attack; but she made herself read on, and was mightily relieved to learn that this awful condition somehow cured itself, usually in a matter of days. In the ‘Causes’ column, the book listed standing about in the freezing cold, or getting soaking wet, which pretty well confirmed the diagnosis while making Karen feel painfully guilty about all the rain she’d emptied on the heads of innocent bystanders the day before. Had they all caught this loathsome disease, she wondered, and were they all undergoing the same degree of suffering and discomfort as she was? The implications, not just for herself but for all dragonkind, were little short of staggering.

  Well, at least she was fairly sure she wasn’t going to die, so that was all right. Now all she had to do was make it through the day somehow, and then she could crawl back into bed and suffer in peace—

  Which reminded her. She looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece and was horrified to see that while she’d been looking the other way, the time had sneakily scuttled on to half-past eight, and she wasn’t even dressed yet.

  Horrible tight human clothes, with all the ludicrous straps and fastenings and the peculiar cloth tubes you had to stuff your arms and legs into. Stupid human shoes, to make up for the hopelessly inadequate clawless human foot. Irritating human junk that had to be loaded into pockets before she dared slam the door shut behind her (keys, purse, wallet, cards, pens, handkerchiefs, combs, lipsticks, nail files—). Pathetic human lack of wings, leaving her no alternative but to run, which no upright species was ever intended to do, in order to clamber onto a crazy human bus and stand in a tightly packed human wedge while the bus crawled painfully in another typically human wedge through the blocked arteries of the city. Why, she asked herself, why this morbid fascination with the X-axis? Surely any fool could see that the surface was so hopelessly overcrowded that the system no longer functioned; in practice, it was already impossible to get from one place to another simply by trundling along the ground, whether on foot or by vehicle, whereas just above the heads and roofs of the toiling, suffering mass of travellers there was almost unlimited free transit space. It couldn’t possibly be mere ignorance or lack of enterprise. There had to be some deep-rooted psychological defect that kept them rooted to the ground, in defiance of the glaringly obvious. Strange, perverse creatures. Aliens.