Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  ‘My price? You mean for the tickets? Well—’

  ‘For the operation,’ Bianca hissed.

  Chronotherapy, also known as Injury Time; a new breakthrough in medical science, brought to you by the pharmaceuticals wing of Chubby Stevenson (Time) Inc.

  What nearly all medicine boils down to is: leave the human body alone and comfortable, and in Time it’ll sort itself out. But if you haven’t got Time, this is a non-starter. So; either you die, or bits fall off you, or you buy more Time.

  It’s an entirely private and personal envelope of addi­tional Time shoe-horned into an ordinary day — one second in real time, but up to three months as far as the user is concerned, during which bones knit, scars heal, muscles rebuild and so on. Since it’s a very small-scale temporal field, it only takes a tiny drop of the raw stuff— less than one microlitre, street value currently £100,000. Double that for the shoe-horn, installation costs, credulity suspension jigs and tooling, the doctor’s and Chubby’s profit. Fortunately, the sensational manner in which she’d received her injuries (Sultry Brunette In Bomb Horror) had sent her market values rocketing, and she’d arranged a few sales of old bits of junk she’d had cluttering her studio which more than covered the cost.

  Later, Bianca was to remember it as the most boring second of her life.

  Mike arrived, dishevelled and out of breath, to find he was already there.

  This worried him. True, his aggravating vagueness and extremely flexible attitude to punctuality had frequently led people to suggest that one of these days he’d be late for his own funeral. On the other hand, he’d always assumed that they’d have the common courtesy to wait for him. Appar­ently not so.

  ‘We therefore commit his body to the earth,’ said the priest, ‘dust to dust, ashes to...’

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. Nobody heard him. He watched with incredulous fury as they started to fill in the grave. It was like watching a waiter take away your meal before you’d had a chance to unfold your table napkin, let alone start eating. One thing did, however, suggest at least a degree of normality. Nobody had told him anything and he hadn’t got a clue what was going on. That made him feel more comfortable. He could cope now.

  ‘Good turnout,’ said a voice to his immediate right. ‘You must feel proud.’

  The voice was coming from a large, florid Victorian weeping angel. She’d seen better days; acid rain, vandalism and the trainee assistant gardener (who sharpened his billhook on her marble ankle) had all taken their toll, leaving her looking like something found in a sink-trap. Mike recoiled slightly.

  ‘Be like that,’ the angel said, apparently not offended. ‘Let’s face it, you’re no oil painting yourself; although, that said, in a bad light you’d pass for a second-rate Jackson Pollock.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The statue sighed. ‘Sorry,’ it said, ‘I forgot, you’re new. Find a puddle or something, take a look at yourself. Or rather,’ she added quickly, ‘don’t. Probably best if you remember yourself the way you used to be.’

  Mike sat down on a tombstone. As he did so, he studied the process. As far as he could tell, he was solid and real; he could feel the stone against his trousered leg, and when he tried to pass his arm through an ornate granite cross, it wouldn’t go. He tried again, only harder; when he banged his wrist on the stone it hurt, and a little smear of blood showed in the graze. In one sense, reassuring; in another, disconcerting.

  ‘Neat trick, isn’t it?’ said the angel, who had been watching. ‘Feels just like the real thing, but isn’t. All a matter of timing, you see.’

  ‘Timing?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The statue yawned. ‘God,’ she said, ‘why’s it always me who’s got to do this? I don’t get paid for explaining to new recruits, I just do it because I’m here. And,’ she added, ‘because I feel sorry for you, bless your poor disoriented souls. And because I’ve got absolutely nothing else to do. Still, I really do think it’s time they did something official, it’s a scandal if you ask me. I mean, there’s all those preparing-for-retirement courses you can go on, so the shock of not having to work won’t send you

  to an early grave; but the biggest and most radical change of your entire existence, you’re supposed to be able to fend for yourself, puzzle it out from first principles. Cheapskate, I call it.’

  Mike took a deep breath — presumably it was a deep breath and not just some virtual reality programmer’s placebo. ‘If you’d explain,’ he said, ‘I personally would be very grateful.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the angel, ‘you’re welcome. Look, forget what I said about timing for the moment, it always confuses people. Think of a radio, right?’

  Mike thought of a radio.

  ‘Now then,’ the statue continued, ‘there’s hundreds, maybe thousands of different radio signals blamming about simultaneously, but the radio only picks them up one at a time. That’s because it’s tuned in to one specific frequency.’ The angel paused. ‘Nobody told me this, by the way,’ she added. ‘I had to work it out for myself. It’s true, though, ‘cos I had it confirmed by Official Channels when I asked them. They’re very good about answering enquiries, so long as you don’t forget the stamped addressed envelope.’

  ‘Please go on,’ Mike said. ‘Like radio waves, you said.’

  ‘Sure.’ The angel thought for a moment, remembering where she’d got to. ‘Well, just as there’s lots of different radio frequencies, there’s lots of different chronological continuums. Continua. Timescales. That’s a better word, although I shouldn’t use it because it’s got a separate technical meaning. Strictly speaking, timescale is the resi­due left after hard time’s been boiled down in a copper kettle.’

  ‘Forget I said that. Different timescales. Now, in the timescale which human mortal life is tuned in to, a second lasts—’ She stopped. ‘Sorry, got in a bit of a tangle there. Should have done the weights-and-measures spiel before I started. Let’s put all that on one side for the time being and stick to Terrestrial Orthodox. As far as you’re concerned, a second lasts one second, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Wrong. A second only lasts a second in your own specific timescale, HMS — that’s Human Mortal Standard. That’s what you were tuned in to when you were alive. Now you’re dead, you’re tuned in to HDS, Human Deceased Standard. One second HN45 is equivalent to 0.8342 sec­onds HDS; or 0.0062 seconds SIS, Supernatural Immortal Standard; or 0.000 147, SITS, Soul In Torment Standard; or—’

  ‘All right,’ Mike said, ‘got that. How does that mean I don’t exist but I can’t walk through tombstones?’

  Being a statue, the angel couldn’t shrug, but by extra-subtle voice modulation it did the vocal equivalent. ‘Don’t exist is a bit of an overstatement,’ she said, ‘and it’s a very complex bit of maths, which I’m still not sure I completely follow. The analogy is, though, think of the radio signals. They’re all there, but you can only listen to one at a time. Now, turning back to timescales, think of yourself as the radio signal.’

  ‘Fine. Here am I going bleep bleep. Who’s being the radio?’

  Another, broader verbal shrug. ‘This is a difficult con­cept to put across,’ she said. ‘Basically, the world is the radio, your fellow sentient beings are — no pun intended, promise — the cat’s whiskers. Do you see what I’m getting at? You exist, you’re here, no question about that. The tombstone there is inanimate — either that, or it’s very, very shy, because we’ve been standing next to each other since 1897 and it’s never said a word — and so it couldn’t notice you even if it wanted to. Doesn’t matter a damn what a

  tombstone thinks. But living creatures are different; they’re all tuned in to their own timescale, and so they just don’t see anybody who’s in a timescale faster than their own. Dead people move too quick; you know, the magic lantern effect. Marvellous system when you come to think of it, bloody efficient way to store billions of people on a relatively small planet.’

  There was a substant
ial pause while Mike let it all sink in. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So do I still have to eat and sleep and so on? Do I still have to go to work and earn money, or is everything free, or don’t I need anything? Can I have things even if I don’t need them?’

  ‘The question doesn’t arise,’ the angel replied. ‘Life expectancy of a dead human’s no more than three days, four days maximum. At the end of that time, either you find an empty property in Mortality you can slip into, or else —phut.’

  ‘Phut?’

  ‘Phut. That’s yet another gross simplification,’ the angel went on apologetically, ‘but so what, I’m pretty shaky on the theory from now on. What actually happens, I think, is that you start to speed up to such an extent that Time just zips by in a meaningless blur and before you know it, you’ve reached the End of the Universe, entropy time, the big nothing; like you’ve fast-forwarded and there you are at the end of the tape. What happens after that is beyond me. Maybe they wind it back, maybe they take it back to the library and get out another one. Let’s put it this way, you’ll know the answer to that particular part of the story long before I will, so if you can, be sure to send me a postcard. I say that to all the new arrivals,’ the angel added, ‘and I’ve never had anything from any of them. But maybe they just forgot.'

  ‘Four days?’

  ‘Four days tops.’

  Mike felt ill. The gravestone was still there under his backside, the breeze was still a little on the chilly side, but he felt as if he was already hurtling past, like a child on a combination merry-go-round and Ferris wheel. ‘You said something about an empty property,’ he remembered. ‘What’s that all about?’

  ‘Thought you’d ask,’ replied the angel. ‘They always do. Just occasionally, you can slip back in. Sounds nice, but isn't.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Wouldn’t fancy it myself,’ the angel replied. ‘The reason being, you don’t go back into HMS time, so you can’t be a human or a cat or a golden eagle or stuff like that. Returns go in HIA time, and that’s — well, weird, really. Look at me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me. HIA; Human Irregular Anomaly. We exist in all timescales simultaneously. We’re in some more strongly than in others, true, and in practice you ignore everything except HMS, HDS and a few others because — come on, let’s ride this radio analogy until it falls to bits — the signals are faint, crackly and in Norwegian. Anyway, that’s what happened to me. I came back as a statue. No bloody fun at all.’

  ‘A statue?’

  ‘That’s right. More of us about than you’d think.’ The angel’s voice was getting softer and softer, slower and slower, as though its batteries were running down fast. ‘The thing to remember about HIA is, it’s very, very...'

  ‘Yes? Yes?’

  ‘Boring.’

  A fraction of a second later, the statue was just a statue; you could tell just by looking at it that it was no more alive than a cellarful of coal. Run down? Asleep? Switched off?

  No way of knowing. Mike stood up, felt pins and needles from his knee to his ankle.

  Four days ...

  Ninety-nine per cent light speed!

  Head forward, wings back, tail streaming behind him, the dragon bulleted on through the murderous slipstream. His scales glowed cherry-red, and the tears streaming from his eyes boiled before they ever reached his cheeks. His eardrums, at a guess, were halfway down his throat. It was just as well he couldn’t open his mouth, because air pressure would have snapped his lower jaw off at the hinge.

  Ugh, he thought —wwhhyyyy aaammm I I I I I ddoooiiiiiinngg tthhiuiiissssss?

  Because if I don’t, that creep Chubby will blow me to Kingdom Come (or, relatively speaking, quite possibly Kingdom Went; wherever, I don’t want to go there).

  And because there’s a certain unbelievable thrill in peeling back the final frontier; shit-scaredly going where everybody else has already gone before, but not yet. As it were.

  And, last but not least, because I’ve got nothing better to do.

  BANG!

  Light speed...

  One very pertinent fact about travelling faster than light— ‘Ouch!’

  — is that it’s bloody dark and you can’t see where you’re going. And, at that sort of speed, even a collision with a high-flying clothes moth takes on the stature of a major railway accident.

  Fortunately, he regained consciousness just in time to pull out of his headlong spin, wrench his battered and groaning body up out of the way of mountains and airliners and jack-knife agonisingly back to straight and level. It was still as dark as thirty feet down a drain, which meant he hadn’t lost speed. What he needed now was lots and lots of height.

  Hey though, he crowed in the back lots of his subcon­scious, this is quite something. No way those two-legged groundling midgets could do this, for all their precious technology. For a dragon, however, it’s just a matter of flying. You do know how to fly, don’t you? You just put your wings together and go...

  ‘Help!’

  Going this fast, you lose all track of Time. Or Time loses all track of you. The only semi-constant is the pain; you’re being beadblasted with photons, every square millimetre of your body surface is white hot, a grain of dust hits you like a cannon shell. You only continue to exist because entropy hasn’t caught up with you yet. But it will.

  Beeeeep!

  What? Oh, Christ, yes, Chubby’s idiotic signal. I can slow down now, just when I was beginning to enjoy myself.

  The lights came back on, and then the dragon was no longer faster-than-light, just very fast; racing, but no longer against the clock. Now then, the trick is, decelerate slowly. In this context, sudden slowth would hit like a brick wall.

  The sound came back on. The vertical hold adjusted itself. God had fiddled with the aerial.

  Congratulations! We all knew you had it in you!

  What the hell? The dragon’s brain cleared and he realised it was a pre-recorded message, playing tinnily and at not quite the right speed through a miniature speaker inside his ear. He slowed down a little more.

  Please proceed to the following co-ordinates. Longitude...

  ‘Fuck you!’ the dragon howled. ‘I haven’t got a map!’

  ... Sixteen minutes west; or, in layman’s terms, the bookstall in Rockefeller Plaza. You will there buy a copy of the New York Times and turn to page four. Estimated you will arrive in nine, repeat nine, minutes.

  High over New York, the dragon found out what the parcel was for. As his dragon body suddenly vanished and he felt a rather different, more vindictive slipstream tearing at his human incarnation, he realised that it was a para­chute.

  New Yorkers are hard to faze. A windswept man with streaming eyes and untidy hair parachuting down onto the concourse at Grand Central is, to them, just another guy trying to beat the rush hour. So finely tuned is the New Yorker’s inbuilt radar that they got out of his way as he landed without even looking at him.

  He picked himself up. No need to dispose of the parachute; in the second and a half during which he’d been rolling on the ground feeling acute pain in both knees, the parachute had been unbuckled, stolen and spirited away. By now, it’d probably been converted into three hundred silk handkerchiefs in a lock-up somewhere in Queens.

  Feeling slightly shaky and, for once, almost out of his depth, he tottered to the bookstall, picked up a newspaper and looked at the date. All that trouble and effort, and he’d fast-forwarded six lousy weeks.

  He turned to page four, as ordered, jotted down the closing prices. Then the sports pages, then the lottery results. Then, out of curiosity, he glanced to the front page.

  And saw a headline.

  The Times, which isn’t your run-of-the-mill sensational­ist fishwrap, had let its hair down. There were screamingly vivid action pictures, BIG headlines, interviews with wit­nesses, angles, turn to page six, continued on page seven. It was a BIG story, full of twists, nuances, implications. There was even a three-column feature by one D. Bennett, linking
the bizarre events to Contragate, the Bermuda Triangle and the assassination of Abe Lincoln.

  The gist of the story, however, was straightforward enough.

  Twelve hours ago, in Mongolia, Saint George had killed the Dragon.

  Mike didn’t sleep well.

  For one thing, since he was going to die, fast-forward, phut, whatever, in four days, he begrudged the time. Also, although he’d never been particularly superstitious, kipping down in a graveyard didn’t appeal to him, particularly since he now had the feeling that he’d be able to see his fellow deadies and maybe they weren’t very nice to look at... Mostly, though, he couldn’t sleep because he was worried.

  Four days to find a — what the hell was it he was looking for? An anomaly, he supposed, but what the hell does an anomaly look like? Apparently, like a statue.

  Not any old statue, though; he’d already tried that. There were plenty of statues in the graveyard and he’d knocked loudly on each one, prodded them for disguised doors and escape hatches, even tried climbing in through ears and open mouths. Failure. By the time he’d finished, he was beginning to hallucinate No Vacancies signs.

  A statue.

  A statue.

  Jesus, yes, a statue! Piece of cake, surely, because wasn’t the most gifted living sculptress (despair is the mother of exaggeration) a personal friend of his, who also happened to owe him one hell of a favour?

  By the time he’d worked that out, it was half past six and the buses were starting to run. He caught the thirty-seven, which went to the hospital. Buses are inanimate (although

  they’re capable of malice; ask anybody who’s run after one, only to watch it draw away from the kerb at the last minute) and accordingly was solid and real enough for him to get on board without falling through the floor. He had no trouble finding a seat, in spite of the fact that there was standing room only.