Noah's Boy
Page 15
“The stars?” Tom asked, with a lifting of the eyebrows. “I take it you don’t mean Hollywood.”
Jao scowled but hesitated. “It is not stars stars, though that’s what we’ve always called them. I mean, our legends do not talk of traveling through space in the sense that you might understand it, though there are legends of sailing the ocean of time, we’re not sure that’s time travel, either. It’s just that … Worlds Dragons might be more accurate, as we think they came from other worlds.”
Tom raised his eyebrows further. Was he trying to put them off making him their leader by acting as arrogant as possible? Bea had a feeling that wouldn’t work. These people struck her as the sort of people who would positively enjoy being stepped on and made to behave like underlings.
Jao seemed to be trying to gather himself together. “Your esteemed ancestor, I said, knew there was a threat, there was something coming, and therefore he faced up to it, to protect us—”
The old man Kyrie had brought with her, and who had a truly disturbing habit of clacking his teeth together, found an even more distracting way to interrupt the conversation. He laughed, a high, discordant laugh and slapped his thighs while doing it.
*
Tom knew there was going to be trouble when Old Joe laughed. “He did not face it. He was dragged. From the parking lot he was dragged, before he could shift. He was killed and … taken away.”
“He knew what the threat was,” Jao said, trying to overpower the old man’s voice. “He knew the threat was coming near, and he bravely defended against it and—”
“Dragged,” Old Joe said, and clacked his teeth with enormous satisfaction, while his eyes looked merrily over the people around him. “And now kept somewhere, though I don’t know where.”
“He’s dead,” Jao said. He looked sour. His mouth set in a straight line. “Which is why it’s so important for the new Great Sky Dragon to—”
“Oh, you want to say that,” Joe said. “And it might even be true. For now. But truth is something different. Yes, daddy dragon is dead. Impossible to pretend otherwise and have dragon egg pass to dragon boy. When dragon dies, dragon egg passes. And it did. But death is not permanent for our kind. Or it need not be. And dragon egg does not distinguish, because even temporary death is rare for daddy dragon. And it could always turn permanent.”
Jao opened his mouth, then closed it. “The Venerable One is dead. We must find his assassins and—”
“Yes, he is dead, but was his head separated from the body? Do you want him to be dead, Jao? Is that the game? Do you want him to be dead forever?” Old Joe asked. He clacked his teeth together, while his gaze played, in amusement, over the assembled people. “I wonder why. Are you afraid whoever killed him will activate dragon egg and get knowledge from him?”
“We—” Jao looked at Tom as though for help, though Tom had absolutely no idea what he could have done to help at that point. “We are sure he’s dead,” he said. “The power wouldn’t have passed to the son of the dragon’s son otherwise.”
“Sure, sure?” Old Joe asked. “You have body and are preparing to send him to his ancestors in style?”
Jao opened his mouth, and this time Tom thought he had to intervene. Not to save Jao. It was quite possible nothing could. Old Joe was having his fun, making fun and mocking, jabbing and withdrawing, but Tom was starting to see a shape through the fog of amusement the old shifter projected, and the shape he saw was making the whole thing seem like a nightmare … but also, perhaps, offering him an opportunity of escape.
He did not want to be the Great Sky Dragon. He didn’t want to preside over the shady activities of the triad, or to be the leader of a criminal organization. And he didn’t want to marry anyone but Kyrie.
He looked at Kyrie and their eyes met, and he recognized in hers the same thought that had been in his. No. They didn’t want to marry anyone else. And perhaps, Tom thought, it was about time they married each other, if nothing else to keep crazy people from planning marriages for them.
He smiled at her and hoped she realized what he was thinking, but then he turned to Jao and said, “It bears asking. Do you have the Great Sky Dragon’s corpse?”
A dark blush tinged Jao’s cheeks. “Well, no, but we are sure he’s dead. If this were just the long sleep, the temporary death, then the power and the knowledge would not have passed to you.” Pause. “Sire.”
“No. Drop the sire and tell me straight why not. If the mechanism is set for the knowledge to pass at death, why would it not? The long sleep, you call it? Temporary death? Nice words, but if you remember it happened to me and when it happened to me, the doctors said it was death in every way. I was in the morgue, before I came back by some means no one can determine. And when I came back, it was almost instantly. So—do you care to explain what it is that makes you sure that the power won’t pass on the long sleep? Has it not passed before?”
Jao plucked at his bottom lip with thumb and forefinger. “I am not old enough to have experience of the long sleep ever happening to the Great Sky Dragon, and if it happened before you were born, sire, it would not matter anyway, because who could say what had happened? The dragon didn’t have a son’s son who could shift, so the power wouldn’t pass. It would be lost as it was to other lines.”
Tom took a deep breath. So, that question was tabled as a qualified “no” as in “no, they had no idea if the power passed on temporary death or not.” He glanced at Joe, who was looking very smug and happy with himself, which, frankly, in Tom’s experience was not really a good thing. “Do you care to explain to me,” Tom said softly, to no one in particular, “what all this stuff about passing the knowledge or the power is? I’ve experienced,” he said, lifting his hand, as he guessed what Jao had opened his lips to explain. “I’ve experienced it as having file upon file in my head, which will open if I touch them so I can look within. I know there’s some mechanism to integrate it, I can feel that, but I don’t know what the mechanism is. They seem to be the memories of the Great Sky Dragon, or perhaps of many Great Sky Dragons.”
“Many,” Jao said. He looked grave. “All of them, since … since the beginning.”
“Since we came to Earth, he means,” Old Joe said. “And it might be all of their minds you have in you, dragon boy, but you can’t use them all nor know what it all means without—”
“We don’t know how it passes,” Jao cut in, with every appearance of a man intercepting a dangerous pass. “We just know by tradition that when the Great Sky Dragon dies, his oldest male descendant on the unbroken male line, receives all these memories. They help guide him in the difficult times ahead and they—”
“You said if the Great Sky Dragon had experienced even the temporary death before I was born, no one would have known because it would only mean it had been lost, like the other lines. What other lines?”
“The lines …” Jao said. “Other shifter lines.”
“There were fifteen when they came to Earth. Fifteen different lines,” Old Joe said. “The cats and the flyers and … many others. But only the son’s son can inherit and not all lines produced that. Only the dragons are left.”
Tom took a deep breath. He looked at Kyrie. “And for all I care it too can go.”
Instantly, shocked, he found himself in between Old Joe and Jao, both of them yelling at him that he didn’t know what he was saying, and that it must not happen. He ignored Jao. He looked at Old Joe. “Why? Why should I care about keeping that knowledge?”
“Because that knowledge is the only thing that will allow us to survive, dragon boy. They’ve found us now, and only that will allow us to stay alive here. We have nowhere else to go.”
Tom blinked at Old Joe. “What? Who are they? What is this all about?”
“You don’t know, and you can’t know until the knowledge in you is activated. I don’t know either, only what I heard over many centuries, gossip and legends.”
“What do you mean until the knowledge is activated?”
Old Joe cackled unpleasantly. “I’m clearly insane? So, when your Great Sky Dragon went missing, they didn’t also get the artifact? You have the artifact?”
“The artifact?” Tom asked, feeling like he had been dumped in the middle of a family argument referring to events he’d never even guessed at.
Jao looked like he had a headache. He put two fingers in the middle of his forehead, as though to contain it, or perhaps to prevent a third eye from popping open. Right then, Tom wouldn’t put that past him, either. “He means the Pearl of Heaven.”
“What? You lost that?” Tom asked, remembering the two-hand-size pearl, smooth and shining in his hands. “Again?”
And Kyrie stood up. Tom could easily see she meant to take over.
*
Kyrie hadn’t meant to speak, but it seemed to her that Tom, Jao and Old Joe were all talking at cross-purposes and she wanted to know for sure what was happening.
Part of her rebelled at the mystical implications of knowledge that passed at the death of someone onto someone whose relation with the possessor of knowledge was that possessor’s long-distant siring of a remote ancestor. But how could someone who shifted into a panther whenever she wanted, and sometimes when she didn’t, doubt the existence of strange, nonmaterial things?
However, one way or another, she was sure this discussion was too strange, too diffuse, and not at all rational. She stood up. “Now, both of you have said that we came from elsewhere, we shifters. From which I understand you to mean our really distant ancestors, since at least I don’t think I’ve come from anywhere, and I’m fairly sure that none of you has either.” She wasn’t sure, of course, when it came to Old Joe. And she didn’t know if he was sure, either. But she glared at one and then the other of them, doing her best “grown-up among children” expression, until Jao sighed.
“This is legend, and we can’t be sure, but our ancestors said, and passed among us, from generation to generation, the idea that our ancestors came from other worlds to this one, the last refuge of our kind who were …” He made a face. “You could call it rebels of some form of empire or kingdom.”
“But almost every culture on Earth has such legends,” Tom said, then closed his lips hard, as though he hadn’t meant to speak at all.
“Yes,” Jao said, and then, as though remembering that Tom was supposed to be in charge. “Yes, sire, but perhaps those legends come from us.”
Old Joe put both hands in the air. He had backed up from Tom, after his outburst where he’d yelled at him that no, no, he couldn’t so blithely put an end to dragonkind of the sort that could inherit the dragon egg. Old Joe wiggled his fingers, food-greasy, and spoke in a tone that betrayed that this was something he had learned early in childhood, “Twice many times many thousands years ago,” he wiggled his fingers as though to symbolize all the time that had passed, “our ancestors came from the stars, running from vile oppression from …” he struggled as if for words. “From the others with no body, and they ran to Earth which was then …” Another hesitation, and Kyrie got the impression that what he was saying had been learned in some other language, probably one so ancient that he could barely remember it himself, one so ancient that she was sure no one else on Earth would know it. She also had a feeling that in that language the words rhymed. “Which was then verdant and luscious but had yet few animals. And our people, the people from other worlds mingled their … their essence with other people from this world so they would have variable bodies, because they thought that they would be able to …” he paused and looked like he was doing some complex calculation in his head. “They thought they would be able to hide should the others come looking for them, which they thought would happen in no time at all. But the locks on the portals of the world held and for many, many hundreds of thousands”—again he wiggled his fingers as if to signify that many—“of father son and father son, the story passed on. To be aware of the others. And in the lines, the knowledge passed father son, father son, but it will not pass through daughter, and when sons not born, the great lines died out.” He shook his head, in an impression of perfect sadness. Then shrugged, shambled back to where he’d been and sat down.
Kyrie wondered if this meeting, with people squatting around was like meetings that Old Joe must have sat around when he was young. But none of this made sense. “But our people … people like us can’t have come to the world before there were humans,” she said, in a tone that betrayed that her last nerve was about to fray. She felt it was. This was important and real, and involved Tom’s mental health, and she did not wish to sit around and listen to Neolithic legends. “Because we can mate with humans. And … we’re humans.”
There was a long silence. Jao opened his mouth, then closed it, and Tom shrugged, as if to indicate none of it mattered, but if it had something to do with how they’d got into the here-now mess, it very well did matter.
“I don’t know,” Bea said at last, after clearing her throat. “But perhaps the reason there are humans is us?”
Everyone stared at her.
She shrugged. “Look, I studied comparative myth in college last year, and there is this Indian sect that believes the idea-form of animals and humans first came to the Earth and that this created humans and … and other animals. Kind of an intelligent design on turbo and without necessarily a god as such.” She lifted her hands. “I’m not saying that’s true. My parents are religious and I think I am too. I haven’t been alive long enough to know better than my parents. But the thing is, even if life on Earth didn’t involve—or human life on Earth didn’t involve a creator, that doesn’t mean that life or human life didn’t have a creator, wherever it came from. It just means that here it was our people …
“Don’t look at me like that. There were other life-forms on Earth. We should have suspected that from the existence of primitive shifters.” Bea lifted her chin, as though braving their scorn. “But I know evolutionarily we keep thinking we have the date of the emergence of modern humans pinned, and then we find another one, older. And we now think that humans pretty much merged with every hominid life-form on Earth, except perhaps the Flores hobbits. Perhaps that’s not just because our species is really randy.” She blushed. “Perhaps it is that we were designed with bits and pieces of the DNA of every humanoid species on Earth, and other life-forms too, including some that were extinct at the time, but whose DNA might still be available. It’s clear that the designing of shifters took science that we can’t begin to comprehend, so why not? If the purpose was to hide, we should be able to hide among the hominids in our human form. I just wonder why the human form …”
Jao cleared his throat. “They say … the legends say that we look like … like people did before they went incorporeal, so … The form they were pursuing might be the form they originally had, or as close to this as the available material could bear.” He cleared his throat again. “The legends said that leaving bodies behind would lead to evil. I don’t know. I understood though that our people were escaping sure death, and this was the last of many worlds they ran to. And that they somehow crossed through … through doors between worlds.”
“Makes sense,” Tom said. “Sorry, I’ve read a lot of science fiction. I used to crash at shelters for runaway teens, and they had that stuff. Portals between parallel worlds, and we somehow closed them from this side, if what Old Joe says is true.”
As though awakened by reference to his name, Old Joe lifted his head. “Yes, but they have found us, after all the many, the thousand thousand years, they have found us, and they are trying to open the door. Someone …” He shrugged. “An enemy mind is on this side and … and trying to open it. That … being has taken the Great Sky Dragon and killed him. I think the long sleep, not real death.”
Jao sighed. “Why would you think so? What would the long sleep do for them that real life won’
t.”
“Easy. When you wake from death,” he looked thoughtfully at Bea, “you’re helpless. Can’t shift. Can’t fight. And the Great Sky Dragon is an old man, not strong and combative like dragon boy. He’s been alive many thousand years, and he is aging. If someone takes him, waits for him to come back from the long sleep, then it will be easy to hurt him, to … make him use the artifact and make him remember how to open the gates, then force him to.”
There was a long silence. Whether it was caused by Old Joe’s sudden eloquence, or by the thought that the Great Sky Dragon might be held hostage in temporary death, until—
“The time to return from death is around three days?” Tom asked.
“Three days is usually the shortest,” Jao said. “Might take as long as two weeks. The median is about five days.”
The silence returned, then Jao said, “But I don’t think the person … That is, whoever killed the Great Sky Dragon, your venerable ancestor, even if they took the body, can’t be counting on using the Pearl of Heaven on him, because the Pearl of Heaven disappeared a week earlier.”
Before silence could return, Conan groaned. “I wanted to have a singing career,” he said, as though out of deep and unavailing grief.
*
“You’ll have a music career,” Tom said, getting up from the foot of the bed. He set the empty bowl on a nearby table, walked to where Conan sat on the cushion, and touched Conan’s shoulder in reassurance. “Hell, Conan, given your voice, I don’t think we could stop you. I think once that video on Facebook went viral, all we could do was keep your fans from tearing us limb from limb if we tried to keep you from them. By the end of this year, you’ll have to hire concert halls to fit all your local fans, and if you’re not selling like crazy with whatever label or on your own, I’d be shocked.”
Conan looked up, his eyes dark with something like fear. “But I can’t, don’t you see? It’s just not possible. You’ll have to be the Great Sky Dragon, and I might as well guard you, because no one else has the kind of loyalty—”