Celestial Inventories (24 page)

“We’re running a little late,” Rick was saying, moving toward him. “Let me help you.

He tried to turn himself in bed. His arms flopped uselessly; he couldn’t even feel them. He had the sudden, nonsensical fear that someone had cut them off when he wasn’t looking.

A tremor began in his right leg. He tried to shut it off, but the mental plea had no effect.

“When are you leaving?” Rick asked.

“Next week.”

“You know, I don’t understand you. What if this just makes it worse?”

“I made
intimate
contact with the dragon. I was drenched in it.
They think that’s where the disease might have come from. Somebody has to get one of those things, dead or alive, so they can study it. Maybe they can find a cure.”

“Let them send a
professional
pilot. Or a full-time hero.”

“I have to see one again, myself. There may not be any more. My people have sighted only one the past four years. They think it’s the last dragon. I just can’t risk waiting.”

Rick kept his eyes on Alec. When he walked around the room, he moved awkwardly, his head turned toward the bed. It was obvious to Alec that he was trying to avoid looking at the dragon skull.

“Want to get ready for the day, now?”

“Sure, why not?”

Alec dozed as Rick began rubbing him down with a damp cloth. Rick used to carry him into the bathroom for this. Not anymore. Alec had felt too vulnerable, sitting slumped over the toilet. He used to fantasize Marie coming to him, taking off her clothes. They hadn’t made love in a very long time.

Someone stepped into the bedroom. He could sense someone by the door, just beyond the limits of his vision. He saw Rick turn around.

“Machines and some special clothes can do this, too, you know,” Marie said. Alec felt momentarily disoriented. Rick turned back toward the bed, looking irritated. He bent over, grunted, and pulled up Alec’s pants a little too roughly.

Alec tried to clear his eyes. He felt on the verge of tears. “Rick, my eyes. . .” Rick dabbed at his eyes and cheeks with a towel. Marie swam suddenly into focus. Dark-haired, doe-eyed, beautiful. “Machines have their place. But not here, not like this.” Rick was wiping at the metallic caps set into the back of Alec’s skull. “Careful, there. I’m going to be needing those soon.” He looked up at his wife. “So . . . when are you leaving?”

“An hour, maybe two. You forgot to give me the key to
storage.”

Alec found himself chuckling mirthlessly. “I haven’t been too good with details of late.”

“Well, that makes you the perfect pilot, now doesn’t it?”

Rick sighed. “He’s a good pilot, actually. Or so I hear.” He worked so furiously at the clothes that Alec was afraid they were going
to rip.

“It’s not safe!” Marie snapped.

“I have to do this. If you really still cared, you’d know that.”

“They’re really going to let you do this, huh? Go back there, find the thing?”

“They’re
not going to
let
me do anything.”

“Chasing dragons, like some kid.”

“There are dragons everywhere, Marie.” Alec chuckled again. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.”

Marie’s voice broke. “Stay here, Alec. We’ll stay. I don’t really want to leave—you must know that. But I can’t sit still while you do this stupid thing. It’s bad enough watching you die from something you can’t help. But you don’t
have
to go back to Bennett. Stay, Alec. I’ll talk to the kids.”

Alec tried to control his trembling, but could not. He was broken meat, flopping, ugly. “No.”

Alec heard the sound of ripping cloth. Rick cursed and began removing the shirt.

The bedroom door slammed. Alec felt a need to say something, but the silence was suddenly intimidating.

“Mr. Bennett?”

“Yeah ?”

“Good luck.” Rick gripped his hand, tightly enough that he eventually felt it.

Again he was seven years old. Again his father tossed him into the air. Again his father did not catch him. But he wasn’t so afraid this time—he felt himself flying, despite his weight, despite his awkwardness, despite his doubt.

Alec dropped rapidly toward the enormous canyon bisecting the northern hemisphere of Bennett. He was fully plugged—adjusting the intensity of his more private thoughts against the almost subliminal babble of the computer medium. At last achieving some sort of balance, he felt the mental underpinnings of his ghostlike arms and legs reach out gradually and drift into the composite wings and weave-layered hull of his craft.

The illusion was that these actions were all conscious and deliberate on his part. In fact, the computer’s controls had taken over and were leading him gently into the system, allowing him to become part of the machinery with the least possible discomfort and disorientation. Before most of his impulses to act had even reached the conscious level, they had been recognized, evaluated, then accepted or rejected by the computer. Reaction times were crucial on Bennett—with a gravity slightly higher than Earth’s, even a short fall could be fatal. The dragon had evolved under those conditions; no human could beat that.

Here, he was as light as a dream.

The compound’s staff was down eighty percent since his father died, for Alec no longer saw the need for personnel largely involved in resource exploitation. They had been all set up for him, the plane fueled, checked and ready, and everyone seemed remarkably compliant to his wishes. Malcolm must have already explained to them that their novice employer was stubborn. But when they first carried him in, Alec did notice a few disgruntled-looking pilots standing around.

He spun the plane upside down, then dropped and rolled to the left. Up here, it was as if his muscles could do anything. The computerized controls made each arm seem to have numerous independently moving joints. At times he was afraid of folding up like a suitcase and plummeting to the ground.

The predominant colours on Bennett were grey, grey-green, and red. Some of the red came from rock formations in and around the numerous canyons and short mountains. Earthquakes brought bits of red up into the grey rock fields.

The other red came from a short, thick plant—a strange amalgam of moss, fern, and shrub—with a brilliant crimson centre. It grew everywhere on the planet. Many of these plants were spoiled by spots of black char.

A third of the plain south of Bennett Compound was now on fire, filling the thick air with carbon dioxide and tiny particles of black ash that attacked his windscreen like hyperactive gnats. Periodically, a cleansing spray washed through the microscopic V-grooves which tattooed the hull. Alec was aware of this spray as a vague, ghostlike dampness somewhere in his skin.

But even with the spray, particles occasionally burst into flame along the ship’s fuselage. A sudden nimbus of white light or a rainbow blazed off the forward canard.

The constant fires were a nuisance, but they destroyed enough plants to keep the oxygen level down. A couple of percentage points more, and Bennett could have been an inferno.

Every few minutes the computer cycled through a systems check. He could eavesdrop when he was in the right state of mind. Electrical schematics overlapped microhydraulic graphic simulations on the undersides of his eyelids. Weaponry alignments multiplied across the mindscreen, then suddenly burst like bright, incendiary bombs.

He could visualize the wide telemetry shield, fielding impulses from his skull plugs and transmitting them to the computer controls then feeding it all back through his ethereal, yet perfect-looking arms and legs and the parts of the plane his arms and legs had become.

The plane dropped past red-brown walls dirty with grey-green and crimson growth. He didn’t see any fires in the immediate vicinity, but they were raging only a few miles away, and he appeared to be dragging the ash down with him. It swarmed over him so thickly that at first he thought his eyes had suddenly grown worse.

Broad plateaus and massive chimney formations rose from a valley floor still miles below him. At times they came close enough together to form their own narrow passages. He was afraid to drop much farther. It would be like a labyrinth down there. And he would need the height when the dragon ventured out, if it did.

The bodies of the mountains were ponderous, spotted with red and green disease. Enormous, infested mounds of alien flesh. He felt sure that, if he broke into them, there’d be alien maggots: blue and green and brilliant silver, star- and cone-shaped heads.

The forward canard helped pull him out of the drop. The sides of the fuselage, his sides, rippled once, then set for better air flow.

Now he had another vista on the canyon: a series of flat places along an ever-broadening series of cliff sides, arranged like enormous steps, rich with the crimson-hearted plants. On some of these steps he could see short, broad grazers, a smaller and slightly hairy version of the hippopotamus. One looked up in a kind of slow motion startle, then lowered its head again. In the shadowed rock behind it, there appeared to be a wide tunnel opening.

Puff birds, their cheek sacs bloated comically, floated around the plane. If Alec looked carefully enough, he could see blotches of lizard colonies on the canyon walls, their jaws long and broad, crocodile-like.

Hand length insects with bloated wings and claw-like feet landed on the hull of his craft and were immediately washed away.

Wing, fin, and hull surfaces changed shape sixty times a second in a graceful, coordinated ballet.

He felt, to the core, lighter than air, with no care that his arms and legs were dead because he didn’t need them anymore. He felt the rockets within his dead fingers, the fire inside his eyes straining behind the goggles. Darkness filled his chest.

Then he saw the dragon. At first it was a bit of black ash, turning the corner of the rock tower far below him. Fluttering and twisting in the wind, it seemed the remnant of some scorched field of alien, vegetable life. It changed shape as it rose, from time to time sending out projections first one way, then another, so that at times it resembled a black, funereal pinwheel.

Then it was a bat, flapping slowly upward out of the shadowed valley toward the heat-baked peaks and plateaus at the top.

Then it was a small black sail boat, floating unsupported in the valley air. A ghost ship. A Flying Dutchman.

And then it was a dragon, resembling everything and nothing.

It was hard to see the thing’s wings clearly. They were three times the length of his plane. Vaguely bat-like, but with gas sacs lining the top and a doubling of the black-grey mottled skin where more gas might be trapped. The wing span appeared to be about eight times the height.

The dragon wrapped itself in its wings, then unwrapped, furled and unfurled, a dark lady teasing with her lingerie.

A wing dropped down, and Alec could see the dragon’s head. The top of the skull was broad and pale, and Alec thought of the extinct condor. The eyes were large and opaque, seemingly without centres. The huge mouth dropped open, loose on its hinges, gulping air, as if hungry for anything that might cross it. He assumed that the large areas surrounding eyes and nose and mouth were gas-filled as well, since they appeared to change shape now and then, going from flat planes to gnarled ridges and swirls, giving the face as a whole an almost limitless expression.

The body was as dark as the wings, dull, and largely hidden.

The dragon lost altitude suddenly. For a moment it wrapped itself tightly for the drop, then unfurled its wings and let them drift up behind it. Alec watched as the dragon rapidly closed on one of the grazers on the steps below. Its wings spread, covering the step from view. Then it was rising rapidly, the grazer struggling in the dragon’s jaws, a thin ribbon of yellow fluid trailing from a neck wound. When the dragon let go, the grazer smashed back onto the step and was still. The dragon settled slowly over it and began
to gnaw.

The sheer physicality of the dragon was enough to take Alec’s breath away. The plane rocked back and forth anxiously. Alec tried to stretch himself, but the wings would not budge. A warning light went off. He felt small and vulnerable, yet drawn to this physical massiveness, this beast of ancient health. Without thinking much about it, he felt the plane drifting down, the altitude readout racing past his eyes, blurring in a way that was almost soothing.

He was at nearly the same level as the dragon. It had finished its meal and winged itself gently off the cliff side. It hung in midair, watching the ship, watching Alec.

The creature’s cheeks and neck billowed. Dust and ash shot up from it, as if caught in a thermal.

Alec let the plane ease closer, rocking slightly in the canyon updrafts.

The roaring thunder suddenly filled him, almost shaking the plane out of sync with him, a sensation he thought must be akin to out-of-body travel. A black cloud filled his field of vision at the same time that electrical charges worked at loosening his scalp.

The cloud fluttered and beat at his windscreen. Huge wing edges curled down at their tips. Then he was rocketing sideways, wings shifting, the rear thrust nozzles swiveling rapidly to direct him away from the looming blood-red rock walls.

Now the dragon was beneath him, massive devil’s head coming up in front of the plane. The thing was flying upside down, blank eyes watching him, and Alec was suddenly bucking the plane ever so slightly, jabbing his belly fin at the dragon’s exposed torso, then rolling out, climbing, banking, and settling back into his altitude once he saw that the dragon hadn’t followed this time.

The dragon rose to a point distant and slightly beneath him, allowing him to circle. Its wings shuddered and rippled like a black paper kite. Only the head was immobile, held rigid in the turbulent air like an African mask. It drifted in the currents, watching.

Watching. One night when Marie had stood over him, thinking he was asleep, she’d lifted the covers, touching him hesitantly.

“Alec?” she’d whispered. “I’m . . . sorry. I just can’t.”

He had been surprised, and oddly touched.

The dragon revolved in midair, wings rising, dropping, paddling forward and back, darkness caught on a wheel.