Ghosts of Engines Past (14 page)

“Nobody actually saw it approaching from space,” I said, wondering if this was significant. “Could humans have dreamed it up?”

“Humans?” exclaimed Glenda. “Humans could never build a thing like that.”

“Not human technology as we know it, yet that silly grin looks like an oddly human touch.”

“Do you think it's from the future?”

“I don't know what to think, but I keep asking myself
why a dragon?
Most human societies have legends about them. Dragons are huge. They inspire awe.”

“But dragons were never real—until now.”

“Oh they were real in our stories and imaginations. Anyway, what about dinosaurs? We only know them by their bones, yet they still have a very similar allure because they were enormous. A human can only cower before something of that size.”

“A human with a hunting rifle could kill the biggest dinosaur.”

“True, but now comes a dragon, and a dragon so big and powerful that no weapons of ours can kill it. We can't reason with it, and it's not been open to negotiations about anything. Again we cower, just as we did in... in fairy tales.”

For a moment the wisp of an impression floated before me, then it vanished. I had been close to a very good guess about the dragon. It was meant to provoke a reaction from humans.
Go back a million years,
I thought.
Lions, crocodiles and cave bears were dragons to the defenceless proto-humans. As we became better masters of our circumstances, the things needed to frighten us just became a lot bigger. Surely that dragon is a parallel, a lesson, an allegory...

The dragon's face loomed above me,  still too large for my mind to encompass.

“Humans are great at winning, but what if the idea is not to win?” asked Glenda.

“There's no alternative, is there?” I replied. “If we surrender, the dragon wins. If the dragon surrenders, we win.”

“We may be meant to worship it. Humans have always worshipped.”

“I don't think it wants worship.”

“You can't know that.”

“The dragon destroys art, which is universally thought of as worthwhile. An invader would destroy our weapons, to demonstrate that resistance is useless. Instead this thing destroys the best and most famous of our artworks. It must be trying to tell us something about art.”

“It might be an angel, sent by God.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? The dragon is not part of reality as we know it. How else could it survive a hydrogen bomb?”

“A Neanderthal hunter might say the same thing after breaking his spear on a panzer, but that does not make the tank an angel or god.”

“Look, just as an exercise, think of the dragon as a god. Would a god just say 'Hey guys, I've got an important announcement'? Gods are above that sort of thing, and the dragon is above words. I think we could no more understand its agenda than the termites eating your floorboards could understand a request to move out or else you'll call an exterminator.”

“But why art? Art is harmless, it's pleasing, it has value, it's good, it helps make us what we are.”

“Well it's obvious that the dragon does not like what we are,” said Glenda with the sort of absolute conviction that makes me shiver.

The British Dragon Advisory Committee moved to Melbourne that afternoon. We continued to have nothing to do, other than discuss what we did not understand. Instead of watching the dragon on the beach, I watched a great deal of television in the weeks that followed. All across the world there were people moving out of ornate mansions and into the most ugly accommodation available. A number of projects were launched to record images of artwork before the dragon destroyed the originals, but Dragonists cults were destroying most artwork before it could be scanned. Other Dragonists were writing computer viruses to corrupt the databases of artwork scans that had already been done. Attempts to hide artwork generally met with failure, because there were big rewards on offer from the Dragonists to reveal where the art hordes were located.

As a member of the British Dragon Advisory Committee, I was given a serviced apartment in a building patrolled by security guards. I had broadband internet, satellite television, and high-level communications links to realtime cameras trained on the dragon, along with Terabytes of images of its earlier rampage. Every few days we would meet at Melbourne University. We did little else other than cover the same ground, but we did manage to look busy and write lots of reports. We also spent a lot of time in bars, getting drunk and hoping for inspiration.

“If I wanted to knock out an enemy, I'd take out his communications, infrastructure, and surveillance capability,” sighed the SAS major as he nursed his drink. “The dragon's actions make no sense. It's left all our military smarts intact.”

“Except for a few communications towers that were a little too aesthetically pleasing,”  Glenda pointed out.

“But this is no way to fight an enemy.”

“It's not our enemy,” I suggested, and not for the first time.

“It might be trying to intimidate us,” continued the major. “You know, destroy art, which is not useful, but leave the world's economy and defences intact. That lets us know that fighting back is not an option, but the economy is okay and nobody gets hurt.”

“Apart from a few art lovers who could not run fast enough,” I reminded him.

“And quite a few religious worshippers,” said Glenda. “That must be significant.”

“That's not true,” I said. “A lot of famous churches, mosques, cathedrals, temples and shrines were attacked and pulverised, yet only the worshippers who tried to be human shields were killed. It's letting us know that worshipping is okay, as long as we don't let a lot of art get in the way.”

“In that sense the dragon is telling us quite a lot,” said the major. “We just don't understand it yet.”

“I disagree,” said Glenda. “A lot of people already have the dragon's message. All around the world there are bonfires of art books, paintings, religious art, art archive tapes, computer graphics software, and even blank sketch pads. In the past people worshipped on the basis of faith in holy writ, but now we have two miles of invincible dragon that anyone can watch and learn from. There are already twenty-three thousand Dragonists living in tents along the cliffs, worshipping it continually. Some even sacrifice themselves by leaping from the cliffs and smashing against its body.”

“They are going to look rather silly if it moves on,” I laughed.

“The faithful are sure that it will stay,” said Glenda emphatically. “It's a matter of symmetry: the dragon started in Paris with the Eiffel Tower, and it finished in Melbourne by eating the spire of the Victorian Arts Centre. Melbourne was once known as the Paris of the South.”

“Is that true?” exclaimed the major.

“About a century ago, yes,” I agreed, standing up. “My round, who is drinking what?”

“Scotch, with ice,” said the major.

“White rum, with a dash of coke,” said Glenda.

“I've been reading folklore stuff,” said the Major. “Why all the business of sacrificing virgins to dragons? Why are virgins special?”

“I think you will find it's virgin girls,” I explained. “It's all symbolism. Fathers, brothers, suitors, all the warrior types are very protective about young and innocent girls. If a dragon can demand them as a sacrifice, it's won the ultimate symbolic victory over warriors. The dragon has not moved since the art burning movements got going, so maybe it prefers art to virgins.”

“Virgins are irrelevant,” Glenda agreed. “The dragon could be a religious oracle with a message about the waste and futility of art.”

“That's hardly a sharing, caring religion,” I said as I waved for the barman.

“All religions sound extreme when they begin,” said Glenda.

“You sound like a believer yourself,” I observed.

“I'm just a method sociologist, don't worry,” she laughed, her expression suddenly changing as rapidly as a computer image being morphed. “You know, get right into the minds of those you study.”

“The SAS has a similar approach,” said the major. “It's the only way to infiltrate convincingly.”

“Now come on, confess, I had you fooled, didn't I?” she asked.

“Well, yes and no. I must admit I was getting a bit nervous about you, so I checked your background. You had a fine career in acting for about five years.”

“I only went into acting so that I could do some fieldwork in method sociology.”

In my experience, that sort of banter is a play for a night's entertainment in bed, so I pulled back from the conversation. On the bar's television I watched a news item about an artist being beaten to death in public while riot police stood by and watched. Such incidents were becoming ever more common. Artists were dying, either by mob violence or at the hands of individual murderers. The civil and military authorities could do little. It was like watching old videos of the Berlin Wall being demolished. The old communist regime had lost power, yet nobody had been ordered to clean out their offices and leave, so they just watched. Many government opportunists even joined the Dragonists. The screen switched to a purification rally where artists were marching through a city square, beating themselves with whips while a pile of paintings from some gallery burned fiercely.

“Scott, you're still here.”

Glenda sat down beside me, swayed slightly, then drained her glass.

“I am the genuine, original, non-virtual Scott,” I replied. “Accept no substitutes, they are all very inferior.”

“The bar's about to close.”

“Is it as late as that?” I said as I looked around. “Where's Mr Special Air Service?”

“Already gone. He has to get up at dawn and run ten miles or something. What are your plans?”

“Go home, go to bed, think about dragons, go to sleep. Yourself?”

“Well, I'm a bit tired of trying to get into the heads of Dragonists. How are you with the dragon?”

“I'm a bit short on inspiration, as usual.”

“Then we have something in common. How do you feel about some company at your place tonight? We'll declare it a dragon-free zone.”

In a way I was rather flattered that I had something the SAS major did not, but I was not interested.

“Look... don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not comfortable with that sort of thing.”

“You mean you're gay?”

“No, no, it's just human contact that worries me.”

“Human contact?”

“I'm... squeamish. No offence, but... like, it's about germs.”

“Ah, I see! You wear gloves all the time, and only drink from bottles you unseal yourself. You go to meals in restaurants with the rest of us, but never eat. You're a hypochondriac, aren't you? A really extreme hypochondriac.”

“It keeps me healthy.”

“How fascinating,” she said with a very odd intonation.

What I had told her was true, but there was more. Much, much more. I returned to my apartment, changed into overalls, then went out again, this time to a municipal sanitary services depot. I had set up a double life. Three years earlier, a less than stable artist in London had paid me back for a bad review of his exhibition by hurling a beer bottle filled with petrol through my window. Fortunately the burning rag had come off in mid-flight, but ever since then I had been very careful about letting people know where I really live. Now I had a feeling that I might need to vanish into a new identity, and what more unlikely identity for a hypochondriac artist than one who drives garbage trucks?

More weeks passed, during which public order did not so much break down, as modify itself to purge society of anything that the dragon might not like. That included certain people, and I was highly qualified in fine arts. On the day that Glenda left the British Dragon Advisory Committee and declared herself a Dragonist, I abandoned my government sponsored apartment, broke all contact with the BDAC, and became a garbage truck driver with no artistic interests at all. There was always a lot of wreckage to clean off the streets of Melbourne, what with the ongoing art purges, so I had found a job easily. I worked night shifts, because it made me less conspicuous. My work involved collecting an ever-increasing number of bodies, and from time to time I recognised a famous face or Australian colleague.

Concentration camps, supposedly for the protection of artists, were established in the countryside near where the dragon lay dormant. Each of these had PROTECTIVE ENCLAVE FOR ARTISTS written prominently on every roof and above the gates. Nobody said as much, but this was clearly to encourage the dragon to have a country picnic rather than cause destruction in the cities, should it decide to go on the rampage again. Pictures of the camps and large maps were projected onto huge screens before its face, but it did not so much as twitch. The reputations of some senior Dragonists in the government were beginning to look a little insecure. To maintain their authority, they needed the dragon's sanction, yet the dragon was putting its seal of approval on nothing. Soon they would resort to even more extreme measures, I was sure of that.

Every morning, after my night-shift ended, I would slump in front of the television and watch the news shows. Nearly every one started with a few seconds of live coverage of the unmoving dragon, then crossed to the latest anti-art riot, beating or rally.

“Our minds are trapped by what we desire,” I said to the screen, which was displaying a bonfire of paintings in some anonymous-looking city square. “We prize memories, images, artefacts, and beautiful things, and art gives us all those. What else? Experiences, I suppose: we love the thrill of one's football team winning, the rush from seducing someone desirable, the satisfaction of owning the most stylish car on the block. Beyond that, there's security, wealth and reputation, but where does all that lead?”

The screen had no answer, and neither did I. No matter how hard I tried to distract myself and let my subconscious produce a brilliant insight, my subconscious remained in bed with a pillow over its head. I made a salad washed in antiseptic for what was a sort of morning dinner, and arranged the individual pieces as the mosaic of a dragon eating an artist. It gave me no inspiration, so I in turn ate the image.