The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (40 page)

“Hush,” she whispers, stroking him. “Don’t talk.”

“But I could as well have been describing this outer body. That, too, is an illusion, its design derived not from some magical genetics but from the darkest corner of human imaginings. Shaped to rule the souls of men.”

The outer body lifts its reptilian head to arch and preen. Paia is the dragon again, showing off her sleek and sinuous neck, her magnificent form, proud of her powerful legs and tail. She stretches gilded wings and extends curved claws to whet their razor tips on a handy rock. Then the dragon settles down again and closes its eyes. Paia is released to a single consciousness. She doesn’t mention how she prefers the shape of the man-body beneath her hands, the one she feels but cannot see. “You’re trying to tell me something.”

“My siblings and I are made of elemental energies. Our physical form is determined by the genetics and evolution of the human mind. We have no DNA of our own. So which came first, the dragon or its myth?”

“Is it a riddle?”

He pulls away slightly. “A basic truth.”

“Does it matter? You are here.” Now she’s sure he’s working his way around some bit of information he doesn’t want to come right out and deliver. What now? She’d thought he’d told her the worst already.

“It matters to some. But in the long run, well . . .”

“Your siblings have different shapes.” She had been about to say “kinder.”

“No accounting for taste,” he quips, but she senses an attempt to redirect her line of questioning.

“Why take any shape at all? I mean, why does it matter what shape you take? You could be one shape today, another
tomorrow, like some people change their clothing. Water does it.”

“No.” He stirs brusquely, as if recalling some old grudge. “It’s not my gift. Water
actually
changes. Her power is over matter. Mine is over minds. I had a choice and I made it, and that was that. Because . . . no, never mind. We have better things to do with our time.”

“Because? Because?” She pushes his hands and mouth away with mock severity. “You can’t leave me hanging!”

“Better for you if I do.”

“I am you now, or so it would appear.”

“Beloved, you always were.”

“Then I should know what you know.” She stretches against him like a cat. “You were saying, because . . .?”

He rumbles his irritation, reminding Paia how very recently she feared doing anything that might displease him. Now what’s left to fear? He’s dissolved her already, and her consciousness appears intact and fully capable of sensation. Yes, fully indeed, she muses, as another tsunami of desire sweeps over her, rolling her against him. Astonishing, how desire can animate a body all of its own accord. Astonishing and wonderful. Still, she wishes she could see his eyes. They were always the surest gauge of his true mood. But his eyes are now her eyes, those great golden orbs lidded against the scouring winds of the heights. To test the extent of her control over the dragon body, she focuses her awareness of it and lifts one lid, thinking of it as a kind of giant window shade. The flood of light is blinding. The cold air sears. Fire growls in protest, and Paia closes the eye. Some control, then. But whose eye is it really? A perplexing dilemma.

“Am I to have my own body back, my own . . . self?”

“Is that what you wish?”

Just like him to twist a question into a complaint. “Whose choice is it?”

He shifts again. Another flare of silent irritation. Finally his voice comes muffled, as if from the depths of pillows. “Yours.”

“Ah. You didn’t want me to know that, did you? Among other things.”

Silence. Yet, in their old days together, she got nothing at all from him if he didn’t want to tell her. So even this
little is progress. Wishing she knew more about the art of seduction, Paia puts her hands to work, and when it seems she has him pliant beneath her, she murmurs, “It’s a lovely shape. It fits just right. But explain to me: why take any shape at all?”

He is a creature with a long habit of illusion, so bedsprings creak faintly as he twists away from her and up, to pace invisibly. Only the air moving across her cheek marks his passage. “Because,” he says in a voice she recognizes, his angry voice, the voice of the God. “Because men need to be controlled! Because men are Nature’s suicidal impulse! Because the history of the world would be so much shorter than it is to be already if terror and awe had never been given form and articulation!”

“And you did that?” she asks meekly.

“I am that!” His voice booms as if he’s grown to fit the scale of his rage. “I am the terrible image of Nature uncontrolled and uncontrollable! The hint of awesome Powers beyond their ken! The threat of the dire consequences of misbehavior! A deterrent against greed and selfishness, against mankind’s wanton thirst for power and taste for destruction! Terror and awe! Before there were gods, there were dragons!”

Now Paia is glad for the unnatural darkness around them, for how could she possibly conceal her utter dismay and disbelief? He cannot be unaware that most others, human and dragon, would level at him exactly the same accusations he’s just thrown at mankind. Is this some new strategy of self-justification, an art she knows he’s already well-practiced in?

“But what about the innocent humans? Not all can be blamed! All those innocent lives you’ve . . .”

“There are no innocents! All humanity is complicit in the death of the Earth, by inaction as much as by intent!” His volume dims, as if he’s turned his back. “Besides, intimidation is not the same as murder. How often must I make this point? Count the dead, I tell you! You’ll find that either their lives were willingly offered here in my own time where I can physically manifest, or they died in other times at the hand of some human gone out of control! If human nature is weak and corruptible, am I to blame?”

“But surely there are other myths you could have personified!”
Part of her curses and accuses him, but another part accepts the tragic truth of all he says. “More . . . hopeful ones.”

“That was my brother’s theory, and Water’s, too. And you see how successful they’ve been at keeping mankind in check. If it weren’t for me . . .!”

Paia waits, for what seems an abnormal length of time. Perhaps there’s a part of him that’s lost faith in his pitiless rhetoric. “What?” she asks finally, and hears him sigh, long and dry, like a wind off a wasteland.

“Well, no method is perfect, when you’re working with such fallible material as the hearts and minds of men. Sooner or later, some human or other wants his own piece of the terror and awe. And then there’s no controlling them. They lose all respect for the natural order of the world, and the long doomward spiral has begun.”

Paia thinks of the girl Erde, able at the direst moments to find an optimistic angle of view, or an excuse for positive action.
I am not that girl
, she decides. I have seen too much of the destruction men have brought about. I have lost my family to it, and the life I once knew. What convincing arguments can I pull together to counter his, when the evidence in his favor lies all around the Citadel, in the greedy hearts of its merchants and in the scheming minds of the Temple’s priests and priestesses?

“I always wondered, even as a little girl, when you first arrived . . . I always wondered why the God was so angry all the time.”

“Not
all
the time.” His growl from the darkness is half-denial, half acknowledgment.

“Yes, all. All the time. Even in your most generous or frivolous moods, it was always there, that underground simmer of rage. I thought you were just mean.”

“I am mean. I am the . . .”

“I know. The God.” An uncomfortable pressure is building in Paia’s chest. She reaches for a sheet to pull up around her shoulders, and finds it right there beneath her hand. Silk. “So you came to the Citadel to punish mankind for all they’d done?”

Fire laughs bleakly. “The world they’ve made seems punishment enough. Let them suffer in it. I came to the Citadel to enjoy myself while the planet still lives. And because
you were there, dragon guide. You might say I had no choice. Perhaps a bit of revenge seemed excusable, under the circumstances, and since there was nothing better to do with my time . . .”

“But you became all and everything that you despise men for!” she cries out suddenly, and bursts into tears.

“Don’t do that. Don’t
do
that!”

“I can’t help it! It’s so . . . such a terrible waste!”

“Maybe I became what humanity deserves!” he shouts. “It’s too late to change things now. Stop crying!”

Does she detect some faint stirrings of regret? Or does he simply mean it’s too late for
him
to change? Paia hiccups and swallows a sob. “Earth and Water tell a different story.”

“And I have told them, and you, the truth of that story. And a dragon cannot lie.” He sits down beside her and draws the sheet aside. “Come, beloved, why concern ourselves with the fate of undeserving men? My siblings are fools to do so. I refuse to join them. My clever ingenuity has made a way for us to be together, at least for a while. Shouldn’t we enjoy it while we can?”

A new concern saps Paia’s resistance: wouldn’t a dragon guide inevitably share her dragon’s weaknesses as well as his strengths? “I suppose a little while longer can’t make any difference. But do you think, my Fire,” she adds only half playfully, “that you will be able to accept the responsibility of an actual relationship?”

He kisses her in reply, then fills her again, and again, and somewhere in their endless excess of orgasm, Paia realizes that they’ve had the argument he was willing to have, but meanwhile strayed completely from the questions she most wants an answer to:
Why now? What made me know to come to you so willingly? What’s happened? What has changed?

T
he Librarian programs a tiny window through the blankness around him to watch the sky-blue limo glide away along the narrow, pitted street. He’s programmed a longer journey than necessary for its passengers, a guided tour of the White City while he takes the time to rescue Stoksie and the others from the
machina rex
, and discover what Luther knows about Earth’s whereabouts.

Now that he has a method, he works quickly and efficiently. He’ll gather up the next ones in a group. He calls up the power grid diagram to trace out the Rex’s location. He hunts up the nearest paver machine, and sends it a long set of radical instructions. Just before leaving, he remembers his video feed to the Citadel. He turns to find the old TV waiting behind him, like a patient family retainer. The screen frames a bright view of the Grand Stair and a great deal of commotion. The Librarian reflexively reaches for the volume control, then recalls that this signal has no sound. In the dust and pitiless sun, armed men are pouring up the steps toward the Temple. The Librarian can’t even think of staying to watch, but he lingers long enough to observe that the vanguard of resistance has already crumbled. The soldiers guarding the stair have thrown down their weapons. Some seem to be greeting Leif Cauldwell’s army as if they were old friends. It’s possible, the Librarian muses. As if famine and epidemic weren’t enough, the Fire-breather’s tyranny split families, estranged neighbors, destroyed the fabric of entire communities. There is a sporadic hail of arrows from the walls of the upper plaza, but perhaps Leif will have less of a battle than he was prepared for. All for the best . . . and still no flash of gold from
above, no vast dragon wing darkening the sky. What can be keeping Fire, the Librarian wonders?

HURRY! HURRY!

Yes, yes, I will. I am
.

When he opens the door this time, he’s around the corner from the Rex’s square. His transportation and rescue vehicle is already waiting for him.

It’s tall, gleaming, and yellow. Yellow like daylilies, or the sun before global warming. It makes the Librarian smile, something he’s felt the need of for a while. It’s a replica of Luther’s Tinker wagon, as accurately as he could remember it, having only seen it in the lantern-lit darkness of the great central cavern at the Refuge. Of course, he’s taken a few liberties. He’s enlarged it substantially, to have room inside the cargo box for a crowd. He’s also beefed up its armor to withstand potential Rex attacks. And if the nanomechs had any real grasp of organic forms, they’d never have produced a nasty looking mutant like the Rex. So the Librarian has avoided replicating Luther’s sturdy mules. Instead, he’s restored the old truck’s propulsion system, substituting clean nanopower for its original filthy-dirty internal combustion engine.

He shuts the door behind him and walks around his creation admiringly. Even the chipped paint and faded signage is bright and new:
Schwann’s Ice Cream
. The Librarian licks his lips. He remembers ice cream.

HURRY! HURRY!

He’s never been one to rush about. How did he get matched with such an impatient dragon? He sighs, and climbs up into the cab. It’s been half a century since he’s driven a vehicle of any sort, but since the last one was an armored personnel carrier, he figures an ice cream truck should be a piece of cake. It’ll come back to him quickly enough. There’s a key in the ignition, not bright and new, but a match to the one Luther wears around his neck as personal amulet and talisman. The Librarian grasps it boldly and fires up the engine. Its nearly silent nano-hum is so different from what he’s expected that for a minute, he’s sure nothing’s working. Then he feels the soft and steady vibration. He slips into gear, gingerly presses the accelerator, and the old/new truck rolls obediently forward. Down the length of the street, the Librarian gains
confidence . . . and speed. Enough to come careening into the square with some doubt still in his mind that he’ll find the Tinkers there with the women and dogs. But he’s proved to himself that N’Doch’s song was not imagined, so probably the women and dogs are real, and Luther, too. As real as anything can be said to be in the white nano-city.