Celestial Inventories (25 page)

The dragon was blowing air, or gas, out of cheeks, mouth, neck sacs. It began rising toward him. The instruments were in Alec’s head, his eyes. The electronic goggles came up. Air speed, wind speed, and a half-dozen other functions read out along a muted silver band that ran across the bottom of the lens. Prepared to meet the dark, he aimed with the goggles and fired.

A cliff off to the dragon’s left exploded into red debris. Alec trembled. A light flashed on his display. He looked out. The dragon was climbing above him.

From underneath, the creature’s body blended in with its wings. Then the wings began to rotate, the head turned down, the dark mass hesitated, and the dragon was suddenly dropping. In seconds the mouth gaped grotesquely, the jaws unhinged, the gas sacs receding, expanding.

Alec pulled away and began to spin in an evasive maneuver. His sensation that the dragon was with him was confirmed by a ballet of graphic stick figures spinning at the bottom of his goggles. Black flaps slapped at his windscreen. He closed his eyes, felt his stomach drop as he cut the thrusters, tensed his shoulders, and prepared the surfaces for the drop. Swiveling the thrusters and cutting them back in, he roared toward the valley floor until he’d left the dragon behind him, then let his canards and altered surfaces bring him back up.

He stared at the dragon, feeling fire at the edge of his lips and at the tips of his fingers. The dragon stared down at him. It was terrible in its huge, limp fleshiness, but somehow Alec could not bring himself to imagine its destruction.

He saw the disease moving through his body, growing, reaching out to embrace his beautiful children and his wife. He saw their faces dissolve in slow motion, in blues and greens and reds.

Then he realized the dragon was descending farther toward the canyon floor, going away. And he was doing nothing to pursue it.

Alec watched until the dragon shrank back to a twist of black ash, then he dropped quickly, following the dragon around several twists in the narrowing canyon, past towers, chimneys, and spires. The surrounding cliffs loomed progressively closer, and at times Alec felt compelled to bring the wings in to reduce their span. Vegetation became sparser this far down, the lizards were in more abundance, and the grazers were nowhere to be seen.

Alec manoeuvred through a series of swirled rock formations, following the rocketing dragon that now looked eagle-sized as it threaded the bull’s eyes, into dragon country.

Part of the wall began to curl overhead, and Alec could see that the canyon here was narrowing, gaining a partial roof. He hesitated, and the plane slowed down, but as the dragon drew farther away from him, escaping, he was seized by a sudden desperation and felt the plane shoot forward.

The wall curled more as he flew its length, forming more than a complete roof over him now, beginning to drop on the other side like a frozen wave. The space here was still hardly confined—a hundred such planes could have flown wingtip to wingtip and would still have room to spare. The walls danced with broken light.

He was enclosed in an almost seamless tunnel.

Alec suddenly experienced vertigo, imagined himself falling through miles of earth with no one there to catch him. He was too heavy, too awkward. Too ugly. He could not fly.

Bright warning lights tattooed his eyelids. He wondered that the plane had let him go this far, but knew proceeding was better than stalling out.

A message was up on his windscreen: THIS IS A HAZARDOUS FLIGHT AREA. ADVISE AGAINST PROCEEDING.

Alec wondered how long it had been there.

Amazingly, the plane flew on, faster and faster. He wished his wife and children could have seen it. Flying through the dark with no hands to hold him.

But it wasn’t at all dark in the tunnel. He looked around. A yellowish growth covered the walls, broken here and there by a greyish, tendriled vegetation. But it was all blurred, blending together.

Up ahead the dragon revolved as if in slow motion, though Alec knew it was travelling faster than he was. Its wings were glistening panels of silver light that, when looked at, almost hurt the eyes. Rainbow light flowed over its head and down its back, trailed off into a tail of fiery dust, and travelled over the dark form, like hordes of migrating, fluorescent parasites in the dragon’s skin.

The tunnel opened up periodically into a necklace of enormous chambers. The dragon slowed down, seeming to float, maneuvering coyly behind occasional spires and hanging lobes of stone. Coquettish.

Alec burned his thrusters lightly, wings tilted upward and the jets along his wing edges straining. So although there was forward progression, it was, like the dragon’s, just short of a stall. An encounter between two winged insects.

Dark, concave ridges with sharp rock dividers, like the body impressions of a huge snake, ringed the chambers. Ribbed stone grew along the walls like roots or stiffened entrails.

His instruments detected activity in the recessed galleries, dark patterns of movement. Vague impressions of limbs and wings and unclassifiable appendages, nothing more.

The walls seemed closer, fecund and teeming. He suddenly imagined he could smell the stone.

Minute bits of material were bouncing off the skin of the plane, some of it darting off before it could be misted away.

Occasionally, something raked lightly along the underside of the ship, too close and too softly for stone.

Ahead of him the tunnel split, both branches far narrower than the one he had been in. The dragon floated at the juncture, its glowing wings and face drifting through highly stylized patterns of light, like a woman dancing in a kimono, her face painted a brilliant white.

He stared for what seemed to be a long time before following the dragon into the starboard tunnel.

The bright kimono began to wrap him. The plane revolved once rapidly on its axis, freeing itself. Alec imagined being wrapped within his own sheets, unable to get loose, paralyzed.

Ahead of him the dragon was imitating, making huge loops out of its pliant wings, twirling itself like a pinwheel.

Another tunnel was opening, even narrower. The dragon straightened and dove through it. Alec hesitated, the plane slowed, but there was nowhere else to go. He had to trust the dragon’s expertise. He dropped his nose and entered.

The tunnel widened, then began to curve steadily upward, narrowing again. Tilting farther up, Alec could feel the strain. Soon they were almost vertical, facing a dimness ahead. Alec could now guess.

The dragon was racing up the hollow insides of a chimney formation. Alec shifted focus, gritted his teeth, and allowed his ship to follow as if towed. He felt sick to his stomach.

The ship gave him something for the nausea—he could feel the change beginning back in his throat. The centre of the chimney was a seamless grey, speckled red. The warning lights cooled, just in time for Alec to burst out of the chimney and into the dazzling sunlight.

As the plane floated out over the valley again, Alec scanned the sky frantically for some sign of the dragon. Nothing. He could see the gleam off the domes of Bennett Compound on the lip of the distant canyon wall. He’d come back to the departure point. Ground vehicles waited along the edge. He soared closer, into gathering shadow.

The shadow wrapped him up with a roar. Dark sheets wound around his chest until he couldn’t breathe. A cry caught in his throat, his goggles blazed red, and with a high pitched whine he pitched over, dragging his mind screaming behind him.

He fired again and again, turning dirt and rock and sky into flame.

His eyes came open with the sense that the plane was folding back its wings. He looked out, straight down, at a fast-approaching ribbon of blue. He was a child falling out of bed, the bedclothes around him so tightly he could not move. He was a child tossed and dropped by his father. He was a dragon too large and much too dark to fly.

The water rose. The aide had left him in his bath too long. He could not move his arms. His legs were gone. And he was slipping fast beneath the waves.

Alec screamed as muscles seemed to tear from bone, as bones bent and snapped. But he was rising, pulling out of the dive, and the disfigurement was only illusory, he reminded himself, no matter how terrible.

He strained for the canyon rim, dragging the plane up behind him. Enough. He had no business here.

And then he slammed into darkness, and the darkness gave way around him, then came back fighting, eating his windscreen, folding wing and fuselage, crushing him.

The devil’s head roared above him, blank eyes blazing. Flames coruscated down wings shrinking, turning to silver.

Crazily, the ship’s computers began cycling through a systems check. Alec watched microhydraulics multiply and disappear, electrical systems blossom. His perfect cobalt-and-lime legs and arms jumbled, doubled, then faded away.

And on the top edge of the telemetry shield, the dragon’s severed muscles and nerves danced madly. He’d speared it, pinned it. He could almost imagine reaching out and grasping it in his hand. It wasn’t going to get away.

He could see the edge of the cliff only a few yards above him, in one unobscured corner of his windscreen. Personnel in red suits lined the lip. He’d never make it; he could feel the plane
falling.

He reached with his mind, and the thrusters pushed.

He felt his stomach rise, the leap in his thighs.

And suddenly he was lifting both plane and shield-pinioned dragon up over the edge of the cliff to solid ground. Plane and dragon skidded over broken rock, crimson-hearted scrub, and cinnamon-coloured soil to a shuddering stop.

Alec thought of his body breaking, the disease spilling out, the disease murdering everyone around him, his beautiful, sleeping children, his wife. He heaved his useless body. He thrashed, palsied, cramping.

“Get him out of there!”

Technicians in black masks were pulling Alec out of his harness and trying to slip a mask over his face. He fought them. Smoke haloed their bulbous heads. He smelled something sharp. Ash began to fill his mouth.

He tried to turn. The dragon roared.

“Get him out!”

His head fell back when they lifted him. He could see the dragon rolling on its side, creasing a cindered wing. Huge blank eyes settled, stared.

Alec was exhilarated. It was like wrestling and pinning the nightmare, even as he was dreaming it.

Great cheeks blew clouds of gas that exploded into flame. Sacs ruptured, flames shot up, dark flesh blistered.

“Tether it!”

The techs carried metal claws to the dragon’s trembling, black-grey mottled sides. The devil’s head fell forward.

And Alec felt his own head fall forward. He looked down at his feet, caught by the twisted hull. His withered feet. Once grounded, he wasn’t much of a bird, or dragon. His people were still trying to pull him out from under the telemetry shield. The dragon sprawled over the rest of the plane and beyond, sides heaving. Yellow liquid bubbled around the wound where the dragon had crashed into the plane, where the telemetry shield entered muscle and nerve, short-circuiting the dragon, becoming a part of the dragon. The dragon was part of his plane.

The dragon tried to rise, but kept jamming the plane wreckage farther into its wound as it struggled. The huge head faced Alec, still terrible, still beautifully dark.

This is wrong,
he thought.

Alec was still in range of the telemetry shield—he could still control it, but his people almost had him loose, and then it would be too late.

Alec thought to lift his head. The dragon’s head stirred.

Alec imagined his arms raised. Burnt wings fluttered.

Alec visualized the telemetry shield, the dragon pinned there. He tried to make the dragon rise, but it fell back, the wings flapping involuntarily, muscles cramped, its body huge, unmanageable, useless, alien.

What am I doing?
he thought.

The dragon might contain his cure. He just needed to allow his people to drag it away.

The dragon thrashed, wings and muscles powerless. Its huge head turned. Alec stared into dark and found something familiar there.

They might be able to reverse the sclerosis. He’d walk. Marie and the children would come back. They’d all welcome him because he’d be clean again.

Who needs it?
He’d changed, and if they’d loved him, they’d have accepted his changing.

The dragon’s body flapped and rolled. Oddly lovely, moth-like. The last of its kind, tossed high and dropped, helpless. But still so strong; if it got back to its lair, it might be able to pick the pieces out. It might be able to heal. Again the eyes enveloped Alec, so dark they left him gasping.

He watched as the technicians struggled to attach the grappling claws. The thing bellowed hideously, leathery skin flapping. The beast had poisoned him, changed his life, infected him with its darkness.

The beast had changed him. The beast had brought out a life different from the one Alec had intended.

A darkness ran in his own veins, dragon’s breath in his lungs. Another world lay under the bridges between neural synapses, a place where dreamers and their nightmares were the same, where only dragons and their hunters might fly.

The dragon had made him fly through the dark.

I have a choice,
he thought.

Alec pushed with his mind just as his people pulled him loose of the plane, almost out of range of the telemetry link with the dragon. And the dragon rose with the crumpled plane clinging to its belly.

It staggered to the cliff’s edge and went over while Alec watched, the technicians holding him back from the lip.

And under the shouts, the frantic scramble, Alec had a brief moment inside the dragon’s head as it slipped over the cliff’s edge, the wind filling broken wings, the darkness filling enormous eyes, heedless of the fire crisping its back as it dived once more into its alien world.

The monster had lived in the field for as long as anyone could remember. For much of that time he chose to lie there, exposed, gazing at the sky. Sometimes he wore a kind of rough tunic, sometimes he did not. He took what little he could find in the almost-barren field and shoved it into his mouth—roots, grass, small animals, trash. He ate with such evident displeasure the townspeople were embarrassed to watch. Every few years they tried feeding him something better, and he gnawed with a terrible aggression on what they threw out on the field, staring at them so furiously they were afraid to stay. He relieved himself, which wasn’t often, without self-consciousness. He fell into sleep with the greatest reluctance, making snoring sounds so loud, repulsive, and full of such suggestive content the people living nearby sold their houses and moved away. Sometimes those houses remained unoccupied for years, unfit for any purpose
save storage.

Sometimes the monster lived in a hut smeared together out of sticks and mud. Sometimes he destroyed that poor construction in paroxysms of rage, hurling the bits of it as far as he could, which was very far indeed.

Sometimes he rebuilt this structure slowly and lovingly, placing each stick and plane as if making art. The hut was of limited practicality, its regular destruction compelling evidence that the monster did not require it for either privacy or survival.

The townspeople rarely visited the field where the monster lived. It was not because he frightened them, although most would have professed varying degrees of discomfort in his presence.
Their absence appeared to have more to do with the fact that he was the local landmark, the one the natives seldom patronized.

One day a university student from a distant county was traveling through this town where the monster lived. He had not heard of the monster before; in fact he hadn’t even heard of the town. Some weekends he simply had an irresistible impulse to drive, and so traveled wherever the roads took him.

The student had driven through the town and was almost to its outer edge when he saw the naked creature lying out in the field. Being of a morbid inclination, he supposed it was a dead body and so pulled over to sit and watch. Eventually he climbed out of his car and stood leaning against it. He felt some disappointment when a blurry outline of hand reached up from the body and waved away a cloud of insects.

The student saw a young girl walking nearby. He strolled over to her casually, smiled and asked, “Who is that lying out in that field?”

“Him? Looking up at the sky? He’s—That’s our monster.”

The student smiled down at the girl. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

Possessing a studied lack of superstition, the student walked across the field until he was only a few feet from the monster. “Hello,” he said. “May I speak to you?”

The monster’s head resembled a great stone rolling over as he turned to look at the student. “At least you ask, politely enough.”

The student thought carefully about what his next words should be. Although he did not find this figure to be terribly frightening, the monster was still one of the least attractive creatures he had ever seen. The monster’s head was far too large for his body and a thin thatch of orangeish hair covered but a small area of his scalp in an elliptical tangle. His chest was lopsided, as was his belly. His smell was decidedly unpleasant, yet the student could not have explained in what way, as nothing came to mind that he might compare it to. The monster had surprisingly thin arms and legs, and both finger- and toe-nails resembled ragged, bitten-off shingles of shale.

“But your good manners do not earn you staring rights,” the monster said.

“I was… composing my thoughts.”

“That is all you humans appear to do, either composing or blurting.”

“I am a student. They have tried to teach me to think before
I speak.”

The monster grunted.

“They have treated you shabbily, haven’t they?”

The monster sat up, and was taller than the student expected. His huge head swiveled. “What do you know? You know nothing about me. I did not summon you, did I? You are but some random—person. The people here—” The monster tried to make a gesture then, but he apparently failed, for his misshapen arm stuttered and fell, trembling. He spat. “They have
not
treated me shabbily. Like people everywhere, they have not treated me—at all.”

“I don’t understand,” the student said.

“For the most part, they ignore me. At best I am a tourist attraction, at worst, an eyesore. Even when they run away, it is as if they run away from a phantom, from nothing. They do not
deal
with me.”

“How does it feel, to be alone?”

The monster swiveled his head. A piece of rough flesh like a peel of bark curled open. The eyeball was grey, like a spoiled egg. But the iris (or pupil, for they were one) was as dazzling and multifaceted as a jewel. “Are you saying this is something you have never experienced?”

“Well, no,” the student admitted. “Sometimes I study by myself, in my room late at night away from the others. And most nights,
I sleep by myself. I have a roommate, but he is seldom there.”

“And do you enjoy these times alone?”

“Well, yes, many times I do. But I know I have a choice. Sometimes I find I must leave my room and find others.”

“Others of your kind?”

“I’m not really sure what my kind is.”

“You understand me, student. Do not pretend stupidity. I will tell you what your
kind
is—it is the kind that often feigns stupidity, without understanding what stupidity truly means.”

“And what does it mean?”

“It means to be asleep to the world. And before you insult me again I want you to know that I am not stupid. I, unfortunately, have never been asleep to the world. It presses against me on all sides, and because I have not the company of others of my kind to soothe me, I feel the solitary brunt of it, the decay of it in all its unholy purity, the stinking rag and the fleshless bone of it.
That, my friend, is my unasked-for wisdom, my untrammeled knowledge of the world.”

“I apologize.”

“Do not apologize when you are not sorry. I saw you with that female. Tell me, how does
that
feel?”

“I don’t understand.”

“To have a companion.”

“We’re hardly companions. I have never seen her before. I simply asked, well, I asked who you were.”

The monster raised both his arms, and the student stepped back. The monster made a noise deep inside his throat, and it might have been a laugh, but it sounded as if something were trapped there, attempting to eat its way out.

The monster tilted his head back. “I would not mind,” he said, his arms and hands contorting in a stretch, his legs splaying as if broken, “knowing the answer to that question.”

The student thought he should leave, but discovered he could not. He watched as the monster ran around the field, grunting, now and then reaching down to claw at the ground to tear out clumps of grass and buried stones, the occasional bit of bone and other scattered debris from past meals. There was nothing remotely graceful about the monster’s movements, but there was an unexpected eagerness that reminded the student of the enthusiasms of children: giddy, uncontrolled, vaguely desperate.

The student wondered if all this might be for his benefit, because he could not believe this morose-looking creature made a habit of such play. The possibility that even this small bit of company might bring out some quality of celebratory silliness in the monster made the student sad.

“Look!” The monster stopped a few feet away and lifted his head to the darkening sky. “Can you feel them coming?”

“Them? The town?” And the student felt anxious again, perceiving some form of danger he could not understand.

“No, of course you cannot,” the monster said. “But if you will pardon my braggadocio I will confess I can
smell
them!”

“Them?”

“The stars!”

The monster reached up and peeled off the small patch of orange hair covering his scalp. The student could not see exactly how it was attached, but was alarmed to see bits of skin and a spray of blood come away with the sweep of the monster’s arm. “Wait!” the student shouted, his hands pressed out in horror, feeling silly, sensing that to beg a stop from such a being was like crying halt to the wind and moon.

The monster dipped his head slightly, a bow to the approaching night, allowing the student to see the rough and bloody baldness of his pate. There in the centre were three wide grooves flowing blood, as if the great veins in the monster’s brain had risen to the top and opened for direct access to the night air.

The monster staggered, suddenly unable to raise his head,
the huge weight of it swinging precariously at the end of his neck. Then with a great crouch and heave he jerked his massive skull up toward a black dome rapidly filling with stars. The student was alarmed to see the tears streaming down the monster’s face, for somehow the presence of tears made this creature even more repulsive than before.

“I suspect you find it monstrous that I weep,” the monster began, and the student thought to deny it, even though of course it was true. “Yes, yes,” the monster said, trembling. “It is monstrous that I weep. It is monstrous that I feel at all, that I breathe the air that generations have breathed, that I walk ground once trodden by thousands, who stood here and lived and sang and loved and then were no more, were bone and mineral and scattered chemical, one last vapor expelled into an atmosphere that winds the world like its death shroud. Monstrous, monstrous that I understand myself so poorly, monstrous that I know nothing of the hearts of those who pass through a town so close to me and yet an endless distance away. The despair I feel is monstrous, such a bitter, vile taste lapping these lips that have not kissed. And how repulsive, not to have kissed, how malformed the unrequited desire to be part of those who ignore you, whose gaze finds nothing when they look at you. How grotesque, that life, any and all life, will some day be extinct—I can see it! With this loathsome eye of mine!
The end of life, the end of this world—in my dreams it has already happened! You call yourself a student, and yet you know nothing of consequence, while I, and all those around me, call me Monster, and I anguish over the things I know.” The monster staggered drunkenly, leaning over the frightened student. “So, yes, child,
I weep. I, Monster, weep.”

And the monster toppled forward onto the student, who experienced a great shifting of the world, land, sky, and time converging in his skull.

When the student awakened he imagined himself back in his dormitory room in that life miles away. He seemed to be all head, but often a night of drinking accomplished that: the world a landslide that enveloped you, trapping limbs and all intention of movement. He shook his head—the weight of it threatened to pull him to the ground. Static fell out of his eyes and powdered the ground with stars. He gazed out over the field at the small crowd gathered at its edge, the ancient brick and stone walls of the town glowing hazily beyond as if smeared with a film of dirty oil.

His eyes seemed surprisingly acute this morning—he could see the faces of the crowd even though they were many yards away. He thought he saw the girl he had asked directions from, and it occurred to him now how pretty she was. A few older people stood behind her, talking, gesturing in his direction. Several men on one end of the crowd had bottles of liquor in their hands, and appeared to be toasting him. He concentrated on them, and it was as if he were gazing through a telescope: their images flew rapidly his way, filling his vision.

They were drunk and laughing as men will laugh, pointing as men will point, foolish and stupid companions. The one in the middle was the most repulsive, rough face and scaly forehead, and the student was alarmed to see that under one drunken lid peeked that clearly recognizable, dazzling jewel of an eye.

The student looked down and examined his poor nakedness: his stick-like legs, his distorted arms and poorly-defined hands, the dark broken nails. He touched the sides of his enormous head.
He ran his hands down his swollen and lopsided chest. He looked up and saw the ugly man with the beautiful jewel eye grinning, his chin wet with drink and drool.

The weeping would come later, he knew, the rages and the useless complaints. But for now he settled himself down in the field and waited for the stars to come, tenderly probing the contours and crevices of his hideous flesh, gingerly acquainting himself with this new knowledge that he was monstrous of limb and monstrous of head, but most of all monstrous in his heart.