Nothing But Blue Skies (3 page)

Perhaps it was the doughnut; possibly it was pure logic, quietly working away at the problem like penetrating oil gradually seeping into a rusted joint. Possibly it was a flash of insight, the mental equivalent of a double six and a quick trip up a ladder; most likely that, because the conclusion arrived complete and ready to wear, batteries included. If Susan Ackroyd was here just a moment ago, it followed that she was not with Paul. If she wasn't with Paul on the morning of the Spring Bank Holiday, didn't that suggest that the two of them weren't the stone-cold definite Item she'd been assuming they were? Maybe they were nothing more than Just Good Friends. In which case (she mused excitedly, biting vigorously into the second doughnut) the game wasn't over and she was still in with a sporting chance, straight blonde hair or no straight blonde hair. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became. If she was a man-eating vampire blonde (and amphibious into the bargain) with her hooks into some poor unsuspecting male right up to the knuckles, would she let him out of her sight on a sunny Bank Holiday morning? Would she hell as like. She'd have had their day together mapped out and precisely scheduled well in advance, with back-ups and fail-safe options in the event of unexpected obstacles and complications, all drawn tightly together into a unified game plan designed to advance the relationship to the next level of the overall strategy - she'd have drawn it all up on graph paper, neatly plotted on the X and Y axes, with each variable charted in a different colour of felt-tip pen. Wouldn't anybody, if they were truly serious about a relationship? Surely it stood to reason.

As she licked cream and sugar residues off her fingertips, the sun flipped open the lid of its paintbox and started filling in the numbered spaces with rich, glowing shades of yellow and gold. It was all fearfully symbolic, as the warmth of insight evaporated the damp residues of anger; and it had never been like this, at Home, where there simply weren't any such extremes. Maybe it was a terrestrial thing, something to do with being limited to three dimensions, one shape, one set of senses and one perspective. If they could fly like birds or swim like fish, would mortal humans still retain the ability to feel things so intensely, to concentrate so ferociously on a single issue, to love or hate a single person so passionately? Highly improbable, to say the least. Oh, but if only Daddy and all the rest of them could just have a taste of what they were missing, love and hate and cream doughnuts too, wouldn't they all be down here, on the other end of the rain, instead of up there in the monotonous, unending blue?

She'd closed her eyes at some stage. Now she opened them again, and immediately saw two very familiar faces, no more than twenty yards away. It was as if someone with a nasty sense of humour had done it on purpose.

The female - well, she was just as blonde as she had been when Karen last saw her, all of twenty minutes ago, if not blonder. And he - oddly enough, he seemed a bit shorter and somehow more meagre than he was in her mind's eye, but even so she felt the same lurching shock as always, a feeling that you get only when you see your beloved or unexpectedly bite hard on tinfoil. There they were, together - didn't they make a lovely couple, as natural a pairing as knife and fork or cod and chips, perfectly matched as if they'd been cut from the same blank. Suddenly, Karen regretted the idiotic limitations of a human body, with no proper teeth to bare or claws to spread. They were walking together towards the museum, side by side and in step like a very small column of soldiers, both of them eyes front, chins up, hands level at their sides (as if butter wouldn't melt; who were they trying to fool?) He was holding a Tesco's bag; she'd taken off her sensible coat and was carrying it folded under one arm. She said something. He laughed.

All right
, Karen thought,
so I'm not really human; I am what I am, and if that's not good enough for some people, that's their hard luck
. Then it occurred to her that being what she was did have a few useful fringe benefits, and that it was the end of May, and she was by right of birth and appointment the Dragon Marshal of Bank Holidays.

What was it the humans said? When things go wrong in your private life, sometimes it helps to throw yourself body and soul into your work.

She began with a bolt of lightning that set dogs barking and nervous people skipping on the spot, followed by a stupendous rumbling belch of thunder that seemed to come from way down inside herself, followed in turn by the very latest Rapier-class air-to-surface anti-personnel rain, the kind that slices through cloth as if it wasn't there and impacts against your skin so hard you can practically hear it. This wasn't a time for gradually winding out the handles and slowly increasing the feed; if ever there was a situation that called for cracking the throttles wide open and delivering the full payload in the first volley, this was it. Maximum wetness, total viscosity, optimum drench and squelch factors, saturation bombardment; instantaneous metamorphosis from bone dry to sopping wet in the twinkling of a small, round red eye.

Daddy would have been proud of her. Faster than the eye could follow, Susan's hair went from golden waterfall to matted thatch, without any mucking about in the intermediate stages of moist, damp, sodden. Smart raindrops turned the exposed lining of her unfair-to-dragons sensible coat into a portable reservoir, so that putting it on would be the only possible way she could make herself wetter than she already was. Mortals - she'd noticed it before and for some reason it bothered her - mortals couldn't help looking ridiculous when they got wet with all their clothes on. They wore the rain like a custard pie jammed in their faces; the joke was unmistakably on them, they were the straight men and the dragons were the comics. Even Paul looked silly - endearingly, adorably silly, but still silly - with his hair plastered down over his forehead and a scale model mountain rill cascading down the slopes of his nose.

And if that didn't spoil the mood, Karen added to herself with grim satisfiaction, nothing would. If half what she'd heard about the sovereign effects of a cold shower was true—

They were laughing. Both of them. He was saying something like ‘God, you're wet!' and she was saying ‘So are you,' or words to that effect, and they were giggling like a couple of schoolchildren. Instead of scurrying for cover like startled rabbits - no point, since they were drenched already - they were just standing there, sniggering their silly heads off, laughing off the worst, the
best
she could do as if it didn't matter, as if a drop of rain never hurt anybody. It was sacrilege. It was an affront to everything that dragons stood for. It was so
unfair
.

Then Karen, who was also sitting out in the pouring rain without hat, coat or umbrella, realised that she was every bit as wet as they were, so wet that she could feel the rain dribbling down inside her underwear, and she wasn't laughing at all.

 

As soon as she woke up the next morning, Karen knew something was desperately wrong.

First, she couldn't breathe. It was as if someone had crept in during the night and stuffed cotton wool up her nose. (Her stupid, inefficient human nose; compared to the plumbing fitted to the ultra-evolved dragon body, with its multiple back-ups and bypasses, human pipes, ducts and conduits were downright primitive. It was a miracle the species had survived so long.)

As if the breathing problem wasn't bad enough, she was leaking. There was moisture of some kind streaming from her eyes and nose. What the stuff was - lubricant or hydraulic fluid or coolant, maybe - or where it had come from she had no idea, but it stood to reason that if it had been inside her head to start with, it was there for a purpose and she couldn't afford to lose much more of it. If the state of her pillow was anything to go by, she'd already been drained of close on a quarter of a pint; what if it was brake fluid or two-stroke oil, and when she next tried to stop suddenly her muscles were to seize and send her toppling headlong to the ground? To make matters even worse, there was something wrong with both her ears and an absolutely foul taste in her mouth, which tended to lend weight to the midnight-assassin theory.

The main thing, of course, was not to panic. First, she took a moment to check and rally those few remaining systems that hadn't been knocked out or severely curtailed by the attack. She found that she could just about breathe through her mouth (though this brought to her attention another malfunction, this time in the back of the throat, which led to convulsive coughing attacks if she wasn't very careful about precisely regulating the air flow), and that most of the motor functions in her arms and legs were just about operational, though with something like a twenty-five per cent reduction in efficiency. She dragged herself out of bed and managed to stagger as far as the bookshelf before subsiding onto the floor in a disorderly heap of limbs.

Even before Karen had made her escape from Home she'd had the foresight to realise that once she was down there among the mortals, she was going to have to cope with any injuries or illness by herself. The version of human shape assumed by dragons was believed to be a pretty faithful copy of the original in most respects, but the simple fact was that where a lot of the trivial detail was concerned, it was a case of best-guessing and figuring out from first principles. It was like trying to build a twentieth-century computer with nothing to go on except the design specifications for a twenty-fifth-century model and a photograph from a Sunday-supplement advert: no problem with getting the exterior looking just right, but the internal workings probably wouldn't fool an expert for very long - intestines the wrong colour or wound with a right-hand instead of a left-hand thread, metric instead of imperial bone-socket sizes, or something equally revealing to the trained eye. Visits to the doctor, in other words, were out of the question; which was why one of the first things she'd acquired on her arrival had been a big, fat medical dictionary.

She listed the symptoms and considered all the possible diagnoses, and came to the conclusion that what she was suffering from was something called a common cold. Terrifyingly, the book assured her that there was no known cure, and the thought of spending the rest of her life as a wheezing, gasping, seeping wreck nearly brought on a terminal panic attack; but she made herself read on, and was mightily relieved to learn that this awful condition somehow cured itself, usually in a matter of days. In the ‘Causes' column, the book listed standing about in the freezing cold, or getting soaking wet, which pretty well confirmed the diagnosis while making Karen feel painfully guilty about all the rain she'd emptied on the heads of innocent bystanders the day before. Had they all caught this loathsome disease, she wondered, and were they all undergoing the same degree of suffering and discomfort as she was? The implications, not just for herself but for all dragonkind, were little short of staggering.

Well, at least she was fairly sure she wasn't going to die, so that was all right. Now all she had to do was make it through the day somehow, and then she could crawl back into bed and suffer in peace—

Which reminded her. She looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece and was horrified to see that while she'd been looking the other way, the time had sneakily scuttled on to half-past eight, and she wasn't even dressed yet.

Horrible tight human clothes, with all the ludicrous straps and fastenings and the peculiar cloth tubes you had to stuff your arms and legs into. Stupid human shoes, to make up for the hopelessly inadequate clawless human foot. Irritating human junk that had to be loaded into pockets before she dared slam the door shut behind her (keys, purse, wallet, cards, pens, handkerchiefs, combs, lipsticks, nail files—). Pathetic human lack of wings, leaving her no alternative but to run, which no upright species was ever intended to do, in order to clamber onto a crazy human bus and stand in a tightly packed human wedge while the bus crawled painfully in another typically human wedge through the blocked arteries of the city. Why, she asked herself, why this morbid fascination with the X-axis? Surely any fool could see that the surface was so hopelessly overcrowded that the system no longer functioned; in practice, it was already impossible to get from one place to another simply by trundling along the ground, whether on foot or by vehicle, whereas just above the heads and roofs of the toiling, suffering mass of travellers there was almost unlimited free transit space. It couldn't possibly be mere ignorance or lack of enterprise. There had to be some deep-rooted psychological defect that kept them rooted to the ground, in defiance of the glaringly obvious. Strange, perverse creatures. Aliens.

(Yes, but Paul wasn't an alien . . . Was he? If so, how on earth could she feel anything at all for him other than a vaguely amused contempt? However hard she tried, she couldn't find an answer to that one.)

Karen looked out at the two square inches or so of outside world that were visible past the human heads and shoulders, and saw that it was raining. Not again . . . She was going to have to find a way of controlling this, unless she wanted a whole nation of cold-stricken humans on her conscience. There had to be a way of cancelling the impulse. She'd never had this problem when she'd been a dragon. Back home there had been plenty of minor vexations and irritants, some of them as bad or worse than the things that set off downpours here on the surface, but she'd always been in perfect control, never shedding a single unintended drop. She thought about that. The only explanation was that the human brain simply couldn't handle the dragon nature; the sheer volume of thought and feeling was overloading the synaptic network, and the human controls couldn't access the dragon systems. Since humans didn't have the powers that dragons took for granted, there weren't any off switches or mute buttons to allow her to deal with them.