Dragonhaven

When I came to, my head still hurt, but not quite as much, and I had Lois' head jammed under my chin, humming. It wasn't a very good hum, it kept breaking up and then starting to rise as if it was going to turn into a shriek, and then she'd catch herself and yank it back down into a hum. But she was trying to hum. And she was only a baby. Time I started dragging myself back together. If I could still find all the pieces.

So I tried to sit up. The moment I moved, the avalanche in my skull started again and I put my hands to my head and squeezed. The avalanche stopped. It wasn't the squeezing though, it was another roar from Gulp: I moved, the avalanche started, Gulp roared, the avalanche stopped. Well, it didn't stop exactly. All the boulders got smaller and they did stop rolling around, as if they'd been flash-frozen by the noise. Or glued. But if the glue wasn't strong enough they'd fall over and start crashing around again. And I doubted the glue was that good. The ones that had stopped rolling were only the up-close ones anyway. There was still a lot of crashing going on at a little more of a distance. It was very, very weird. Almost weird enough not to be horrible. But not quite. And very, very painful. There was a softish, as rocks go, rather quivery, bristly glowing blob from Lois . . . and a great big sort of angular looming thing, like she was still standing over us except she wasn't, from Gulp.

And outside my skull there were a lot of big looming things. Big looming things. Big looming things.

Yes. You knew this already, reading it here, but I was having a lot. of trouble with reality. We were in a cavern full of dragons.

I'll let that sink in for a minute. It takes a lot of sinking in. Think yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside  -  and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can't stand on her hind legs and not bump her head  -  and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try.

There was an actual fire in a big hearth-space (big  -  Wilsonville would probably fit into it) not too far away from where Lois and I skulked in a little half niche in the uneven stony wall, although I couldn't see what it was burning, and it didn't smell like wood, and the red light it cast seemed to me more purple than wood firelight. (It didn't smell like meat or blood or dead things either, which was just as well. Although I was weak and shaky probably from lack of food too I was not up to the concept of eating from any direction, eater or eatee, and I was particularly not up to thinking reassuring thoughts about how dragons don't eat humans.) There was a very strong smell of dragon over the strong smell of the smoke, which was almost as overwhelming as the sight of them was  -  and the echoes, when Gulp roared, must have been making old Earth totter on her axis.

It was like there was some kind of geometric progression-explosion for every sense I was forced to use: sight, hearing, smell . . . the smell was strong enough that I was tasting it too, which only left touch, and Lois and the nobbly rock at my back were not much comfort. If you wake up and find yourself chained to a wall in a dungeon and there are a lot of spiky-looking iron things hanging by the fire, you're relieved there isn't anyone looking at you thoughtfully while he's holding the spikiest in the fire, but that you're alone isn't much comfort.

I say the nobbly rock wasn't much comfort, and You have to remember I was aching in everything I had to ache in, but we were also in some kind of nest. I was so sore and tired and rattled that it took me a little while  -  what with the cavern-full-of-dragons thing kind of taking my attention  -  to realize this. I was lying on the ground, but I was really well padded with  -  I picked up a handful of the stuff and let it slip through my fingers and patter back into the heap. Dragon scales. They're a little prickly I admit, but in heaps they're surprisingly soft. And warm. Even a cavern which is full of dragons and a small-town-sized fireplace going a blast has drafts, particularly when you figure the ceiling is over sixty feet up.

Gulp sat or crouched near us, with the end of her tail flung out in front of us, so we were barricaded in, by the fire, by the wall, and by Gulp's tail. Here Gulp was a dark but streaky iridescent green; it was some weird light, because she looked darker by ordinary daylight, and it was like thick red twilight in the cavern. Remember I said that when we'd first come down here last night (if it had been last night) there'd been something almost familiar about the weird light? Yeah. It was just like in my dreams. I couldn't decide if I recognized the smell from my dreams too. And I was often frightened in my dreams. But the damn crushing terror was new and like complicated in this Toto-I-have-the-feeling-we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more way, like maybe I had a whole five horrible new senses to experience it with or something, thanks a lot.

The dragons around us were different sizes and different colors; there were a dozen of them, maybe fifteen  -  that I could see  -  that I thought I could see. No, I didn't recognize any of them  -  which was a relief: I know, I'm spending a lot of time here redefining "limit" and "edge" (and "crazy" and "impossible") but recognizing one of these dragons from my dreams of dragons would have been waaay over any definition of any edge you like  -  even if in my dreams they were, well, friendlier. Or at least they were okay with my being there, which these guys were not.

It was hard to tell dragons from rocks and shadows, and while I was never sure about this either it seemed to me that it wasn't always the same dozen or fifteen dragons  -  although I thought Gulp was nearly as big as most of them. The one I could see most clearly, however, was a lot bigger than Gulp, facing us from the other side of the hearth. He was black, with no iridescence at all, although on some of him  -  eye ridges and nose, spine, elbows  -  the scales were outlined in red. I had thought Gulp was scary  -  he was scary. He made Gulp, look like a cuddly toy dragon. A fifty-foot cuddly toy dragon. Looking at the size of his head and the one front claw that were reasonably illuminated by the firelight I figured he probably went on forever. His tail probably came out at the caves by the Institute, near where I'd seen Billy that time I'd gone to find him, to tell him Dad had okayed my overnight solo. What a long time ago that was. Sort of the time version of the length of this dragon. And I wondered, suddenly, if dragons were what Billy had been worrying about, down there in the cave. He hadn't really seen a dragon tail, had he? Sitting in a cavern full of dragons, anything was possible. I might as well just get rid of "impossible" as a concept and stop wasting time trying to redefine it.

Monster Dragon's eye slowly blinked. It was like watching an eclipse. I had the feeling I didn't want to look into that eye, as if it might blind me, like you're not supposed to look at the sun, even during an eclipse. The leader, maybe? Alpha male and all that? In that case he might be Lois' dad too, if Old Pete was right and it's only the alphas that breed. I wondered who had inherited Lois' mom's position.

Cautiously I checked the inside of my skull to see if I could tell which boulder Monster Dragon's was. I expected him to be the largest and the hurtingest, but he wasn't. He was large, all right, but he was almost not a boulder at all, more like a . . . a big lump of clay the potter hasn't decided what to do with yet. A bit, you know, malleable. Or poised. Balanced. Almost peaceful, which was pretty damned dramatic under the circumstances. How did I know it was him? I don't know. And to the extent that I could wonder about anything in the old, comparatively-normal-human Jake way, I wondered just what the last three weeks of hanging out with Gulp had done to me.

Had she meant to teach me to talk to her? Or was that an accident of having to spend too much time with me  -  because of Lois? Having decided not to fry me, that is. Then why hadn't it happened with Old Pete? Because if he'd started having dragon-shaped, dragon-identified headaches, he'd have mentioned it  -  because it wouldn't be just boring human weakness any more, it would be about dragons.

Was it Lois again  -  the emergency of Lois? First the extended emergency begun by having stuck her down my shirt front right after she was born. And then . . . you know those stories of moms lifting the front ends of trucks off their children the trucks have just run over? Maybe it was like that. In the stress of those last moments back at Westcamp, I managed to get through to Gulp. I mean, just having a headache . . . Eric gives me a headache, and we've never gone in for mind-reading. (Automatically the thought followed: Now there's a really horrible idea.) And then I thought of his voice over the two-way, and I wondered how he was doing. How everyone at the Institute was doing. My father was hostage . . . ?

And I'm sitting around, trapped and helpless and hallucinating, in a cave full of dragons. I know dragons don't eat humans . . . but if we're playing the Walrus and the Carpenter here, I'm definitely an oyster.

So there I was  -  out of time, out of humanity, out of life, certainly life as I knew it, with an aching, echoing head full of . . . waiting. Oh great. What do I do now?

I can't tell you how bad this was, how lost I was, how mindsmithereeningly alone I was, in this flickery shadowy red-purply nowhere, full of huge breathing shadowy things with huge shining eyes. And there I was, scared silly, scared beyond silly. And one of the things I came out of that experience with is a total inability to use the word "telepathy." It just doesn't fit, okay? And also . . . telepathic dragons. Pleeeease. That is so last century. I've got like shelves of Mom's old story books with telepathic (if pouchless) dragons in them.

But the problem remains that us mouth-flapping talking-crazy humans don't have any words for any kind of silent stuff, which is maybe why we overuse "telepathy" so hard. Like a color-blind species making everything red because it's the only color they've heard of, even though they can't see it either, but it makes them feel clever, like they can imagine color. We can deal with radio waves, that they exist I mean, and even stuff like our dragon fence, but communication that isn't through our standard five senses is as taboo as the idea that any animals but us have real intelligence. So I've called it "telepathy" a few times already because I haven't got anything else to call it, but I'm stopping now. You can just make up your own word. "Ummgmmgmm" or something, because it occurred to me eventually that the nearest thing us humans do have to some of what dragons do is a kind of inaudible hum. Which is maybe how Lois and I groped toward a common wavelength at the beginning. Mouth talking isn't completely on a different planet from an audible hum, and once you've got to the vocal-cord-jiggling humming part. . . . That's still not right, okay? But it's a piece of some of it. Maybe.

I'm sitting here now, a long time after I woke up in the cave full of dragons for the first time, thinking, It's nothing like that. But what is it like? If it's like anything  -  and it's not like anything or I wouldn't be making such a drooling idiot of myself trying to explain  -  it's maybe more like sign language, except that it's going on in your head, with a little audible harmonic background some of the time. Like you might wave your hands (or you do if you're me) while you're talking. Part of where my Headache came from was just trying to grab on to something that almost makes sense, but not really  -  like the brain strain version of your eyes struggling to see through somebody else's glasses.

I remembered that thinking words at Gulp hadn't done much good, and while I wasn't sure what Gulp had understood, she'd got us away before the helicopter had arrived, and while she might have had a big avoid thing for helicopters the way all our dragons seemed to about all human stuff . . . she'd got us away. Maybe only because Lois was too young to leave her mutant freak serial murderer mom, but I couldn't quite believe that. I may have been her worst nightmare but I just didn't feel Gulp was defending us both now only for Lois' sake. Which is also to say that I freaking  -  mutant well was picking stuff up from the Gulp rock in my head. Emergency may be a hell of a way to make contact, but by golly it works.

So one way or another here I was in a cavern full of dragons, and still alive to tell about it. Supposing I got out of the cavern full of dragons again, alive, and there was anyone I dared tell. . . . I was going to tell them what? I squeezed my skull with my hands again, till my wrists ached. Sometimes it's just your thoughts you can't deal with, and I couldn't deal with mine.

Slowly I tried to organize a picture in my head of Lois and me playing in the meadow where Gulp had first found us. Sort of out in the front of my head, away from my private thoughts.

This was sucked away  -  the same dizzy, queasy no-longer-entirely-me-doing-it feeling as I'd had when I'd been trying to "talk" to Gulp and almost immediately there was a picture in my head of . . . well, in hindsight, it was a cavern full of dragons, but I didn't know that at the time. It was way too bizarre. The only reason I even knew I was receiving something was that it was way too bizarre for me to have made it up. I've learned a little more now about how dragons see things, or at least how they make their head-picture-communications of what they see, which I guess is also some kind of shorthand like an alphabet is for us. I know the this-group-of-dragons, uh, thingummy. It isn't even really a picture. But it's an image, or a symbol of an image, or a gesture of an image.

But it's not only an image. This is the really hard part. You have to do something too  -  like if one person puts out a hand the other person is supposed to put out their hand too and shake it. It's the handshake that makes it  -  a handshake. Or like the famous stability model of the three, legged stool. If there was a dragon-alphabet version, it would have one of its legs missing: You'd hold it up  -  you'd make it stable  -  by thinking about it, or by thinking, "This is a three-legged stool. Never mind one of its legs is missing." The dragon alphabet mostly doesn't just lie there like ours does. Mostly you have to connect with it somehow, with what you're seeing or receiving, you have to hold something up or plug something in, to make it really work. This makes "reading" it a lot harder. If your two-legged stool falls over, you aren't getting the message "stability." More likely you're thinking it's something about falling over, which it is, kind of, only backwards.

This was the first time I'd received something sent from a dragon. At least that I knew about. Well, any dragon but Lois. That I'd started maybe picking stuff up from Gulp was new and uncertain  -  and I hadn't learned about having to plug in yet either. This time at least I was sort of expecting it  -  expecting something  -  probably because I'd "known" that the big lump of peaceful clay in my head was actually Big-Goes-on-Forever Dragon. It was a little like  -  a little tiny microscopic  -  like looking through one of those cheesy 3D viewer things, that you put a wheel of pictures in and click them around, and what you see is really nothing like what you see in the world-it's sort of too flat and too jumping-out-at-you simultaneously. (Okay, how retro are we at the Institute? We still sell the glasses, and half a dozen wheels of 3D photos of Smokehill. The funny thing is that people still buy them.) It was a bit like that, only worse. At least when you're looking through the viewfinder at several rows of mountains that don't line up in any direction, including with the horizon or with each other, you know what they're trying to do  -  what the picture is trying to be. And you can take the viewer away from your eyes and your normal, ordinary life is still there.

But this  -  this was  -  gah, I've run out of words again. "Amazing"  -  boring. "Incredible"  -  too vague. "Stunning"  -  my least favorite adjective even before the Headache because it always sounds to me like being hit on the head with a hammer.

So sending-and-receiving, so, proving that COMMUNICATION was going on, or at least that was what both sides were trying to make happen, didn't make my poor fractured head hurt any less, but it made having a headache sort of make some sense: my brain was being coerced  -  like a window being jimmied-into behaving in a way that it was never built for. Cue sound of splintering. Gulp hadn't done anything like this  -  although "talking" to her had briefly paralyzed me to the point that I couldn't flick the switch on the two-way. Maybe this was the next stage. Because I had the strangest feeling that Monster Dragon was actually helping me somehow. That he was really trying to teach me . . . maybe even trying to be taught by me . . . poor freaking dragon.

The mess in my head seemed to be saying, Yes, we know about that. Go on. Although I want to emphasize that there wasn't any impatience or rudeness about it  -  even in the state I was in I could feel that. Could feel that gentleness. It just was, like being in the cave of dragons (hungry, shaking, bewildered, and terrified thrown in free) was.

Okay. Right. Go on with what? And like how?

I could tell you a lot about those first days I spent in the cavern full of dragons, trying to learn to talk to them, and they to me, but most of it is about not succeeding, which pretty much any scientist will tell you is 99 percent of what you do, finding out what does not work. A scientist, though, puts his notes down and goes away and has a cup of coffee or reads a newspaper or something. Even a field biologist counting scales or scat has a campsite, somewhere that is away from the specimens he thinks he's studying, something that's his not theirs (whoever they are). A good field biologist wants to be able to go away, because one of the things you're always supposed to be worrying about is affecting your object of study's behavior by your presence. The Institute had been worrying about that ever since Old Pete opened the cage doors, because it's always been so hard to learn anything about our dragons, beyond that they apparently were still out there somewhere. And if our best attempts at being tactful had already driven them underground, before what happened to Lois' mother. . ..

We hadn't known it was literally underground, although that was always a good guess, in a landscape like this one, with a lot of underground caves. So maybe that was what Billy had been worrying about. But I doubted that if I wandered down one of the tunnels out of the fire-cave I'd find myself coming out beside the Institute, at least not before I starved to death. And besides, I wasn't going anywhere. I was sitting in a cave surrounded by dragons and far from being a discreet note-taker I was the object of study  -  the lab rat, in fact. And I didn't get to go away. Lab rats don't. I was there and they were all looking at me, with their huge sheeny bottomless eyes. And climbing around inside my head and making my skull sore. When Gulliver got stuck in Brobdingnag, the giants didn't climb around inside his head.

I told you way back at the beginning that I've always found caves magical. I'm not sure this tendency was helpful under these conditions. If things get too surreal you haven't got anywhere to, you know, stand any more, to say "okay this is real real," so you can maybe measure some of the rest of it, so that "up" and "down" and "breathing" are no longer dangerously alien concepts that you have to keep checking up on. And that's hard. But these caves . . . even now that I'm used to them, and used to sharing them with a lot of dragons . . . it's like the caves themselves are part of the, uh, conversation, part of the something's-here prickle down your spine, part of the watchingness  -  the consciousness. Part of the communication process  -  the connecting, the plugging ill. The up and the down and the breathing.

I still have no idea how far the caves extend, nor in how many directions. But they're big enough to hold quite a few dragons. And while I never have found anything down there that shares the space the dragons use, except some beetles and spiders and a few tiny flying things to get caught in the webs, all the shadows are populated. Which is what I mean about the consciousness. And the breathing.

And there are a lot of shadows. The rock itself is beautiful, mostly red and black with some dark green and gold, and there's silver veining that runs through a lot of it with no pattern I can see, although it also has a sort of wrinkly gleam almost like scales. As if the rock is dragon colored, dragon adapted  -  almost like it's part dragon itself.

In daylight I've never seen any silver-veined dragons, but down here in the shifting, shadowy darkness a lot of their scale patterns suddenly seem silver-edged, or seem so for a while, and then they move or stretch or half-turn and it goes away again and you wonder if you imagined it. Except that if you're imagining it you're imagining it a lot. I've stopped thinking I'm imagining it, because I see it so much, and this place no longer freaks me out the way it did in the beginning. But it does make me wonder about the caves. And how the dragons make somewhere a home. And the stone water-sculptures  -  stalactites and stalagmites and the other heaps and coils and masses and spines I don't know the names for  -  some of them are beyond even what I saw in my dreams. And why do so many of the heaps and coils look like sleeping dragons?

They kept me well fed, if a steady diet of grilled mutton and venison counts as well fed. There was a pool next to the hearth where we were, which was filled up by a trickle that ran down the wall. It was weirdly greasy and ickily warm and tasted of sulfur, but it was water, and I crept that step or two out of our niche when I needed to, so I wasn't thirsty, but food. . .. Lois tucked in at once and it obviously helped her, eating, but it was like, yeah, well, she's a dragon and it's not really me they're trying to feed anyway, I just happen to be here too  -  and I couldn't face it. If I could have curled up into a lumpy little ball of self-pity and stayed that way I probably would have.

But there was always Lois. I started eating finally because it obviously bothered her that I didn't. After she finished hers she'd come look at mine and look at me and look at the food again and look at me again . . . and it wasn't because she was still hungry. It was so obvious . . . and I was so stressed out it seemed okay that my baby dragon was doing something so easily translatable in human terms. It seemed sort of restful, in the middle of everything else that was going on. And eventually it was like "well you know if you ate something it might make the nausea go away, think of it as a scientific experiment" and hunger won.

And it did make me feel better  -  food  -  like I was still recognizably (duh) alive in all this totally impossible (no wait, "impossible" has been banished from the vocab) stuff, that it wasn't just all some really messed-up dream  -  that it wasn't just my dragon dreams had taken a really tyrannical (one might even say draconian, ha ha ha) turn for the worse. Which was kind of a mixed blessing really  -  if it was a messed-up dream eventually I'd wake up. Persephone eating those pomegranate seeds didn't mean she had to stay, it meant that she was finally waking up to the fact that she already was there and she could either cope or die. I think Alice was trying to wake up, grabbing all those EAT MEs and DRINK MEs. Maybe it was those first days in the dragons' cavern when I parted company with Alice at last.

Big dragons don't eat very often. So I suppose I should be grateful that they fed me as often as they did. A baby dragon my size eats a lot, but then it's busy growing up to be a dragon. And they must know that humans don't actually get a lot bigger than what I am. Maybe they just kept offering me food because, once I got started, I kept eating it. Maybe they noticed that Lois worried if I didn't eat as often as she did.

I missed carbs and fruit immediately and after about three days  -  I think it was probably three days.  -  I even found myself thinking a little wistfully about vegetables. After a week I might have eaten a green bean or two with pleasure, which would have been a first. I discovered the sulfur pool outlet, so I managed to have a bit of a wash now and then too without polluting everyone's drinking water, but it didn't work awfully well, and there was nothing I could do about my clothes except keep wearing them. Lois saved me from certain embarrassments. After her first meal she did her I-have-to-go-outdoors-now thing of scuttling in little circles making her distressed-peep noise, and the little Lois-rock in my head . . . well, it's not true that you can't imagine a smell. You can if it's a dragonlet who's trying to put across her immediate need for latrine space.

I don't know if running in circles and peeping is a common baby-dragon thing, or whether she was making smells in some of the big dragons' heads too, but Gulp reached her long neck out, touched her (enormous) nose to Lois' (tiny) nose  -  me busy trying to sieve myself through the rock at the back of our niche as Gulp's more-than-niche-sized nose got closer and closer  -  and then, well, pointed.

I followed, because I was going to need to make some smells too, pretty soon, and discovered this . . . brimstone chamber, I don't know what else to call it. It didn't smell like what humans did nor like what Lois did  -  it smelled like burning rock  -  like what I'd imagine you'd smell if you were standing somewhere near a volcano. It wasn't disgusting. If anything it was scary  -  I know, I keep droning on about how everything was so scary, but it's not as stupid as it sounds, maybe, giant poop is kind of scary  -  and it did make your eyes water.

I got in and out as fast as I could, although over time and use I noticed that the reason the chamber wasn't dark wasn't only that what the dragons left, uh, glowed slightly, but also because there was a very tall rock chimney that opened into the outer world and during the daytime a little light came down it. I wondered what the smell was like at the top  -  whether there was a blasted patch around the opening from the fumes. Also, the trench we used lay, or had been dug, at an angle, and everything tumbled or was washed down (there's a lot of inertial force to Giant Poop, and a big dragon takes a long time to have a pee) a big hole at the bottom end. It took me quite a while longer to figure out that the reason the fire that burned in the big central chamber smelled the way it did was because it was burning dried dragon dung. How did they dry it? And where? How did they figure out it burned? That last is probably a no-brainer to a dragon.

You're probably going off in six directions at once now, wanting to know if this means that dragons are civilized, or maybe you're busy shouting about how stupid I am for not Addressing This Very Important Subject Immediately. Well, I'm telling the story, like I told you at the beginning I was going to do  -  try to do  -  and I'm not going to address the radioactive question of the Civilization of Dragons. There's a lot of ink spilled elsewhere/space wasted on the internet over this, and the truth is I'm not interested. As far as I'm concerned that's the story we're still telling, and I'm not sure we're out of the foreword yet. It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)

But if you insist on knowing whether a dedicated latrine area is a sign of civilization, the answer is no; most den-living animals have something like it. Old Pete's caged dragons certainly had a dedicated latrine area, but then so does chinensis, for pity's sake, and nobody would mistake chinensis for being intelligent. And I couldn't have told you for sure that the trenches and the slope were dug rather than just found. You could at this point if this is all really getting up your nose (ha ha) also discount the mind stuff  -  I warn you, you won't be able to for much longer, so enjoy it while you can  -  by saying it's merely the way dragons communicate, like dogs growl or whine or raise or flatten their ears and their tails and their hackles.

I could argue for a fire in a hearth, but I admit that dragons being central-Australian in origin and having their own unique relationship with fire including a built-in lighting mechanism confuses the issue having a fire going at home for a dragon may be no more intellectual than a wild dog making a nest out of grass. I was myself more taken with the fact that Gulp pointed, but there are lemurs that point when they're making their "watch out" noise, and vervet monkeys have different warning calls  -  "watch out that's an eagle" or "watch out that's a snake," and everyone looks up and runs down or looks down and runs up. That's pretty good language, even if they can't discuss the meaning of life with it.

You know I'm really glad that they'd discovered the lichen on Mars before Lois and I got together. It's that lichen that really threw the barracuda in the guppy tank. It meant all the hardcore scientists were already off balance when the idea came up that there really was something even a little more special and unusual about dragons than that they were really, really big and vomited fire. After the Martian lichen, some of the scientists came quietly.

But that's another story. I'm getting ahead of myself again. It gets harder to tell it in order as I get nearer the end. Not the end, nothing like, but the place I am, writing this.

I'm back at the how-do-I-tell-it place again  -  where I started  -  and where I am now more or less permanently, ever since Gulp picked Lois and me up and flew away with us. Where there are no he-saids and she-saids  -  except for that gibbering chucklehead Jake. The where that is the why I didn't want to start, because I knew this was coming. What will it be like when we get an astronaut to Mars and he or she gets friendly with the lichen and is invited to sit in on one of their group sessions? Which they probably will, since the lichen seems to have been disappointed with the conversations they've/it's tried to have with all the probes. What will that be like? It'll be STRANGE. And I bet when the astronauts write up their reports they'll be using lots of phrases like "this is impossible to explain but. . ."

I don't know how long we  -  Lois and I  -  were in that cavern, except to go to the toilet, before they let us go anywhere else. I think, from the daylight through the latrine chimney, and how often they fed us (and how often we went to the latrine), it must have been about five days. But I kept falling asleep, or maybe I just kept passing out, either because I was very, very tired (which I was: weirdness and terror will do that to you) or because (because of the weirdness and the terror) I needed the escape. When I was asleep I could be somewhere familiar . . . which is pretty funny when it was so often a cave full of dragons. It's just it was a different cave: ow, that laughter hurts.

Lois stuck close to me all those first days; I don't know if she was pretty weirded out her own self or whether she knew I was in trouble  -  or whether she was picking up "trouble" from me or the dragons  -  but she seemed even to lose interest in Gulp for a while. I'd wake up out of one of my sudden naps and not immediately see her and think okay, that's fine, she's finally gone exploring, that's a good thing, trying not to feel utterly lonesome and forlorn, and then there'd be a swirly sort of commotion like looking down the top of a blender with the lid off after you've dumped something really challenging in, and there would be Lois surfacing from the bottom of the heap of dragon scales.

I also fell asleep a lot  -  although I think that was more like passing out  -  in the middle of my attempts-at-talking with the black dragon, who I started out calling Nero because I kept thinking about burning, but in the first place that only scared me worse, and in the second place it was pretty unfair under the circumstances. He never so much as showed me his teeth, let alone shot fire at me the way Gulp had, and he couldn't help being big. (I don't know who it was fired at me when Gulp first arrived with her passengers, but I'd stake Smokehill's ownership deeds that it wasn't him. He wouldn't have missed.)

And that sense of waiting he did so well  -  at first it rattled me too, but then everything rattled me  -  and never mind what a wuss I am, it would have rattled you too  -  and then I began to, I don't know, be kind of grateful, or to rely on it, or something, and then the writingness seemed to be even a kind of serenity, even, almost, a kind of  -  comfort (at this point I started worrying about what I knew about prisoners identifying with their captors and people in institutions forgetting how to live in the world, but at least worrying, even about very weird new things, made my brain feel sort of like it still belonged to me, that we hadn't totally parted company as a result of recent events), and by the time they let Lois and me out of the fire-cavern for the first time since we'd come in, I'd started calling him Buddha. Which became Bud, of course.

I think it was him who told Gulp to take us outside, although it may have been Gulp's idea. At first I think I  -  and probably Lois too because she was attached to me  -  were strictly Gulp and Bud's problem. After the initial brief outburst of semi-mayhem the other dragons sort of sat back and said "good luck" or "better you than me" or something (possibly "I hope you get over this dumb idea soon"). It took longer before I started getting any kind of an individual fix on any of the other dragons, although I was often aware of that barely-restrained-avalanche thinking  -  or "thinking"  -  from them, like a bunch of journalists being held back by the yellow tape at a crime scene on a TV cop show.

The thing is that as the hours, or the days, passed, I got more and more fixated on sunlight, sky, trees, fresh air, and less able to think, or try to think, about anything else. Some of that was just fear, of course. All there was in the cavern was stone and fire and darkness  -  and dragons, the smallest of which still made me look like a Yorkshire terrier standing next to a hippopotamus. There were no dragonlets that I ever saw, except Lois.

When I came to, my head still hurt, but not quite as much, and I had Lois' head jammed under my chin, humming. It wasn't a very good hum, it kept breaking up and then starting to rise as if it was going to turn into a shriek, and then she'd catch herself and yank it back down into a hum. But she was trying to hum. And she was only a baby. Time I started dragging myself back together. If I could still find all the pieces.

So I tried to sit up. The moment I moved, the avalanche in my skull started again and I put my hands to my head and squeezed. The avalanche stopped. It wasn't the squeezing though, it was another roar from Gulp: I moved, the avalanche started, Gulp roared, the avalanche stopped. Well, it didn't stop exactly. All the boulders got smaller and they did stop rolling around, as if they'd been flash-frozen by the noise. Or glued. But if the glue wasn't strong enough they'd fall over and start crashing around again. And I doubted the glue was that good. The ones that had stopped rolling were only the up-close ones anyway. There was still a lot of crashing going on at a little more of a distance. It was very, very weird. Almost weird enough not to be horrible. But not quite. And very, very painful. There was a softish, as rocks go, rather quivery, bristly glowing blob from Lois . . . and a great big sort of angular looming thing, like she was still standing over us except she wasn't, from Gulp.

And outside my skull there were a lot of big looming things. Big looming things. Big looming things.

Yes. You knew this already, reading it here, but I was having a lot. of trouble with reality. We were in a cavern full of dragons.

I'll let that sink in for a minute. It takes a lot of sinking in. Think yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside  -  and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can't stand on her hind legs and not bump her head  -  and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try.

There was an actual fire in a big hearth-space (big  -  Wilsonville would probably fit into it) not too far away from where Lois and I skulked in a little half niche in the uneven stony wall, although I couldn't see what it was burning, and it didn't smell like wood, and the red light it cast seemed to me more purple than wood firelight. (It didn't smell like meat or blood or dead things either, which was just as well. Although I was weak and shaky probably from lack of food too I was not up to the concept of eating from any direction, eater or eatee, and I was particularly not up to thinking reassuring thoughts about how dragons don't eat humans.) There was a very strong smell of dragon over the strong smell of the smoke, which was almost as overwhelming as the sight of them was  -  and the echoes, when Gulp roared, must have been making old Earth totter on her axis.

It was like there was some kind of geometric progression-explosion for every sense I was forced to use: sight, hearing, smell . . . the smell was strong enough that I was tasting it too, which only left touch, and Lois and the nobbly rock at my back were not much comfort. If you wake up and find yourself chained to a wall in a dungeon and there are a lot of spiky-looking iron things hanging by the fire, you're relieved there isn't anyone looking at you thoughtfully while he's holding the spikiest in the fire, but that you're alone isn't much comfort.

I say the nobbly rock wasn't much comfort, and You have to remember I was aching in everything I had to ache in, but we were also in some kind of nest. I was so sore and tired and rattled that it took me a little while  -  what with the cavern-full-of-dragons thing kind of taking my attention  -  to realize this. I was lying on the ground, but I was really well padded with  -  I picked up a handful of the stuff and let it slip through my fingers and patter back into the heap. Dragon scales. They're a little prickly I admit, but in heaps they're surprisingly soft. And warm. Even a cavern which is full of dragons and a small-town-sized fireplace going a blast has drafts, particularly when you figure the ceiling is over sixty feet up.

Gulp sat or crouched near us, with the end of her tail flung out in front of us, so we were barricaded in, by the fire, by the wall, and by Gulp's tail. Here Gulp was a dark but streaky iridescent green; it was some weird light, because she looked darker by ordinary daylight, and it was like thick red twilight in the cavern. Remember I said that when we'd first come down here last night (if it had been last night) there'd been something almost familiar about the weird light? Yeah. It was just like in my dreams. I couldn't decide if I recognized the smell from my dreams too. And I was often frightened in my dreams. But the damn crushing terror was new and like complicated in this Toto-I-have-the-feeling-we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more way, like maybe I had a whole five horrible new senses to experience it with or something, thanks a lot.

The dragons around us were different sizes and different colors; there were a dozen of them, maybe fifteen  -  that I could see  -  that I thought I could see. No, I didn't recognize any of them  -  which was a relief: I know, I'm spending a lot of time here redefining "limit" and "edge" (and "crazy" and "impossible") but recognizing one of these dragons from my dreams of dragons would have been waaay over any definition of any edge you like  -  even if in my dreams they were, well, friendlier. Or at least they were okay with my being there, which these guys were not.

It was hard to tell dragons from rocks and shadows, and while I was never sure about this either it seemed to me that it wasn't always the same dozen or fifteen dragons  -  although I thought Gulp was nearly as big as most of them. The one I could see most clearly, however, was a lot bigger than Gulp, facing us from the other side of the hearth. He was black, with no iridescence at all, although on some of him  -  eye ridges and nose, spine, elbows  -  the scales were outlined in red. I had thought Gulp was scary  -  he was scary. He made Gulp, look like a cuddly toy dragon. A fifty-foot cuddly toy dragon. Looking at the size of his head and the one front claw that were reasonably illuminated by the firelight I figured he probably went on forever. His tail probably came out at the caves by the Institute, near where I'd seen Billy that time I'd gone to find him, to tell him Dad had okayed my overnight solo. What a long time ago that was. Sort of the time version of the length of this dragon. And I wondered, suddenly, if dragons were what Billy had been worrying about, down there in the cave. He hadn't really seen a dragon tail, had he? Sitting in a cavern full of dragons, anything was possible. I might as well just get rid of "impossible" as a concept and stop wasting time trying to redefine it.

Monster Dragon's eye slowly blinked. It was like watching an eclipse. I had the feeling I didn't want to look into that eye, as if it might blind me, like you're not supposed to look at the sun, even during an eclipse. The leader, maybe? Alpha male and all that? In that case he might be Lois' dad too, if Old Pete was right and it's only the alphas that breed. I wondered who had inherited Lois' mom's position.

Cautiously I checked the inside of my skull to see if I could tell which boulder Monster Dragon's was. I expected him to be the largest and the hurtingest, but he wasn't. He was large, all right, but he was almost not a boulder at all, more like a . . . a big lump of clay the potter hasn't decided what to do with yet. A bit, you know, malleable. Or poised. Balanced. Almost peaceful, which was pretty damned dramatic under the circumstances. How did I know it was him? I don't know. And to the extent that I could wonder about anything in the old, comparatively-normal-human Jake way, I wondered just what the last three weeks of hanging out with Gulp had done to me.

Had she meant to teach me to talk to her? Or was that an accident of having to spend too much time with me  -  because of Lois? Having decided not to fry me, that is. Then why hadn't it happened with Old Pete? Because if he'd started having dragon-shaped, dragon-identified headaches, he'd have mentioned it  -  because it wouldn't be just boring human weakness any more, it would be about dragons.

Was it Lois again  -  the emergency of Lois? First the extended emergency begun by having stuck her down my shirt front right after she was born. And then . . . you know those stories of moms lifting the front ends of trucks off their children the trucks have just run over? Maybe it was like that. In the stress of those last moments back at Westcamp, I managed to get through to Gulp. I mean, just having a headache . . . Eric gives me a headache, and we've never gone in for mind-reading. (Automatically the thought followed: Now there's a really horrible idea.) And then I thought of his voice over the two-way, and I wondered how he was doing. How everyone at the Institute was doing. My father was hostage . . . ?

And I'm sitting around, trapped and helpless and hallucinating, in a cave full of dragons. I know dragons don't eat humans . . . but if we're playing the Walrus and the Carpenter here, I'm definitely an oyster.

So there I was  -  out of time, out of humanity, out of life, certainly life as I knew it, with an aching, echoing head full of . . . waiting. Oh great. What do I do now?

I can't tell you how bad this was, how lost I was, how mindsmithereeningly alone I was, in this flickery shadowy red-purply nowhere, full of huge breathing shadowy things with huge shining eyes. And there I was, scared silly, scared beyond silly. And one of the things I came out of that experience with is a total inability to use the word "telepathy." It just doesn't fit, okay? And also . . . telepathic dragons. Pleeeease. That is so last century. I've got like shelves of Mom's old story books with telepathic (if pouchless) dragons in them.

But the problem remains that us mouth-flapping talking-crazy humans don't have any words for any kind of silent stuff, which is maybe why we overuse "telepathy" so hard. Like a color-blind species making everything red because it's the only color they've heard of, even though they can't see it either, but it makes them feel clever, like they can imagine color. We can deal with radio waves, that they exist I mean, and even stuff like our dragon fence, but communication that isn't through our standard five senses is as taboo as the idea that any animals but us have real intelligence. So I've called it "telepathy" a few times already because I haven't got anything else to call it, but I'm stopping now. You can just make up your own word. "Ummgmmgmm" or something, because it occurred to me eventually that the nearest thing us humans do have to some of what dragons do is a kind of inaudible hum. Which is maybe how Lois and I groped toward a common wavelength at the beginning. Mouth talking isn't completely on a different planet from an audible hum, and once you've got to the vocal-cord-jiggling humming part. . . . That's still not right, okay? But it's a piece of some of it. Maybe.

I'm sitting here now, a long time after I woke up in the cave full of dragons for the first time, thinking, It's nothing like that. But what is it like? If it's like anything  -  and it's not like anything or I wouldn't be making such a drooling idiot of myself trying to explain  -  it's maybe more like sign language, except that it's going on in your head, with a little audible harmonic background some of the time. Like you might wave your hands (or you do if you're me) while you're talking. Part of where my Headache came from was just trying to grab on to something that almost makes sense, but not really  -  like the brain strain version of your eyes struggling to see through somebody else's glasses.

I remembered that thinking words at Gulp hadn't done much good, and while I wasn't sure what Gulp had understood, she'd got us away before the helicopter had arrived, and while she might have had a big avoid thing for helicopters the way all our dragons seemed to about all human stuff . . . she'd got us away. Maybe only because Lois was too young to leave her mutant freak serial murderer mom, but I couldn't quite believe that. I may have been her worst nightmare but I just didn't feel Gulp was defending us both now only for Lois' sake. Which is also to say that I freaking  -  mutant well was picking stuff up from the Gulp rock in my head. Emergency may be a hell of a way to make contact, but by golly it works.

So one way or another here I was in a cavern full of dragons, and still alive to tell about it. Supposing I got out of the cavern full of dragons again, alive, and there was anyone I dared tell. . . . I was going to tell them what? I squeezed my skull with my hands again, till my wrists ached. Sometimes it's just your thoughts you can't deal with, and I couldn't deal with mine.

Slowly I tried to organize a picture in my head of Lois and me playing in the meadow where Gulp had first found us. Sort of out in the front of my head, away from my private thoughts.

This was sucked away  -  the same dizzy, queasy no-longer-entirely-me-doing-it feeling as I'd had when I'd been trying to "talk" to Gulp and almost immediately there was a picture in my head of . . . well, in hindsight, it was a cavern full of dragons, but I didn't know that at the time. It was way too bizarre. The only reason I even knew I was receiving something was that it was way too bizarre for me to have made it up. I've learned a little more now about how dragons see things, or at least how they make their head-picture-communications of what they see, which I guess is also some kind of shorthand like an alphabet is for us. I know the this-group-of-dragons, uh, thingummy. It isn't even really a picture. But it's an image, or a symbol of an image, or a gesture of an image.

But it's not only an image. This is the really hard part. You have to do something too  -  like if one person puts out a hand the other person is supposed to put out their hand too and shake it. It's the handshake that makes it  -  a handshake. Or like the famous stability model of the three, legged stool. If there was a dragon-alphabet version, it would have one of its legs missing: You'd hold it up  -  you'd make it stable  -  by thinking about it, or by thinking, "This is a three-legged stool. Never mind one of its legs is missing." The dragon alphabet mostly doesn't just lie there like ours does. Mostly you have to connect with it somehow, with what you're seeing or receiving, you have to hold something up or plug something in, to make it really work. This makes "reading" it a lot harder. If your two-legged stool falls over, you aren't getting the message "stability." More likely you're thinking it's something about falling over, which it is, kind of, only backwards.

This was the first time I'd received something sent from a dragon. At least that I knew about. Well, any dragon but Lois. That I'd started maybe picking stuff up from Gulp was new and uncertain  -  and I hadn't learned about having to plug in yet either. This time at least I was sort of expecting it  -  expecting something  -  probably because I'd "known" that the big lump of peaceful clay in my head was actually Big-Goes-on-Forever Dragon. It was a little like  -  a little tiny microscopic  -  like looking through one of those cheesy 3D viewer things, that you put a wheel of pictures in and click them around, and what you see is really nothing like what you see in the world-it's sort of too flat and too jumping-out-at-you simultaneously. (Okay, how retro are we at the Institute? We still sell the glasses, and half a dozen wheels of 3D photos of Smokehill. The funny thing is that people still buy them.) It was a bit like that, only worse. At least when you're looking through the viewfinder at several rows of mountains that don't line up in any direction, including with the horizon or with each other, you know what they're trying to do  -  what the picture is trying to be. And you can take the viewer away from your eyes and your normal, ordinary life is still there.

But this  -  this was  -  gah, I've run out of words again. "Amazing"  -  boring. "Incredible"  -  too vague. "Stunning"  -  my least favorite adjective even before the Headache because it always sounds to me like being hit on the head with a hammer.

So sending-and-receiving, so, proving that COMMUNICATION was going on, or at least that was what both sides were trying to make happen, didn't make my poor fractured head hurt any less, but it made having a headache sort of make some sense: my brain was being coerced  -  like a window being jimmied-into behaving in a way that it was never built for. Cue sound of splintering. Gulp hadn't done anything like this  -  although "talking" to her had briefly paralyzed me to the point that I couldn't flick the switch on the two-way. Maybe this was the next stage. Because I had the strangest feeling that Monster Dragon was actually helping me somehow. That he was really trying to teach me . . . maybe even trying to be taught by me . . . poor freaking dragon.

The mess in my head seemed to be saying, Yes, we know about that. Go on. Although I want to emphasize that there wasn't any impatience or rudeness about it  -  even in the state I was in I could feel that. Could feel that gentleness. It just was, like being in the cave of dragons (hungry, shaking, bewildered, and terrified thrown in free) was.

Okay. Right. Go on with what? And like how?

I could tell you a lot about those first days I spent in the cavern full of dragons, trying to learn to talk to them, and they to me, but most of it is about not succeeding, which pretty much any scientist will tell you is 99 percent of what you do, finding out what does not work. A scientist, though, puts his notes down and goes away and has a cup of coffee or reads a newspaper or something. Even a field biologist counting scales or scat has a campsite, somewhere that is away from the specimens he thinks he's studying, something that's his not theirs (whoever they are). A good field biologist wants to be able to go away, because one of the things you're always supposed to be worrying about is affecting your object of study's behavior by your presence. The Institute had been worrying about that ever since Old Pete opened the cage doors, because it's always been so hard to learn anything about our dragons, beyond that they apparently were still out there somewhere. And if our best attempts at being tactful had already driven them underground, before what happened to Lois' mother. . ..

We hadn't known it was literally underground, although that was always a good guess, in a landscape like this one, with a lot of underground caves. So maybe that was what Billy had been worrying about. But I doubted that if I wandered down one of the tunnels out of the fire-cave I'd find myself coming out beside the Institute, at least not before I starved to death. And besides, I wasn't going anywhere. I was sitting in a cave surrounded by dragons and far from being a discreet note-taker I was the object of study  -  the lab rat, in fact. And I didn't get to go away. Lab rats don't. I was there and they were all looking at me, with their huge sheeny bottomless eyes. And climbing around inside my head and making my skull sore. When Gulliver got stuck in Brobdingnag, the giants didn't climb around inside his head.

I told you way back at the beginning that I've always found caves magical. I'm not sure this tendency was helpful under these conditions. If things get too surreal you haven't got anywhere to, you know, stand any more, to say "okay this is real real," so you can maybe measure some of the rest of it, so that "up" and "down" and "breathing" are no longer dangerously alien concepts that you have to keep checking up on. And that's hard. But these caves . . . even now that I'm used to them, and used to sharing them with a lot of dragons . . . it's like the caves themselves are part of the, uh, conversation, part of the something's-here prickle down your spine, part of the watchingness  -  the consciousness. Part of the communication process  -  the connecting, the plugging ill. The up and the down and the breathing.

I still have no idea how far the caves extend, nor in how many directions. But they're big enough to hold quite a few dragons. And while I never have found anything down there that shares the space the dragons use, except some beetles and spiders and a few tiny flying things to get caught in the webs, all the shadows are populated. Which is what I mean about the consciousness. And the breathing.

And there are a lot of shadows. The rock itself is beautiful, mostly red and black with some dark green and gold, and there's silver veining that runs through a lot of it with no pattern I can see, although it also has a sort of wrinkly gleam almost like scales. As if the rock is dragon colored, dragon adapted  -  almost like it's part dragon itself.

In daylight I've never seen any silver-veined dragons, but down here in the shifting, shadowy darkness a lot of their scale patterns suddenly seem silver-edged, or seem so for a while, and then they move or stretch or half-turn and it goes away again and you wonder if you imagined it. Except that if you're imagining it you're imagining it a lot. I've stopped thinking I'm imagining it, because I see it so much, and this place no longer freaks me out the way it did in the beginning. But it does make me wonder about the caves. And how the dragons make somewhere a home. And the stone water-sculptures  -  stalactites and stalagmites and the other heaps and coils and masses and spines I don't know the names for  -  some of them are beyond even what I saw in my dreams. And why do so many of the heaps and coils look like sleeping dragons?

They kept me well fed, if a steady diet of grilled mutton and venison counts as well fed. There was a pool next to the hearth where we were, which was filled up by a trickle that ran down the wall. It was weirdly greasy and ickily warm and tasted of sulfur, but it was water, and I crept that step or two out of our niche when I needed to, so I wasn't thirsty, but food. . .. Lois tucked in at once and it obviously helped her, eating, but it was like, yeah, well, she's a dragon and it's not really me they're trying to feed anyway, I just happen to be here too  -  and I couldn't face it. If I could have curled up into a lumpy little ball of self-pity and stayed that way I probably would have.

But there was always Lois. I started eating finally because it obviously bothered her that I didn't. After she finished hers she'd come look at mine and look at me and look at the food again and look at me again . . . and it wasn't because she was still hungry. It was so obvious . . . and I was so stressed out it seemed okay that my baby dragon was doing something so easily translatable in human terms. It seemed sort of restful, in the middle of everything else that was going on. And eventually it was like "well you know if you ate something it might make the nausea go away, think of it as a scientific experiment" and hunger won.

And it did make me feel better  -  food  -  like I was still recognizably (duh) alive in all this totally impossible (no wait, "impossible" has been banished from the vocab) stuff, that it wasn't just all some really messed-up dream  -  that it wasn't just my dragon dreams had taken a really tyrannical (one might even say draconian, ha ha ha) turn for the worse. Which was kind of a mixed blessing really  -  if it was a messed-up dream eventually I'd wake up. Persephone eating those pomegranate seeds didn't mean she had to stay, it meant that she was finally waking up to the fact that she already was there and she could either cope or die. I think Alice was trying to wake up, grabbing all those EAT MEs and DRINK MEs. Maybe it was those first days in the dragons' cavern when I parted company with Alice at last.

Big dragons don't eat very often. So I suppose I should be grateful that they fed me as often as they did. A baby dragon my size eats a lot, but then it's busy growing up to be a dragon. And they must know that humans don't actually get a lot bigger than what I am. Maybe they just kept offering me food because, once I got started, I kept eating it. Maybe they noticed that Lois worried if I didn't eat as often as she did.

I missed carbs and fruit immediately and after about three days  -  I think it was probably three days.  -  I even found myself thinking a little wistfully about vegetables. After a week I might have eaten a green bean or two with pleasure, which would have been a first. I discovered the sulfur pool outlet, so I managed to have a bit of a wash now and then too without polluting everyone's drinking water, but it didn't work awfully well, and there was nothing I could do about my clothes except keep wearing them. Lois saved me from certain embarrassments. After her first meal she did her I-have-to-go-outdoors-now thing of scuttling in little circles making her distressed-peep noise, and the little Lois-rock in my head . . . well, it's not true that you can't imagine a smell. You can if it's a dragonlet who's trying to put across her immediate need for latrine space.

I don't know if running in circles and peeping is a common baby-dragon thing, or whether she was making smells in some of the big dragons' heads too, but Gulp reached her long neck out, touched her (enormous) nose to Lois' (tiny) nose  -  me busy trying to sieve myself through the rock at the back of our niche as Gulp's more-than-niche-sized nose got closer and closer  -  and then, well, pointed.

I followed, because I was going to need to make some smells too, pretty soon, and discovered this . . . brimstone chamber, I don't know what else to call it. It didn't smell like what humans did nor like what Lois did  -  it smelled like burning rock  -  like what I'd imagine you'd smell if you were standing somewhere near a volcano. It wasn't disgusting. If anything it was scary  -  I know, I keep droning on about how everything was so scary, but it's not as stupid as it sounds, maybe, giant poop is kind of scary  -  and it did make your eyes water.

I got in and out as fast as I could, although over time and use I noticed that the reason the chamber wasn't dark wasn't only that what the dragons left, uh, glowed slightly, but also because there was a very tall rock chimney that opened into the outer world and during the daytime a little light came down it. I wondered what the smell was like at the top  -  whether there was a blasted patch around the opening from the fumes. Also, the trench we used lay, or had been dug, at an angle, and everything tumbled or was washed down (there's a lot of inertial force to Giant Poop, and a big dragon takes a long time to have a pee) a big hole at the bottom end. It took me quite a while longer to figure out that the reason the fire that burned in the big central chamber smelled the way it did was because it was burning dried dragon dung. How did they dry it? And where? How did they figure out it burned? That last is probably a no-brainer to a dragon.

You're probably going off in six directions at once now, wanting to know if this means that dragons are civilized, or maybe you're busy shouting about how stupid I am for not Addressing This Very Important Subject Immediately. Well, I'm telling the story, like I told you at the beginning I was going to do  -  try to do  -  and I'm not going to address the radioactive question of the Civilization of Dragons. There's a lot of ink spilled elsewhere/space wasted on the internet over this, and the truth is I'm not interested. As far as I'm concerned that's the story we're still telling, and I'm not sure we're out of the foreword yet. It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)

But if you insist on knowing whether a dedicated latrine area is a sign of civilization, the answer is no; most den-living animals have something like it. Old Pete's caged dragons certainly had a dedicated latrine area, but then so does chinensis, for pity's sake, and nobody would mistake chinensis for being intelligent. And I couldn't have told you for sure that the trenches and the slope were dug rather than just found. You could at this point if this is all really getting up your nose (ha ha) also discount the mind stuff  -  I warn you, you won't be able to for much longer, so enjoy it while you can  -  by saying it's merely the way dragons communicate, like dogs growl or whine or raise or flatten their ears and their tails and their hackles.

I could argue for a fire in a hearth, but I admit that dragons being central-Australian in origin and having their own unique relationship with fire including a built-in lighting mechanism confuses the issue having a fire going at home for a dragon may be no more intellectual than a wild dog making a nest out of grass. I was myself more taken with the fact that Gulp pointed, but there are lemurs that point when they're making their "watch out" noise, and vervet monkeys have different warning calls  -  "watch out that's an eagle" or "watch out that's a snake," and everyone looks up and runs down or looks down and runs up. That's pretty good language, even if they can't discuss the meaning of life with it.

You know I'm really glad that they'd discovered the lichen on Mars before Lois and I got together. It's that lichen that really threw the barracuda in the guppy tank. It meant all the hardcore scientists were already off balance when the idea came up that there really was something even a little more special and unusual about dragons than that they were really, really big and vomited fire. After the Martian lichen, some of the scientists came quietly.

But that's another story. I'm getting ahead of myself again. It gets harder to tell it in order as I get nearer the end. Not the end, nothing like, but the place I am, writing this.

I'm back at the how-do-I-tell-it place again  -  where I started  -  and where I am now more or less permanently, ever since Gulp picked Lois and me up and flew away with us. Where there are no he-saids and she-saids  -  except for that gibbering chucklehead Jake. The where that is the why I didn't want to start, because I knew this was coming. What will it be like when we get an astronaut to Mars and he or she gets friendly with the lichen and is invited to sit in on one of their group sessions? Which they probably will, since the lichen seems to have been disappointed with the conversations they've/it's tried to have with all the probes. What will that be like? It'll be STRANGE. And I bet when the astronauts write up their reports they'll be using lots of phrases like "this is impossible to explain but. . ."

I don't know how long we  -  Lois and I  -  were in that cavern, except to go to the toilet, before they let us go anywhere else. I think, from the daylight through the latrine chimney, and how often they fed us (and how often we went to the latrine), it must have been about five days. But I kept falling asleep, or maybe I just kept passing out, either because I was very, very tired (which I was: weirdness and terror will do that to you) or because (because of the weirdness and the terror) I needed the escape. When I was asleep I could be somewhere familiar . . . which is pretty funny when it was so often a cave full of dragons. It's just it was a different cave: ow, that laughter hurts.

Lois stuck close to me all those first days; I don't know if she was pretty weirded out her own self or whether she knew I was in trouble  -  or whether she was picking up "trouble" from me or the dragons  -  but she seemed even to lose interest in Gulp for a while. I'd wake up out of one of my sudden naps and not immediately see her and think okay, that's fine, she's finally gone exploring, that's a good thing, trying not to feel utterly lonesome and forlorn, and then there'd be a swirly sort of commotion like looking down the top of a blender with the lid off after you've dumped something really challenging in, and there would be Lois surfacing from the bottom of the heap of dragon scales.

I also fell asleep a lot  -  although I think that was more like passing out  -  in the middle of my attempts-at-talking with the black dragon, who I started out calling Nero because I kept thinking about burning, but in the first place that only scared me worse, and in the second place it was pretty unfair under the circumstances. He never so much as showed me his teeth, let alone shot fire at me the way Gulp had, and he couldn't help being big. (I don't know who it was fired at me when Gulp first arrived with her passengers, but I'd stake Smokehill's ownership deeds that it wasn't him. He wouldn't have missed.)

And that sense of waiting he did so well  -  at first it rattled me too, but then everything rattled me  -  and never mind what a wuss I am, it would have rattled you too  -  and then I began to, I don't know, be kind of grateful, or to rely on it, or something, and then the writingness seemed to be even a kind of serenity, even, almost, a kind of  -  comfort (at this point I started worrying about what I knew about prisoners identifying with their captors and people in institutions forgetting how to live in the world, but at least worrying, even about very weird new things, made my brain feel sort of like it still belonged to me, that we hadn't totally parted company as a result of recent events), and by the time they let Lois and me out of the fire-cavern for the first time since we'd come in, I'd started calling him Buddha. Which became Bud, of course.

I think it was him who told Gulp to take us outside, although it may have been Gulp's idea. At first I think I  -  and probably Lois too because she was attached to me  -  were strictly Gulp and Bud's problem. After the initial brief outburst of semi-mayhem the other dragons sort of sat back and said "good luck" or "better you than me" or something (possibly "I hope you get over this dumb idea soon"). It took longer before I started getting any kind of an individual fix on any of the other dragons, although I was often aware of that barely-restrained-avalanche thinking  -  or "thinking"  -  from them, like a bunch of journalists being held back by the yellow tape at a crime scene on a TV cop show.

The thing is that as the hours, or the days, passed, I got more and more fixated on sunlight, sky, trees, fresh air, and less able to think, or try to think, about anything else. Some of that was just fear, of course. All there was in the cavern was stone and fire and darkness  -  and dragons, the smallest of which still made me look like a Yorkshire terrier standing next to a hippopotamus. There were no dragonlets that I ever saw, except Lois.

I don't think it was dark in there, to the dragons, or maybe they just liked dark. But they moved easily among the shadows, winding their ways among the boulders and stone pillars, and there was this almost-motionless thing they did, where all you could see was the glow of their eyes (dragons don't blink nearly as often as humans do; mostly their eyes are either open or closed), and then you'd try to follow the rest of them and decide which of the hummocks were stone and which of them were dragon, and then every now and then a boulder would move. Occasionally the firelight fell on someone's side so YOU could see him or her breathing, but not very often. I think this probably made it worse, the not knowing, although being a Yorkshire terrier surrounded by hippos, how much detail did you need? You're alive because nobody's eaten you. Or sat on you.

But I got so that I couldn't think as far back as the institute and other human beings  -  Dad, Billy, Martha  -  that was too hard. Even not remembering Eric or f.l.s or cleaning odorata's cage, which you might think was a good thing, left a hole, made me less me. The dragons weren't being deliberately cruel  -  you know, something like, hey, his kind is responsible for all our problems! Let's make him suffer!  -  or even thoughtless. I was just too strange for them. (But presumably a lot less scary. At least as just me, all by myself. As the forward scout of the army at your gate, maybe scary enough.) And maybe Bud figured out that what he was increasingly picking up from me was misery.

On the fifth day, if it was the fifth day, Gulp moved forward from whatever shadows she'd been in  -  although mostly I could see her, like I could see Bud, near to Lois' and my corner, and the other dragons stayed farther away  -  anyway she unwound herself from some shadows and then carefully did her invitation-for-transport display, which is that she folded herself up as low as she'd go and then laid her neck and head flat on the ground in front of us . . . which I might still not have got except that suddenly there were some very queer-looking things in my head that were enough like trees, in my tree-deprived state, that I was willing to jump at anything that looked like a chance.

With us in our small-by-dragon-standards niche, and having her arm's length  -  my arm's length  -  away, her breath was like the blast from the biggest fan heater you ever imagined although I swear she was trying to breathe shallowly. Lois clambered up her head to the top of her skull at once, making a happy peep this time, but when Gulp didn't move, I, well, I didn't jump, couldn't she just have pointed to the door and I'd walk? But that didn't seem to be an option. She rolled her ginormous eye at me  -  and I've already told you that being glared at by a dragon is a powerful experience  -  and I took a deep breath just taking a deep breath makes you feel extra paltry, by the way, in a cavern full of dragons. And I reluctantly followed Lois, although I went the long way up her shoulder. Even the thought of getting out of the cavern didn't make me like stepping on a dragon. And I wasn't even thinking about the throwing-up part of traveling that way.

But I also didn't really know that she might not be taking us farther in. The trees in my head really weren't very good trees  -  not as a human thinks about trees  -  not as a human who doesn't yet know how to connect thinks about trees  -  and I was afraid they were just an echo of my longing. Maybe the caves had sort of greenish geometric rocks farther in (although it was a geometry I didn't know and I wouldn't have wanted to say they were rocks either).

I had my eyes closed for a lot of it  -  rocky walls flashing past that close are not comfortable viewing  -  and there were a lot of lurches that if they were dragon stair steps were a lot too long for human legs. But I noticed that we were humping our way upward not down and I think it probably would have broken what remained of my sanity if it had turned out she wasn't going to take us out of the caves after all. But she was. I smelled it first  -  cool, moving air that didn't have burning in it  -  and then I opened my eyes and saw daylight. . ..

It was another sunny day outdoors. Outdoors. I had felt so far away, not just underground, which is intense enough to someone like me whose desk is always as close to the window as I can get it and who can't sit still more than a few hours without going outside, barring blizzards, and even then I'll probably go stand on the doorstep and look hopefully for any sign of it stopping till the flakes make my eyelashes stick together and I can't see any more. But in the whole crazy inexplicable business of trying to talk to Bud, it felt like years had passed in the flickery reddish windowless darkness  -  I was crazy enough by then to wonder if maybe years had passed, like in old tales of people who visit the fairies.

I slithered down Gulp's shoulder and fell on the ground  -  the stories of the early ocean crossings, when sailors and passengers get out and kiss the ground when there's finally some ground to kiss after months at sea. But at least they'd had air and sky.

I plastered myself against the bit of ground I landed on, like it was my best friend, which it was. I even bit off some grass  -  well, it wasn't grass, but it was some kind of green thing. I suppose I might have poisoned myself, but I didn't. It had a bitter taste but it tasted good. It tasted of sunlight  -  of the world aboveground, of the world where humans existed  -  I don't know. I almost felt crazier from having got outside again  -  from having spent five days (or five hundred years) trying to adjust to being a light-deprived lab rat and being scared out of my small lab-rat mind about one of the dragons losing its temper. Bud may have been boss dragon but I knew without being able to talk to any of them about it that not everybody agreed with him about wasting time on me.

Bud had followed us out, and was lying down, trying to look small, I think, like Gulp tried, but he had his head raised  -  oh, a mere seven or eight feet off the ground-watching me. After I had crawled around on my hands and knees for a few minutes, just reminding myself of dirt and plants  -  I think I did some whimpering too  -  I stood up, staggering a little, although I'd been walking in the fire-cavern okay, and turned my face up to the sun, and did a crazy little dance  -  and Lois did it with me, cavorting and peeping.

One of the weirdest things about the fire-cavern was how quiet it was. Except for Lois and me nobody ever said anything  -  or growled or harked or whined or peeped or chirped or chortled or shouted. Most ly you heard nothing at all, except the sound of your own breathing and a sort of low, eerily harmonic background sssssssssh that was presumably the dragons breathing, but you couldn't identify it. It sounded more like gremlins to me  -  some kind of cave spook whispering around in the dark. Occasionally you heard these great big creatures moving around, big soft echoey rustles, a few clicks and clatters of talons and wings; and occasionally they made one or another kind of rumble, like maybe a dragon cough or a dragon snort, but they didn't talk. Or hum. Not to hear anyway. (That came later, when the other dragons started deciding that Bud and Gulp's idea about me wasn't so awful after all. Or maybe it's just that dragons are good losers.) You did hear the fire a bit, but a dried-dragon-dung fire doesn't crackle like a wood fire does, as well as being too purple-blue.

And my human thing about talking had gone away too. You know how I kept talking at Westcamp after Gulp arrived. Not in the dragon rave. I hummed a little bit back at Lois but that was about all. It was almost like my mouth was pressed shut, by the weight of all that darkness and all those dragons.

But I had a little tiny epiphany then, that first time outdoors, with daylight on my skin and in my eyes. You know how deaf people are taught to talk, if they can learn it, because even though they can't hear, it makes it easier for them to communicate with hearing people, who are used to talking. And then hearing people who want to be able to talk to deaf people learn sign language, and then  -  sometimes  -  they talk at the same time as they use the sign language, to help the deaf people, lip-read, I suppose, or get used to the way the mouth is always flapping in hearing people, or something.

While I was still high with being outdoors again  -  with being reconnected, even if only barely (where the hell was I, in all of five million acres of Smokehill?), with my life  -  I went over to Bud, stopping when I was still far enough away not to get a crick in my neck by looking up to where he was holding his head (which he probably had as low as he could without getting a crick in his neck), and started talking. Out loud. Like a normal human. Like I hadn't done for five days in Bud's cave. I've always been a big hand-gesture person, like Mom �C Dad only waves his arms around when he's mad  -  so I used hand gestures too. I tried to make pictures in my mind while I was telling him the stories �C like the hearing person using sign language  -  but my words led the pictures. Us humans, we lead with words. This is how we do it. And  -  I think  -  they got it. Maybe they had a great big dragon epiphany too.

It's been and still is all totally hard sweating dia-freaking-bolical work after that  -  in fact in a way it's been worse because that's when I started to believe in what we were doing, Bud and me, talking to each other here we go again, like when I first began to realize what raising Lois was really going to be like. But this time  -  this time I was going to let myself know how hard it was going to be, and do it anyway. I know how dumb this sounds, but I wanted to be a grown-up for Bud. This was different from what had happened with Lois. Duh.

But if you've hung on this long because you think I'm going to Explain Everything  -  stop now. Put this down, go away, wash the car, look up the horoscope for your goldfish, and I'm sorry I've wasted so much of your time. Give this book to your library (if they want it). But it was a big thing, that day, for me anyway. Back there in the dark Bud had been patiently holding the dragon space for me  -  while I mostly cowered in my niche. (Of course I couldn't cope, any more than I could have coped with a dragonlet, which was clearly impossible.) But out here in the light I could see that that is what he had been doing  -  that it wasn't all just being in the dark surrounded by dragons and making stuff up to make myself feel better. It was happening in daylight too. Bud was listening. Bud wanted to listen. To me.

I think the last few days had been pretty intense for the dragons too. I may be unbelievably weeny in dragon terms but that I was there was epoch making. And look what trouble one really weeny new germ can do somewhere it's never been before.

The point is that that was the first day it seemed to me possible  -  a human talking to a dragon. That it wasn't just craziness and desperation and darkness. The craziness and desperation may have started it . . . but it had a future. Talking to each other had a future. There is pretty much no bigger wow than that.

So I told him  -  them  -  because Gulp had moved to lie down by Bud and was obviously "listening" too  -  about finding the dying mother dragon who'd only just given birth, and how Lois was the only one of her dragonlets still alive. How I'd tucked her down my shirt without thinking about it, and run away. How I'd made myself doolally trying to keep her alive, and without knowing how to keep her alive, and my only excuse was that she'd survived. I told them about the Institute  -  I can't begin to imagine what my pictures of the inside of the Institute must have looked/felt/smelled/something  -  else/whatever to them  -  and about the human laws that made what I'd done so dangerous. That part didn't go in pictures so well, but I tried. (So you try making a picture in your head of laws. All I could think of was that big famous picture of the Constitution, with John Hancock's signature taking up half the space. So, I skipped over the law thing a little.)

I told them that the Institute existed only because they, the dragons, existed, and that we were doing the best we could and knew how and although that wasn't very good it was the best we could, and that we were probably losing too, and that if anyone ever found out about Lois that would probably be the end of the line because the people who were against the Institute kept imagining that we were doing something like Lois, although we never had before; and that if they did find out, and especially if they figured out who her mother was, they'd say that she was the daughter of a rogue killer dragon and genes will tell and she had to be destroyed twice, first because she was illegal anyway and second because of her mom.

What I didn't try to tell them about was the dragon dreams. And that's funny too, because I planned to, to the extent that any of this was planned. Once I was telling the story I would've told them about the dragon dreams, how I felt that especially at the beginning they were helping hold me together, like rope, or a straitjacket  -  and I sort of hesitated on the brink, with a tentative picture of Lois' mom as I saw her in my dreams, and there was almost this pause where I swear everyone understood everyone else, two dragons and one human  -  I don't suppose even Bud got even 10 percent of all the rest of it, the question was what fragments were he and Gulp fishing out of the nutso deluge and what were they doing with them??  -  and it was about this thing I knew was crazy, about Lois' mom, this is the place where we understood each other  -  and then while it was over in just long enough for it to have been a pause, it was like that was all that was necessary. I didn't have to tell them. Lois' mom in my head, keeping me together. Yes. Of course. Oh. . .

I was losing it pretty bad with the pictures by now but they probably picked up the hysteria. I told them I didn't know why Lois had survived, and I sure as hell didn't know why I was able to talk to dragons, even the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest bit, or they to me, to the extent that I or they were talking, but we were, weren't we, communicating, even though it was kind of messy, and we were probably creating a new all  -  singing all  -  dancing Day-Glo definition of "blunderbotchandscrewup."

But I'd got it that Gulp was sending me trees, right? I assumed it  -  the communication  -  that it was happening  -  had something to do with Lois  -  with Lois and me. Something to do with having to be so all-berserkingly involved with her to keep her alive  -  probably it was just standard op for a mother dragon and her dragonlets, but it was whopping-meganormous-vast, incomprehensible new ground for a dragonlet and a human. I wasn't even a grown-up, you know? Although maybe that meant I was like squishy enough to adapt, when a grown-up would have been all stiff and solid and filled up and couldn't. Maybe the success of the involvement though was why she survived  -  either that I didn't know that I instinctively knew what she could or couldn't eat, for example, or that the bonding to Mom  -  and any mom would do  -  is as important as what a dragonlet eats  -  or who the mom was.

So her side of the adaptation process was why she made so much noise  -  why she tried to talk like humans talk. I'd pretty much always secretly believed that she was, you know, intelligent, more like humans are intelligent than like dogs (or mynah birds) are intelligent, but I also knew I was loopy from the strain of the relationship that was keeping her alive. . . . But I also thought about Mom and Katie and I figured it's just part of momming that you think your kid's wonderful. Even if you're a human and your kid's a dragon.

So I'd kept a low profile about certain aspects of just how Lois might be wonderful. That she might be dorky-checklist-human-IQ-test-intelligent wonderful. Which would presumably mean that dragons were dorky-checklist-human-IQ-test-intelligent. Which is way too scary, you know? Well, you do know, because a lot of people out there now are reacting like we've declared the earth is flat after all, or that being a heroin dealer is a life  -  affirming socially responsible career choice, by suggesting that dragons will talk back to us as soon as we get the common language problem sorted out better. My suspicion about Lois could just have been that I was suffering from momness, and maybe that would have been a good thing, or at least easier, simpler, and a whole lot less scary.

Till now. Till the last five days. Since Gulp had brought us here. No, before that. Since Gulp had apologized for almost killing me. I'd known then, beyond any so-called rational doubt, but I hadn't taken it in. My taking-it-in faculty was fully occupied with the daily fact of Gulp's visits. And I was probably too used to not facing this with Lois, in case I was wrong. Or maybe in case I was right. Martian lichen or no Martian lichen  -  vervets with language or no vervets with language  -  philosophies of humanness and that Earth is a community, not a police state, or no philosophies of etc.  -  it was still too big, too strange, too far away from the way I was used to thinking. Too impossible. It wasn't just being underground with a cavern full of dragons that had freaked me out so badly, you know. At least the guys who found out about the lichen oil Mars, it was happening on Mars. This was happening here.

And now comes the show-stopper, the super jackpot question, the one if you get it right they don't just give you a huge ugly new house and an even huger uglier new car, you will also be expected to solve world hunger, kiss babies and walk on water, so think carefully before you answer: If dragons are intelligent like humans  -  or more like humans than like dogs or mynah birds or vervets  -  and just by the way, dragons are up to eighty feet long and can spout fire at will  -  why are dragons a dying race and humans dominate the planet in a sawing-of-the-tree-limb-you're-standing-on kind of way?

I still don't know the answer to why dragons are dying out, just to get that over with since it's usually the first thing that pro-dragon people ask me. (The anti-dragon people all still keep saying, How do you know they're intelligent?) I think I don't know because it isn't an answer like that there's something in the water that shouldn't be or isn't that should be, or like that. I don't think it's even the restriction of usable territory. They could've expanded a lot more than they have in Smokehill and while, no, okay, I don't know how intelligent they are (How intelligent are you? How intelligent am I? At what point does this become a dumb question?), I think they're quite intelligent enough to have been clandestine about it if they wanted to be. Okay, maybe they have been, and presently unknown underground mazes all over Smokehill are stuffed with dragons. But I don't believe it. (Or anyway not unless they've also bred a sheep that lives in the dark and eats rocks.)

Maybe their intelligence doesn't run that way. I think it probably doesn't. Because this is one of the things I think about dragons, when I try to think about the way they think: they didn't evolve to be paranoid the way we did. They didn't need to  -  They evolved to be huge and very difficult to kill. Yes, they're meat-eaters, so their prey wouldn't be too fond of them, but prey tends to survive by running away (and by breeding like crazy), not attacking. And most other predators a dragon can just laugh at. Or whatever they do. They do have a sense of humor. I think. Lois' sense of humor could be just from hanging around me too much, but I don't think so.

(I think there's humor in the way Gulp collapses when she's inviting me to walk up her shoulder and up [and up and up and UP] her neck and sit behind her head. You know how a dog you're scolding may suddenly go all limp, when what they're saying is "Yes, yes, you're right, I'm sorry, you're the boss"? If it's a dog, the next thing it does is roll over on its back and offer you its tummy, which isn't practical in a dragon, with the spine plates. But I think Gulp is having a little dragon joke that goes, "Walk on me, master, I am as dirt beneath your feet." And she means it about as much as the dog means it, who is watching you closely and is going to start wagging its tail the moment your face starts to smile.)

Anyway. The point is, dragons never learned to take threats to their existence seriously, and it's too late now.

I also think, by the way, that because they live so long  -  I'm pretty sure Bud remembers Old Pete  -  and don't waste energy being paranoid that their sense of time is a lot different from ours. I don't believe Bud kept us  -  me anyway  -  underground for five days to intimidate us  -  me  -  I think he thought we were just having a nice chat, trying to have a nice chat, here finally was the perfect opportunity for a nice chat, he was really interested in the chat, and it hadn't occurred to him till  -  maybe  -  he began to read/guess from all that "trees and sky and sunlight and despair" stuff in my head, that I wasn't finding it as interesting as he was, that I didn't have the attention span that he did. Maybe he was picking me up well enough to notice that my ability to make pictures in my head was starting to get worse, not better, and he figured I was getting like tired.

Meanwhile humans succeeded in the evolution game partly because they learned to be paranoid so successfully. To hit first before the other guy hits you. It worked with sabertooth tigers. Who's extinct? But who's bigger, meaner, faster, and has longer teeth? The tiger. Humans are so ft little things. The only weapon they have is their brains.

Dragons are going under because they don't understand how to fight back. Maybe they could have evolved to be able to fight back, a long time ago, if they or some of their genes realized it was going to be necessary some day. But it's too late now. Sure, they'll fry the occasional human who tries to murder them, but they don't get it about extermination or war. As soon as the Aussies really organized to get rid of them, they didn't have a chance.

Okay, okay, enough with the cheezy philosophy, you want me to get to the famous story about Bud and the helicopters, right? My great moment? My great moment, crap, I was just totally, totally lucky that the major in charge was brighter than some career military types and didn't automatically believe that you shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe the kind of gunnery you can carry on a helicopter is limited, and they didn't want to blow me up  -  but even that's lucky, that they didn't decide the possible death of one civilian would be just an unfortunate friendly fire incident  -  an acceptable loss in a battlefield situation.

Because outside Smokehill, by the time I disappeared, the anti-dragon lobby was lashing the populace into a frenzy, and the Searles had just about won. Congress was about to pass legislation to kill all of Smokehill's dragons because they were a danger to humanity  -  and Smokehill had THOUSANDS of them! And each and every one of them was TEN MILES LONG!  -  which is what had been going on back at the Institute while Gulp and Lois and I were getting acquainted, and why Dad had lately found himself under something a lot like house arrest. All because of one crummy stinking little poacher who thought he was going to look like a big guy by, what, bringing home a dragon's eye? Selling slices of her adrenals for enough money to buy Hawaii (as long as he did it fast enough)? And who happened to have parents who were millionaires (so what did he need more money for?) and would much rather blame the dragon than the fact that their son was an evil creep.

The irony is that it was my disappearance that almost gave the final victory to the Searles. It's so almost an almost that of all the almost moments I've told you about, that's probably the almostest of all.

But the amazing thing was Bud. He'd got enough of my story to know that something had to be done. I think he'd been worrying about what was happening ever since Lois' mother died  -  what it meant besides the loss of six dragons. I understand worry. His worry engine cranked up a gear.

I'm not sure about this, but dragons just obviously don't breed very often, or there'd be more of them. I don't myself get it why you want a situation where there's only one mom who has a litter of babies instead of several moms with one or even two each, but hey, there's so much I don't get that sometimes I almost want to be put down someone else's shirt and let them take care of everything for a while. Like I wonder if Bud is in communication somehow with the dragons in Kenya and Australia  -  that they all know they're dying -  dying out. And the humans are so clueless they just killed a mom?

Presumably everyone (everyone in Smokehill or even everyone everywhere) knew that Lois' mother was about to have her babies. This was an important event. Killing any dragon is going to upset the rest of them just like murdering humans upsets us. But a mom and her dragonlets must be a community tragedy  -  and a major tragedy for a declining community. Which is probably why Gulp lost it when she saw Lois and me in the meadow. And maybe why Gulp's first appearance underground with me on board as well as Lois was not greeted with hallelujahs. Even dragons, under extreme stress and grief, can be a little crabby. And their sense of time is probably why it took them so long to react at all  -  by human time measurement.

Anyway. So the afternoon we heard the helicopters coming there were five of us outside  -  Bud, Gulp, Lois, me, and another l;rowv dragon, because I seemed to be beginning to pick her up too, in my head I mean, I don't know how she got chosen or if she chose herself, but she seemed to be another one who remembered Old Pete.

(By then I was beginning to learn that dragon language has stuff in it that translates into sounds  -  like human language  -  more than into pictures, and that includes that they have names, and that their names are mostly soundy rather than picturey. Most of it's still pictures  -  at least most of what I can pick up is pictures  -  what dragon words I can "hear" are full of brrrrrry non-noises that make your skull buzz, if you're human, which makes me wonder if maybe there's a lot of talking going on after all, just below a pitch I can hear. I named her Zenobia because that's a little like what her name really is. Zzzzzzzzznnnnnnmmmm is closer, but harder to say with a human mouth and throat. Once I'd started again I couldn't stop trying to talk. And, after all, if they were going to try to "talk" to more humans than me, they'd better get used to it.)

This was at least another week after the first time they'd brought me outdoors; I know, I'd make a rotten Robinson Crusoe or one of those people, I just didn't keep track. I meant to. But I didn't. And time felt so funny in the dragon caverns anyway that I was never sure it was the next day when they brought me up again, or how long we'd been below. Talking to Bud also seemed to make my own time sense go funny  -  more so as I got better at it, if you want to call it better, but let's say more so when I didn't keep falling asleep/passing out so often. Like when we made the connection  -  because it was a bit like that; it wasn't like you say a sentence and then shut up, it was more like going into the room with the person you're talking to so you can hear each other when I went into the same "room" with Bud I moved into dream time or something.

What I was definitely aware of was that I really had to get back to the Institute soon, that I should have gone back a long time ago already  -  if the dragons felt like letting me, which wasn't a question I'd asked yet. Or figured out how to ask. But I also knew that the more, um, dragon communication I'd learned by the time I went back, the more persuasive I'd be able to be (I hoped) about what I had learned and how important it was. One more reason I didn't know how much time passed is because the process of trying to stuff myself with Practical Demonstratable Dragonese was different above- and belowground. Belowground it was easier to pick up the pictures and the brrrrrs. Aboveground it was easier to make sense of the pictures I'd picked up. Easier is a relative concept though, because none of it was easy, and I was dizzy and headachy all the time. I wondered if Bud ever got a headache talking to me. But if he did, did he notice? Like that there's this eensy weensy alien pebble rolling around in the bottom of his tourist-bus-sized skull?

And have I mentioned recently that languages are not one of my talents?

But I think Bud was a lot clearer about one thing than I was. He'd got it that dragons were in danger, even if he hadn't got it about Congress. (About dragon government: I don't know, but I think maybe Bud is Congress.) Maybe the dragons have a long history of dragons failing to communicate with humans  -  surely they'd've tried when the Aussies first started wiping them out, for example? They wouldn't be so bewildered they wouldn't try to say "please stop, can we negotiate"? Or wouldn't they recognize humans as intelligent any more than we recognized them as intelligent? Maybe they only saw us as a plague they couldn't defeat  -  like a book or a movie about the planet being taken over by aliens or apes. Or germs. Or Yorkshire terriers. Maybe I was a big surprise to them too.

But  -  particularly if they'd thought about all this before  -  Bud would know that I wasn't going to be able to go back to the institute and say, "Hey! Dragons can talk in their heads and in mine too (sort of)!" Because I was going to prove this  -  how? Everything I could have  -  and, of course, eventually did  -  tell anyone could be seen as raving. Which a lot of people do see it as. Still. But some of the important people believe me. And part of the reason why is because of Bud the day the helicopters came.

The dragons all heard them long before I did. Lois heard them too and when I was puzzled she sent me a picture of a wider-than-tall blob with something funny going on at the top and going gup gup gup which I didn't understand at all  -  although it was also yellow, and I've never seen a yellow helicopter  -  which may give you another tiny glimpse of how hard the learning process is, because a helicopter is something I know. (The dragon pictograph-with-non-sound for dragon doesn't look or sound anything like the human idea of a dragon either, even after you've plugged in, and it varies from dragon to dragon, like some of it's style, like some of them present Essential Dragon as wearing All Star high-tops and jeans, and some of them rhinestones and black velvet. Maybe Essential Helicopter is yellow?)

While I was still trying to figure it out, Zenobia and Gulp headed for the tunnel to the cavern. Gulp tried to take Lois, but she wouldn't go; she came and hid behind me. Hiding behind something the size of me away from something the size of Gulp is pretty funny, but Gulp would have realized that the only way she'd nab Lois was by force and I also think I picked up something between Bud and Gulp which I think was Bud saying, Let her stay. So Gulp and Zenobia left. And Lois and I . . . and Bud . . . stayed where we were.

I was already worried, before I heard the choppers too. Even when I can't pick up specifics I can sometimes pick up atmosphere  -  well, everybody (every human body) knows about that, it doesn't have to be something esoteric about dragons. You walk into a room where there's a perfectly ordinary conversation going on and your ears are telling you it's a perfectly ordinary conversation and the hairs on the back of your neck are telling you it isn't. There was some hairy atmosphere going on and not knowing was bad enough.

And then I heard it  -  whompwhompwhomp  -  and then I really panicked. I started shouting and waving my hands at Bud again  -  I got so crazy I actually grabbed one of the . . . the spiny wart-things on one of his front feet, like I could pull him toward the cavern door, like a dog on a lead. (I was pulling on a toe, you know, because that's what I could reach.) And for the second time since I'd met my first dragon I burst into tears, for reasons not too dissimilar from that first time, and if you want to despise me, feel free, I don't care. I didn't want to see another dead dragon. Another dragon stupidly killed by humans. And by then Bud was also my friend.

The choppers found us all right. Bud would be pretty hard to miss if you were even half looking. Most chopper flights don't see dragons only because dragons get out of the way as soon as they hear the chopper. I can imagine the guns trained on him and all that. But they saw me too, and they tried to get me out of the way first since I was (no doubt mysteriously) still alive. It was like something on a bad TV movie, the blast of the broadcast voice telling me to move slowly away from the dragon. It was almost funny. Like moving slowly away from something the size (and firepower) of a dragon meant anything.

I suppose really they were not being that stupid  -  they could always try to kill the other end of him, which was a long way away, but I was stubbornly sticking by the fire-breathing end, and remember that dragons can breathe a lot of fire after they're dead. I should say that Bud was now lying flat on the ground  -  he'd put his head down as soon as the choppers came into sight  -  the way Gulp had the day she met us, or when she was inviting us for transport  -  and all curled in on himself too, so maybe you couldn't see quite how many miles of him there were. Well, it makes perfectly good any-old-species sense, doesn't it? If you're trying to look non-threatening you try to look small and weak. It's just very hard to do effectively if you're a dragon (but proves they have, you know, imagination).

And I think they didn't realize just how big Bud is. Or maybe Major Handley involuntarily found himself wondering what the hell he was seeing  -  because I was jumping up and down beside Bud's nose screaming idiotic things like Don't shoot, Don't shoot! He's okay! We're all okay! Please don't shoot! Although how, exactly, even a bright human at the head of a deliberate show of military force (to impress the dragons?) figured out that I wasn't begging to be rescued I'm not sure. Maybe he didn't know either and  -  since I'd survived this long  -  was waiting for clarification. The "extermination" order for our dragons hadn't come yet  -  there was still room for doubt. Or negotiation.

I tried to talk to him about this, later. He just looked at me and shook his head. He's still a career military guy and I'm still a bleeding heart dipstick. I'll be sending him birthday cards for the rest of his life to thank him though.

Anyway. Lois was jumping up and down with me and shrieking  -  I think I've mentioned she had a very piercing shriek  -  and the poor major wouldn't have known about her. Even if he thought Bud was not making any moves because he was dead, Lois was obviously alive, and big enough to do damage if she had the inclination. She even looked enough like a dragon by then that you might even guess she was one.

There were three of them, but it was the major's helicopter that sank down a little lower as if for a better view. As I say, I think they didn't really get how big Bud was. But there was a sudden, gentle picture in my mind not unlike a nudge with an elbow, and I turned around and flung myself up Bud's shoulder a lot more enthusiastically than I'd ever climbed Gulp's. But then I was even more desperate that day than when she'd flown us away from the first helicopter coming after me.

I galloped up all that neck, half bent over, scrabbling at the spinal plates with my hands  -  remember that dragons are slippery  -  but I didn't perch on his neck. I climbed the rest of the war, on to his head. I could brace my feet against the nobbles and hold on to the smaller, less sharp-edged spikes. Lois, for once, remained where she was, although she stopped shrieking to peep at me, and there was a gust of something through my mind that I'm pretty sure was envy.

And Bud slowly uncurled. First he raised his head and neck, and then he stood up, and then he stood on his back legs and craned. And I found myself staring into the major's helicopter at a lot of platter-sized eyes and wide-open mouths, and shouting over the helicopter din, It's okay, see? He's okay. I'm okay. This is Bud. We can talk to each other. Sort of.