She’s been seeing them all her life, but never so close—never from these Heights. Now she wonders if she’s ever really seen them at all. The dragons swim the air over Torchtown, majestic, gluttonous, expansive in their skins. The green one, she sees at once, is the frailer. Its scales are dull, almost mossy, the joints arthritic, swollen, barnacled. It resembles a grandpa lobster she caught once by mistake, a creature grown large beyond its nature by time. Its face has turned melancholy with age, bearded with useless frills, the eyes rheumy and half-seeing. Its wings flap the air in tatters.
The yellow dragon is the stronger, but only just. Puffed up, it’s a bully past its prime, a hunk of muscle with the precision gone. It circles through the air in uneven, oval-shaped loops, unable to corner properly. Its square-jawed face bears a look of willful stupidity, its eyes slits, half-hidden beneath a heavy brow. Its brawny tail whips the air, all bulging tendons, but its limbs are as little and vestigial as the arms of the T. rexes who decorate Duncan’s underpants.
As they dip and somersault amid the morning haze, they blow their first fire-breaths of the day: the yellow in a steady, unendurable stream, the green one in staccato bursts. Abby backs away from the window. She backs into the footstool—it was a footstool she tripped over; the long-forgotten word returns to her now with ease in the face of this wordless terror—and sinks down onto it, still staring. No cords, no wires. The Lady was wrong. These are no tools of the People Machines, no simple weapons to be disarmed. These dragons are alive. The world is so big, even God will never find her here.
* * *
The Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg is practicing her new signature. Her handwriting ranks among her finest accomplishments. The line is strong, each stroke adorned with minute tassels and curls; her ascenders soar, slender but never pinched, and her descenders hang in orderly bunches, like the fruit of well-tended vines. The space beneath she saves for the flourish, a textless undulation of pure calligraphy, more resplendent than even her title.
The Baroness Swan Lenore Ripple, née Dahlberg
How strange that the name will be hers in a mere matter of hours: after years of waiting, months of negotiations, only a single night lies between her and marriage. But now, as she signs, the hired car jolts and shudders, upsetting the ink, and darkness engulfs the name before she can complete it.
“Damn,” Swanny mutters, peeling off a kid glove now spattered black. She places a sheet of blotting paper over the offending page and presses her diary closed, then sets the cedar lap desk on the floor.
The inside of the limousine is red plush, upholstered like a coffin, and it hasn’t been recently vacuumed. Motes of dust swim in the late-afternoon light. Swanny settles herself back into the cocoonlike folds of her chinchilla fur coat. She’s an ample girl, with chocolate-brunette hair; pendant, sensual lips painted the color of wine—and arms like beluga whale flippers. Her arms do not rank among her finest accomplishments. They are flabby and pale, and have been on her mind since she looked into the mirror this morning. She adjusts the coat around her shoulders and consoles herself thinking of the elegant puffed sleeves of her wedding gown.
“Mother, I don’t know why you wouldn’t ask my intended to retrieve us in a flying machine.”
Beside her, Pippi is bent over a stack of documents; in addition to her reading glasses, she holds a pearl-handled magnifier over the lines of tiny type. In her other hand, she grasps a martini glass, empty except for an olive pit. She grunts noncommittally.
“I would have preferred to ride in a flying machine. To be flung loose from the bonds of Earth, to share the sky with dragons—well. Every tragedian knows that the fear of death gives love its meaning and its import.” Swanny gazes sorrowfully out the window, fingering her ringlets as they pass the last of the Lionel Roswell Expressway’s famous shantytowns. Years ago, when the dragons first came, the highway used to host a thriving subculture of enterprising beggars and thieves, sustaining themselves upon the never-ending caravan of moving vans headed somewhere, anywhere, else. Now, the few remaining squatters dwell in scattered, haphazard assemblages of tarp and plastic resembling broken kites. “My intended would have looked so masculine, piloting our craft with unerring skill, delivering us from all harm, as the city fell away beneath us. I can’t imagine a more illuminating first encounter. And the HowFly has a quite romantic reputation, you know. It’s said that, at a certain altitude, simply breathing in the air is like sipping Champagne. People become quite giddy. Of course, it would be difficult to speak intimately with one’s mother along. But in a flying machine—”
“Swanny, enough.”
“The least you could do is engage me in conversation. You’ve reviewed those documents a dozen times, I can’t see the urgency in your going over them again.”
Pippi looks up sharply. “You are about to enter into a binding legal contract. That is the urgency.” She rattles the olive pit in her glass. “And as for the flying machine, the last thing I want is a Ripple vehicle touching down on our estate. Suppose they brought their own appraisers.”
“You make it sound like a corporate takeover. If it were up to you, I’d be married via conference call.”
“Swanny, I’ll remind you that the contracts I’ve negotiated are not some unimportant side note to marriage. They are the marriage. You may have all the expectations in the world, but when it comes to ink on paper, it’s either there or it’s not. What are you worrying on your gum?”
Swanny removes a finger from her mouth and peers at it fretfully. “I think I need another extraction.”
“Darling, I asked you before we left.”
“And I said I didn’t know but we should bring the dentist just in case.”
“And how would that look? Bringing your own dentist to the wedding?”
“Like inbreeding?”
“Like—well, like rather severe inbreeding, dear. Here, let me shake you another martini.”
“Just a small one. All this jostling makes me queasy.”
“You have a point.” Pippi rolls down the window and leans out. “Driver, would you please avoid these potholes? My daughter, and our martinis, are very sensitive to motion!”
The limousine driver rides on the hood in a seat of his own devising, fashioned from a barber chair with massage beads slung over the back. It’s bolted down with rusty screws the size of doorknobs. He absently grips the reins of the two lumbering oxen who pull the vehicle; one glances over its shoulder, snorting through its nose ring at the stridence of Pippi’s voice.
“Driver? Did you hear me?”
“Wanna go off-road?”
“What?”
“Want me to drive on the shoulder? Maybe in the ditch?”
“No! I simply asked that you cease and desist this constant bumping!”
“Only way to avoid potholes here is to go off-road.”
Pippi sighs. She rolls up the window and fans herself with the heavy cuff of her fox fur coat. “That man is impossible. I’m going to report him to the service.”
“Mmm.” Swanny relishes having her mother cater to her for a change: “I’ll have that martini with two olives.”