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?