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.