The human reception area at Dragon Nearcamp is still pretty minimal. This was my idea first, but not only my dad but also a few of the brighter ethologists and sociologists that the new, expanded Institute was already attracting were saying the same thing. When us humans want human stuff, we'd go back to Farcamp and decompress. But it's turned out to be totally practical as well as sensible because I'm still the only human so far who can hack the headaches for more than a few hours, although Dad and Martha are beginning to learn. Nobody but me has ever picked up a mental image they can use (although I wonder about Martha, with her empathy, which seems to me almost telepathic, but she says it never comes in anything you could call pictures), but they sure do get the headaches. Real howlers, sometimes, and with visual disturbances, sometimes really graphic hallucinations, and a good bit of vertigo and nausea thrown in.
I don't know if I put up with the headaches better because I'm getting something out of them, or because they're not as bad as what everybody else gets or because I sort of grew into them. If it's that they're not as bad, I'm really sorry. Maybe we'll get over this eventually, or find a way around it. We've only just started after all. I figure we have the time. I hope we have the time. I'm worried that some ruthless impatient human is going to decide that the only way — or the fastest way — would be to raise a dragonlet the way I raised Lois, which I can't believe any dragon mom would agree to. Would any human mom — ? Exactly. But there's still a little problem sometimes convincing the rest of the human world that dragons aren't still just animals.
I've also tried to find out — mostly from Bud — if trying to talk to humans, well, not if it gives them headaches, exactly, because I wouldn't expect it to be the same thing, but if there are any drawbacks to trying to talk to humans — anything that goes wrong with the dragon because of talking to humans. I can manage to get the idea of pain across — I think — and I'm pretty sure Bud is blowing me off. I'm such a master at being blown off. My impression, for what it's worth, which is probably nothing, is that there is some kind of recoil, for dragons, but physical pain isn't it. This worries me too. But it might explain why there aren't too many of the human liaison committee, and why the rest of them tend to stay out of our way.
We've just been so LUCKY in a lot of ways. Major Handley was maybe our first piece of brilliant luck — at that black bleak moment when it looked like the Searles and their gang of crooked creeps were going to win. A career military guy capable of independent thought when his orders were to shoot first (as I found out, although not from him) and ask questions later. You don't get luckier than that. But a bright career military guy who obeys orders still had to stop and think about how to obey his order. I wasn't running away, you remember — I was running toward the big black scaly monster of all the Searles' bluster — and then Bud did his extension-ladder trick and the major looked at me standing on the top of Bud's head and waving and shouting and figured that while I looked pretty upset, I didn't look like it was the dragon that was upsetting me. At that moment, I think, is when our luck turned.
There are a few things that haven't gone according to plan. They still haven't repealed the law that makes my saving Lois' life a life-sentence felony. They've changed pretty much all the other bad laws about dragons but they can't seem to shift that one. Don't ask me why. The human world makes less and less sense to me. But that's one of the reasons we need to stay an internationally trendy soap opera with rare endangered animals: And me a pop star that no one dares prosecute.
Some of the other reasons are lying around me like medium-sized mountains as I write this, in the dragon Nearcamp. I'm the only human here tonight. Katie doesn't let Martha come as often as either of us would like — she thinks the headaches might stunt her growth or something. If they stunted mine, I'm gratefuclass="underline" Being loomed over by dragons makes me really dislike looming over other humans — and there's a really nice ethologist from Illinois who's been here most of this week. She's done almost all her work with horses but she gets it about dragons, I think because she doesn't assume her horses are just dumber than humans. They're horses. But she had to go back to Farcamp because of the headaches — and in fact I had to lead her out of the cavern because she was seeing so many starbursts and whirligigs. What people see varies — she's a starbursts-and-whirligigs type. She'll probably be back in a day or two after she's had a lot of sleep and a large bottle of aspirin.
It's getting late and almost everybody here is asleep. Lois is the nearest to me — only a small hillock, maybe the size of a big pony — a rosy, bronzy hillock in the purply reddish firelight, snoring into my shoes. (Most dragons don't snore either.)
I don't think dragons have a written language — although I've started to wonder about some of the scratches on the walls here and at Centraclass="underline" I started out thinking they were geological, and then I thought they were about the dragons hollowing out their living quarters to suit them, but lately, hmmm — anyway I still don't think dragons have a written language, exactly, maybe they're just doing a dragony Lascaux thing. Maybe they make songs, like the Arkhola. Hmmm. . . But Bud spends so much time (as now) watching over my shoulder when I'm using my laptop (he doesn't seem to have any trouble staying awake) that I'm not so sure about that any more either.
And then sometimes I think he's just doing some kind of experiment in communication when he knows I'm concentrating on something else, because when he's looking over my shoulder I usually have this really strange, low-down headache, almost a throat — or a chest — or a stomachache. . . I admit I'd just as soon not wake up some morning and discover I'm growing scales and spinal plates. I mean, if it's necessary, okay, but I'd rather not.
You're trying to be as objective as you can when you take notes. Mom and Dad — Mom in particular — had this whole rant about There Is No Such Thing as True Objectivity — but then she was a very Bad Scientist — and for ordinary lock the-lab-and-go-home-at-night scientists, maybe how they are is not so important, but in my dragon notes I almost always start out by mentioning what sort of a state I'm in — which is something I learned from Mom. If you've been up all night feeding orphans, it shows, next day, in your work (she said) and it's just arrogant of you not to make note of it. Pretty much everything I ever wrote in the first year of Lois' life starts SOS, which stands for Short of Sleep. How can it not be important to how reliable my notes are when I'm so tired I'm hallucinating dragons hiding behind the trees around Billy and Grace's house?
My notes now start with H, HH, HHH, or, occasionally, HHHH, which is about headache intensity. XH is the new Bud headache. This that I'm writing now is headed XH, and I'll look over all the H headings when I get back to Farcamp or the Institute and probably try to even them out a little. And I have an increasing series of symbols for moods and feelings and stuff, although that's partly because I think some of the moods are actually dragon-language-background-layer and not me at all.