But Lois came back to the Institute less and less once she hit her growth spurt. By the end of her third year she wouldn't fit through ordinary doorways any more and although she didn't have keeping-up problems with people on foot, she couldn't squeeze into the back of a jeep any more either, while her wings weren't anything like big enough yet for flying. She also began to lose interest in strange humans — every new human wasn't immediately her new best friend, the way she had been. She would still turn it on for a TV crew, but you — well, I — could begin to see that her heart wasn't in it. It was as if she was being polite. Where did she learn polite?
She was learning to be a dragon. Who are I swear genetically polite. Which was the thing I'd wanted most of all, Lois becoming a, you know, genuine, 100 percent dragon, and that did take a lot of the edge off the whole mom trauma. What stopped me from getting too comfy about it though was that she was also obviously sweating learning "dragon language" almost as badly as I was. Like maybe there's a developmental window for learning language in dragons the way there is in humans, and if you miss it, you've had it. And that made me feel really, really, really bad.
But there are a couple more things I think I know now that I didn't then — three or four years ago. Now pay attention because I'm not going to tell you twice. I'm getting out into woo-woo territory and I don't much like it out here. Or rather, I like it fine, while I'm out there, with Bud, or occasionally some of the others, it's coming back to human ground level with what he or they have given me I find kind of bad, looking at it as a human and wondering what the hell I do with it and how to explain it in any way another human — any human but Martha — is going to believe — or be able to make sense of. Yeah, everybody gives me lots of slack — make that lots of slack — because of Lois, but old habits die hard and nobody outside space opera and unicorns likes the "t" word either. Maybe especially when the only stuff I bring back that isn't bits and pieces is all woo-woo and nothing I can shake down into words and put in my dictionary. So don't ask me any questions, okay? Just listen.
One of the big questions has always been what Lois' mom was doing having her dragonlets so far away from the rest of the dragons — from anywhere dragons ever go in Smokehill — and especially from her mid wives. Okay, you think, maybe the dragons did it differently when they were in cages, and maybe what Old Pete saw wasn't like what they'd be doing on their own. But that's not it.
The reason it happened is because she had a . . . uh, I'm going to call it a vision . . . that told her to. That told her to go off by herself and have her babies alone. I can still hardly think about it, it's so awful — her going off like that, and what happened. And it might explain why Gulp was quite so, well, beside herself, when she first found Lois and me. They'd known Lois' mom died, of course (I think dragons feel it when one of them dies), but somehow they'd missed that one of her babies had survived.
Or then again maybe they didn't miss it. I'm pretty sure I got what Bud is telling me about Lois' mom, but I'm not sure about this. It wasn't till two years later that we started getting those dragon sightings away from the usual dragon stomping grounds. But maybe a dragonlet has to be two years old before it starts showing up on dragon radar. Or maybe Lois didn't show up on dragon radar because her radar was crippled by being raised by humans. Or maybe part of the original vision included that the dragons should go looking for some kind of sign two years after Lois' mom died. (Okay, she did have her own name. It's something like Hhhhhllllllsssssssn. So I call her Halcyon.) I like that version myself — that they didn't know what the sign was they were looking for. Which really does explain why Gulp briefly lost her mind.
It's obvious that all those dragon headaches I was having before there were any dragons around but Lois, weren't Lois herself, but Halcyon, or Halcyon's ghost, if you like, although you probably don't like. Why did Lois survive? There is NO WAY that poor globby fetus had a prayer of surviving, stuck down some strange species' shirtfront and fed alien liquids. But she did. She did at least partly because . . . because Halcyon's ghost was making me have Mom Dragon Vibes? (Was Halcyon's vibes coming off a grotesque human dwarf like me what sent Gulp — briefly — mad?) I don't know. But a big piece of the answer about Lois is there somewhere.
Here's the, uh, controversial bit. So far this was just the easy bit, okay? I mean I've told you a lot about Halcyon already, but I'm guessing you've been finding it a little hard to believe — you weren't there having the brain version of the hamster running up the inside of your pantleg, and I was, and I still tried really hard to make out that it was just dreams and shock and native goofiness. So I keep trying to make being haunted by a dragon ghost sound more convincing — or maybe I'm just hoping if I mention it often enough you'll start accepting it just because it's there all the time like a tree or a house or that tub of yogurt in the back of the fridge that turned green months ago. Familiarity breeds getting to used to the idea. My master plan.
Okay, here we go. Bud believes that what's happened to Lois and me is not only the thing that's going to make it possible for dragons and humans to learn to talk to each other — but that it pretty much wouldn't have happened any other way. Some poor dragon mom was going to have to die all by herself and all but one of her babies die with her and that one remaining baby get picked up by a human just in time for the dying mom to somehow kind of zap herself into her surrogate. And the human had to have been young enough and/or weird enough — like maybe dragon-as-center-of-universe weird — for the zap to take. I don't want to even think about thinking about the odds . . . or what that might mean about how stuff gets, you know, arranged . . . is it worse to be scared to death by the odds or to consider the possibility that it was what-I'm-calling arranged? Brrrrr. Whatever you do with this idea, it makes me colder than a cavern without a dragon to lean on.
But if Bud believes it I believe it. Some of the other dragons don't. But there are probably stick-in-the-mud dragons like there are stick-in-the-mud humans, who don't want to believe anything too new and strange and world-detonating, and personally I'd be happy to entertain a better (i.e., less scary) hypothesis if you've got one but I did say better.
One thing that makes me think Bud is right, besides the fact that he's Bud, is that while Lois is sweating learning dragon language almost as hard as I am, we talk to each other better than we talk to any-dragon-body else, most of the time, Lois and me. Maybe it's not really all that much better. But there's a kind of ease or fit to it that I don't have with any of the other dragons, even Bud. For example we have a, uh, let's call it a glyph, although it's maybe more a kind of spasm (maybe helps to explain the headaches, and the wigglyness of the dragon alphabetor alphabets — or that moods and layers thing, thinking of a, uh, unit or module or something of it as a spasm) for "frustration" which we made up together out of how we felt about trying to learn to talk to (other) dragons. But when I used it on Bud he knew instantly what I was "talking" about, so Lois and I get gold stars and pats on the head for that piece of initiative-taking homework.
You don't have the smiling, nodding, pointing to your chest and saying your name option with dragons. Nor can you point to another object and say "rock" and wait to see what they say. They won't say anything. If you've been pointing at a rock and saying "rock" for the last six months, however, if you've been working at it really hard, you may have begun to wonder why after you say "rock" you very often get a kind of heavy sensation in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet (and furthermore it seems a bit diagonal. Right hand, left foot. Left hand, right foot). Although the first elation (supposing you manage to be elated through the confusion) drains away real fast as you start to wonder if they're talking about a kind of rock, a size of rock, a shape of rock, a color of rock, weight of rock, age of rock, even a hardness of rock, or a kind/size/shape/color/weight/age/hardness of anything, or maybe it's about something else entirely (Where it came from? How it was created? Or if it's a big rock, which way its shadow falls as the Sun rises up over it and goes down the other side, and no I am not joking) and maybe it's not "rock" at all, but "thing pointed at" or "humans sure are into rocks, I wonder what that's about?" "Hello" in dragon is a sort of short, stylized flash of . . . something like my first look into Halcyon's dying eye, and it'll knock you over if you're not ready for it.