Gregory Benford - A Hiss of Dragon

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2024-11-19 1 0 57KB 10 页 5.9玖币

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A HISS OF DRAGON

By Gregory Benford & Marc Laidlaw

"Incoming Dragon!" Leopold yelled, and ducked to the left. I went right.

Dragons come in slow and easy. A blimp with wings, this one settled down like

a wrinkled brown sky falling. I scrambled over boulders, trying to be

inconspicuous and fast at the same time. It didn't seem like a promising

beginning for a new job.

Leopold and I had been working on the ledge in front of the Dragon's Lair,

stacking berry pods. This Dragon must have flown toward its Lair from the

other side of the mountain spire, so our radio tag on him didn't transmit

through all the rock. Usually they're not so direct. Most Dragons circle their

Lairs a few times, checking for scavengers and egg stealers. If they don't

circle, they're usually too tired. And when they're tired, they're irritable.

Something told me I didn't want to be within reach of this one's throat flame.

I dropped my berrybag rig and went down the rocks

feet first. The boulders were slippery with green moss for about 20 meters

below the ledge, so I slid down on them. I tried to keep the falls to under

four meters and banged my butt when I missed. I could hear Leopold knocking

loose rocks on the other side, moving down toward where our skimmer was

parked.

A shadow fell over me, blotting out Beta's big yellow disk. The brown bag

above thrashed its wings and gave a trumpeting shriek. It had caught sight of

the berry bags and knew something was up. Most likely, with its weak eyes, the

Dragon thought the bags were eggers-off season, but what do Dragons know about

seasons? -and would attack them. That was the optimistic theory. The

pessimistic one was that the Dragon had seen one of us. I smacked painfully

into a splintered boulder and glanced up. Its underbelly was heaving, turning

purple: anger. Not a reassuring sign. Eggers don't bother Dragons that much.

Then its wings fanned the air, backwards. It drifted off the ledge, hovering.

The long neck snaked around, and two nearsighted eyes sought mine. The nose

expanded, catching my scent. The Dragon hissed triumphantly.

Our skimmer was set for a fast takeoff. But it was 200 meters down, on the

only wide spot we could find. I made a megaphone of my hands and shouted into

the thin mountain mist, "Leopold! Grab air!"

I jumped down to a long boulder that jutted into space. Below and a little to

the left I could make out the skimmer's shiny wings through the shifting green

fog. I sucked in a breath and ran off the end of the boulder.

Dragons are clumsy at level flight, but they can drop like a brick. The only

way to beat this one down to the skimmer was by falling most of the way.

I banked down, arms out. Our gravity is only a third of Earth normal. Even

when falling, you have time to think

things over. I can do the calculations fast enough-it came out to nine

seconds-but getting the count right with a Dragon on your tail is another

matter. I ticked the seconds off and then popped the chute. It fanned and

filled. The skimmer came rushing up, wind whipped my face. Then my harness

jerked me to a halt. I drifted down. I thumped the release and fell free.

Above me, a trumpeting bellow. Something was coming in at four o'clock and I

turned, snatching for my blaser. Could it be that fast? But it was Leopold, on

chute. I sprinted for the skimmer. It was pointed along the best outbound

wind, flaps already down, a standard precaution, I belted in, sliding my feet

into the pedals. I caught a dank, foul reek of Dragon. More high shrieking,

closer, Leopold came running up, panting. He wriggled into the rear seat. A

thumping of wings. A ceiling of wrinkled leather. Something hissing overhead.

Dragons don't fly, they float. They have a big green hydrogen-filled dome on

their backs to give them lift. They make the hydrogen in their stomachs and

can dive quickly by venting it out the ass. This one was farting and falling

as we zoomed away. I banked, turned to get a look at the huffing brown

mountain hooting its anger at us, and grinned.

"I take back what I said this morning," Leopold gasped. "You'll draw full

wages and commissions, from the start."

I didn't say anything. I'd just noticed that somewhere back there I had pissed

my boots full.

I covered it pretty well back at the strip. I twisted out of the skimmer and

slipped into the maintenance bay. I had extra clothes in my bag, so I slipped

on some fresh socks and thongs.

When I was sure I smelled approximately human, I tromped back out to Leopold.

I was damned if I would let my morning's success be blotted out by an

embarrassing accident. It was a hirer's market these days. My training at crop

dusting out in the flat farmlands had given me an edge over the other guys who

had applied. I was determined to hang on to this job.

Leopold was the guy who "invented" the Dragons, five years ago. He took a life

form native to Lex, the bloats, and tinkered with their DNA. Bloats are

balloonlike and nasty. Leopold made them bigger, tougher, and spliced in a

lust for thistleberries that makes Dragons hoard them compulsively. It had

been a brilliant job of engineering. The Dragons gathered thistleberries, and

Leopold stole them from the Lairs.

Thistleberries are a luxury good, high in protein, and delicious. The market

for them might collapse if Lex's economy got worse-the copper seams over in

Bahinin had run out last month. This was nearly the only good flying job left.

More than anything else, I wanted to keep flying. And not as a crop duster.

Clod-grubber work is a pain.

Leopold was leaning against his skimmer, a little pale, watching his men husk

thistleberries. His thigh muscles were still thick; he was clearly an airman

by ancestry, but he looked tired.

"Goddamn," he said. "I can't figure it out, kid. The Dragons are hauling in

more berries than normal. We can't get into the Lairs, though. You'd think it

was mating season around here, the way they're attacking my men."

"Mating season? When's that?"

"Oh, in about another six months, when the puffbushes bloom in the treetops.

The pollen sets off the mating urges in Dragons-steps up their harvest, but it

also makes 'em

meaner."

"Great," I said. "I'm allergic to puffbush pollen. I'll have to fight off

Dragons with running eyes and a stuffy nose."

Leopold shook his head absently; he hadn't heard me. "I can't understand it-

there's nothing wrong with my Dragon designs."

"Seems to me you could have toned down the behavior plexes," I said. "Calm

them down a bit -I mean, they've outgrown their competition to the point that

they don't even need to be mean anymore. They don't browse much as it is . . .

nobody's going to bother them."

"No way-there's just not the money for it, Drake. Look, I'm operating on the

margin here. My five-year rights to the genetic patents just ran out, and now

I'm in competition with Kwalan Rhiang, who owns the other half of the forest.

Besides, you think gene splicing is easy?"

"Still, if they can bioengineer humans . . . I mean, we were beefed up for

strength and oxy burning nearly a thousand years ago."

"But we weren't blown up to five times the size of our progenitors, Drake. I

made those Dragons out of mean sons of bitches-blimps with teeth is what they

were. It gets tricky when you mess with the life cycles of something that's

already that unstable. You just don't understand what's involved here."

I nodded. "I'm no bioengineer-granted."

He looked at me and grinned, a spreading warm grin on his deeply lined face.

"Yeah, Drake, but you're good at what you do-really good. What happened today,

well, I'm getting too old for that sort of thing, and' it's happening more and

more often. If you hadn't been there I'd probably be stewing in that Dragon's

stomach right now-

skimmer and all."

I shrugged. That gave me a chance to roll the slabs of muscle in my shoulders,

neck, and pectorals -a subtle advertisement that I had enough to keep a

skimmer aloft for hours.

"So," he continued. "I'm giving you full pilot rank. The skimmer's yours. You

can fly it home tonight, on the condition that you meet me at the Angis Tavern

for a drink later on. And bring your girl Evelaine, too, if you want."

"It's a deal, Leopold. See you there."

I whistled like a dungwarbler all the way home, pedaling my new skimmer over

the treetops toward the city. I nearly wrapped myself in a floating thicket of

windbrambles, but not even this could destroy my good mood.

I didn't notice any Dragons roaming around, though I saw that the treetops had

been plucked of their berries and then scorched. Leopold had at least had the

foresight, when he was gene tinkering, to provide for the thistleberries'

constant replenishment. He gave the Dragons a throat flame to singe the

treetops with, which makes the berries grow quickly. A nice touch.

It would have been simpler, of course, to have men harvest the thistleberries

themselves, but that never worked out, economically. Thistleberries grow on

top of virtually unclimbable thorntrees, where you can't even maneuver a

skimmer without great difficulty. And if a man fell to the ground . . . well,

if it's on the ground, it has spines, that's the rule on Lex. There's nothing

soft to fall on down there. Sky life is more complex than ground life. You can

actually do something useful with sky life-namely, bioengineering. Lex may be

a low-metal world-which means low-technology-but our bioengineers are the

best.

A clapping sound, to the left. I stopped whistling. Down through the greenish

haze I could see a dark form coming in over the treetops, its wide rubbery

wings slapping together at the top of each stroke. A smackwing. Good meat,

spicy and moist. But hard to catch. Evelaine and I had good news to celebrate

tonight; I decided to bring her home smackwing for dinner. I. took the skimmer

down in the path of the smackwing, meanwhile slipping my blaser from its

holster.

The trick to hunting in the air is to get beneath your prey so that you can

grab it while it falls, but this smackwing was flying too low. I headed in

fast, hoping to frighten it into rising above me, but it was no use. The

smackwing saw me, red eyes rolling. It missed a beat in its flapping and dived

toward the treetops. At that instant a snagger shot into view from the topmost

branches, rising with a low farting sound. The smackwing spotted this

blimplike thing that had leaped into its path but apparently didn't think it

too threatening. It swerved about a meter under the bobbing creature-

And stopped flat, in mid-air.

I laughed aloud, sheathing my blaser. The snagger had won his meal like a real

hunter.

Beneath the snagger's wide blimplike body was a dangling sheet of transparent

sticky material. The smackwing struggled in the moist folds as the snagger

drew the sheet upward. To the unwary smackwing that clear sheet must have been

invisible until the instant he flew into it.

Within another minute, as I pedaled past the spot, the snagger had entirely

engulfed the smackwing and was unrolling its sticky sheet as it drifted back

into the treetops. Pale yellow eyes considered me and rejected the notion of

me as food. A ponderous predator, wise with years.

I flew into the spired city: Kalatin.

I parked on the deck of our apartment building, high above the jumbled wooden

buildings of the city. Now that my interview had been successful, we'd be able

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Gregory Benford - A Hiss of Dragon

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