Hariveen
For all our modern dependence on dragons, most people never see one. The trend to deprive people of the knowledge of the reality of our energy policy has only accelerated in recent decades. In the same way we keep death out of sight in hospitals, we keep the dragons out of people’s view behind concrete walls and steel doors, behind secretive employment contracts and ironclad NDAs, maintaining the illusion that modernity is cost-free.
If dragons are so safe, as the government and the energy companies keep on insisting, why the thick prisonlike fence around Harvard Yard and the high-security isolation barriers that gave Wall Street its name? Makes you wonder what they aren’t telling us, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the problem isn’t limited to the Commonwealth of Maine and Massachusetts, or even to the other countries in North America. Everywhere in the world, from the Hibernia Republic to the city-states of the Sinitic League, people are content to let mysteries be mysteries.
You can find a hint of this modern state of affairs even in antiquity.
[Animation of an aeolipile revolving, with jets of steam shooting out.]
The first person in recorded history to harness draconic energy was Hero of Alexandria. He constructed a brass sphere with two bent pipes coming out, pointing in opposite directions. The sphere was free to rotate about an axis perpendicular to the pipes.
Hero then lined the inside of the sphere with pieces of amber, carved into intricate mythological scenes. A handful of fireflies were trapped inside the sphere to provide illumination, like shooting stars revolving in this inner empyrean. The intent, evidently, was to create a piece of temple art, whose hidden beauty could be appreciated only by the gods and imagined by the worshippers.
However, to the surprise of everyone, Hero’s creation aroused the curiosity of local Egyptian dragons, and two juvenile specimens slithered into the device through the pipes, asplike. Pleased by the art they found inside, the dragons filled the interior with heated steam. The scalding steam, jetting out of the bent pipes, spun the sphere as though it were a living thing, bringing joy and wonder to all viewers.
Hero went on to create more and more elaborate versions of the aeolipile, and died relatively young, raving mad. Few writers in antiquity drew any connection between his work and his death.
Lee
Of course I’m disappointed. I thought the little dragons were going to be the appetizers for the main course, not the whole meal!
The one good thing is that the “Knights of Mannaport” are no longer bugging me all the time to “do something” about the safety of the town. I guess even the anti-dragon conspiracy videos they watch online don’t consider little dragons much of a threat.
One by one, the corporations stopped calling.
So I called them.
“Our engineers have done the feasibility studies. It’s just not economical to exploit the little dragons you have,” they’d tell me. Then they’d drone on and on about megawatts and gigawatts and ROI and capitalization and utility rates and depreciation.
Turns out that the dragons in Mannaport are barely in the kilowatt range. Back in the days when James Watt used to strap a pair of kaleidoscopic goggles on a donkey-sized nessie and call that a steam engine, such low output might have been commercially acceptable. But now? Not so much.
“Little dragons will grow into big ones, right?”
“Not always,” they’d say. Full-grown dragons come in all sizes, even within the same species. And our miniature dragons, according to the biologists they sent, are already done with growing.
“But we have so many of them!” I’d say. “Can’t you corral a bunch of them to do something useful together?”
They’d lecture me on the biology and habits of dragons, the lack of qualified dragon-whisperers, and the dangers of “overengineering.”
Turns out that dragons rarely, if ever, work well in teams. And they can only be enticed, not coerced, to work. The last time anyone tried to force a bunch of small dragons to work together was at Chernobyl, and that was a disaster no one wants to repeat.
“I’ve heard of places that make single-person vehicles and household power plants that run on small dragons,” I’d plead. “Surely there’s some way to make that work?”
“The only places where that’s economical are kibbutzim and big, dense metropolises where the rich might want to show off,” they’d say. “Remember, dragons like to stay where they are, or migrate between fixed points they pick themselves.”
“But the dragons may start migrating.”
“Who wants to go to Mannaport unless you already live there?”
Then they stopped taking my calls altogether.
I’m not giving up, though. Someone told me that over in Japan, they’ve made big strides in miniaturization that we can only dream of. There has to be a way to make a profit from our tiny dragons. Has to be.
Alexander
I tell people to stay as far away as possible. The dragons look cute and harmless, but I know the truth.
Joey was the smart one in the family. Went to an exam school. He had the grades and test scores to get out of Mannaport, to be anything he wanted.
But the only thing my brother wanted was to be a dragon-whisperer, to work with the dragons up close, not just to “bask in the glory of the fruits of their labor from afar”—yep, that was how he talked, like an old novel they made you read in school. Used to make me want to punch him. Talk properly, you doofus!
“Lawyers, bankers, coders—they’re all parasites, mere leeches,” he used to say. “What do they do except manipulate symbols to generate more symbols? But a whisperer is someone who coaxes the breath of life out of the dragon, who makes civilization possible.”
He left home for the DRACOGRID plant in Boston Harbor the day he turned eighteen. They pay dragon-whisperers well, but that’s because the job is so dangerous, and so few have the talent for it.
Joey told me that you cannot force a dragon to work; you have to beguile it. He told me how a czarina in Saint Petersburg once built a whole room in her palace out of amber in order to tempt the dragons into breathing fire—I think she was imitating some hero in Alexandria?—and she got badly burned. That gave me nightmares as a kid.
Let’s see, my mother kept Joey’s scholarship essay around here somewhere . . . There it is. “Howard Hughes ended up in Las Vegas because he thought the bright lights and endless glamour would keep the flight of dragons that kept his aviation empire aloft entertained. During the Cold Race, NATO and GEAIA both secretly funded artists to try to entice the Warsaw Pact dragons to defect. But hundreds of years after Newcomen and Watt, dragon-whispering is still more art than science.
“I intend to become a great artist.”
Dragons are fickle, lazy, and easily bored. Even if you manage to lure them to settle in a city with treasure, books, or novelty, they’d rather nap near the hoard than work. That last bit, getting a dragon to breathe fire while remaining docile, is where they need the dragon-whisperer.
No one knows how dragon-whispering works. There’s a code of silence among the whisperers, a secretive guild passing their wisdom down the generations by word of mouth. When we were boys, Joey and I used to play games where I’d be the dragon, and he’d try to get me to do chores—usually by promising me time on the game console he built himself.