Jonathan Strahan - Eclipse Three

Nothing to do but wait, now.

Deep into the bowels of one February night, Tug was awakened by distant music from beyond the spheres. Blanket wrapped haphazardly around himself, he stumbled up onto the frosted deck, finding himself surprisingly alone, as if the rest of the ship had been ensorcelled into fairytale somnolence.

Moonlight silvered the whole world. Pellenera-piping, argent eidolon-loomed atop the bank of the feeder canal. Tug shivered. Did she herald the arrival of a new recruit? Where was the guy?

But no newcomer emerged from among the winter-bare branches. Pellenera seemed intent merely on bleeding out her heart through the ocarina, as if seeking to convey an urgent message to someone.

Tug's mind drowned in the music. He seemed to be seeing the world through Pellenera's eyes, gazing down at himself on the deck. Was she tapping his optic nerves, seeing herself on the shore? That music-

Tug had a sudden vision of the Nubian woman, dancing naked save for-

– a skirt fashioned of bananas?

The music stopped. Pellenera vanished.

What the hell had all that been about?

An o-mail response from Drawn & Quarterly came in March, just as spring arrived.

Tug rushed back to the Tom Pudding with an o-café printout of the message.

Sukey Damariscotta was playing a videogame with Janey Vogelsang when Tug tracked her down: Spores of Myst. He hustled her away from Janey, to a quiet corner, then bade her read the printout.

"Oh, Tug, this is wonderful! We've done it!"

"I can't believe it!"

"Me neither!"

Tug grabbed Sukey, hugged her close, kissed her passionately and wildly lips to lips.

Hands on Tug's chest, Sukey pushed back, broke his embrace.

"What are you doing?"

"Sukey, I-You've gotta know by now-"

"Know what?" Her face registered distaste, as if she had been handed a slimy slug. "Oh, no, Tug, you can't imagine us hooking up, can you? I like you, sure, a lot. I respect your talent. But you're way too old…"

Time must've crept along somehow in its monotonous, purposeless, sempiternal fashion, although Tug couldn't have testified to that reality. All he knew was that in some manner he had crossed blocks of Carrollboro to stand outside The Wyandot. His old residence of thirty years' habitation was garlanded with scaffolding, its plastic-membraned windows so many blank, unseeing eyes, unbreachable passages to a vanished era, a lost youth.

In the end, he returned to the Tom Pudding.

What choice did he have in this fallen, inhospitable world?

Sukey acted friendly toward him, even somewhat intimate. But Tug knew that they would never relate the same way again, and that their collaboration was over, whatever the fate of their one and only book.

The voice of Ozzie Vasterling, when broadcast through the intercom system of the Tom Pudding-a system no one prior to this moment had even suspected was still active-resembled that of the Vizier of Cockaigne in the 1939 film version of that classic, as rendered by the imperious Charles Coburn.

"Attention, attention! Everyone report to my lab-on the double!"

Some folks were missing, ashore on their individual business. But Ozzie's lab soon filled up with two dozen souls, Tug among them.

Weeks ago, Tug might have been as excited as the others gathered here. But since Sukey's rebuff, life had lost its savor. What miracle could restore that burnish? None…

But yet-

Pellenera stood before the brane-buster, looking as out-of-place as a black panther in a taxi. Imagine a continent full of such creatures! Ozzie sat behind the keys of his harmonium. The brane-buster hummed and sparkled.

Ozzie could hardly speak. "Vibrations! It's all in the way the invisible strings vibrate! I only had to pay attention to her! Watch!"

He nodded to the Nubian, and she began to play her ocarina, as Ozzie pumped the harmonium attachment.

In the cabinet of the brane-buster, what could only be paradoxically described as a coruscating static vortex blossomed. Gasps from the watchers-even from sulky Tug.

With a joyous primal yawp, Pellenera hurled herself into the cabinet, still playing, and was no more.

The vortex lapsed into non-being as well.

Someone asked, "Is that the end?"

"Ha! Do you think I'm an idiot! I recorded every last note!"

Pellenera's looped song started up again, and the vortex resumed.

Everyone waited.

Time stretched like the silent heist scene in Hitchcock's Rififi.

Pellenera popped out of the cabinet, carrying something concealed in the crook of her arm, but naked as water herself.

Even from the edge of the crowd, Tug noticed that her naked back was inexplicably crisscrossed with a latticework of long antique gnarly scars, and he winced.

Revealed, her burden was one perfect golden Cavendish banana.

She smiled, and took several steps forward, the spectators parting before her like grasses beneath a breeze, until she came face to face with Tug.

And she handed the banana to him.

Alright, it isn't much of a dragon. I never said it was. More a lizard kind of thing. But if you lay down on your side and squint at it, you can see it's a dragon, as long as you're careful not to get too close.

Yeah-that's too close. Don't say I didn't warn you. That flame may be tiny but, like a match tip, it can really burn. I've got an ointment right here. Johnson's 470. I've tried others, but they all barely touch the pain. You should have seen what happened when I used the stuff in my kit. What a flare. Oh right. I do go on sometimes. Here it is. Just rub it in quickly. You'll hardly feel a thing by this afternoon.

You know, if I believed Jonathan Swift about the Lilliputians, I'd say that this is a dragon who could have terrorized them. Or the little people who stayed on the island in Mistress Masham's Repose. They'd surely have run screaming from it. Or it could have been the harrower of the Borrowers. Yeah-say that ten times fast. But those were in books, for God's sake. Not real. Not even faction. My girlfriend, Dana, the sometimes editor, who used to go to this college, did you ever meet her? Dana Woodbridge. Though of course being an English lit major, she probably never took a science course. Oh the point? Sure. I was getting to that. You know, Emily Dickinson wrote "Success in circuit lies." Dana likes to quote that when we have our long discussions. Well, about faction, Dana told me that it's truth crossed with fiction. You know-made-up memoirs and that sort of thing. It's hot now she says.

Well, not as hot as dragon's breath, whatever the size. And mustache hairs, when they singe, smell godawful. As you've just found out.

I suppose I could have stamped on it when I first saw it. The dragon, not the mustache hairs I mean. Hard to stamp on them without hurting someone. Hahahahahaha. Oh, sorry. That's my sense of humor. Dana doesn't think I'm good at it either. But I'm working on it. But if I'd stamped on it at once… the dragon, not… Right you got that. I'll move on.

Well, if I had, I'd have gotten rid of the problem in a second. I mean, it wasn't a lizard and couldn't scurry away. It could fly a bit, but I think that whole flying dragon stuff was made up by people who didn't know a thing about flight muscles, and lift and birds having hollow bones. By a bit I mean it had the floating ability of a hot-air balloon, except with nothing to use as ballast or to throw overboard when it wanted to descend. It just stopped holding its hot breath, blew it out, and down it came.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't believe me either. And not because I have a reputation as a jokester. That was in high school. College, I'm all serious student. Geology major, anthropology minor. It's how I came upon the little dragon, on a geology field trip to the Mideast last summer.