David Weber - The Excalibur Alternative

"None," Sir George admitted. He pushed himself experimentally into a sitting position and patted Matilda's knee reassuringly when he felt no sudden dizziness. He sat a moment, then rose smoothly to his feet and raised one hand, palm uppermost.

"I feel fine," he told them, and it was true.

"Perhaps you do, but you've given me more than enough fright for one day, Sir George Wincaster!" Matilda said in a much tarter tone. He grinned apologetically down at her and extended his hand, raising her lightly, and tucked her arm through his as he turned to face his senior officers once more.

"I feel fine," he repeated. "No doubt I did stumble over something. My thoughts were elsewhere, and any man can be clumsy enough to fall over his own two feet from time to time. But no harm was done, so be about your business while I—" he smiled at them and patted his wife's hand where it rested on his elbow "—attempt to make some amends to my lady wife for having afrighted her so boorishly!"

A rumble of laughter greeted his sally and the crowd began to disperse. He watched them go, then turned his gaze back to the dragon-man.

But the dragon-man was no longer there.

Matilda watched him closely for the rest of that long day, and she fussed over him as they prepared for bed that night, but Sir George had told her nothing but the simple truth. He did, indeed, feel fine—better, in some ways, than in a very long time—and he soothed her fears by drawing her down beside him. Her eyes widened with delight at the sudden passion of his embrace, and he proceeded to give her the most conclusive possible proof that there was nothing at all wrong with her husband.

But that night, as Matilda drifted into sleep in the circle of his arms and he prepared to follow her, he dreamed. Or thought he did, at least...

"Welcome, Sir George," the voice said, and the baron turned to find the speaker, only to blink in astonishment. The voice had sounded remarkably like Father Timothy's, although it carried an edge of polish and sophistication the blunt-spoken priest had never displayed. But it wasn't Father Timothy. For that matter, it wasn't even human, and he gaped in shock as he found himself facing one of the eternally silent dragon-men.

"I fear we have taken some liberties with your mind, Sir George," the dragon-man said. Or seemed to say, although his mouth never moved. "We apologize for that. It was both a violation of your privacy and of our own customs and codes, yet in this instance we had no choice, for it was imperative that we speak with you."

" Speak with me?" Sir George blurted. "How is it that I've never heard so much as a single sound from any of you, and now... now this—"

He waved his arms, and only then did he realize how odd their surroundings were. They stood in the center of a featureless gray plain, surrounded by... nothing. The grayness underfoot simply stretched away in every direction, to the uttermost limit of visibility, and he swallowed hard.

"Where are we?" he demanded, and was pleased to hear no quaver in his voice.

"Inside your own mind, in a sense," the dragon-man replied. "That isn't precisely correct, but it will serve as a crude approximation. We hope to be able to explain it more fully at a future time. But unless you and we act soon—and decisively—it's unlikely either your people or ours will have sufficient future for such explanations."

"What do you mean? And if you wished to speak with me, why did you never do so before this?" Sir George asked warily.

"To answer your second question first," the dragon-man answered calmly, "it wasn't possible to speak directly to you prior to this time. Indeed, we aren't `speaking' even now. Not as your species understands the term, at any rate."

Sir George frowned in perplexity, and the dragon-man cocked his head. His features were as alien as the "Commander's," yet Sir George had the sudden, unmistakable feeling of an amused smile. It came, he realized slowly, not from the dragon-man's face , but rather from somewhere inside the other. It was nothing he saw; rather it was something he felt. Which was absurd, of course... except that he felt absolutely no doubt of what he was sensing.

"This is a dream," he said flatly, and the dragon-man responded with an astonishingly human shrug.

"In a sense," he acknowledged. "You're most certainly asleep, at any rate. But if this is a dream, it's one we share... and the only way in which we could communicate with you. It's also—" the sense of a smile was even stronger, but this time it carried a hungry edge, as well "—a method of communication which the `Commander' and his kind cannot possibly tap or intercept."

"Ah?" Despite himself, Sir George's mental ears pricked at that. No doubt it was only a dream, and this talkative dragon-man was no more than his own imagination, but if only—

"Indeed," the dragon-man reassured him, and folded his arms across a massive chest. "Our kind don't use spoken speech among ourselves as most other races do," he explained. "In fact, we aren't capable of it, for we lack the vocal cords, or the equivalent of them, which you and other species use to produce sound."

"Then how do you speak to one another?" Sir George asked intently. "And, for that matter, what do you call your kind among yourselves?"

"We are what others call `telepaths,' " the dragon-man replied. "It means simply that we cast our thoughts directly into one another's minds, without need of words. And no doubt because we do so, we don't use individual names as other species do. Or, rather, we don't require them, for each of us has a unique gestalt—a taste, or flavor, if you will—which all others of our kind recognize. As for what we call ourselves as a species, the closest equivalent in your language would probably be `People.' Since meeting you humans, however, and especially since establishing a contact point in your mind, we aboard this ship have been rather taken by your own descriptions of us." The dragon-man's amusement was apparent. "The notion of playing the part of one of your `dragons' against the `Commander' is extremely attractive to us, Sir George."

Sir George smiled. It was amazing. The perpetually silent, completely alien dragon-man was no longer silent or alien. Or, rather, he remained alien, but unlike the demon-jester, his tone was as expressive as any human's, and his body language might have been that of Father Timothy or Rolf Grayhame. Was that because the "contact point" the dragon-man had mentioned somehow gave them an insight into how humans expressed emotions, so that they might do the same? Or was it some sort of natural consequence, a... translating effect of this "telepathy" the dragon-man had spoken of?

"If you find the notion pleasing, we'll no doubt continue to call you dragons," he said after a moment, putting aside his speculations until there was time to deal with them properly, and the dragon-man projected the sense of another fierce grin as he nodded.

"We would find that most acceptable," he said. "Yet the need for you to give us a name because we've never developed one is another example of the differences between your kind and us which result from the fact of our telepathy. Despite several of your millennia as the Federation's slaves, we have still to evolve many of the reference points most other species take for granted. Indeed, it was extremely difficult for our ancestors to grasp even the concept of spoken communication when the Federation discovered our world. They took many years to do so, and only the fact that they had independently developed a nuclear-age technology of their own prevented the Federation from classifying us as dumb beasts."