Fragment 33

Anne woke up alone, and shivering. That part was normal, but the blankets that she was tangled in weren't. As she struggled out of their clingy confines, she remembered the rest.

Right, she was at a stranger's house. Chris. Chris who picked up dying girls off the street and lived here with… Mac? This bathrobe belonged to Mac. It was small, faded, and vaguely green, with clover leaves embroidered on it. The living room that she'd stumbled through to get to the bathroom had a couch patterned in flowers. Maybe Mac was short for Mackenzie or something. Anne had known a girl named Mackenzie once. Or maybe it was a guy and Chris liked flowers. No judgement.

There were sheets tangled up in the blankets too, and everything that had been touching her skin was damp and clammy feeling. She had been sweating despite her shivers. Feverish. Thirsty.

The glass beside the bed was empty. The only sound was the old fashioned ticking of a clock in another room. She felt dizzy just from sitting up.

Tentatively, she called out, "Hello?"

She didn't know whether to feel relieved or worried when no one answered. The world spun when she stood, but she just stayed still until it was mostly steady again. She tottered to the bathroom first, and drank a handful of water from the sink after she washed her hands.

She had to go back to the bedroom and to get the glass, before venturing around the tall counter and into the kitchen. She opened a door on the refrigerator, to find that it was the fancy kind and that she'd opened the half that was freezer space.

A single bag of frozen vegetables huddled alone on the highest shelf, overlooking a chaotic war between paper wrapped packages with the names of various cuts of meat written on them, and small cartons of ice cream that ranged from single servings to quarts. The cold air felt good and her shivers eased, as she stood there staring into the freezer.

When she finally closed the door, a quart of ice cream was in her other hand. She was almost disappointed when she peeked into the other side and saw a fairly normal collection of refrigerated goods. Beer, milk, eggs, and various condiments. A small drawer full of cheeses, and a larger drawer with some fruits and vegetables.

A box of cubes for making broth and an electric water kettle sat open on the counter, but Anne ignored them, and hunted through the drawers until she found a spoon.

Ice cream. It had been so long. She carried everything back to the bed, which took a lot more effort than it should have, but she didn't want to spread her germs around. She was exhausted by the time she had herself propped up with the blankets mostly straightened out, and her nose was running again.

It was so raw that it hurt to dry it against a tissue, but there was a small jar of salve beside the box of tissues. If rubbing soft paper against her face hurt, the fragrant eucalyptus salve burned, and it was so strong that she could actually smell it. She didn't rub it off though, and capped the little jare carefully.

Who knew how much longer things made with ingredients from other continents would be available. Even in the streets, with everyone keeping their distance, news filtered down.

The ice cream had softened enough that her feeble strength was sufficient to lift a heaping spoonful by the time she opened it. She held the mouthful of frozen cream on her tongue until it had melted before swallowing. It was just like holding a cold pack against her forehead, only from the inside, she silently excused her greed.

She lifted out another spoonful.

--

She had wasted an entire day chasing after the "jets" and had only gotten close enough to one to see the row of windows that proved that it truly was some sort of airship.

She laughed again and compressed her form into one more streamlined than the one that was written into her pattern. Her natural wings weren't as swift and colorful as the feathered ones of her favorite teacher, but she was a little smug about the fact that there were far more illustrations that resembled her shape than his. The fact that most of those illustrations showed dragons being hunted by humans, she blithely ignored.

She flew toward the heart of civilization, and debated which of the great cities should be blessed with her presence first. London? Paris? Venice? Paris, she decided. Surely a mere two centuries would not be enough to pull that city from its place as the heart of fashion, the leader of the latest vogue.

She had no doubt at all that she would be able to acquire a "phone" of her own in a Paris shop.

She had no doubt until she saw the city in the distance many hours later. It was larger than it had been, much larger, and taller, as the morning sun lit its vast expanse. Ten times as large as the city she had known but two centuries ago. Grander too perhaps, but too quiet.

New kinds of vehicles crawled its streets, but few, far too few. A city that had sung with more than half a million voices, streets that had been crowded with clattering carriages, wagons, and pedestrians, its sound was reduced to a quiet hum.

Victoria's tales of the plague that now swept the world had not painted this picture of hushed quiet in her mind. The old plagues had been noisy, filled with moans and groans, weeping and shouting. These endless empty streets were frightening. No pillars of smoke, no stacks of bodies, the wind did not carry decay and sickness away from the city.

And yet…

When she opened her true eyes she could see how they hid. More sparks of life than she could count hid within those many walls. They hid as though it were an army marching upon them, rather than the unseen. And indeed, uniforms clothed many of the figures who were in the streets. They were different than the uniforms she remembered, but they could be nothing else.

She turned toward the isles without descending.

--

He glared at the child and counseled himself to patience. After a moment he lifted his gaze to the stars that lit the sky overhead.

If the unweavers were to sweep the mankind from the face of the Earth entirely within a generation, he would feel only mild regret, but the child who had lived among them would mourn. It was highly unlikely that any sickness could ever destroy them all, in any case.

The child was probably just too young to understand how brief their lives really were. Also, he very likely only wanted to save some favorite individual among them. And of course, because he could not see the patterns within things, he could not understand how complex that pattern was. If anything, the pattern of an individual "human" was more complex than the pattern of a "dragon", because they were a younger species.

He was quite certain that the patterns of dragons were also becoming more complex over time, as each generation tended to add onto what already existed within them, rather than removing what had existed before. The difference was that they designed the changes themselves, while the other creatures that shared the world with them lived or died according to whatever additions or very occasionally, subtractions, that chance bestowed upon them.

He dropped his head to the child's level, and told him quietly, "Even if you could see everything as I see it, by the time you could grasp every detail of the pattern within the individual human that you wish to reinforce, they would already be dead."

The child dropped his gaze and sighed, but he didn't argue.

"When I was young, there was an elder," he began, but the child held up his hands in a gesture adopted from the mankind to forestall his words.

"Can you come down into the city, to the place that I'm going to be living for perhaps another decade, and teach me there?" the child asked earnestly. "I need to teach you more English too, and that will be easier there."

"Why?" he asked doubtfully.

"I can use the 'internet' there, and also take care of Anne, and give her a better chance to recover on her own," the child explained.

After a moment he agreed. There was much left for both of them to learn.

He was not used to speaking while flying, so he felt startled when the child shouted, partway down the mountain, "Did that elder you were going to tell me about succeed in reinforcing someone's pattern?"

He thought about the old dragon who had scorned, or perhaps envied, his own desire to write wings into his pattern. "She worked with the patterns of the simplest creatures," he explained quietly, carefully shaping the sound so that it leapt toward the child.

The elder had shown him how patterns of not I could also be shaped. She had also believed that it might be possible to create a living pattern from your own energy, if you truly understood and could shape even the smallest detail from memory. He remembered her large hand and the water that had filled it slowly.

She had smacked him when he had performed what appeared to be the same trick only a century later, by pulling the water out of the air around him. But later they had laughed about it, because his method had taken a tiny fraction of the energy she had used, and that was the only way she'd known that he hadn't created the water directly from its pattern. It had taken him vastly longer to truly understand what she had actually shown him.

He doubted that anyone would ever be able to create even the simplest living pattern directly out of energy. It was incredibly difficult to create even a small amount of the pure element that served as the foundation for all life.