DONAR Page 2

  “Well, you two are more of a ‘natural’ for flight than I am,” Brianne replied with a hint of a chuckle. “You have the advantage on me. All I have is this one body.”

  For just a second, the Quist twins looked her up and down as she had done them when they first stepped out. In the little eternity wrapped up in that second, some little voice inside Brianne hoped that they appreciated what they saw in her as much as she appreciated what she saw in them.

  “You’d take to it well enough,” Conran assured her.

  “You would,” Donar agreed. “Once we got you fitted with a flight rig, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to learn to use the wings. In fact, considering all the places you’ve been and the things you’ve had to do in your work, I’m a little surprised you haven’t tried it already.”

  Brianne couldn’t help arching her eyebrows and rolling her eyes a bit at the thought of it. “Well, you’re right about that. I’ve had to go to some pretty high places sometimes. I guess I’ve always just gone automatically to the ways of flying that humans always use. It comes from not having another body with wings already built in, so to speak.”

  “The first Lacertans adapted to it,” said Donar. “You would too.”

  There was just a moment’s break in the conversation, with unstated admiration passing between the human scientist and her weredragon benefactors.

  “We’d better get going, Brianne,” Conran said. “Donar and I cleared out our whole schedule for today because it’s so important, but I’d still rather not waste time, and I’m sure your two assistants are as anxious as you are.”

  “I spoke to them earlier,” said Brianne, “and yes, they’re as ready as I am.”

  Conran slapped his brother on the shoulder. “Then let’s be getting up there. We’ll see you soon, Brianne.”

  Brianne stepped to one side, and the two brothers stepped slightly back and apart, making a little extra room for what came next. It was a sight she had seen before, of course, traveling in the kinds of circles and to the kinds of places that she did, but it was no less impressive for her being accustomed to it. The Quist brothers, with the casual ease of having done it every day since they were a year old, relaxed their bodies and released their human physical forms into another shape.

  Their skin turned to green scales with golden stripes as if new flesh were being laid upon them with an invisible trowel. Long, thick reptilian tails of matching scalation emerged from their lower backs, and from their upper backs, mighty wings of green leather blossomed and unfurled. Their necks elongated into serpentine shapes with those same green and gold-striped scales, and soft spines erupted from the backs of their necks down to their wings.

  The shapes of their heads changed, lengthening, morphing from human to reptilian, with blunt snouts in front and crowns of horns above the eyes. Their hands and feet turned to scaly, taloned things, capable of cutting gouges in stone. In place of the human Conran and Donar Quist stood two tall, proud dragon men of Lacerta. Had they so desired, they could have released their human shapes into complete, four-legged dragons, but these forms would serve them well enough.

  They nodded their dragon heads courteously in her direction; then, beating those fantastic wings and stirring up a draft on the terrace, they lunged onto the railing and bounded into the air with powerful swishes of their tails. In less time than it took to say it, the Quist twins were airborne, soaring off away from the mountain and into the morning sky.

  Brianne watched them go, admiring their grace in the air. They were truly as much at home off the ground as they were on it. She had seen the natural wonders of known space. She had seen the wildlife of dozens of planets. But in all her travels, Brianne had never encountered anything else that quite compared with the weredragons of the planet Lacerta. Especially the male ones.

  And, she thought, of all the dragon men she had encountered, she had never seen any that quite compared with these two. They were a strikingly beautiful lot, all things considered, but these two, this Conran and this Donar, were special. They were not only beautiful, but they were also Princes of their planet, and they wore their stature as if it were the most natural and comfortable thing in the world. It came to them naturally.

  The brothers cleaved their way through the air in the direction of Brianne’s project, which they and their wealth had made possible. The image of them standing so near her, so male, so incomparably beautiful, so perfect—and so close to being completely naked—lingered in her mind. They were awesome in their dragon way, but they were doubly awesome as young men.

  Brianne noted again that it was only their deference to having a human as a houseguest that had prompted them to wear loincloths for their morning flight. Had she suggested that they needn’t be so shy, they would have very readily dropped even those rudimentary garments and presented themselves to her in their full awesomeness.

  But no—that would have been a distraction, a very great distraction that might have led to even more distracting things. No doubt it would have led to things so distracting that it would have been easy to get lost in them. Lacertan males were notoriously sexual creatures and reputed to be insatiable. As they never got enough, those who shared a bed with them could hardly get enough of them. That was the last thing Brianne needed just now, especially as there were two of them.

  That was not to say that she didn’t need it. She was a healthy young woman, and she did have needs that could have been more than satisfied by a man of this planet. Or two such men. That, however, was not her reason for being here. She looked down from the two dragon-man figures that had now grown small in the sunlit sky to that one spot on the ground that was now the center of her greatest ambitions.

  That was the important thing now. Damara and her entire species, whose planet had come to such harm and was now inevitably doomed—that was the most important thing now. Brianne must not fail. The future of a part of the natural world was depending on her. There would be other times for the kinds of satisfaction that she had just indulged herself enough to contemplate. The one who needed her the most right now was one who could not even really comprehend what was happening to her. It was all about Damara.

  It’s all right, sweetheart, Brianne thought to the subject of her work. It won’t be much longer before you’re awake and we can get started. You’re going to have a future, I promise. This isn’t the end of the cralowogs, not if I can help it.

  She glanced up again at the twin man-dragons wheeling about in the sky and added with assurance, Not if we can help it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Far down below the circling and swooping Quist brothers lay a transparent dome, two kilometers wide. It was on land that their family had owned going back for generations, and like everything else in Greenscale, it was integrated into the tree-clustered landscape. One arc of the dome enclosed a rocky section of a mountain, from which a waterfall from a spring inside the cliff side poured into an artificial lake. The space inside the dome was made up of patches of planted forest, sections of brush and tall grass, and meadows, all carefully created. No expense was spared in the creation of this enclosed environment.

  Hidden devices throughout the space, again blending in with everything around them, worked to keep it exactly as it was. The money of the Quist Foundation had called forth the most talented engineers and biologists of their planet to construct it with the perfect craft and integrity on the outside and the perfect equilibrium on the inside, and to maintain it in exactly the right state—all for the benefit of what lay in another, opaque silver dome lying in the meadow near the lake.

  It was a shining blister or bubble of biologically neutral matter, chiefly carbon compounds engineered to maintain its solidity and not to interact biologically or chemically with anything else. The structure was about the size of the large hover-van that had lifted it into the dome and placed it where it now lay, before the dome was finally sealed. And there it rested, waiting for the moment when it would be opened and the purpose for which Bria
nne Heatherton had designed and the Quist Foundation had sponsored the dome would at last be fulfilled.

  Donar and Conran flew in slow circles over the circumference of what their Foundation’s money had built to Brianne’s specifications. They peered down with their dragon eyes, as sharp as a hawk’s, and brought the silver bubble into sharp focus, admiring and anticipating what their engineers and scientists had made on Brianne’s behalf. Of all the things they had done in their young lives since taking control of their family’s philanthropic interests, this was the thing that made them the proudest—partly because of what it meant to the life and natural history of the galaxy, and partly, they each had to admit, because of what it meant to the woman who initiated the project.

  It was Brianne Heatherton herself who had attracted them to her work. It was Brianne’s intelligence, her courage, her dedication, her passion. And yes, her beauty. Any such woman who was so fiercely devoted to a project like this was someone they wanted to know, perhaps to know very, very well. As they flew high over the dome, their wings both using and supported by the thermal currents that the planetary weather system made, Donar and Conran both replayed her presentation in their minds. They had watched it, together and separately, so many times that they practically knew it by heart.

  The first time they watched it, the brothers sat together at the round table in their large office in the mansion. They turned down the lights and turned on the holographic projector at the center of the table, and loaded the program transmitted from the Galactic Natural History Society. And there before them the image of Brianne Heatherton resolved itself into their sight for the first time.

  There was no denying that the first thing about her that came to their attention was her beauty. It was never their main criterion for deciding whose work they would sponsor (it couldn’t be, considering that some of the beneficiaries of their Foundation’s work were neither human nor Lacertan), but it definitely made them take notice.

  In the hologram, she was seated in an egg-shaped chair in a library, likely that of the Natural History Society itself, with the lights turned down and a soft spotlight on her to set a mood and an atmosphere. On the floor beside her lay a slightly raised circle of light that Conran and Donar recognized as another holoprojector. She was dressed in a suit with tails that flowed like a gown, with opaque stockings and shoes with heels just high enough to be interesting—or, the brothers thought, as interesting as the woman herself. Brianne had made herself look businesslike but just slightly elegant, an effective combination. With the brothers’ rapt attention, she began.

  An image appeared beside her, hovering over the projector on the floor. It was a planet, green and blue with the signs of life, but with the white of its clouds growing sparse and tenuous and ghostly, and wide swaths and stains of darkness on its browned continents. It gave the quiet impression of a planet in distress. “This is Torado IV,” said Brianne in the hologram. “It is the only planet in its system that bears or is capable of sustaining higher life forms. Torado IV will soon lose its life-supporting capabilities. Even as we speak, the planet is dying.”

  The hologram beside Brianne shifted, pulling back its vantage point, and as it did, the hologram expanded to a panoramic view with Brianne sitting in one corner of it, narrating. Torado IV receded into a tableau of the disk of the Toradan system, ten planets circling the central star. Brianne continued, “You’re now seeing Torado IV in its original orbital position and trajectory. That original orbit has been changed, with life-threatening results for the entire planet.”

  In response to Brianne’s narration, what appeared to be a spinning, flashing ring of light around an impenetrably black center moved into the image. It passed through the disk of the solar system at an angle, and when it intersected with the orbit of Torado IV at a critical distance ahead of the planet’s path, the green and blue planet reacted by shifting the arc of its orbit at an angle towards the star.

  The flashing dark object moved off and disappeared, leaving Torado IV to swing in its arc on an altered path. Brianne explained, “When a rogue black hole passed through the Toradan system, it caused a shift in the planet’s orbit. Torado IV is now on an orbital trajectory that brings it progressively closer to its Sun. The consequences for the planet and the life that it harbors are dire.”

  The panorama behind Brianne shifted to a series of moving images showing glaciers—mighty cliffs and peaks of blue-white ice—crumbling and cracking and spewing themselves downward into the ocean with huge upheavals of churning water. Brianne narrated, “glaciers and ice in the polar regions of the planet are melting at a dramatic rate, destroying habitats of animals in those areas and raising global sea levels.”

  The view changed again to show a series of beaches and rocky coasts being swallowed, devoured, by immense swells and waves of water that loomed up over the land and extended as far as the eye could see. “The rapidly rising sea levels are drowning every coast on every continent,” said Brianne.

  “In other parts of Torado IV,” Brianne continued, “the effects of the change in temperature are very different and just as punishing. Rising temperatures are scorching the inland areas. Lakes and rivers all over the planet are evaporating, leaving dry and desolate places.” To illustrate her point, the holographic vista now showed river beds that once churned with rushing waters and rapids now reduced to feebly trickling streams, while what had been the beds of lakes and other rivers now lay as naked expanses of parched and cracked soil.

  Brianne went on, “Vegetation across the planet has been receding from lower land to higher ground, and animal life has been following it, migrating to habitats for which it is not naturally suited.” To make her point, the tableau showed what had been plains, meadows, and grasslands changed to stretches of dry, brittle brown, while the green of living plant life clung to slopes and mountainsides under pale and cloudless skies.

  “Weather patterns are drastically and dangerously distorted, with severe weather turning more extreme,” said Brianne. “Where rain does appear, it comes in the form of monsoon-like bursts that flood wildlife habitats. Storms have grown stronger by orders of magnitude, and where this is no such weather, grass fires and forest fires have taken over.”

  The hologram starkly showed the tallest, mightiest trees, centuries old, in the grip of Biblical rains and hurricane winds that snapped their trunks and ripped them from the ground by their roots. In other places, tornadoes dropped from the sky in clusters of massive, whirling grey rope, lashing and ravaging the land. Vast forests turned to crackling silhouettes of blackness under searing orange carpets of flame. In the wake of the fires lay black deserts strewn with charred trunks and boughs. Smoke blanketed the sky and cast spreading grey shrouds over the land.

  The large tableau disappeared, and Brianne came forward into full view at full size again. Her expression was grave but sincere. “This proposal is about a project to mitigate the effects of the irreversible and terminal effects of climate change on one species native to Torado IV. The planet itself cannot be saved. But some of the life on it might be spared. Different projects are now under way to collect specimens of Toradan life and relocate them to other planets where their population might be safely replenished.

  Submitted for what I hope will be your approval: a conservation project to benefit the cralowogs of Torado IV. On a planet without sentient life, the cralowog is one of the most highly evolved organisms. It is a versatile animal, adapted for marine, freshwater, land, and arboreal habitats, and giving birth to its young in water.”

  Beside Brianne, the holoprojector produced a new image of a fabulous beast. It was the size of a bear. The display turned it around, and it became animated, moving into different positions to show its different attributes. Its head, like its size, was reminiscent of a bear, but its ears could contract flat and tight against the skull. It had short, sleek fur on the top of its head, down its back, and on the upper parts of its tail and limbs. The animal had extendable ribs that created fin-
like structures along its sides, connected its limbs, like a flying squirrel. In water, these “fins” enabled it to swim slowly and gracefully like a manta ray, but when on the hunt in water, it could flatten the fins back against the body, tuck in its limbs, and use the vertically flattened tail to accelerate and propel itself forward like a shark.

  Continuing her narration, Brianne said, “Cralowogs are omnivorous, eating both meat and plants. They breed and give birth only in water. The global warming of Torado IV and the resulting changes in ocean temperature have affected their life cycle, interfering with their breeding. The ratio of females to males has been thrown out of balance, and the females need an optimal water temperature in which to give birth to their young. Large numbers of cralowog pups are being stillborn or not surviving after birth.

  Also, the marine animals and plants on which the cralowogs feed have been dying off, sharply reducing half of the animals’ food supply. The die-off or migration of land animals and plants have cut down the other half. As with all the other indigenous animals, the population of cralowogs is dropping dramatically. The Galactic Natural History Society and other scientific authorities have declared all life on Torado IV endangered. If nothing is done, extinction will soon follow.”