Dragon Country, part 2
Please note: this story contains a scene of rape and violence
Lance sang as he walked into the woods. The sun was just up, the world might as well be empty, and it was a beautiful Saturday morning with the trees just hinting at yellow.
He hiked for a couple of hours, upwards and eastwards through the forest, aiming for the high ground and the majestic hills. A short break for a drink and something to eat, and he was high enough to be able to find an outcrop of rocks and sit enthroned to look back down towards the city he'd come from, and beyond that, misting into the western horizon, the ocean. To the north, a travelling plume announced a train; to the south there was a sliced line through the hills where the tracks led away, but no locomotive to be seen. He glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a balloon, but it was low in the sky and hard to be sure of. It was balloon weather, though; possibly there'd be a race later in the day.
Lance had persuaded a friendly aeronaut to take him up, once, and the winds had been kind and they'd overflown somewhere not so very far from where he was now standing. He hadn't been able to distinguish any kind of dragon sign, not from that height, but the experience was exhilarating. Not that it was real flight, not the way dragons did it, but it was the best a human being could do (airships, in Lance's opinion, Did Not Count) and Lance would certainly try it again when he got the opportunity.
He packed his water bottle back into his rucksack and folded the wrapper from his fruit and nut bar into his pocket. Time to be moving on.
He did not believe that all the dragons were gone. There had been so many dragons throughout history, dragons that had protected ships in storms, rescued frantic ballooning pioneers, helped foresters to clear trees. Also dragons who'd terrorised shepherds and set fire to cities and sent horses mad with fear, but you couldn't really blame a dragon for that, he thought. They were wild, after all.
But they said that there were no dragons left today, and he so badly wanted there to be dragons still in the world. Lance was determined to look for them, to find them somewhere, so every weekend he could spare, he went into the hills, to dragon country. Not to interfere, not to bring them back within range of humanity where they could be slaughtered to make dragon-hide boots for the beautiful and arrogant. No. Just to know that the dragons weren't all gone.
After a while the paths had petered out and there was only rough grass. Lance hadn't been this way before, but it felt promising, so he decided to let himself pick a random direction. He closed his eyes, rotated on the spot, and took a step forward. He felt a sudden wave of nausea and lurched to his knees. Okay, not doing that again. Still dizzy, he heaved in some deep breaths and decided that no, he was not going to throw up, then it felt as though his world darkened for an instant of chill, as though something had passed between him and the sun. He stared at the sky, but there was nothing to be seen, only a clear bright blue. Weird. Very weird.
The nauseated feeling stayed with him, but he walked on anyway. It would be wrong to waste such a lovely day. He was careful to note the shapes of the hills around him, and how far he went. It would be embarrassing to get lost and have to send up a flare for help.
To Lance's delight, he found himself descending into a bowl-shaped valley, which looked, he told himself, just right for dragons. There was even a small opening under one of the hills, but as it wasn't big enough for him to get more than his head and one arm inside, he doubted it would home a dragon. And there was nothing around to indicate that dragons did, in fact, live here. No bones of prey, no scratched or damaged trees, no footprints… certainly no glimpse of the noble beast in the distance. He sat down and ate his lunch. The nausea seemed to have subsided.
It was when he knocked his water bottle sideways, and snatched it up to minimise the loss, that he saw the claw.
It certainly looked like a claw. Black as charcoal, the length of his index finger, with a gleam to it and a scimitar-like curve… if it was a claw, and he very much wanted to believe that it was, it was a claw from a very large creature indeed. Lance put it carefully into his backpack. He'd have a look in his fossil books. He'd feel stupid if it was a prehistoric worm, or something. But he had a very good feeling about this.
The claw, if it was a claw, was the only thing he found that day, but it was a lot more than he'd ever found before, and Lance sang jauntily as he strode back towards the city. It seemed to be a long way off, and not getting any nearer, and he was almost ready to worry when he missed his footing and fell sideways with a yelp. But when he got his breath back and stood up again, he found he'd made better progress than he'd thought, because there was the path back through the woods, and after that it was less than two hours to get home because it was all downhill.
Lance's brain said he could not be certain that he'd found a dragon's claw. Lance's heart was sure, but even so, he didn't intend to mention it to anyone. He hunted through his repair kits and found a pair of black leather shoelaces, which he knotted into a careful loop and hung the claw through so that he could wear it like a necklace, a talisman, under his shirt. Proof that he was right, that there were still dragons in the world.
*
Lance was strongly tempted to go back to the hills on Sunday, but he was weary from the previous day's hiking, and more to the point, had promised to visit JC, who was obviously emerging from his reclusive phase and ready to reconnect with the world. He should probably be encouraged. So Lance caught the tram into town, stopped off for some pastries from Fatone's-the bakery adjunct to the restaurant was open every morning except Monday, and their sfogliatelle was the food of the gods-caught the bus out to the north-east, and walked the last half-mile to JC's barn, where he was welcomed by a slightly startled JC in a mud-stained T-shirt who promised he had not forgotten Lance's visit, but he'd been caught up working in the garden and time had gotten away from him. JC took him into the back garden, gave him wine, and took him on a tour of the plant beds, still abundant with the flowers of late summer. They ended up sitting on the bench carved from the trunk of a fallen tree, which was more comfortable than it looked and of which JC was inordinately proud. JC seemed ready for more than trivial conversation by this time, so Lance asked what he was working on.
JC looked oddly uncertain, and fiddled with his wine glass. "Oh, you know. Form, and relationship with reality..."
Lance was not at all sure what that meant, but decided he had better be encouraging. "Do you have a show lined up?"
"No, no... I'm nowhere near ready for that yet. But I could show you a couple of pieces, if you like."
"That'd be great. Please."
So JC led Lance to the workshop on the upper level of the barn. There were racks and tables and shelves full of metal pieces and wood, stones, found objects of all kinds from glass bottles to pebbles, scraps of newspaper, rusting garden tools. Lance had been in here once before, and was still surprised at the neatness and orderliness of JC's work space. The living room downstairs was anything but orderly. It was a matter of priorities, he supposed.
Four boulder-sized lumps were concealed by floral sheets ("My aunt gave them to me, and I can't sleep in them, they're so hideous," JC explained), which JC whisked clear to show Lance his newest creations.
Lance had never pretended to 'get' JC's sculpture, and he didn't understand these any more than he'd understood the collection that had been JC's last public show, four years before. Sharp-edged and angular, rising into odd, fractured shapes… his eyes traced the lines of metal and glass, snagged on the unexpected punctuations of softer materials, followed a course along from one joint to the next, through what seemed to be too many right angles, and almost, almost for a moment he thought he understood what JC was doing here, thought he saw something more in the world than he'd seen before… then it was gone, and he just felt queasy and had to look away. Lance shook his head.
"Wow, 'C. That is-I don't even know what that is. But I think you're on to something."
JC's face creased into a puzzled frown. "I don't know, man, I think I got it and then it just… it's actually kinda frustrating. I mean, I know what I want to achieve, but it's like, how do you, how does it, it's, it's-"
"Breathe, JC."
JC huffed. "It's like, I need more dimensions. How can three dimensions be enough to express it all? It seems like there should be more, only I can't figure out how to access them. If only I could access them, maybe I could say something real."
Lance began to laugh. Because, really, who else but JC would be dissatisfied with the fundamental facts of reality? After a moment, JC laughed along with him. And Lance looked at the finished and part-finished works, and shook his head again, because this was freaky stuff and no mistake, and nobody but JC could have made these particular pieces. Nobody else expected reality to accommodate itself to his sculptures.
"So you're saying you need more room in reality."
"Yeah. Yeah, that's it. There needs to be more… it feels like there ought to be more. There isn't room for everything."
"You have Time."
"I don't think it helps much."
"No, I mean, Time," Lance clarified. "The fourth dimension. Your work has length and breadth and depth, and also duration."
JC's mouth turned down. "Yeah, but, that's not 'cause of what I do, it's not in my control. I don't get to build duration into the work-everything has duration, and I guess I could, like, set it to explode or something, but that's not what I want to say. Although it would be cool, you know? Art that only exists for a precise amount of time… I guess like graffiti, and pavement art, but no. It's not what I'm doing, not right now. Things are like, like, like pencils, you know?"
Lance didn't know, but JC was clearly intent on explaining. "See, the work starts out as a concept, a point, and then you create it, and that takes a while, and its co-ordinates in time, no, its profile in time, is like the sharp end of a pencil, the point is when it starts and then it grows in length and depth and breadth until it's complete. And then when it's made, it looks like the shaft of the pencil, it just continues to exist, like an infinite pencil, except it isn't actually infinite because nothing is, but you don't know when its time will come to an end. But that isn't what I mean."
Good, thought Lance, because he didn't think the concept would come across in JC's weird, angular sculptures. Although it was kind of a cool image. "The physicists say there may be a whole bunch of other dimensions, only we can't perceive them. They're, um, wrapped around like tiny rolls..." He'd read that physics book two and a half times so far, and the concept wasn't really sticking in his brain. That was the trouble with astrophysicists, Lance thought, the really good ones didn't have brains like normal human beings. Normal human beings couldn't think about the size of the universe like it was easy. Particle physicists, too, from the opposite direction. "You know what, you should talk with people at the university about this stuff."
"Oh, yeah, I hung out with a couple of guys," JC said, dismissively, "but they were all about the equations. I mean, I guess the math is a bit like art, but, eh. I want to make it… palpable. If we could only access those other dimensions, create a truly multi-dimensional work, that's what I want to do. I get it in my head, but it doesn't fit into what I can do with my hands. It's driving me crazy."
"Hmm," said Lance. He was intrigued by the idea that JC could somehow think in more than three-four, he supposed-dimensions. It was almost a pity JC was an artist. If he'd been a mathematician, or a physicist, he might have been able to do something spectacular. At least he'd have the tools to express what he claimed to have in his head. It was all very well JC saying the university guys weren't getting it, but Lance had more faith in science than in art. "I guess you have as much chance of figuring it out as a mathematician," Lance said, mostly to be nice, although as the words left his mouth he thought maybe it was true. "Keep poking at reality until it bends for you. You let me know when you get to show these, you hear me?"
JC shuffled a bit. "I don't know if that's going to happen. When, I mean. Right now I'm just, you know. Working."
Shit, Lance thought. JC's agent had abandoned him. Again. What was that, the fourth one now? "I hope you don't forget to eat," he said.
"Oh! Um, no. Of course not. You wanna-I put something in the oven, I guess it should be done by now."
It was more than done, but they sloshed quite a bit of red wine and a tin of tomatoes over the remains and cooked some pasta, and it was fine. JC ate in a single-minded way that led Lance to suspect he did, in fact, forget to eat quite a lot of the time. He practically inhaled the sfogliatelle. Lance would very much have liked to broach the subject of maybe getting JC an assistant, or a job, depending on where his finances were, and it was irritating not to be able to pick out the specifics from the multi-tonal hum of JC's thoughts. But JC had a natural shield, so that all Lance could get from him was mood, no better than a regular empath, and he could not tell whether the worry he could detect was something serious like "I can't afford next week's meals" or only "that order for faceted zircon is late".
"See, I think I hit a dead end," JC said, abruptly, and there was a flash of anguish that caught Lance off guard. "I haven't been able to work on anything in weeks. Months, even. It just won't… I just wonder if I'm trying to do something impossible because I can't create anymore, and it's an excuse. If I'm just chasing dragons."
"If you catch one, let me know," Lance said.
"Sometimes I think I should go right back to the beginning, start in, like, one dimension, well, okay, two, and work from there, make it simple, only, only I'm not sure if I can. I don't know if I remember how."
"You know what you need?" Lance said, as inspiration seized him. "You need a student. Someone who's stuck in a different place than you are. You help someone else to work on problems you already solved, maybe that will remind you how to do it."
JC's forehead creased. "Do you think that would be a good idea? I mean, I don't know if I could help anyone else, not stuck like I am."
"Sure you could," Lance said, "you have a great eye for this stuff, you could help someone see what sh-they were getting right, and you could help them be brave enough to try new stuff. You've never been afraid of trying new stuff, have you?"
"I… no, I guess not."
"And maybe it would help you, too. I think you're so tied up in wondering how to use more dimensions in your work, maybe stopping thinking about it would give it a chance to, like, resolve itself in your head. And if you want to go back to basics, then helping someone who needs that would help you, too, wouldn't it?"
"Lance, are you offering me a job?"
"Ah… maybe. Do you know Britney Spears?"
"The kid who did those lovely naif paintings? We met a couple of times. Awful mother."
"Well, Britney needs help."
"Is she still working? I don't recall seeing anything new from her for, uh, a long while."
"She's been out of it for a while, she got married, had a couple of kids, and she's ready to get back to painting again, only she lost her confidence. I think you two could be good for each other, if you get along. How about it? Will you give it a try?"
"I guess it wouldn't do any harm to meet," JC said, "but you know, we have to have an artistic relationship. Mutual respect, and all that. I mean, I liked her paintings but I was maybe seeing things in them that weren't there on purpose. And who knows if she likes my work? We were shown in the same exhibition a few years back, today's rising stars or some such crap, but it doesn't mean she likes what I do, or even knows it, really. She was just a kid."
"I'm going to set something up," Lance said, getting out his notepad. "Dinner, maybe. We'll start with that."
JC nodded. "It could be good," he mused, "getting to work with another artist. I kinda miss that."
*
"And this came for you," said Lisa, laying a small box on top of Monday's letters. "There's a card with it."
After Lisa and her air of excitement had retreated to her own desk, Lance was not particularly surprised to find that the card was from Adam Lambert. The flamboyant handwriting thanked him for introducing Adam to Simon Cowell, and hoped the enclosed would make a welcome addition to his collection. Lance remembered being so flustered he'd risked making that call with Lambert still in the room, and decided he disliked Adam Lambert. 'The enclosed' proved to be a snowglobe of a baby dragon emerging from an egg. Lance frowned at it. The proportions were all wrong. The egg's surface gleamed with muted rainbow colours like oil in a puddle, but it was too shallowly curved where it stood proud of the 'sand' surface, and the dragon baby's red head was so large the rest of its body could not possibly fit within the egg.
Lance did not want a thank-you present from Adam Lambert. Lance did not like people with adamantine shielding and dragon-hide boots. He would put the snowglobe into the box for the charity collectors… he looked at it again. Tilted it, so that tiny flakes drifted like ash from a volcano. Then he put it on the shelf next to the green dragon, and turned his attention to his mail.
*
He tried quite hard to ignore his new ornament, but it was as persistent as a popular song, worming its way into his head at unexpected moments, so that he'd find himself staring up at the little red head emerging from its improbable shell, and trying to figure out why something so patently incorrect seemed to convey a kind of rightness. Lance spent a lot of time mentally swearing at Adam Lambert for giving him such a distracting gift.
However, he did have a business to run, jobs to fill, applicants to see, and the particular problem of Britney to deal with. He was confident that she and JC would have something to offer one another, and set up a dinner together so they could get reacquainted and see if there was any reason why this deal wouldn't work; but there was still the difficulty of getting Britney an assistant to wrangle her kids and the rest of her life. Britney was a great client if you liked getting a fee every time she accepted a candidate you sent her, but he would have preferred to find the one, perfect person for her.
That afternoon there was a tidal disruption in the outer office. Lance put his accounts to one side and awaited Chris's entrance into his own room, which followed after a few noisy minutes.
"So, Mr Employment Agent," Chris began, and sat.
"You didn't," Lance said, though he knew he was wrong.
"If you mean, I didn't tell that fat git what he could do with his job, you're wrong." Chris looked pleased with himself, although there was a roil of uncertainty behind his grin.
"I suppose it was inevitable."
"I couldn't work there any more. I mean, I had this sweet motorcycle, and I went over every cog and rod and cylinder and she was singing, fine as could be, and the bastard wanted me to make out she needed-I'll spare you the technical details, but it was just fucked, seriously. And I said the owner was paying me to make sure his machine was safe and sound, and it was, and, eh. You know."
"You lost your temper."
"He lost his first! Technically, it's possible I provoked him."
Lance rolled his eyes. "And now you need a job. You do realise there's better places than here for someone with your kind of skills."
"I'm not necessarily looking to work as a mechanic," Chris said, surprising him. "I've been saving, I want to start up my own place, but I don't quite have the capital yet. I could go work for some other dishonest piece of shit, but I doubt it'd help me. The only decent garage I know is Wright's Wheels, and they aren't hiring because I asked. But I can do other stuff. I could be somebody's driver, chauffeur, keep the cars tuned and polished, whatever. Or, I don't know, anything. I don't mind being a bouncer or a trash collector or-anything that keeps me in meals and lets me put a bit by. I don't need much."
Lance felt a bit guilty for accepting the little coiled gold dragon, but there had been no point refusing the gift. And it probably hadn't cost a lot.
"Okay. Okay, I'll see what I can do. Did Lisa give you one of our forms?" Chris shot him a disgusted look, and Lance sighed. "It makes my life a lot easier-it makes getting you a job much quicker, if you fill in the details." There didn't seem to be any blanks in his drawer, so Lance went over to the press and stamped a couple, one of which he handed over. "If you need a pen there's one on the inkstand."
Chris muttered something about pretentious bastards with quills and fancy inkwells, even though he knew perfectly well that Lance used a fountain pen like everyone else and only kept the cut glass set on his desk because they were pretty, but he settled down to fill in his details, and very soon handed his completed application over.
"I'll do my best to find you something, Chris," Lance said. "With an honest boss."
"You're a good man," Chris said. "You don't mind if I distract your assistant for a while, do you? I think she has chocolate chip cookies."
Lance was actually wondering why Lisa had not come in with coffee and a plate of something, but as Chris opened the door to the outer office he heard a familiar voice and thought, oh. Chris went out, calling blessings down upon Lisa's head, and a moment later there was a knock on the door.
"Come in," he called, bracing himself.
"Hi," Adam Lambert said, cheerfully. "I brought Chris over, he finished working on my bike and managed to get himself sacked, so I thought it was the least I could do."
"It was very kind of you," Lance said.
"Oh, not really. I was coming this way anyway. I wanted to ask, I wondered if, would you have dinner with me tonight?"
"I, I-" what? "I'm busy." Lance almost bit his tongue to hold in the automatic apology that wanted to follow-his momma would be unimpressed. Truth to tell, he was fighting an impulse to say yes.
"Ah," said Adam Lambert. "Right. I see you have the hatchling on display."
"Yes, it's a very-it's an interesting piece. Thank you. You didn't need to give me anything, I was just doing my job."
"Sure, but you got me exactly where I needed to be. I'm grateful. And I thought you'd appreciate it, since you collect dragon… memorabilia. With the shell being authentic, I mean."
"Authentic?"
"Mm hm."
Did he mean, it was from an actual dragon egg? How on earth-was that even possible? "I'd have thought dragon eggs were a lot bigger," he said, trying to keep a disinterested tone.
"It's from the pointy end, obviously, or the curve would barely show in a thing that size. But you can see from the colours. Like a black version of abalone, which I don't believe occurs anywhere else in nature. You should look out for it next time you go hiking. You never know what else you might find."
Lance was too thrown to know what to say to that. "You, uh, seem to know a lot about dragons."
Adam Lambert smiled. "There's a lot more I could tell you, if you have dinner with me."
"I can't. Like I said. I'm busy."
"Then-"
"These are the best damn chocolate chip cookies ever. Bass, when I'm rich I'm going to steal your assistant." Chris, marching back into the office bearing a depleted plate of cookies. Lance blessed him for his timing.
"You wouldn't be as good a boss as me," he said. "Hand them over."
Chris, naturally, offered the plate to Adam Lambert first.
"No, thanks, I already tried them, and you're right, they are good. I guess I should get going. Do you need a ride home?"
"That would be cool," Chris said. "Lance, you got my number, if anything should, you know."
"I will call," said Lance. "You take care, now."
"Say hi to JC for me," Chris said as he left in Adam Lambert's wake.
Well.
*
"Hey, Lance. Good to see you!" Papa Fatone had the happy knack of making it seem that you were the one person in the world he most wanted to see. It was a real asset, when you ran a restaurant. "Hey, Joey! Here's your favourite customer! You have two guests tonight? Don't worry, we'll look after you."
"I know you will," Lance said, grinning back.
"We put you in the Nook," Joey said from behind him, "since you asked for privacy. This way."
The Nook turned out to be a tiny side-room filled with film posters and autographed photographs of famous people, which might have been the usual restaurant schtick except that Joe Fatone, Senior was in some of the pictures. Fatone's had been feeding people for a long time.
"Table for three," said Joey, in a tone of mild disapproval. "I suppose this means you aren't having an intimate date with that special person. Unless," he brightened, "you have a harem now?"
"No." Lance smiled. It was impossible not to cheer up with Joey around. "It's business. Well, mostly. They're friends too."
"When are you going to find yourself a nice boy? You ought to have them lining up!"
"Oh, well, you know. Work. And…"
"And?"
"I did get-someone asked me out. Only it was for tonight, so I couldn't go. And I wasn't sure if I wanted to."
"So what's the problem?" Joey slid into one of the chairs. "I got time, there's hardly anybody in yet and Kel can cope for a few minutes."
"It's just that, he, I don't know. I don't trust him, and he seems to be, there's some questionable stuff. How could I date someone who goes against my principles?"
"But he's really hot," Joey stated. He didn't need to be a mind-reader to guess that.
"Yeah…" There was something compelling about Adam Lambert, and Lance did not know what it was. "I keep thinking about him," he admitted. "But I don't think I even like him."
"Maybe you should give the guy a chance," Joey said. "Could be you just aren't on the same wavelength."
Not on the same wavelength was about right, Lance thought. With Adam's shielding and the fact that he was hiding something in a way Lance had never encountered before, he didn't see how they could manage to get along. It was just really tempting to try, until Lance brought himself up short by remembering the dragon-hide boots. How could there possibly be a good explanation for dragon-hide boots?
Joey seemed to recognise that the conversation had nowhere to go, and stood up. "You want something to drink while you're waiting?"
Lance ordered gratefully, and scanned the wine list while Joey went to fetch his aperitif. It arrived scant seconds before Kelly showed JC into the Nook, and a few moments later, Britney's arrival had them both standing up again to greet her.
What was really gratifying was that Britney and JC seemed to get on at once. There were several minutes of obligatory mutual admiration, and then they were commiserating on how hard it was to fight through artist's block, and Lance hardly needed to say a word. He picked out a bottle of wine, but Joey didn't bother to take an order for food, showing up a few minutes later with a bowl of olives, a platter of antipasti, and breadsticks, and later brought a chicken dish with salad for Britney, a gigantic bowl of spaghetti and meatballs which JC hoovered clean in between enthusiastic and incoherent descriptions of pieces he had admired, and a dish for Lance which he hadn't tried before but which turned out to be just what he wanted. Joey informed him with a wicked smirk that it was Penne con Pollo al Dragoncello.
His artistic experiment was plainly going to work. Lance only needed to nudge the conversation briefly, to make sure the two of them made an actual appointment to get together at Britney's place to do some work. He was, he decided complacently, very good at his job. Even if he wasn't getting a commission for this one.
*
"I have to get someone for Britney," Lance said as Lisa entered his office first thing the following morning. "She's so excited about working as an artist again, it'd be a real shame if all that enthusiasm drains away because she doesn't get any time."
"It went well last night, then?"
"Couldn't have gone better, really. I'm sure it's going to work out for both of them. Oh, man." Lance was looking at the morning's list.
"I don't think you're going to have time for Britney's problems until after lunch," Lisa confirmed.
"Lunch? Hah. You know these two are going to over-run, and I would put money on at least one of the others as well. You keep the coffee brewing or there'll be fistfights."
His first appointment was due in half an hour, leaving Lance just enough time to read today's letters and glance through the files before the client arrived.
After that, there was no let-up until nigh on two o'clock, and as he showed the most recent applicant-a promising young woman, he thought she'd be easy to place, probably when the Pan Dancers got back from their tour-out of the office, Lance realised he was extremely hungry.
Lisa, of course, had been to the sandwich bar just along the road.
"You are the best assistant ever," he said through a mouthful of turkey and lettuce.
She beamed. "I know. You have about forty minutes before that update call with Mr Fuller. Do you want to think about the Britney problem, or is your head too full?"
"I really want to get her suited as soon as possible, so let's see if we can figure something out now. So. Kasdorf, Hedderson, Peters."
"I have the notes here. It looks like any of them would be competent."
"Yeah. It's more a personality thing. Ms Peters seemed a bit young… see, I kinda thought she really needs a mom in her life," Lance said, "but now I'm wondering if I got that wrong. Maybe a younger assistant would be better, they'd have more in common."
"A mom might be what she needs," Lisa decided, "but I'm not sure it's what she wants. I mean, you said her actual mom was all kinds of pushy and not very nurturing, and honestly, if Britney's mom was the kind of mom who, like, baked cookies with her kids and made sure they had clean socks and everything, I bet Britney would have turned out to be that kind of mom too."
"I think she wants to be, but I don't think she knows how."
"Yeah, but, there's lots of ways to be a good mother. You don't have to be the cookies-baking kind."
"That's true." Lance's mother had taught him to bake cookies. "Also, kids are pretty good at forgiving their parents when they fuck up." But it was still uncomfortable to go home and hear everyone desperately trying not to think about anything except Mary Had A Little Lamb.
"I wonder if Britney doesn't like women very much," Lisa said, thoughtfully. "I mean, she doesn't seem to have girlfriends. Sometimes, women feel like other women are competitors, and they don't get to be friends. Maybe that's why her assistants don't last long. If she, if she feels like they're competing for her kids' affection, that'd be kinda scary, wouldn't it?"
"Huh." Lance would have to ponder that. He'd never picked up on any such feelings, but then, he'd never witnessed Britney's interactions with her assistants, and she did have that habit of pushing all the negative stuff down out of sight and refusing to think about it. If it even made it as far as conscious thought, which it probably wouldn't. He-and Britney, as far as he could tell-had just assumed what she wanted was a capable, organised woman. If that was wrong... He didn't think there were any men on his books who were applying for a job as a nanny or personal assistant. Mostly the ones without marketable talent, professional qualifications or technical skills wanted to be bodyguards. He sighed. "The more I think about it, the more I wonder if you aren't right about her not really wanting another woman around. But we don't have any men who-wait. Wait just one second. I just had the stupidest-Okay, I'm gonna-" He leapt for his telephone and paged hurriedly through the address folder.
"Chris! Hi. Listen, you said you didn't need a job as a mechanic, right? How would you feel about being a kind of, erm, part time secretary, part time child minder, with a side order of cook and laundry-maid?"
Five minutes later, he put the phone down and did a little dance of triumph. Lisa applauded politely from the doorway.
"Your boss is a genius, seriously. It's crazy, but I really think it'll work-at least for long enough that Britney'll get back her artist mojo and Chris will save enough money to start his garage."
"Chris? Chris Kirkpatrick?" Lisa started to laugh. "Are you serious?"
"He has four younger sisters, he'll look after her," said Lance. "And he's incredibly good with little kids, mostly because he never really grew up." He had a great feeling about this. "Right, back to the grindstone. I'll give Britney a call and tell her we're sending someone over, then it's time to hit the accounts. Here's my notes from this morning."
"And here's the rest of your sandwich. And, um, this came."
Lance eyed her warily as she handed him the envelope. He recognised that fizzy feeling behind her smile, and was not at all surprised that the address was in Adam Lambert's handwriting.
"He, um, he sent me something, too. Tickets for a concert Saturday night. It's a variety concert, he's probably on quite early, being so new, but wouldn't it be great to see what he can do when he's not just singing in the office?"
Possibly, Lance thought. "I'm sure he'll be very good," he said.
"Then you'll come?"
"Me? Aren't you going to ask a friend along?"
She wrinkled her nose. "Last time I went to a concert with my mates they ditched me because a bunch of skeevy guys wanted to buy them drinks. And you're the reason Adam has this gig, of course you should come!"
"Ah. Well…"
"Just think about it. I'm going to start on this filing."
Left alone in his office, Lance opened the note. Hi. Chris K told me you really were busy yesterday, and I'm a persistent guy so I'm going to ask you again, and then one more time after this if you say no, but third time's the charm and if you say no again I promise I'll leave you alone. Will you have dinner with me? As an extra incentive, you can ask me about my boots. My evenings are filling up now, Simon C has me on the circuit already, but I'm sure we can work something out. A telephone number, a sprawling signature.
Damn it, Lance thought.
*
"See, I just don't know if it's a good idea."
"You said he was hot," Joey stated, as though that answered all arguments.
"No, you said he was hot," said Lance. "Okay, he is hot." Gorgeous blue eyes, great smile, long legs-in dragon-hide boots. "But I don't have a clue what he's thinking, and it's so weird, I've never had that before and I don't like it."
"It might not be such a bad thing," said Joey, who never needed to ask a customer what he wanted to eat. "Keeps the element of surprise. And, it means you aren't always the one who knows what's going on. Makes for a more equal relationship, if you have to use your words."
Lance opened his mouth to reply to that, realised Joe had a point, and ate a meatball instead. He'd never thought of it that way before, but maybe, maybe it was a little bit unfair that he could always tell if a guy was lying to him. "So you're saying I should go for it?"
"Course I am. 'Bout time you had someone interesting in your life. Make him bring you here for dinner, I want to get a look at the guy."
"I was thinking maybe lunch," said Lance, admitting to himself that he'd known Joey would encourage him, which was why he was here eating spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and asking for advice. If he'd wanted to be discouraged he'd have called his sister.
"That's right, make him work for it," Joey said, cheerfully.
*
He telephoned, and-inevitably-reached Adam Lambert's answering service, so left a message suggesting three possible lunch dates. Right. Done. Then he settled down for a nice, comfortable evening with his dogs and his physics book. Dogs were so much easier than people. Their love was total and uncomplicated. And they hid nothing.
Mid-way through the evening, Adam Lambert called back, and they had a polite, stilted conversation culminating in an arrangement to meet for lunch the following Wednesday. When he replaced the receiver, Lance sat immobile by his telephone table, trying for what seemed like the thousandth time to decide whether he was being fair and reasonable and giving a good-looking man a chance, or being foolish, led around by his baser desires, and going against all his principles.
Lance's life had been much simpler before Adam Lambert arrived in it.
He had brought the snowglobe home with him. It was too distracting to keep at work. At least if he spent half an hour gazing at it in his own living room he wasn't wasting time that should be spent on his accounts. He set it on the coffee table in front of the couch, and settled down to tackle the physics book again. He was almost sure his brain was beginning to wrap itself around the idea of a many-dimensional universe, but Kaluza-Klein theory was very slippery. If JC could do it by instinct, more power to him.
And now he was picturing those weird and wonderful sculptures JC had made. He tried to get them plain in his mind, and experienced again that odd feeling that there were too many right angles, until he slid off the couch feeling dizzy. He fetched up in front of the coffee table, nose to nose with the baby dragonlet which was of course, of course it was coming from a different dimension than was captured in the snowglobe, it was too big because the rest of it was somewhere else, how obvious it was. The meatballs lurched uncomfortably in his stomach and Lance had to blink and shake his head, and when he looked again the little dragon was just the wrong size as usual.
But he knew, now. He knew where dragon country was.
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Lance sang as he walked into the woods. The sun was just up, the world might as well be empty, and it was a beautiful Saturday morning with the trees just hinting at yellow.
He hiked for a couple of hours, upwards and eastwards through the forest, aiming for the high ground and the majestic hills. A short break for a drink and something to eat, and he was high enough to be able to find an outcrop of rocks and sit enthroned to look back down towards the city he'd come from, and beyond that, misting into the western horizon, the ocean. To the north, a travelling plume announced a train; to the south there was a sliced line through the hills where the tracks led away, but no locomotive to be seen. He glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a balloon, but it was low in the sky and hard to be sure of. It was balloon weather, though; possibly there'd be a race later in the day.
Lance had persuaded a friendly aeronaut to take him up, once, and the winds had been kind and they'd overflown somewhere not so very far from where he was now standing. He hadn't been able to distinguish any kind of dragon sign, not from that height, but the experience was exhilarating. Not that it was real flight, not the way dragons did it, but it was the best a human being could do (airships, in Lance's opinion, Did Not Count) and Lance would certainly try it again when he got the opportunity.
He packed his water bottle back into his rucksack and folded the wrapper from his fruit and nut bar into his pocket. Time to be moving on.
He did not believe that all the dragons were gone. There had been so many dragons throughout history, dragons that had protected ships in storms, rescued frantic ballooning pioneers, helped foresters to clear trees. Also dragons who'd terrorised shepherds and set fire to cities and sent horses mad with fear, but you couldn't really blame a dragon for that, he thought. They were wild, after all.
But they said that there were no dragons left today, and he so badly wanted there to be dragons still in the world. Lance was determined to look for them, to find them somewhere, so every weekend he could spare, he went into the hills, to dragon country. Not to interfere, not to bring them back within range of humanity where they could be slaughtered to make dragon-hide boots for the beautiful and arrogant. No. Just to know that the dragons weren't all gone.
After a while the paths had petered out and there was only rough grass. Lance hadn't been this way before, but it felt promising, so he decided to let himself pick a random direction. He closed his eyes, rotated on the spot, and took a step forward. He felt a sudden wave of nausea and lurched to his knees. Okay, not doing that again. Still dizzy, he heaved in some deep breaths and decided that no, he was not going to throw up, then it felt as though his world darkened for an instant of chill, as though something had passed between him and the sun. He stared at the sky, but there was nothing to be seen, only a clear bright blue. Weird. Very weird.
The nauseated feeling stayed with him, but he walked on anyway. It would be wrong to waste such a lovely day. He was careful to note the shapes of the hills around him, and how far he went. It would be embarrassing to get lost and have to send up a flare for help.
To Lance's delight, he found himself descending into a bowl-shaped valley, which looked, he told himself, just right for dragons. There was even a small opening under one of the hills, but as it wasn't big enough for him to get more than his head and one arm inside, he doubted it would home a dragon. And there was nothing around to indicate that dragons did, in fact, live here. No bones of prey, no scratched or damaged trees, no footprints… certainly no glimpse of the noble beast in the distance. He sat down and ate his lunch. The nausea seemed to have subsided.
It was when he knocked his water bottle sideways, and snatched it up to minimise the loss, that he saw the claw.
It certainly looked like a claw. Black as charcoal, the length of his index finger, with a gleam to it and a scimitar-like curve… if it was a claw, and he very much wanted to believe that it was, it was a claw from a very large creature indeed. Lance put it carefully into his backpack. He'd have a look in his fossil books. He'd feel stupid if it was a prehistoric worm, or something. But he had a very good feeling about this.
The claw, if it was a claw, was the only thing he found that day, but it was a lot more than he'd ever found before, and Lance sang jauntily as he strode back towards the city. It seemed to be a long way off, and not getting any nearer, and he was almost ready to worry when he missed his footing and fell sideways with a yelp. But when he got his breath back and stood up again, he found he'd made better progress than he'd thought, because there was the path back through the woods, and after that it was less than two hours to get home because it was all downhill.
Lance's brain said he could not be certain that he'd found a dragon's claw. Lance's heart was sure, but even so, he didn't intend to mention it to anyone. He hunted through his repair kits and found a pair of black leather shoelaces, which he knotted into a careful loop and hung the claw through so that he could wear it like a necklace, a talisman, under his shirt. Proof that he was right, that there were still dragons in the world.
*
Lance was strongly tempted to go back to the hills on Sunday, but he was weary from the previous day's hiking, and more to the point, had promised to visit JC, who was obviously emerging from his reclusive phase and ready to reconnect with the world. He should probably be encouraged. So Lance caught the tram into town, stopped off for some pastries from Fatone's-the bakery adjunct to the restaurant was open every morning except Monday, and their sfogliatelle was the food of the gods-caught the bus out to the north-east, and walked the last half-mile to JC's barn, where he was welcomed by a slightly startled JC in a mud-stained T-shirt who promised he had not forgotten Lance's visit, but he'd been caught up working in the garden and time had gotten away from him. JC took him into the back garden, gave him wine, and took him on a tour of the plant beds, still abundant with the flowers of late summer. They ended up sitting on the bench carved from the trunk of a fallen tree, which was more comfortable than it looked and of which JC was inordinately proud. JC seemed ready for more than trivial conversation by this time, so Lance asked what he was working on.
JC looked oddly uncertain, and fiddled with his wine glass. "Oh, you know. Form, and relationship with reality..."
Lance was not at all sure what that meant, but decided he had better be encouraging. "Do you have a show lined up?"
"No, no... I'm nowhere near ready for that yet. But I could show you a couple of pieces, if you like."
"That'd be great. Please."
So JC led Lance to the workshop on the upper level of the barn. There were racks and tables and shelves full of metal pieces and wood, stones, found objects of all kinds from glass bottles to pebbles, scraps of newspaper, rusting garden tools. Lance had been in here once before, and was still surprised at the neatness and orderliness of JC's work space. The living room downstairs was anything but orderly. It was a matter of priorities, he supposed.
Four boulder-sized lumps were concealed by floral sheets ("My aunt gave them to me, and I can't sleep in them, they're so hideous," JC explained), which JC whisked clear to show Lance his newest creations.
Lance had never pretended to 'get' JC's sculpture, and he didn't understand these any more than he'd understood the collection that had been JC's last public show, four years before. Sharp-edged and angular, rising into odd, fractured shapes… his eyes traced the lines of metal and glass, snagged on the unexpected punctuations of softer materials, followed a course along from one joint to the next, through what seemed to be too many right angles, and almost, almost for a moment he thought he understood what JC was doing here, thought he saw something more in the world than he'd seen before… then it was gone, and he just felt queasy and had to look away. Lance shook his head.
"Wow, 'C. That is-I don't even know what that is. But I think you're on to something."
JC's face creased into a puzzled frown. "I don't know, man, I think I got it and then it just… it's actually kinda frustrating. I mean, I know what I want to achieve, but it's like, how do you, how does it, it's, it's-"
"Breathe, JC."
JC huffed. "It's like, I need more dimensions. How can three dimensions be enough to express it all? It seems like there should be more, only I can't figure out how to access them. If only I could access them, maybe I could say something real."
Lance began to laugh. Because, really, who else but JC would be dissatisfied with the fundamental facts of reality? After a moment, JC laughed along with him. And Lance looked at the finished and part-finished works, and shook his head again, because this was freaky stuff and no mistake, and nobody but JC could have made these particular pieces. Nobody else expected reality to accommodate itself to his sculptures.
"So you're saying you need more room in reality."
"Yeah. Yeah, that's it. There needs to be more… it feels like there ought to be more. There isn't room for everything."
"You have Time."
"I don't think it helps much."
"No, I mean, Time," Lance clarified. "The fourth dimension. Your work has length and breadth and depth, and also duration."
JC's mouth turned down. "Yeah, but, that's not 'cause of what I do, it's not in my control. I don't get to build duration into the work-everything has duration, and I guess I could, like, set it to explode or something, but that's not what I want to say. Although it would be cool, you know? Art that only exists for a precise amount of time… I guess like graffiti, and pavement art, but no. It's not what I'm doing, not right now. Things are like, like, like pencils, you know?"
Lance didn't know, but JC was clearly intent on explaining. "See, the work starts out as a concept, a point, and then you create it, and that takes a while, and its co-ordinates in time, no, its profile in time, is like the sharp end of a pencil, the point is when it starts and then it grows in length and depth and breadth until it's complete. And then when it's made, it looks like the shaft of the pencil, it just continues to exist, like an infinite pencil, except it isn't actually infinite because nothing is, but you don't know when its time will come to an end. But that isn't what I mean."
Good, thought Lance, because he didn't think the concept would come across in JC's weird, angular sculptures. Although it was kind of a cool image. "The physicists say there may be a whole bunch of other dimensions, only we can't perceive them. They're, um, wrapped around like tiny rolls..." He'd read that physics book two and a half times so far, and the concept wasn't really sticking in his brain. That was the trouble with astrophysicists, Lance thought, the really good ones didn't have brains like normal human beings. Normal human beings couldn't think about the size of the universe like it was easy. Particle physicists, too, from the opposite direction. "You know what, you should talk with people at the university about this stuff."
"Oh, yeah, I hung out with a couple of guys," JC said, dismissively, "but they were all about the equations. I mean, I guess the math is a bit like art, but, eh. I want to make it… palpable. If we could only access those other dimensions, create a truly multi-dimensional work, that's what I want to do. I get it in my head, but it doesn't fit into what I can do with my hands. It's driving me crazy."
"Hmm," said Lance. He was intrigued by the idea that JC could somehow think in more than three-four, he supposed-dimensions. It was almost a pity JC was an artist. If he'd been a mathematician, or a physicist, he might have been able to do something spectacular. At least he'd have the tools to express what he claimed to have in his head. It was all very well JC saying the university guys weren't getting it, but Lance had more faith in science than in art. "I guess you have as much chance of figuring it out as a mathematician," Lance said, mostly to be nice, although as the words left his mouth he thought maybe it was true. "Keep poking at reality until it bends for you. You let me know when you get to show these, you hear me?"
JC shuffled a bit. "I don't know if that's going to happen. When, I mean. Right now I'm just, you know. Working."
Shit, Lance thought. JC's agent had abandoned him. Again. What was that, the fourth one now? "I hope you don't forget to eat," he said.
"Oh! Um, no. Of course not. You wanna-I put something in the oven, I guess it should be done by now."
It was more than done, but they sloshed quite a bit of red wine and a tin of tomatoes over the remains and cooked some pasta, and it was fine. JC ate in a single-minded way that led Lance to suspect he did, in fact, forget to eat quite a lot of the time. He practically inhaled the sfogliatelle. Lance would very much have liked to broach the subject of maybe getting JC an assistant, or a job, depending on where his finances were, and it was irritating not to be able to pick out the specifics from the multi-tonal hum of JC's thoughts. But JC had a natural shield, so that all Lance could get from him was mood, no better than a regular empath, and he could not tell whether the worry he could detect was something serious like "I can't afford next week's meals" or only "that order for faceted zircon is late".
"See, I think I hit a dead end," JC said, abruptly, and there was a flash of anguish that caught Lance off guard. "I haven't been able to work on anything in weeks. Months, even. It just won't… I just wonder if I'm trying to do something impossible because I can't create anymore, and it's an excuse. If I'm just chasing dragons."
"If you catch one, let me know," Lance said.
"Sometimes I think I should go right back to the beginning, start in, like, one dimension, well, okay, two, and work from there, make it simple, only, only I'm not sure if I can. I don't know if I remember how."
"You know what you need?" Lance said, as inspiration seized him. "You need a student. Someone who's stuck in a different place than you are. You help someone else to work on problems you already solved, maybe that will remind you how to do it."
JC's forehead creased. "Do you think that would be a good idea? I mean, I don't know if I could help anyone else, not stuck like I am."
"Sure you could," Lance said, "you have a great eye for this stuff, you could help someone see what sh-they were getting right, and you could help them be brave enough to try new stuff. You've never been afraid of trying new stuff, have you?"
"I… no, I guess not."
"And maybe it would help you, too. I think you're so tied up in wondering how to use more dimensions in your work, maybe stopping thinking about it would give it a chance to, like, resolve itself in your head. And if you want to go back to basics, then helping someone who needs that would help you, too, wouldn't it?"
"Lance, are you offering me a job?"
"Ah… maybe. Do you know Britney Spears?"
"The kid who did those lovely naif paintings? We met a couple of times. Awful mother."
"Well, Britney needs help."
"Is she still working? I don't recall seeing anything new from her for, uh, a long while."
"She's been out of it for a while, she got married, had a couple of kids, and she's ready to get back to painting again, only she lost her confidence. I think you two could be good for each other, if you get along. How about it? Will you give it a try?"
"I guess it wouldn't do any harm to meet," JC said, "but you know, we have to have an artistic relationship. Mutual respect, and all that. I mean, I liked her paintings but I was maybe seeing things in them that weren't there on purpose. And who knows if she likes my work? We were shown in the same exhibition a few years back, today's rising stars or some such crap, but it doesn't mean she likes what I do, or even knows it, really. She was just a kid."
"I'm going to set something up," Lance said, getting out his notepad. "Dinner, maybe. We'll start with that."
JC nodded. "It could be good," he mused, "getting to work with another artist. I kinda miss that."
*
"And this came for you," said Lisa, laying a small box on top of Monday's letters. "There's a card with it."
After Lisa and her air of excitement had retreated to her own desk, Lance was not particularly surprised to find that the card was from Adam Lambert. The flamboyant handwriting thanked him for introducing Adam to Simon Cowell, and hoped the enclosed would make a welcome addition to his collection. Lance remembered being so flustered he'd risked making that call with Lambert still in the room, and decided he disliked Adam Lambert. 'The enclosed' proved to be a snowglobe of a baby dragon emerging from an egg. Lance frowned at it. The proportions were all wrong. The egg's surface gleamed with muted rainbow colours like oil in a puddle, but it was too shallowly curved where it stood proud of the 'sand' surface, and the dragon baby's red head was so large the rest of its body could not possibly fit within the egg.
Lance did not want a thank-you present from Adam Lambert. Lance did not like people with adamantine shielding and dragon-hide boots. He would put the snowglobe into the box for the charity collectors… he looked at it again. Tilted it, so that tiny flakes drifted like ash from a volcano. Then he put it on the shelf next to the green dragon, and turned his attention to his mail.
*
He tried quite hard to ignore his new ornament, but it was as persistent as a popular song, worming its way into his head at unexpected moments, so that he'd find himself staring up at the little red head emerging from its improbable shell, and trying to figure out why something so patently incorrect seemed to convey a kind of rightness. Lance spent a lot of time mentally swearing at Adam Lambert for giving him such a distracting gift.
However, he did have a business to run, jobs to fill, applicants to see, and the particular problem of Britney to deal with. He was confident that she and JC would have something to offer one another, and set up a dinner together so they could get reacquainted and see if there was any reason why this deal wouldn't work; but there was still the difficulty of getting Britney an assistant to wrangle her kids and the rest of her life. Britney was a great client if you liked getting a fee every time she accepted a candidate you sent her, but he would have preferred to find the one, perfect person for her.
That afternoon there was a tidal disruption in the outer office. Lance put his accounts to one side and awaited Chris's entrance into his own room, which followed after a few noisy minutes.
"So, Mr Employment Agent," Chris began, and sat.
"You didn't," Lance said, though he knew he was wrong.
"If you mean, I didn't tell that fat git what he could do with his job, you're wrong." Chris looked pleased with himself, although there was a roil of uncertainty behind his grin.
"I suppose it was inevitable."
"I couldn't work there any more. I mean, I had this sweet motorcycle, and I went over every cog and rod and cylinder and she was singing, fine as could be, and the bastard wanted me to make out she needed-I'll spare you the technical details, but it was just fucked, seriously. And I said the owner was paying me to make sure his machine was safe and sound, and it was, and, eh. You know."
"You lost your temper."
"He lost his first! Technically, it's possible I provoked him."
Lance rolled his eyes. "And now you need a job. You do realise there's better places than here for someone with your kind of skills."
"I'm not necessarily looking to work as a mechanic," Chris said, surprising him. "I've been saving, I want to start up my own place, but I don't quite have the capital yet. I could go work for some other dishonest piece of shit, but I doubt it'd help me. The only decent garage I know is Wright's Wheels, and they aren't hiring because I asked. But I can do other stuff. I could be somebody's driver, chauffeur, keep the cars tuned and polished, whatever. Or, I don't know, anything. I don't mind being a bouncer or a trash collector or-anything that keeps me in meals and lets me put a bit by. I don't need much."
Lance felt a bit guilty for accepting the little coiled gold dragon, but there had been no point refusing the gift. And it probably hadn't cost a lot.
"Okay. Okay, I'll see what I can do. Did Lisa give you one of our forms?" Chris shot him a disgusted look, and Lance sighed. "It makes my life a lot easier-it makes getting you a job much quicker, if you fill in the details." There didn't seem to be any blanks in his drawer, so Lance went over to the press and stamped a couple, one of which he handed over. "If you need a pen there's one on the inkstand."
Chris muttered something about pretentious bastards with quills and fancy inkwells, even though he knew perfectly well that Lance used a fountain pen like everyone else and only kept the cut glass set on his desk because they were pretty, but he settled down to fill in his details, and very soon handed his completed application over.
"I'll do my best to find you something, Chris," Lance said. "With an honest boss."
"You're a good man," Chris said. "You don't mind if I distract your assistant for a while, do you? I think she has chocolate chip cookies."
Lance was actually wondering why Lisa had not come in with coffee and a plate of something, but as Chris opened the door to the outer office he heard a familiar voice and thought, oh. Chris went out, calling blessings down upon Lisa's head, and a moment later there was a knock on the door.
"Come in," he called, bracing himself.
"Hi," Adam Lambert said, cheerfully. "I brought Chris over, he finished working on my bike and managed to get himself sacked, so I thought it was the least I could do."
"It was very kind of you," Lance said.
"Oh, not really. I was coming this way anyway. I wanted to ask, I wondered if, would you have dinner with me tonight?"
"I, I-" what? "I'm busy." Lance almost bit his tongue to hold in the automatic apology that wanted to follow-his momma would be unimpressed. Truth to tell, he was fighting an impulse to say yes.
"Ah," said Adam Lambert. "Right. I see you have the hatchling on display."
"Yes, it's a very-it's an interesting piece. Thank you. You didn't need to give me anything, I was just doing my job."
"Sure, but you got me exactly where I needed to be. I'm grateful. And I thought you'd appreciate it, since you collect dragon… memorabilia. With the shell being authentic, I mean."
"Authentic?"
"Mm hm."
Did he mean, it was from an actual dragon egg? How on earth-was that even possible? "I'd have thought dragon eggs were a lot bigger," he said, trying to keep a disinterested tone.
"It's from the pointy end, obviously, or the curve would barely show in a thing that size. But you can see from the colours. Like a black version of abalone, which I don't believe occurs anywhere else in nature. You should look out for it next time you go hiking. You never know what else you might find."
Lance was too thrown to know what to say to that. "You, uh, seem to know a lot about dragons."
Adam Lambert smiled. "There's a lot more I could tell you, if you have dinner with me."
"I can't. Like I said. I'm busy."
"Then-"
"These are the best damn chocolate chip cookies ever. Bass, when I'm rich I'm going to steal your assistant." Chris, marching back into the office bearing a depleted plate of cookies. Lance blessed him for his timing.
"You wouldn't be as good a boss as me," he said. "Hand them over."
Chris, naturally, offered the plate to Adam Lambert first.
"No, thanks, I already tried them, and you're right, they are good. I guess I should get going. Do you need a ride home?"
"That would be cool," Chris said. "Lance, you got my number, if anything should, you know."
"I will call," said Lance. "You take care, now."
"Say hi to JC for me," Chris said as he left in Adam Lambert's wake.
Well.
*
"Hey, Lance. Good to see you!" Papa Fatone had the happy knack of making it seem that you were the one person in the world he most wanted to see. It was a real asset, when you ran a restaurant. "Hey, Joey! Here's your favourite customer! You have two guests tonight? Don't worry, we'll look after you."
"I know you will," Lance said, grinning back.
"We put you in the Nook," Joey said from behind him, "since you asked for privacy. This way."
The Nook turned out to be a tiny side-room filled with film posters and autographed photographs of famous people, which might have been the usual restaurant schtick except that Joe Fatone, Senior was in some of the pictures. Fatone's had been feeding people for a long time.
"Table for three," said Joey, in a tone of mild disapproval. "I suppose this means you aren't having an intimate date with that special person. Unless," he brightened, "you have a harem now?"
"No." Lance smiled. It was impossible not to cheer up with Joey around. "It's business. Well, mostly. They're friends too."
"When are you going to find yourself a nice boy? You ought to have them lining up!"
"Oh, well, you know. Work. And…"
"And?"
"I did get-someone asked me out. Only it was for tonight, so I couldn't go. And I wasn't sure if I wanted to."
"So what's the problem?" Joey slid into one of the chairs. "I got time, there's hardly anybody in yet and Kel can cope for a few minutes."
"It's just that, he, I don't know. I don't trust him, and he seems to be, there's some questionable stuff. How could I date someone who goes against my principles?"
"But he's really hot," Joey stated. He didn't need to be a mind-reader to guess that.
"Yeah…" There was something compelling about Adam Lambert, and Lance did not know what it was. "I keep thinking about him," he admitted. "But I don't think I even like him."
"Maybe you should give the guy a chance," Joey said. "Could be you just aren't on the same wavelength."
Not on the same wavelength was about right, Lance thought. With Adam's shielding and the fact that he was hiding something in a way Lance had never encountered before, he didn't see how they could manage to get along. It was just really tempting to try, until Lance brought himself up short by remembering the dragon-hide boots. How could there possibly be a good explanation for dragon-hide boots?
Joey seemed to recognise that the conversation had nowhere to go, and stood up. "You want something to drink while you're waiting?"
Lance ordered gratefully, and scanned the wine list while Joey went to fetch his aperitif. It arrived scant seconds before Kelly showed JC into the Nook, and a few moments later, Britney's arrival had them both standing up again to greet her.
What was really gratifying was that Britney and JC seemed to get on at once. There were several minutes of obligatory mutual admiration, and then they were commiserating on how hard it was to fight through artist's block, and Lance hardly needed to say a word. He picked out a bottle of wine, but Joey didn't bother to take an order for food, showing up a few minutes later with a bowl of olives, a platter of antipasti, and breadsticks, and later brought a chicken dish with salad for Britney, a gigantic bowl of spaghetti and meatballs which JC hoovered clean in between enthusiastic and incoherent descriptions of pieces he had admired, and a dish for Lance which he hadn't tried before but which turned out to be just what he wanted. Joey informed him with a wicked smirk that it was Penne con Pollo al Dragoncello.
His artistic experiment was plainly going to work. Lance only needed to nudge the conversation briefly, to make sure the two of them made an actual appointment to get together at Britney's place to do some work. He was, he decided complacently, very good at his job. Even if he wasn't getting a commission for this one.
*
"I have to get someone for Britney," Lance said as Lisa entered his office first thing the following morning. "She's so excited about working as an artist again, it'd be a real shame if all that enthusiasm drains away because she doesn't get any time."
"It went well last night, then?"
"Couldn't have gone better, really. I'm sure it's going to work out for both of them. Oh, man." Lance was looking at the morning's list.
"I don't think you're going to have time for Britney's problems until after lunch," Lisa confirmed.
"Lunch? Hah. You know these two are going to over-run, and I would put money on at least one of the others as well. You keep the coffee brewing or there'll be fistfights."
His first appointment was due in half an hour, leaving Lance just enough time to read today's letters and glance through the files before the client arrived.
After that, there was no let-up until nigh on two o'clock, and as he showed the most recent applicant-a promising young woman, he thought she'd be easy to place, probably when the Pan Dancers got back from their tour-out of the office, Lance realised he was extremely hungry.
Lisa, of course, had been to the sandwich bar just along the road.
"You are the best assistant ever," he said through a mouthful of turkey and lettuce.
She beamed. "I know. You have about forty minutes before that update call with Mr Fuller. Do you want to think about the Britney problem, or is your head too full?"
"I really want to get her suited as soon as possible, so let's see if we can figure something out now. So. Kasdorf, Hedderson, Peters."
"I have the notes here. It looks like any of them would be competent."
"Yeah. It's more a personality thing. Ms Peters seemed a bit young… see, I kinda thought she really needs a mom in her life," Lance said, "but now I'm wondering if I got that wrong. Maybe a younger assistant would be better, they'd have more in common."
"A mom might be what she needs," Lisa decided, "but I'm not sure it's what she wants. I mean, you said her actual mom was all kinds of pushy and not very nurturing, and honestly, if Britney's mom was the kind of mom who, like, baked cookies with her kids and made sure they had clean socks and everything, I bet Britney would have turned out to be that kind of mom too."
"I think she wants to be, but I don't think she knows how."
"Yeah, but, there's lots of ways to be a good mother. You don't have to be the cookies-baking kind."
"That's true." Lance's mother had taught him to bake cookies. "Also, kids are pretty good at forgiving their parents when they fuck up." But it was still uncomfortable to go home and hear everyone desperately trying not to think about anything except Mary Had A Little Lamb.
"I wonder if Britney doesn't like women very much," Lisa said, thoughtfully. "I mean, she doesn't seem to have girlfriends. Sometimes, women feel like other women are competitors, and they don't get to be friends. Maybe that's why her assistants don't last long. If she, if she feels like they're competing for her kids' affection, that'd be kinda scary, wouldn't it?"
"Huh." Lance would have to ponder that. He'd never picked up on any such feelings, but then, he'd never witnessed Britney's interactions with her assistants, and she did have that habit of pushing all the negative stuff down out of sight and refusing to think about it. If it even made it as far as conscious thought, which it probably wouldn't. He-and Britney, as far as he could tell-had just assumed what she wanted was a capable, organised woman. If that was wrong... He didn't think there were any men on his books who were applying for a job as a nanny or personal assistant. Mostly the ones without marketable talent, professional qualifications or technical skills wanted to be bodyguards. He sighed. "The more I think about it, the more I wonder if you aren't right about her not really wanting another woman around. But we don't have any men who-wait. Wait just one second. I just had the stupidest-Okay, I'm gonna-" He leapt for his telephone and paged hurriedly through the address folder.
"Chris! Hi. Listen, you said you didn't need a job as a mechanic, right? How would you feel about being a kind of, erm, part time secretary, part time child minder, with a side order of cook and laundry-maid?"
Five minutes later, he put the phone down and did a little dance of triumph. Lisa applauded politely from the doorway.
"Your boss is a genius, seriously. It's crazy, but I really think it'll work-at least for long enough that Britney'll get back her artist mojo and Chris will save enough money to start his garage."
"Chris? Chris Kirkpatrick?" Lisa started to laugh. "Are you serious?"
"He has four younger sisters, he'll look after her," said Lance. "And he's incredibly good with little kids, mostly because he never really grew up." He had a great feeling about this. "Right, back to the grindstone. I'll give Britney a call and tell her we're sending someone over, then it's time to hit the accounts. Here's my notes from this morning."
"And here's the rest of your sandwich. And, um, this came."
Lance eyed her warily as she handed him the envelope. He recognised that fizzy feeling behind her smile, and was not at all surprised that the address was in Adam Lambert's handwriting.
"He, um, he sent me something, too. Tickets for a concert Saturday night. It's a variety concert, he's probably on quite early, being so new, but wouldn't it be great to see what he can do when he's not just singing in the office?"
Possibly, Lance thought. "I'm sure he'll be very good," he said.
"Then you'll come?"
"Me? Aren't you going to ask a friend along?"
She wrinkled her nose. "Last time I went to a concert with my mates they ditched me because a bunch of skeevy guys wanted to buy them drinks. And you're the reason Adam has this gig, of course you should come!"
"Ah. Well…"
"Just think about it. I'm going to start on this filing."
Left alone in his office, Lance opened the note. Hi. Chris K told me you really were busy yesterday, and I'm a persistent guy so I'm going to ask you again, and then one more time after this if you say no, but third time's the charm and if you say no again I promise I'll leave you alone. Will you have dinner with me? As an extra incentive, you can ask me about my boots. My evenings are filling up now, Simon C has me on the circuit already, but I'm sure we can work something out. A telephone number, a sprawling signature.
Damn it, Lance thought.
*
"See, I just don't know if it's a good idea."
"You said he was hot," Joey stated, as though that answered all arguments.
"No, you said he was hot," said Lance. "Okay, he is hot." Gorgeous blue eyes, great smile, long legs-in dragon-hide boots. "But I don't have a clue what he's thinking, and it's so weird, I've never had that before and I don't like it."
"It might not be such a bad thing," said Joey, who never needed to ask a customer what he wanted to eat. "Keeps the element of surprise. And, it means you aren't always the one who knows what's going on. Makes for a more equal relationship, if you have to use your words."
Lance opened his mouth to reply to that, realised Joe had a point, and ate a meatball instead. He'd never thought of it that way before, but maybe, maybe it was a little bit unfair that he could always tell if a guy was lying to him. "So you're saying I should go for it?"
"Course I am. 'Bout time you had someone interesting in your life. Make him bring you here for dinner, I want to get a look at the guy."
"I was thinking maybe lunch," said Lance, admitting to himself that he'd known Joey would encourage him, which was why he was here eating spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and asking for advice. If he'd wanted to be discouraged he'd have called his sister.
"That's right, make him work for it," Joey said, cheerfully.
*
He telephoned, and-inevitably-reached Adam Lambert's answering service, so left a message suggesting three possible lunch dates. Right. Done. Then he settled down for a nice, comfortable evening with his dogs and his physics book. Dogs were so much easier than people. Their love was total and uncomplicated. And they hid nothing.
Mid-way through the evening, Adam Lambert called back, and they had a polite, stilted conversation culminating in an arrangement to meet for lunch the following Wednesday. When he replaced the receiver, Lance sat immobile by his telephone table, trying for what seemed like the thousandth time to decide whether he was being fair and reasonable and giving a good-looking man a chance, or being foolish, led around by his baser desires, and going against all his principles.
Lance's life had been much simpler before Adam Lambert arrived in it.
He had brought the snowglobe home with him. It was too distracting to keep at work. At least if he spent half an hour gazing at it in his own living room he wasn't wasting time that should be spent on his accounts. He set it on the coffee table in front of the couch, and settled down to tackle the physics book again. He was almost sure his brain was beginning to wrap itself around the idea of a many-dimensional universe, but Kaluza-Klein theory was very slippery. If JC could do it by instinct, more power to him.
And now he was picturing those weird and wonderful sculptures JC had made. He tried to get them plain in his mind, and experienced again that odd feeling that there were too many right angles, until he slid off the couch feeling dizzy. He fetched up in front of the coffee table, nose to nose with the baby dragonlet which was of course, of course it was coming from a different dimension than was captured in the snowglobe, it was too big because the rest of it was somewhere else, how obvious it was. The meatballs lurched uncomfortably in his stomach and Lance had to blink and shake his head, and when he looked again the little dragon was just the wrong size as usual.
But he knew, now. He knew where dragon country was.
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