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A HISS OF DRAGON
By Gregory Benford & Marc Laidlaw
"Incoming Dragon!"Leopold yelled, and ducked to the left. I went right.
Dragons come in slow and easy. A blimp with wings, this one settled down like a wrinkled brown sky
falling. I scrambled over boulders, trying to be inconspicuous and fast at the same time. Itdidn't seem like
a promising beginning for a new job.
Leopold and I had been working on the ledge in front of the Dragon's Lair, stacking berry pods. This
Dragon must have flown toward its Lair from the other side of the mountain spire, so our radio tag on him
didn't transmit through all the rock. Usuallythey're not so direct. Most Dragons circle their Lairs a few
times, checking for scavengers and egg stealers. If theydon't circle, they're usually too tired.And when
they're tired, they're irritable. Something told me Ididn't want to be within reach of this one's throat flame.
I dropped my berrybag rig and went down the rocks
feetfirst. The boulders were slippery with green moss for about 20 meters belowthe ledge, so I slid
down on them. I tried to keep the falls to under four meters and banged my butt when I missed. I could
hear Leopold knocking loose rocks on the other side, moving down toward where our skimmerwas
parked .
A shadow fell over me, blotting out Beta's big yellow disk. The brown bag above thrashed its wings and
gave a trumpeting shriek.It had caught sight of the berry bags and knew something was up. Most likely,
with its weak eyes, the Dragon thought the bags were eggers-off season, but what do Dragons know
about seasons? -and would attack them. That was the optimistic theory. The pessimistic one was that the
Dragon had seen one of us. I smacked painfully into a splintered boulder and glanced up. Its underbelly
was heaving, turning purple: anger.Not a reassuring sign. Eggersdon't bother Dragons that much.
Then its wings fanned the air, backwards. It drifted off the ledge, hovering. The long neck snaked
around, and two nearsighted eyes sought mine. The nose expanded, catching my scent. The Dragon
hissed triumphantly.
Page 1
 Our skimmer was set for a fast takeoff.But it was 200 meters down, on the only wide spot we could
find. I made a megaphone of my hands and shouted into the thin mountain mist, "Leopold! Grab air!"
I jumped down to a long boulder that jutted into space. Below and a little to the left I could make out the
skimmer's shiny wings through the shifting green fog. I sucked in a breath and ran off the end of the
boulder.
Dragons are clumsy at level flight, but they can drop like a brick. The only way to beat this one down to
the skimmer was by falling most of the way.
I banked down, arms out.Our gravity is only a third of Earth normal. Even when falling, you have time to
think
thingsover. I can do the calculations fast enough-it came out to nine seconds-but getting the count right
with a Dragon on your tail is another matter. I ticked the seconds off and then popped the chute. It
fanned and filled.The skimmer came rushing up ,wind whipped my face . Then my harness jerked me to a
halt. I drifted down. I thumped the release and fell free. Above me, a trumpetingbellow . Something was
coming in at four o'clock and I turned, snatching for my blaser.Could it be that fast?But it was Leopold,
on chute. I sprinted for the skimmer. Itwas pointed along the best outbound wind, flaps already down, a
standard precaution, I belted in, sliding my feet into the pedals. I caught a dank, foul reek of Dragon.
More high shrieking, closer, Leopold came running up, panting. He wriggled into the rear seat.A
thumping of wings.A ceiling of wrinkled leather.Something hissing overhead.
Dragonsdon't fly, they float. They have a big green hydrogen-filled dome on their backs to give them lift.
They make the hydrogen in their stomachs and can dive quickly by venting it out the ass. This one was
farting and falling as we zoomed away. I banked, turned to get a look at the huffing brown mountain
hooting its anger at us, and grinned.
"I take back what I said this morning," Leopold gasped. "You'll draw full wages and commissions, from
the start."
Ididn't say anything.I'd just noticed that somewhere back there I had pissed my boots full.
I covered it pretty well back at the strip. I twisted out of the skimmer and slipped into the maintenance
bay. I had extra clothes in my bag, so I slipped on some fresh socks and thongs.
When I was sure I smelled approximately human, I tromped back out to Leopold. I was damned if I
would let my morning's success be blotted out by an embarrassing accident. It was a hirer's market these
days. My training at crop dusting out in the flat farmlands had given me an edge over the otherguys who
had applied. I was determined to hang on to this job.
Leopold was theguy who "invented" the Dragons, five years ago. He took a life form native to Lex, the
bloats, and tinkered with their DNA. Bloats are balloonlike and nasty. Leopold made them bigger,
tougher, and spliced in a lust for thistleberries that makes Dragons hoard them compulsively. It had been
a brilliant job of engineering. The Dragons gathered thistleberries, and Leopold stole them from the Lairs.
Thistleberries are a luxury good, high in protein, and delicious. The market for them might collapse if
Lex's economy got worse-the copper seams over in Bahinin had run out last month. This was nearly the
only good flying job left. More than anything else, I wanted to keep flying.And not as a crop duster.
Clod-grubber work is a pain.
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 Leopold was leaning against his skimmer, a little pale, watching his men husk thistleberries. His thigh
muscles were still thick; he was clearlyan airman by ancestry, but he looked tired.
"Goddamn," he said. "I can't figure it out, kid. The Dragons are hauling in more berries than normal. We
can't get into the Lairs, though. You'd think it was mating season around here, the way they're attacking
my men."
"Mating season? When's that?"
"Oh, in about another six months, when the puffbushes bloom in the treetops.The pollen sets off the
mating urges in Dragons-steps up their harvest, but it also makes 'em
meaner."
"Great," I said. "I'm allergic to puffbush pollen. I'll have to fight off Dragons with running eyes and a
stuffy nose."
Leopold shook his head absently; hehadn't heard me. "I can't understand it-there's nothing wrong with
my Dragon designs."
"Seems to me you could have toned down the behavior plexes," I said. "Calm them down a bit -I mean,
they've outgrown their competition to the point that they don't even need to be mean anymore. They
don't browse much as it is . . . nobody's going to bother them."
"No way-there's just not the money for it, Drake.Look,I'm operating on the margin here. My five-year
rights to the genetic patents just ran out, and nowI'm in competition with Kwalan Rhiang, who owns the
other half of the forest. Besides, you think gene splicing is easy?"
"Still, if they can bioengineer humans . . . I mean, we were beefed up for strength and oxy burning nearly
a thousand years ago."
"But we weren't blown up to five times the size of our progenitors, Drake. I made those Dragons out of
mean sons of bitches-blimps with teeth is what they were. It gets tricky when you mess with the life
cycles of somethingthat's already that unstable. You just don't understand what's involved here."
I nodded. "I'm no bioengineer-granted."
He looked at me and grinned, a spreading warm grin on his deeply lined face. "Yeah, Drake, but you're
good at what you do-really good. What happened today, well,I'm getting too old for that sort of thing,
and' it's happening more and more often. If youhadn't been there I'd probably be stewing in that Dragon's
stomach right now-
skimmerand all."
I shrugged. That gave me a chance to roll the slabs of muscle in my shoulders, neck, and pectorals -a
subtle advertisement that I had enough to keep a skimmer aloft for hours.
"So," he continued. "I'm giving you full pilot rank. Theskimmer's yours. You can fly it home tonight, on
the condition that you meet me at the Angis Tavern for a drink later on. And bring your girl Evelaine, too,
if you want."
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 "It's a deal, Leopold. See you there."
I whistled like a dungwarbler all the way home, pedaling my new skimmer over the treetops toward the
city. I nearly wrapped myself in a floating thicket of windbrambles, but not even this could destroy my
good mood.
Ididn't notice any Dragons roaming around, though I saw that the treetops had been plucked of their
berries and then scorched. Leopold had at least had the foresight, when he was gene tinkering, to
provide for the thistleberries' constant replenishment. He gave the Dragons a throat flame to singe the
treetops with, which makes the berries grow quickly.A nice touch.
It would have been simpler, of course, to have men harvest the thistleberries themselves, but that never
worked out, economically. Thistleberries grow on top of virtually unclimbable thorntrees, where youcan't
even maneuver a skimmer without great difficulty.And if a man fell to the ground . . . well, if it's on the
ground, it has spines, that's the rule on Lex.There's nothing soft to fall on down there. Sky life is more
complex than ground life. You can actually do something useful with sky life-namely, bioengineering. Lex
may be a low-metal world-which means low-technology-but our bioengineers are the best.
A clapping sound, to the left.I stopped whistling. Down through the greenish haze I could see a dark
form coming in over the treetops, its wide rubbery wings slapping together at the top of each stroke.A
smackwing.Good meat, spicy and moist.But hard to catch. Evelaine and I had good news to celebrate
tonight; I decided to bring her home smackwing for dinner. I. took the skimmer down in the path of the
smackwing, meanwhile slipping my blaser from its holster.
The trick to hunting in the air is to get beneath your prey so that you can grab it while it falls, but this
smackwing was flying too low. I headed in fast, hoping to frighten it into rising above me, but it was no
use. The smackwing saw me, red eyes rolling. It missed a beat in its flapping and dived toward the
treetops. Atthat instant a snagger shot into view from the topmost branches, rising with a low farting
sound. The smackwing spottedthis blimplike thing that had leaped into its path but apparently didn't think
it too threatening. It swerved about a meter under the bobbing creature-
Andstopped flat, in mid-air.
I laughed aloud, sheathing my blaser. The snagger had won his meal like a real hunter.
Beneath the snagger's wide blimplike body was a dangling sheet of transparent sticky material. The
smackwing struggled in the moist folds as the snagger drew the sheet upward. To the unwarysmackwing
that clear sheet must have been invisible until the instant he flew into it.
Within another minute, as I pedaled past the spot, the snagger had entirely engulfed the smackwing and
was unrolling its sticky sheet as it drifted back into the treetops. Pale yellow eyes considered me and
rejected the notion of me as food.A ponderous predator, wise with years.
I flew into the spired city: Kalatin.
I parked on the deck of our apartment building, high above the jumbled wooden buildings of the city.
Now that my interview had been successful,we'd be able to stay in Kalatin, though I hoped we could find
a better apartment. This one was as old as the city-which in turn had been around for a great deal of the
1200 years humans had been on Lex. As the wood of the lower stories rotted, and as the building
crumbled away, new quarterswere just built on top of it and settled into place . Someday this city would
be an archaeologist's dream. In the meantime, it was an inhabitant's nightmare.
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 Five minutes later, having negotiated several treacherous ladders and a splintering shinny pole into the
depths of the old building, I crept quietly to the wooden door of my apartment and let myself in, clutching
the mudskater steaks that I'd picked up on the way home. It was dark and cramped inside, the smell of
rubbed wood strong. I could hear Evelaine moving around in the kitchen, so I sneaked to the doorway
and looked in. Shewas turned away, chopping thistleberries with a thorn-knife.
I grabbed her, throwing the steaks into the kitchen, and kissed her.
"Got the job, Evey!"I said. "Leopold took me out himself and I ended up saving his-"
"It is you!" She covered her nose, squirming away from me. "What is that smell, Drake?"
"Smell?"
"Like something died.It's all over you."
I remembered the afternoon's events. It was either the smell of Dragon, whichI'd got from scrambling
around in a Lair, or that of urine. I played it safe and said, "I thinkit's Dragon."
"Well take it somewhere else. I'm cooking dinner."
"I'll hop in the cycler. You can cook up the steaksI
brought, then we're going out to celebrate."
The Angis Tavern is no skiff joint, good for a stale senso on the way home from work.It's the best. The
Angis is a vast old place, perched on a pyramid of rock. Orange fog nestles at the base, a misty collar
separating it from the jumble of the city below.
Evelaine pedaled the skimmer with me, having trouble in her gown. We made a wobbly landing on the
rickety side deck. Itwould've been easier to coast down to the city, where there was more room for a
glide approach, but that's pointless. There are thick cactus and thornbushes around the Angis base, hard
to negotiate at night. In the olddays it kept away predators; now it keeps away the riffraff.
Butnot completely: two beggars accosted us as we dismounted, offering to shine up the skimmer's
aluminum skin. I growled convincingly at them, and they skittered away. The Angis is so big, so full of
crannies to hide out in, theycan't keep it clear of beggars, I guess.
We went in a balcony entrance. Fat balloons nudged against the ceiling, ten meters overhead, dangling
their cords. I snagged one and stepped off into space. Evelaine hooked it as I fell. We rode it down, past
alcoves set in the rock wall. Well-dressed patrons nodded as we eased down, the balloon following. The
Angis is a spire, broadening gradually as we descended. Phosphors cast creamy glows on the tables set
into the walls. I spotted Leopold sprawled ina webbing , two empty tankards lying discarded underneath.
"You're late," he called. We stepped off onto his ledge. Our balloons, released, shot back to the roof.
"You didn't set a time. Evelaine, Leopold." Nods, intro-
ductoryphrases.
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