There are a few things that haven't gone according to plan. They still haven't repealed the law that makes my saving Lois' life a life-sentence felony. They've changed pretty much all the other bad laws about dragons but they can't seem to shift that one. Don't ask me why. The human world makes less and less sense to me. But that's one of the reasons we need to stay an internationally trendy soap opera with rare endangered animals: And me a pop star that no one dares prosecute.

Some of the other reasons are lying around me like medium-sized mountains as I write this, in the dragon Nearcamp. I'm the only human here tonight. Katie doesn't let Martha come as often as either of us would like — she thinks the headaches might stunt her growth or something. If they stunted mine, I'm grateful: Being loomed over by dragons makes me really dislike looming over other humans — and there's a really nice ethologist from Illinois who's been here most of this week. She's done almost all her work with horses but she gets it about dragons, I think because she doesn't assume her horses are just dumber than humans. They're horses. But she had to go back to Farcamp because of the headaches — and in fact I had to lead her out of the cavern because she was seeing so many starbursts and whirligigs. What people see varies — she's a starbursts-and-whirligigs type. She'll probably be back in a day or two after she's had a lot of sleep and a large bottle of aspirin.

It's getting late and almost everybody here is asleep. Lois is the nearest to me — only a small hillock, maybe the size of a big pony — a rosy, bronzy hillock in the purply reddish firelight, snoring into my shoes. (Most dragons don't snore either.)

I don't think dragons have a written language — although I've started to wonder about some of the scratches on the walls here and at Central: I started out thinking they were geological, and then I thought they were about the dragons hollowing out their living quarters to suit them, but lately, hmmm — anyway I still don't think dragons have a written language, exactly, maybe they're just doing a dragony Lascaux thing. Maybe they make songs, like the Arkhola. Hmmm. . . But Bud spends so much time (as now) watching over my shoulder when I'm using my laptop (he doesn't seem to have any trouble staying awake) that I'm not so sure about that any more either.

And then sometimes I think he's just doing some kind of experiment in communication when he knows I'm concentrating on something else, because when he's looking over my shoulder I usually have this really strange, low-down headache, almost a throat — or a chest — or a stomachache. . . I admit I'd just as soon not wake up some morning and discover I'm growing scales and spinal plates. I mean, if it's necessary, okay, but I'd rather not.

You're trying to be as objective as you can when you take notes. Mom and Dad — Mom in particular — had this whole rant about There Is No Such Thing as True Objectivity — but then she was a very Bad Scientist — and for ordinary lock the-lab-and-go-home-at-night scientists, maybe how they are is not so important, but in my dragon notes I almost always start out by mentioning what sort of a state I'm in — which is something I learned from Mom. If you've been up all night feeding orphans, it shows, next day, in your work (she said) and it's just arrogant of you not to make note of it. Pretty much everything I ever wrote in the first year of Lois' life starts SOS, which stands for Short of Sleep. How can it not be important to how reliable my notes are when I'm so tired I'm hallucinating dragons hiding behind the trees around Billy and Grace's house?

My notes now start with H, HH, HHH, or, occasionally, HHHH, which is about headache intensity. XH is the new Bud headache. This that I'm writing now is headed XH, and I'll look over all the H headings when I get back to Farcamp or the Institute and probably try to even them out a little. And I have an increasing series of symbols for moods and feelings and stuff, although that's partly because I think some of the moods are actually dragon-language-background-layer and not me at all.

I have trouble reading some of my early notes about Lois because I was still trying to make up a shorthand that wouldn't get me slapped in jail and Smokehill turned over to developer piranhas if anyone found one of my notebooks, or broke the password on my computer (I am not a computer genius). I can read most of them, but not all of them. But everything, up till I started this, was still all notes, daily fragments and questions with no answers and unconnected details and ravings (lots of these). Dad's the one who told me that how I felt about all of it is valid too. Maybe our first conversation about it, when he started really leaning on me about writing this, went like this: "Valid for what?" I said. "Who cares? Lois is who's important — and now all the other dragons."

Dad made scritchy noises running his fingers through his beard. (I don't think I'm just being whatever-my-old-man-is-I'm-not-going-to-be although maybe I am, since it's obvious that unless I'm kidnapped by aliens and even if I don't ever get any PhD's I'm going to be head of the Institute some day too, but I shave. Actually one of the reasons why I shave may be the scritchy noises Dad makes when he's thinking about something.)

"You're the human," said Dad finally. "Sure, it's about our dragons, but most humans are mostly interested in other humans. You're a way for the ones who aren't so interested in dragons to get it. By tuning into you. And I know you don't want to hear this, but it's your story too."

Actually this freaked me out. I can just about stand having Bud staring over my shoulder all the time and Lois glued to me (almost) all the time, but they're my friends. I don't want a lot of strange humans staring at me for a clue. Not me, boss.

But then I thought about what Dad had done, keeping the Institute going — have I reminded you recently that he's the real hero of this story? — and I thought about Eleanor on national TV . . . and then my mind did a sort of somersault and I thought about all those books I read when I was a kid about ordinary kids who lived in towns with streetlights and movie theaters, who went to school and played football and ate at McDonald's. The way I'd sucked them down, because I wanted to know. And okay, they were fiction, but they were real fiction, if you follow me, and how did the authors know how to make them up?

So then I thought about how I had felt about all of it. I thought about what had been going on behind the notes, as I reread my notes. And then I thought, okay, maybe I'll try it. And then I got the worst case of writer's block you can imagine, and I buried myself in dragons in the hopes that the Headache would hammer it all out of me. Either the writer's block or, preferably, this idea of Dad's (and, it turned out, Martha's too) about writing about how I felt.

And how I feel, here, in a cavern full of dragons, is that it's all so interesting. Which maybe you're thinking is an anticlimax, but in that case I feel sorry for you because that just means you don't really know about interesting. Interesting is as good as it gets — and no I'm not getting all masculine, here, okay? I can say the word "love" and not throw up or turn blue. It if makes you happy, you can say that interesting is part of love — and if you'd like me to say I love my dragons, fine, here we go: I love my dragons.

But it's turned out to be so much more than just (!) raising one baby critter no human has (probably) ever raised before. I'm still scared to death too — not of the dragons any more (except in terms of the fact that they're still BIG and I wouldn't survive being stood on, however accidentally, and however sorry they were afterward), but for them. Every now and then I heave this huge sigh like my lungs are going to burst before I get enough oxygen in and out of them, and it's all about everything.