Here's the, uh, controversial bit. So far this was just the easy bit, okay? I mean I've told you a lot about Halcyon already, but I'm guessing you've been finding it a little hard to believe — you weren't there having the brain version of the hamster running up the inside of your pantleg, and I was, and I still tried really hard to make out that it was just dreams and shock and native goofiness. So I keep trying to make being haunted by a dragon ghost sound more convincing — or maybe I'm just hoping if I mention it often enough you'll start accepting it just because it's there all the time like a tree or a house or that tub of yogurt in the back of the fridge that turned green months ago. Familiarity breeds getting to used to the idea. My master plan.

Okay, here we go. Bud believes that what's happened to Lois and me is not only the thing that's going to make it possible for dragons and humans to learn to talk to each other — but that it pretty much wouldn't have happened any other way. Some poor dragon mom was going to have to die all by herself and all but one of her babies die with her and that one remaining baby get picked up by a human just in time for the dying mom to somehow kind of zap herself into her surrogate. And the human had to have been young enough and/or weird enough — like maybe dragon-as-center-of-universe weird — for the zap to take. I don't want to even think about thinking about the odds . . . or what that might mean about how stuff gets, you know, arranged . . . is it worse to be scared to death by the odds or to consider the possibility that it was what-I'm-calling arranged? Brrrrr. Whatever you do with this idea, it makes me colder than a cavern without a dragon to lean on.

But if Bud believes it I believe it. Some of the other dragons don't. But there are probably stick-in-the-mud dragons like there are stick-in-the-mud humans, who don't want to believe anything too new and strange and world-detonating, and personally I'd be happy to entertain a better (i.e., less scary) hypothesis if you've got one but I did say better.

One thing that makes me think Bud is right, besides the fact that he's Bud, is that while Lois is sweating learning dragon language almost as hard as I am, we talk to each other better than we talk to any-dragon-body else, most of the time, Lois and me. Maybe it's not really all that much better. But there's a kind of ease or fit to it that I don't have with any of the other dragons, even Bud. For example we have a, uh, let's call it a glyph, although it's maybe more a kind of spasm (maybe helps to explain the headaches, and the wigglyness of the dragon alphabetor alphabets — or that moods and layers thing, thinking of a, uh, unit or module or something of it as a spasm) for "frustration" which we made up together out of how we felt about trying to learn to talk to (other) dragons. But when I used it on Bud he knew instantly what I was "talking" about, so Lois and I get gold stars and pats on the head for that piece of initiative-taking homework.

You don't have the smiling, nodding, pointing to your chest and saying your name option with dragons. Nor can you point to another object and say "rock" and wait to see what they say. They won't say anything. If you've been pointing at a rock and saying "rock" for the last six months, however, if you've been working at it really hard, you may have begun to wonder why after you say "rock" you very often get a kind of heavy sensation in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet (and furthermore it seems a bit diagonal. Right hand, left foot. Left hand, right foot). Although the first elation (supposing you manage to be elated through the confusion) drains away real fast as you start to wonder if they're talking about a kind of rock, a size of rock, a shape of rock, a color of rock, weight of rock, age of rock, even a hardness of rock, or a kind/size/shape/color/weight/age/hardness of anything, or maybe it's about something else entirely (Where it came from? How it was created? Or if it's a big rock, which way its shadow falls as the Sun rises up over it and goes down the other side, and no I am not joking) and maybe it's not "rock" at all, but "thing pointed at" or "humans sure are into rocks, I wonder what that's about?" "Hello" in dragon is a sort of short, stylized flash of . . . something like my first look into Halcyon's dying eye, and it'll knock you over if you're not ready for it.

And there's not a lot you can do about the Headache but try to wait it out. See if you're going to be one of the lucky ones, and that it won't just go on swamping you (flounder flounder squelch squelch), that you'll be able to kind of go with the flow after a while. And that's already supposing that you're one of the (lucky) ones that don't just dissolve into a quaking, gibbering mess the first time you get within hailing (so to speak) distance of a dragon, and, more to the point, don't stay dissolved (and gibbering). Almost everybody gets a little melty around the edges on first introduction. But some people can't learn to cope. And you can't blame them — well I can't, anyway. It's the size of three or four Tyrannosaurus rexes, and it breathes fire, you know? What's not to be brain-burstingly afraid of?

But despite all the up-against-it-nesses, see above, I'd much rather be at Farcamp and Dragon Central because when I'm at the Institute I start to lose faith in my dictionary — and the dictionary has to be what I'm for. Maybe I can figure out a way to break the idea of "dictionary" out of words on a page . . . but even the Son of the Son of the Son of the (okay, Daughter of the) Best Graphics Package in the Human Multiverse — I mean the latest update of the one I was using at the beginning — hasn't shown me a way to do it yet. Maybe because all the graphics packages are designed by humans. I need some kind of three- (or four-, or five-) dimensional Sens-surround thingummy. Any major computer whizzes out there who want a real challenge?

Us humans, we still think word = word, mostly. I'm still best with Lois partly I think because we're kind of on the same level — young and stupid, and, you know, disadvantaged — we didn't get raised right, in our different ways. I'm second-best with Bud but I think the second-part is because Bud is so far beyond me.

Here's another thing you're not going to want to hear: Okay, so, maybe it's because they're so much bigger, maybe their brainwaves are bigger somehow or something, and they can't fit in our tiny skulls (that's aside from the three-or-four Tyrannosauruses eeeeek brain-melt aspect). But (you sneer: I can hear you sneering) if dragons are so bright, why are they living in caves instead of out conquering the galaxy and living in penthouses and eating their toasted sheep off jewel-encrusted platinum platters?

Now you just sit there and think that back at yourself for a minute. Why do dragons live quietly in caves and human beings have invented global warming and strip mining and biological warfare and genocide? Who's the real winner here in the superior species competition? What dragons do is think. That's what they're really good at. Like it or lump it. And that's why when I get out there in the dragon space, it's okay . . . except I'm only a stupid human and I can't go very far, and even as far as I can go it's farther than I can bring back with me to all the other humans, who even when they don't want to kill something or pave something over, still tend to think in terms of x = y and only if x and y both take up normal space in three dimensions and can be measured and checked off a list.

Yeah. I'm prejudiced. Sue me. Or take this book back to the bookseller and demand your money back because you don't like my politics. But all right, enough of the woo-woo and the politics. I'm still human, no spinal plates yet, and I guess I kind of need to spend some time at the institute . . . and at least that means Martha and I get to sleep in a bed in a house sometimes and the house is ours and we can close the door. So you can relax now. I'm going to tell you the story you want to hear, about Bud. I'm going to tell you about something that everyone knows happened out here in the human approved three-dimensional world. Well, let's say something that made the news, which isn't the same thing, but it'll do in this case. And I'm finally going to tell you why it happened.