I think Gulp's babies were early. Even as unborn pre-blobs they're already countable individuals to their mom but neither mom nor blobs, I think, have a reliable sense of when they're going to be born, any more than human moms do. And so I think that's why they didn't have me on tap, so to speak, at Dragon Central, where it would have been a comparatively short hop for a flying dragon to take me to the birth place in the Bonelands. Mind you, I have no idea how they would have convinced me to stick around — I guarantee I would not have understood "Hey, Jake, wanna be escort to one of Gulp's babies?" — but they'd've thought of something. They could always have just got in the way. What would I have done? Forced past them? Playing tag with a dragon just doesn't appeal much.

I'd wanted to walk back, that morning in the Bonelands after I woke up, but I was staggering and kind of crazy, and still full of the dreams I was half forgetting and that were half turning into a new part of me, which is maybe why I was staggering and kind of crazy. (Kind of crazy includes that I was two or three hours of a big dragon flying full pelt into the Bonelands and the nearest good water supply was back out of them again, and I wanted to walk.) Anyway the dragons wouldn't let me walk anywhere. They'd brought Bud like six sheep to help him recuperate, and he'd specially char-grilled a piece for me, and we lay around like we were on holiday for a couple of days — all eight of us (fourteen if you count the tucked-away blobs) — and then he flew me back to Dragon Central. We all went together in little hops, because Lois couldn't fly very far yet. Let me tell you flying in a troop of dragons (a squadron, just like the game) is even more amazing than anything. Life. The universe. Everything. And Gulp looked . . . I don't know how to describe it. Transcendent.

But I had had a look at the front part of the caves — where we all went as soon as the sun got high — and with my new dragon-sense I got a promise (which is like putting your hand into your empty pocket and finding that someone has slipped you something, money or chocolate or a magic ring) that I'd be brought back to the birth place in the Bonelands from Dragon Central some time. Because I think that is the Birth Place — and you remember what I said about the Dragon Central caves, how it's like the rock itself had become dragony — it's like that only way more so at the birth place. At the birth place you know the stones can talk to you. Now if only I could learn the language.

I'm also no longer sure about mom and dad in dragon terms. I'm not sure but what it's some kind of marsupial kibbutz, in those pouches, and that while maybe Gulp and Bud contributed some of the eggs and sperm — assuming it's even an egg-and-sperm deal, which I don't know either — they may not have contributed all of them. Put it on the list of stuff to try and find out. Including whether the kibbutz thing might have something to do with getting 'em started on how dragon communication works. Maybe the birth place will tell me.

One more thing that I did learn is that having your dragonlets born during a full moon is maybe the best good luck omen there is. Dragon moms start doing whatever the dragon equivalent is of "star light star bright first star I've seen tonight" as moons get full toward the ends of their pregnancies. Are dragons superstitious? Beats me. Do dragons actually have an oar in the ethereal what-have-you so that wishing on stars (or whatever) actually has an influence? Beats me too. But it won't surprise you if I tell you I think dragons are capable of almost anything. And if you want to think that I say "good luck omen" because I'm superstitious and that's not what the dragons were telling me at all, that's your privilege. But my version is that it would have been a very bad omen if Gulp's last baby had missed — had got into the pouch after moonset, when the only thing touching its gummy little hide was darkness and clueless human hands.

So at least Lois had had something going for her.

Oh yes, and what did we say when everyone wanted to know why the big black dragon had come booming in for Jake? What was that all about? We waffled. Oh, my, how we waffled. Now that we've been kind of winning for a while (and there's even money in the bank, we've NEVER had money in the bank before) Dad's developed quite a flair for waffling. (I'm still a lousy waffler, so I just disappeared.) Katie's really good at it too — she's always been a gift to the business admin side, and she's done more and more of the interface with Outsiders stuff since Mom died, and she got him started on Waffling as a live art (as opposed to his natural style of thumping and roaring). Katie's weakness is being too nice, which has never been one of Dad's problems.

So you're reading it here for the first time, about Gulp's babies. The publisher who thinks they're going to get this — although they haven't actually read it yet, so who knows — have already been sworn to ninety-six jillion kinds of secrecy, with sub clauses about underlings being chained to their desks with no internet access till pub date, etc. And even if it does get out, it doesn't really matter. I hope. Our security nowadays makes your average bank vault look like a wet paper bag, and a lot of the Dragon Squadron money has gone on the fence — which at this point probably would hold up against a bomb or two. I wish I knew whether I should be glad about that or not.

It was about two months after this, after Gulp's babies were born, that Martha told me she was pregnant.

There should be a very large white space here on the page . . . because I don't care how much else has happened to you in your life and how many unique things you've been a part of and how many endangered species you've rescued and how many laws of science and biology you've personally exploded . . . there's nothing like the prospect of your own first child for making your life turn over and start becoming something else.

. . . And it got worse fast. First Martha said that she was going to spend as much time at Nearcamp and Dragon Central as she could — which is to say as much of the headaches as she could stand — which I understood but didn't want her torturing herself and who knew if this would mean the baby was busy adapting and wouldn't have to have dragon headaches or whether it would just start having the headache before it was born, which seemed pretty rough. Martha said no, she'd be able to tell if the baby was unhappy. I'd've (nervously) said okay to that one . . . till she said she wanted to have it at Dragon Central, I mean, born there. She said that if she had a totally free hand she'd have it at the birthplace in the Bonelands, if the dragons would allow it and whew I started bouncing up to the ceiling and making holes in it with my head she said, Jake, calm down, Dragon Central was good enough.

And I said something like GOOD ENOUGH??? And the conversation went on like that for a while. Her point was that birth was a big deal (. . . duh . . . ), and that Gulp's dragonlets' birth that I'd been able to be a part of had changed me profoundly and made my connection to the/my dragons so much stronger and the least we could do was try to return the favor. And I was damned out of my own mouth because I'd told her about this. And I could see her point but I couldn't stop gobbling about "safety" and "if something went wrong" and so on.

We were still arguing and in fact we had so not come to any conclusions or even any working hypotheses that we hadn't told anybody, not even Dad and Katie, yet, when Dad and Katie came to us and said that, uh, well, they'd decided to get married.

"Oh, that's great! That's wonderful!" Martha said, and grabbed her mother and swung her around in an impromptu tango. And I hugged my dad, and he hugged me back, which is absolutely the dragons' fault, all that sticking my hand (or more) in dragons' mouths and learning to see/hear/read the atmosphere and all that group-bond stuff with dragons and so on, I've got so touchy-feely with my human friends it's probably pretty repulsive, but they put up with it, probably partly because to the extent that they hang out with dragons it's happening to them too, which certainly includes my dad. So we actually hugged each other pretty well.