Episode 10
The zoo
I should explain about the network, because it's how I know the next part, and I wasn't there.
Dragons talk to each other without talking. That's the whole of it. Not words; more like the feeling you get when someone in the next room is thinking about you. Ricardo has it with his grandfather, a hand on the back of the neck from across a river, and his grandfather had it with his mother, and so on back, a line of hands, and when I came out of the brass I came out into the middle of that line like a phone that's been switched on in a house where everyone's already talking. The old ones call it the family. Ricardo calls it the network, because he's nineteen. Vovô doesn't call it anything, because you don't name the air.
Most of what comes down it is nothing. Weather. Somebody's knee. But some of it is old, and some of it is his, the voice from the start, the one in the cardigan, because he was on the line before any of us, and what follows is a thing he put there a very long time ago, for whoever came next, and I'm the whoever, and I've been carrying it around for nine days trying to decide whether it's mine to tell.
It's about a zoo. I'll tell it the way it came.
We were hunted. You should know that first, because everything after is because of it.
A thing that can feel where another thing is, across a room, across a river, across a sea, is the most valuable thing in the world to anyone who wants to know what's coming, and the most dangerous thing in the world to anyone who has something to hide, and the world has always had more of the second kind. So dragons were hunted. Not for the fire. Nobody ever cared about the fire, the fire's easy, any idiot can learn fire. For the line. For the family. For the thing that comes down the network that you don't name.
And in the old country, the old old one, China or Japan or the place before they were either, there were men who read about it. Scholars. Alchemists. The kind of men who sit in a room full of books about ancient magic and get an idea, and the idea was: if we can't have a dragon, we can build one.
They'd read that the gift lived in the head. So they went looking for it in heads. A tissue, they thought, a piece of the brain, the size of a thumbnail, where the family lived. And they took it out of people. I'm not going to say how, because the old one didn't, and he was there, and if he wouldn't say it then I won't. They took it out of people and they put it into animals. Dogs first. Then birds, because birds see further. Then anything. For a hundred years, more, in a walled place with a lot of rooms, they took the thing that feels out of one creature and pressed it into another and waited for it to feel.
It didn't. Not for a very long time. What they got, mostly, were dead animals and sadder men.
But you don't do a thing for a hundred years without learning something, even if it's the wrong thing, and what they learned first wasn't a dragon. It was how to watch. Rooms of watchers. Animals with a little of somebody in them, not enough to feel, just enough to look, and report, and a system for the reports, and men to read them. The old one says that was the first surveillance system in the world, and that everything since, the famous people, the department, the posters on the sides of buses, is that room with better lighting. He says it fondly. He was fond of most things by the end.
And then, one day, one of them worked.
Not because they'd got the tissue right. They never got the tissue right. It worked because the animal was lucky. That's the old one's word. A mouse, he says, though the record doesn't say mouse, the record says small. Something small with a thumbnail of somebody in it, in a room full of dead attempts, and a spirit passing through, one of the ones who'd stayed, one of the ones who'd enjoyed life and left a piece behind, and the small thing caught it. The way a net catches a fish it wasn't set for. And it woke up, and it felt, and it looked at the men, and the men understood that they had made something they had no name for.
That was the first one. There were more. Not many. Each one lucky. Each one a net that happened to be in the water when something swam through.
Here's the part that nobody planned.
You can't do a thing like that for generations, in a walled place, with the spirits of the country passing through it like weather, without the country noticing. The old one says it the way you'd say water finds a way. After enough generations of lucky animals in that place, the ordinary animals, the ones nobody had touched, the mice in the walls and the cats in the yards and the cranes on the roofs, started to feel. On their own. No tissue, no thumbnail, no men in a room. Born with it. As if the gift had got tired of being stolen and had simply decided to be everywhere.
The prince called them the ninja. He was a child when he named them, and he thought it was funny, and it was, a little: a kingdom's worth of animals that could feel where you were and never once told anyone. The era of the ninja, he called it, to the old one, with enormous satisfaction, when he was eight and the old one was whatever the old one was, and the two of them were standing in a doorway looking at a room.
Because he showed him the zoo.
It was a copy of the Forbidden City. That's the thing that comes down the line clearest, clearer than the men or the mice: red walls, gold roofs, courtyards inside courtyards, the whole thing rebuilt smaller and somewhere else, a palace for the animals that had been given a thumbnail of a person, and for the people who were about to be.
Because that was the rule of the place, by then. Nearly everyone who lived there went through it. The procedure. You came to the zoo as a person and you left as something that could feel, and what you left as depended on luck, and luck, the old one says, mostly meant mouse.
The mice were in the lower section. A floor under the floor, under the biggest hall, and the hall was full of ancient things: bronzes, bells, stones with writing on, a whole room of the oldest objects the kingdom owned, arranged in a ring around the centre, and in the centre, under all of it, the mice. The prince explained it to the old one the way a child explains a thing he's been told: the old things keep the bad spirits out. You put what you're keeping in the middle, and you put age around it, because age is heavy and spirits don't like heavy, and then whatever passes through the palace at night, whatever's out there enjoying life and leaving pieces of itself, can't get in to the small things in the middle and wake them up wrong.
"Chuan," the old one says he said. Just that. The prince's name, or the word for what the place was for, the old one was never sure which, and he asked, and the boy said it again, Chuan, and looked at the ring of bronzes, and looked at the floor under the floor, and said the thing that's been sitting in my head for nine days like a stone in a pocket:
"We didn't fully understand it. One day we left the door open."
A dog got in. That's the part that comes down the line with the least words and the most weight, the way the worst things do. Not a monster, not a spirit, not anything the ring of bronzes had been built to keep out. A dog, an ordinary one, from the yards, that had wandered through a door somebody had forgotten to shut, and gone down to the floor under the floor, and done what dogs do in a room full of mice.
It killed a few. Maybe a dozen. That should have been the end of it.
But the mice were linked. That was what they'd been made for; that was the whole point of the thumbnail and the luck and the spirit caught in the net. Every one of them was on the line with every other one, the way I'm on the line with Vovô and Ricardo, and when the first one died, suddenly, in the dark, with teeth in it, the shock of that went down the line into all of them at once. Not the news of it. The feeling. The teeth. And the next one felt it and stopped, the way a heart stops when it's been told to, and its stopping went down the line too, and the next, and the next, a wave of one small death mirrored a hundred times in a hundred small bodies that had never been bitten, until the floor under the floor was quiet, and the dog was standing in the middle of it, confused, with a dozen on its conscience and hundreds at its feet.
The old one calls it the first thing anyone ever learned about the network that they didn't want to know: that it carries everything. Joy, weather, somebody's knee. And the end. It carries the end, at the speed of feeling, to everyone who's listening, and there's no door for that. He says the prince stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at the quiet floor, eight years old, and said, "That was our first failure," meaning his, meaning the zoo's, meaning the whole idea of building a thing that feels, and that he never once, in all the years after, in all the years of being Kaiser, said my. Always our. The old one loved him for that. I can feel it on the line, nine days old, like warmth off a wall.
That's where it stops. Two boys at the top of a stair in a palace that was a copy of a palace, looking down at a ring of old things around a floor gone quiet, and one of them saying one day we left the door open, in the past tense, at eight years old, having just learned what a door is for.
The ninja are still here, by the way. That part didn't come down the line; that part Vovô told me, on the stool, when I asked why the pigeons on Canal Street look at me like that.
They never went away. They spread. A kingdom's worth of animals that could feel where you were became a world's worth, over the centuries, quietly, the way water finds a way, and today, if you know where to look, they're everywhere the watching is done. Police. Border posts. The secret services of every country that has one, which is every country. A dog at an airport that finds what it's looking for a little too often. A cat in an embassy. Somebody's parrot. The old one says every government on earth has a room somewhere with something small in it that feels, and most of them don't know what they've got, and the few that do don't say.
Not the Krallen. Never the Krallen. The old one is very firm about this on the line, firmer than he is about almost anything, and I've worked out why, and it's the closest thing to snobbery I've felt from him. The ninja are extraordinary. I won't pretend otherwise; some of them can feel further than I can, and I'm a compass. But they didn't learn it. They caught it, the way the first mouse caught a spirit, and everything they do with it since they do the way a leaf does things: they lean on the chi of the place they're in, the nature of it, the weather and the water and the old stone, and they let it move through them and they call that a gift. They don't shape it. They never once take hold of it and turn it, the way a dragon does with a floor, the way Ricardo did on his knees on a net of writing. Such amateurs, the old one says, fondly, the way you'd say it about a child who's built something impressive out of things that were lying around. And then, less fondly: and look what it cost.
Because it did cost. A thing that can feel, in a room that belongs to a government, gets used the way everything rare and gifted gets used. And for a very long time the dragons could do nothing about it. Our hands were tied. That's the phrase that comes down the line, in Vovô's voice and his mother's and hers: our hands were tied. We were the hunted thing. We were the reason the room existed. A dragon walking into a government to complain about the treatment of psychic animals would have walked out as an exhibit, and so, for centuries, we watched the ninja get used and said nothing, and that's another kind of failure, and nobody on the line calls it my either.
It changed when the Alliance went in. Not by force. By paperwork, which the old one says is worse. After the big hero of their time went missing, the one every country had leaned on without admitting it, the one whose absence left a hole the size of a government in every government, the Alliance walked into that hole and sat down. Integrated, is the word. Councils inside ministries. Old things with lanyards. And the rooms with the small feeling things in them got, for the first time, someone standing in front of them.
Who the big hero was, and where they went, the line doesn't say. The old one goes quiet there, the way Vovô goes quiet at the window. I have a feeling about it, the way I have a feeling about most things I'm not supposed to have feelings about yet. I'm keeping it for later.
I've thought about this a lot, for something nine days old.
The old one says the Kaiser was right. He says it the way you'd say the sky is up. And I used to think, in the first few days, when I had all his words and none of the meanings, that it was about the door. The other door. The one in the story he never quite tells, the one that opened and took him. But I've had the zoo on the line for nine days now, and I don't think it's that door. I think it's this one. I think a boy of eight stood in a doorway and looked at a room full of things that had been made to feel by men who didn't understand feeling, and said we didn't fully understand it, and meant: you can't build this. You can only be born with it, or lucky. And if you keep trying to build it, one day you'll build something that feels, and it'll feel the door, and it'll open it.
And the old one, who was a universe, and young, and made of wanting to see, didn't listen. Because he wanted to see. And I think, on the line, in the part he never quite says, that what came through the other door was a dog. A bigger one. And that it found the whole world linked, and the world felt the teeth, all at once, and went quiet, and that's what soft is. That's what the floor has been for a year. A hundred small bodies that have never been bitten, waiting to find out whether they've stopped.
I'm a compass. I point at things. I'm pointing at a man in Berlin, and at the people in good coats, and, lately, faintly, at something I can't name, in the old country, under a floor, in the middle of a ring of ancient things. It's very small. It's very still. It feels, on the line, like a door that somebody left open a very long time ago, and never went back to close.
I haven't told Ricardo. I'm telling you.
No biggi.