Dragon’s Blood

by
Robert T. Weston

All Ahkenaton could think about on the long flight

home from his father’s was taking a nap in his garden.
A long nap, to relieve the stress of the trip, the nervous
excitement that having to deal with all the people –
made even worse than usual because of some
anomalous readings from his blood tests – engendered.
His father had wanted him to stay another couple of
days until they’d been confirmed, but that was not
something he could do. For no matter how solicitous
everyone was, and though they were unfailingly kind;
there were too many of them; and dealing with them
was simply too exhausting.
So he’d come home. His father would call him if
there was any real cause for alarm, or even if there
wasn’t.
He breathed a heavy sigh of relief as he came in the
great front doors and closed the world off. Despite his
need to unwind, or maybe because of it, he'd been
careful not to rush. He made mistakes when he rushed
and he’d been very carefully deliberate about setting
each individual mechanism going.
He’d turned on the house metronome as he came in
the main entrance. He’d made his way up the long
staircase through the hill to the main floor turning on
each light, one at a time. He’d made his way to the
back, counting his vase collection as he’d passed from
Dragon’s Blood Robert T. Weston
room to room. Each separate act was a deliberate step
to ratchet down his anxiety.
He’d stopped a moment in the door to the garden,
appreciating how the hillside wrapped around to the
north and east to block the winds off the sea, and had
found that it was every bit as warm as he could have
hoped. Breathing deeply, he’d stood there, to take in
the varied scents from the herbs and flowers, before
passing outside.
He’d been careful to take his time choosing his
spot. First he admired his new roses, but hadn’t settled
there, knowing as he did that they would soon be in the
shade. He’d wandered through the grape arbor but,
though the dappled sunlight was pleasant, he knew he
would want more warmth – more heat – than it offered.
Finally, he’d settled down to lie at the cliff’s edge and
watch the sea, the deep hypnotic blue of the Aegean that
invariably pulled him out of himself. He could let go
here, let himself relax in the direct rays of the sun, let
go the thoughts and concerns that his visit, with its new
tests, had raised.
The mingled scents of sage and the sea washed over
him; the distant gentle rhythm of the waves far below
rose up and to blow away the tensions of the day. He
was, in fact, settling into a nap, his long tail curling over
his snout, almost asleep, when Circe settled to the
ground next to him.
He was slow to wake and so it took him a moment
to recognize her. For one thing, it was the first time
he’d ever seen her dressed in anything but white and
certainly he’d never seen her with her hair down before.
He blinked drowsily at her, both surprised and
discomforted by her arrival. He’d never been entirely
comfortable when Xerxes brought her around, despite
his assurances. The fact was that he’d always felt that

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she was watching him and his father’s warnings to be
wary of her – because Xerxes was too infatuated with
her for his judgement to be trusted – had only
reinforced that feeling. It was one of only a few times
when his father and Xerxes had ever disagreed and he
found it almost more unnerving than Circe herself.
As he came more fully awake, he was struck by
how differently she was dressed, all in grey, a dark grey,
in fact, almost charcoal, that blended with and
emphasized the midnight of her skin and hair. His
attention flitted from from one detail to another, her
long hair flowing like a cloak to her waist, the odd
expression on her face, the way her hands held to each
other; he was sure it meant something, people’s
expressions always meant something, and it was all a
fresh, if futile, reminder of how much humans
communicated without words. He wished Xerxes were
here to explain it to him and wondered at his absence.
“Ahkenaton,” she said and paused and gulped and
started again. “Ahkenaton.”
The sound of her voice helped him to focus and
reminded him that he had resources. In his mind’s eye,
he called up the catalogue of expressions his father had
given him and began to search for a match. Sixteen
points starting with the eyebrows, nose, mouth, cheeks.
He fed the simplified pattern into the algorithm and read
with confusion the description that came back.
“Expression number 192 – extreme grief, usually
associated with the recent death of a loved one. Hand
position may indicated a subtext of guilt.” He blinked at
that, “Subtext of guilt? What does that mean?”
She drew a deep breath and went on, “There’s been
an, a terrible accident.”
A tear leaked from one eye as she struggled to
continue, she sniffed, “Xerxes has died.”

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He stared at her uncomprehending, she couldn’t
have said what he thought she’d said, that just wasn’t
possible. He shook his head and blinked rapidly.
“What, what? I don’t understand. Where’s my
father?”
“I haven’t told him yet. I haven’t told anyone yet,
though I think Merlin knows.”
Ahkenaton felt himself backing away from her, it
was almost as if he’d lost command of his body. This
couldn’t be happening, he refused to believe it.
“How, how could he die. Xerxes can’t die!”
He was screaming at her, at least it was his voice,
distorted though it was; it was as if someone or
something else had taken control of his body. An
unsettling feeling arose from his stomach, a burning up
the length of his neck and he found himself belching
fire. The unexpectedness of its blast knocked him back
over the edge of the cliff.
Halfway to the sea he fell, still in shock at what
he’d done, before his wings spread of their own accord,
green and gold in the sun, and lifted him back up over
the cliff’s edge to see the devastation he had wrought.
The garden burned, his garden, and in its midst she
stood there, a small figure untouched by the
conflagration he’d ignited. A feeling of horror swept
through him, feelings of rage and grief warred with a
sense of numbness at the thought of Xerxes being dead.
“She must have killed him so that she could get your
blood.”
The thought came to him in a flash and its cool
analytical tone was so thoroughly at odds with his other
feelings that he was taken aback even as he accepted it.
“Yes!” he thought through his tears, “Xerxes must
have discovered that she was planning on stealing my

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blood and when he tried to stop her... She must have
killed him.”
He dived at her and this time his fire was entirely
deliberate. It washed over her and melted everything in
its path, the very stones of the mountain ran like water,
but it had no effect on her at all and she rose into the air
after him.
“Of course it wouldn’t work,” the thought was
scornful, “she’s far to powerful to be harmed by
anything you could do.”
“If she could kill Xerxes, what chance would I
have,” he thought with despair. “She’ll kill me and
drain my blood.”
“Flee!”
For a moment he ignored the thought; his sense of
loss was almost overwhelming as he wailed,
“I don’t care. Xerxes!”


But his instinct for survival would not allow him to
give up so easily and he fled, not looking back and so
not seeing the lines in her face deepen. Rising up into
the sky, barely aware how his flight must look, like a
shooting star in reverse, he rose above the atmosphere.
Out beyond the magnetosphere to catch the solar wind
he streaked and, tacking against it, sped faster than light
away from the Earth.
Ahkenaton was only just beginning to get a grip on
himself as he drew power from the wind and cast a spell
to hide himself. Almost it slipped from his grasp as he
remembered the day Xerxes had taught him how to
gather the aether into a shield about himself, to bend the

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light around and about him, sending it on its way as if
he weren’t there.
Far, far from the Earth, high above the plain of the
solar ecliptic, he remembered that being shielded from
the rigors of the vacuum was not enough. He, as much
as anyone except the gods, was a child Earth’s
biosphere and could not long survive so far from the
rest of its life.
He needed somewhere to hide and, remembering
Xerxes’ explanation that all life in the solar system
shared the same metagenomic basis, he set his path to
describe a great arc above the inner planets and headed
for the sun. It was Xerxes who’d explained to him that
his blood was an almost pure plasma of Higgs Bosons;
it was what allowed him to control his momentum the
way he did. And it was the web it made, flowing
through his wings, that allowed him to tack with the
aetheric wind, and would enable him to draw
sustenance from the strange, but allied, life supported
by the sun’s nuclear fires. He could hide there, in its
photosphere, for weeks if need be, without taking harm
from the Earth’s distance, and few indeed were those
who could do the same.
Descending through the sun’s corona, into the
photosphere, and gliding as close to the sun’s core as he
dared, he remembered Xerxes being there when his egg
hatched, with at least as much wonder in his eyes as in
Ahkenaton’s own at his first glimpse of the world. He
sniffled as he remembered the first time Xerxes brought
him here, to the sun, showing him how it’s ecosystem
really was, in fact, just another variation along with all
of the rest of the solar system’s varied biomes. The
memory reawakened his sense of loss and he had to
struggle to maintain control of his aura.

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
When he had regained some measure of self-
composure, he realized that he was no longer alone.
There was a man dressed in bright green pants and a
short coat striped in all the colors of the rainbow over a
plain white shirt. He had ordinary brown hair, he was
clean shaven, and he definitely wasn’t anyone
Ahkenaton knew.
Only a magician could be here and though the man
was dressed nothing like the magicians Ahkenaton
knew in Atlantis, he was signalling using the standard
broadcast protocol. He was saying,
“Quite a little chase you’ve led me.”
In his left hand he carried a staff whose tips gave
off sparks and he was smiling. It was not a nice smile.
Ahkenaton, still in shock from the news of Xerxes’
death, and emotionally exhausted after his flight from
Circe, could only stare at the man fearfully.
The man’s smile grew broader, and cruel. The top
of his staff glowed more intensely and Ahkenaton found
himself enmeshed in a web of silver threads that pulled
his wings up tight into his body. They began to rise
away from the core and, after a moment, there was a
sharp pain in his side. It took him a moment, despite
the warnings he’d been given, to understand what was
happening, that it was his blood that the man wanted.
He strained against the spell to no avail as he felt his
blood drawn from him.
Abruptly, the web vanished. Ahkenaton recoiled
unsteadily back, his wings spreading out of their own
accord. They had risen into the chromosphere, just

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short of the corona, and out of the midst of a nearby
flare, Circe soared, her eyes blazing.
“Orthanach!”
Her cry blasted across the general broadcast
channel, in a rising tone which Ahkenaton registered but
could not understand in his confused conviction that
she’d killed Xerxes.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter who kills me,”
Ahkenaton thought bitterly.
A sudden feeling of doubt arose, seemingly from
nowhere, but he brushed it aside, “but she killed
Xerxes.”
He saw that she was in the middle of deflecting a
spell from the man who’d bound him, “Orthanach,”
came a tart thought, but he didn’t allow himself to be
distracted. Instead, taking the opportunity presented, he
attacked her again.
Powered by not only his rage and grief but
strengthened by the nuclear fires around him, he
breathed his most intense fire at her. Just as he’d hoped,
his attack caught her by surprise even as she was in the
middle of unleashing a spell that set Orthanach’s coat
smoldering despite his shields,.
Ahkenaton’s fire knocked her back. In the time it
took her to reorient herself, the man attacked her again,
and it began to dawn on Ahkenaton that it must have
been she who broke the spell that had bound him.
He twisted in distress.
“What, what, I don’t understand?” he thought
plaintively before once again finding himself caught in
a new web even as a thought came,
“She’s trying to defend you.”
Circe had crossed her arms before her, palms out to
repel the man’s attack. Now she swept them out and
wide to her sides and from her finger tips lines of

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lightning leapt to spear the man forcing him to
frantically raise new shields. She made a circle with her
left hand and the web fell away from Ahkenaton once
more.
In a battle between magicians, Ahkenaton knew,
every second is precious, and the time Circe spent in
freeing him, even for a magician as powerful as she,
could not help but cost her. Indeed, even as he realized
this, Orthanach took advantage of the opening she
offered him to cast a spell that seemed to gather all the
sun’s radiation and send it in a wave of oily silver that
washed over her. Distracted though he was, it was still
obvious to Ahkenaton that it had hurt her,
“How do I know that?” He thought in bemusement
as the man’s next spell trapped her in bands of crackling
silver lightning. At the same time, almost casually, he
rebound Ahkenaton as he gloated over her.
“You shouldn’t have interfered Circe,” the man
laughed at her. “Or, at least, you should have come
better prepared.”
“That staff of yours is impressive,” she replied, “but
it won’t hold me for long.”
“I don’t need it too, just long enough to drain our
little friend.” He turned back to the struggling dragon,
“Really, it will just hurt that much more if you keep
fighting it.”
Ahkenaton cried, twisting in pain, and replied
without thinking, “If Xerxes were here...”
“Ah,” the other interrupted, “but he’s not,” and
added cruelly, “and it would only have been a short
while before he drained you himself. A dragon child’s
blood is far to precious to waste.”
Ahkenaton froze as the man’s meaning struck him,
and then he screamed, in denial, in horror, “Nooo...”
and struggled to break free of the web.

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“Join with me.” The thought insisted.
Without being fully aware of what he was doing, he
joined and the world around him clarified itself. All in
an instant, the very nature of his senses changed and
everything for miles around became – visible – as if he
were looking at it from the outside, like looking into a
crystal ball, with himself at the center, from all
directions, and with an almost incomprehensible level
of detail.
He saw his own blood coursing through his veins.
He perceived the structure of the spell binding him and
the locus of the other with whom – in a paroxysm of
fury and loss – he had joined. Together they focused his
energies and burst out of the web, charging Orthanach
as if to physically crush him. The fire they breathed
was like nothing he’d ever accomplished before, a
coherent stream of gravitons that twisted space and
ripped into the magician’s shields, forcing him to devote
his full attention to shoring them up.
At the same time, and despite the chains of
lightning that bound her and her own shields, he was
intimately aware of Circe’s face contorting with shock
and rage.
“Liar!” She screamed, and the spell she cast fuzzed
Ahkenaton’s new awareness; it not only shattered the
lightning that bound her but damaged her own shields;
and struck at Orthanach when he could least afford it.
Ahkenaton was all too aware, as he charged, that it
was her spell, not his fire, that shattered Orthanach’s
staff and ran something akin to volcanic flame through
his bones. More, his new awareness told him that she’d
hurt herself with the too sudden escalation of energies
and his own body clenched in sympathy at the pain that
was now so clear to him in her wracked features

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Orthanach barely had time to scream before his
form became translucent and fractured; light bursting
from the fissures in his skin in the instant that it took for
him to dissolve in a shower of sparks which were
themselves blown away by the solar wind.


Ahkenaton sailed through the space where the
dissipated magician had been and looped back, his
senses screaming at him of the damage Circe had done
to herself. She was gasping as she curled up tightly and
she was clearly struggling just to shore up her defenses
against the swirls and eddy’s of radiation pouring up
from the core. He hovered at a distance, not too near
her, confused and uncertain, afraid to approach and
afraid not to, not least because his recognition of her
expression was so strange, almost automatic.
“She saved my life.” He thought, and was certain
with an unfamiliar knowlege that it might well be at the
cost of her own.
Mastering her pain, she looked across at him,
blinking. Her eyes closed and, a moment later he
received a weak broadcast, as if she could barely cast
the spell to signal him.
“It’s not true you know. Xerxes loved you as if you
were his own child and would never have hurt you.”
He blinked at her in his turn, struggling to
understand,
“Why...”
It still wasn’t a question he could quite formulate
but she understood and answered him.

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“Xerxes would never have forgiven me if I’d
allowed you to come to harm.”
“But, but, you killed him,” he burst out.
“Well...,” she answered ruefully, “yes, but that was
an accident, not what I had in mind at all.”
She started to shake her head, gasped, and paused to
master her pain.
“We were having a discussion, which turned into a
fight, sort of, which got out of hand.”
A look of bewilderment passed over her face as she
went on, as if she still couldn’t quite comprehend what
had happened or how.
“It never occurred to me that he might not have
backup shielding in place when I struck him.”
He could see the grief again, even through the pain,
and he drifted closer. She quite clearly pulled herself
together enough to look more closely at him, and so
detected the stream of plasma seeping from his wound.
“You’re injured,” she roused momentarily despite
her weakness.
“Why haven’t you staunched that? You need to get
back to Earth and get it properly taken care of.”
“But, but, what about you. I can’t just leave you
here; you’ll die.”
She shrugged, and grimaced contorted her perfect
features. She gritted her teeth and said through thinned
lips, “Well... yes, I do believe that likely. But these
things do happen, one can hardly complain of a short
life – why I’m nearly as old as Merlin – and, perhaps I
deserve to die.”
She shook her head, wincing, and closed her eyes as
she went on,
“Never mind. You need to get to your father. That
wound of yours will need special tending to make sure
there’s no infection. Xerxes told me you could live in

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this environment but perhaps he never pointed out that
that makes it possible for you to actually contract
infections here which puts you at risk of suffering septic
shock. Go home Ahkenaton. Go home and get that
wound properly cleaned. Please.”
Her voice had faded steadily and finally she seemed
to lose consciousness though he remained aware of the
net of energies she’d cast around herself. Her breath
stilled and her pulse grew faint and uneven. He came
closer. He knew she was right, the wound that
Orthanach had opened to drain his blood was sore and
he could feel a weakness stealing over him. It might
have been his imagination but it might also be the kind
of infection that she’d said. He couldn’t survive long
here in this condition, for though he could indeed cover
up the wound he didn’t know the spells that would
make sure it remained clean.
And what about her, he couldn’t just leave her and
it was obvious even to him that her shields wouldn’t
hold all that long.
He needed to get back to his father, someplace safe
where he could heal. Injured as he was, he wouldn’t be
able to reach even the speed of light which meant it
might well take hours to get home. If he tried to carry
her, the extra strain made it even more likely that he
wouldn’t make it all the way back.


“You know what Xerxes would do.”
It wasn’t, strictly speaking, his conscience. This
new awareness had revealed it to be his own hind-brain,

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considerably closer and more a part of himself then a
twin could ever be.
“Yes,” the thought wasn’t exactly bitter, more like
disgruntled, “a part of you. I’d hoped to have a life of
my own but I see now that that’s not going to happen.”
“You’ve always been here, haven’t you?”
“Yes, well, no, not always. I’ve only been conscious
of myself the last hundred years or so — and only
conscious of you for the last decade.”
Ahkenaton shrugged this off, a matter for another
time. Right now he had to figure out how to help Circe.
“Use our blood.”
“Huh.”
“You should learn to pay attention. Xerxes and our
father have talked about some of the spells that
dragon’s blood could be used for.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Hmpf, well I do. You’ll have to concentrate
though.” The tone of the thought turned snide, “I can
fake a metronome if you think it might help.”
Ahkenaton growled in irritation.
“Oh yeah, like that’ll be a big help. Get a grip.”
Ahkenaton felt vaguely ashamed of himself as he
asked,
“So what is it we’re doing?”
“I’ll gather up the blood, you prepare a container,
like this.”
The diagram of a casting circle formed in his
thoughts. It was really more of a complicated cat’s
cradle for four hands then the traditional circle, even
granting that there was no solid surface here to draw on.
The tags declared it to be made of fractal chains of
quarks anchored by elaborately folded molecules of
muons at the even nodes and of toroids of bosons at the
odd nodes. The bosons would be easy, he could just

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filter a few from his blood. The muons would be more
complicated since they wouldn’t really be stable until
the molecules he slotted them into were complete.
“We’ll put Circe in it to dissolve her external
shields...”
“What!” Ahkenaton thought in alarm. “That can’t
be right.”
The answering thought was tart, reminding him of
their father.
“If you’d just let me explain, the spell will initially
anchor our blood, with some modification, on her
neural net. From there it will be merged with her
metagenome to establish a stronger correlation between
it and her body. It should be fine.”
“Should, should?”
He knew he was beginning to panic but the
answering thought remained calm,
“It will be fine.”
Ahkenaton was in no way pleased with the
patronizing tone his hind-brain’s adopted but had no
time to object as it continued.
“I admit that it’s a little experimental – but Xerxes
was sure that it would work. Basically we’ll immerse
her network in a dilute mixture of Higgs Bosons and
then, so to speak, freeze it. The phase change should
stabilize her entire metagenome. Indeed, it was your
father’s suspicion that it should be a kind of
immortality.”
“You throw those shoulds around way too much.”
“Well, we could always let her die, which is pretty
much certain to be the case if we don’t do something –
and soon.”
That brought Ahkenaton’s temper right down. It
was true; he could sense her life ebbing away as he
argued with himself.

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“Alright,” he sighed, “ I suppose we’d better get to
work.”
“Good.”
He went to work on the containment field even as
he, well his hind-brain – whatever – began collecting
the blood still leaking from his side. His new sense of
the space around him, the ebb and flow of the gravitons
constituting the winds of the aether, made it easy to
select out the particular pre-cursors of the muons he
wanted and assemble them into the desired form. He’d
always needed his father’s help to do this kind of thing
before, or specially constructed machines. As it was,
though he knew the theory well enough, he found it to
be difficult and exhausting and not made easier by the
fact that he was using his own blood. Still, it was
doable -- though somewhere at the back of his mind,
“Minds?”
He wondered privately, then puzzled over how
private they could be as he struggled to integrate what
he now understood to be not merely a containment field
for his blood but a healing spell to directly interface
with Circe’s own neural net which would be used to
perform the actual higher level integration with her
metagenome.
And even as he admired his handiwork, and worried
about his loss of privacy, he wondered at his easy
recognition of Circe’s body language. It was not just
the recognition of facial expressions, a thing he’d never
managed to reliably accomplish without consulting the
catalogue but everything; he’d done it without thinking,
no special effort at all. Was it, he wondered, something
he was getting through his hind-brain?
But the container was ready for Circe’s body and all
his attention was needed to properly position it. Once it
was in, they sealed the ward and then took a moment to

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at least temporarily staunch the flow of blood from his
side; the pain of which had become seriously
distracting.
Ahkenaton winced as he watched the blood froth
about her and begin to dissolve her shields.
“You’re sure this will work?”
“I hope so.”
He felt his eyes bulge,
“Hope, hope?”
“Oh, calm down. Yes, hope, it’s not like it’s ever
been done before. Oh, look, we have a connection to her
network on standard Atlantean broadcast frequencies.
This is going to be tricky. You distract the maintenance
AI, in case it gets concerned, while I monitor the phase
change.”
Ahkenaton blinked but did as he was told.
Fortunately, her neural net’s AI was feeling
overwhelmed by the damage done by Orthanach’s
attack and already accepted him as a known, and
friendly, party. Its face was really no more than an
outline of a human face, place holders for eyes,
eyebrows, a mouth, and a pair of lines for the cheeks,
enough to define basic expressions; in this case,
anxiety.
“Can you help with this?”
The AI asked, as it sent him a schematic of her
network with the areas of damage color coded. He
winced as he saw how much of that color was angry red
and even, in a few areas, black, but he was even more
taken aback to realize how automatic his recognition of
the AI’s concern had been; perhaps joining with his
hind-brain had cured him – though he felt no different.
He blinked and set the matter aside – there were
more important things to be accomplished – and told it
apologetically.

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“We’re trying to induce a phase change in her
metagenome to stabilize things but I don’t know for
sure if it’ll work.”
Only to have it demand, “What kind of phase
change? And what do you mean we?”
“My hind-brain and I.” he said contritely, “I’ve only
just started to get to know him and...”
“Your hind-brain!” It interrupted, “Oh, yes, you’re a
dragon aren’t you. You didn’t know about it before?”
“As I was saying,” he said stiffly, offended by the
interruption, “I only just met him.”
“Well, alright. Tell me about this phase change.”
Ahkenaton sent a flowchart of the algorithm for the
spell his hind-brain was working on and in only
seconds, the AI responded with an expression of shock,
“You’re using your blood to do this. Circe wouldn’t
want you putting your life a risk.”
“Well,” he replied truculently, “it’s too late for that
now. We’ve already started.”
Even for an outline, the AI’s distress was evident,
its concern for its mistress’ desires at war with its
concern for her survival.
“There’s a partial match for this spell in her
experimental archives; it’s very risky, for both you and
her.”
“It was my hind-brain’s idea and I didn’t have any
of my own other then trying to fly her home.”
“Which would have been just as risky.”
Its sigh of resignation was patent.
“So how is it going?”
He squinted in puzzlement, even as he checked his
hind-brain’s progress.
“It’s nearly ready. Can’t you tell?”

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“No. Usage of the detection spells that advanced
require prior, and explicit, approval because it’s
possible to subvert them into actual offensive systems.”
“But surely she trusts you?”
“Circe isn’t so foolish as to trust a fully independent
intelligence loose in her network. My functions are
mostly limited to preliminary access control, calendar
management, and inventory. You may not have studied
it but in the early days of Atlantis there were several of
well-publicized instances where AIs attacked their
creators. Magicians have quite rightly been wary of
allowing such constructs to much independence since
then. In my case, for instance, all of my emotional
context is derived via Circe’s amygdala.”
“Oh.”
He wasn’t entirely sure what it was talking about,
he’d never had direct contact with the kind of general
purpose AIs that magician’s kept in their neural nets,
just the much simpler ones in everyday use around his
father’s laboratory and those were tied to particular
spells.
“So what will you do if she dies?”
“Oh, without the motivation her emotions provide, I
expect I’ll just float around analyzing things until I
dissolve.”
Ahkenaton was taken aback, that seemed a sad kind
of fate to look forward to, but before he could think it
through, he noticed that, not merely her neural net, but
her entire metagenome was now saturated in the
bosonic condensate they’d made from his blood. Not
only that, but the bosons were themselves dissolving
into long chain-like molecules of gravitons. He found it
utterly beautiful, and yet; he was aware that a sunspot
was beginning to bloom around them as the space-time

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Dragon’s Blood Robert T. Weston
matrix flattened out. In a few minutes, he knew, it
would be large enough to attract attention on the Earth.
“That might be awkward,” he reflected to himself.
Then, quite suddenly, he felt, more than saw, the
change. It was like watching a speck of dust land in a
glass of super-cooled water; all in an instant turning to
ice. Circe’s metagenome crystallized in his awareness;
a diamond like transparency in the aether that limned
her body, sank into it, and was gone.
The AI, sounding vaguely alarmed, was saying,
“I have to go now. I hope it worked.”
He tried to re-signal but got no reply as, around and
throughout Circe’s body, all her wardings, both the
remains of her own shields and the container he’d
helped create, collapsed. A globe of terrible clarity
blossomed in his awareness. A great calm in the aether
that enveloped him as all free gravitons were driven
away; the space around him went utterly flat. It was all
he could do to keep his own body’s aura intact and for
some seconds he was to busy stabilizing his shields to
pay attention to Circe.
Once he was confident his shields were firmly
established, he became aware that her body had been
left floating, completely unshielded, in the heat of the
corona; a circumstance that should have vaporized it in
microseconds. And yet, there she was. True, her
clothes were gone, but she was still there, untouched by
either the hard vacuum or the harder radiation.
“What?”
He began to panic before, from his hind-brain,
waves of calmness washed over him,
“She’s fine, fine, really. Her metagenome’s been
fully stabilized maybe even down to the sub-graviton
level. Nothing remotely natural is going to hurt her.”

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Dragon’s Blood Robert T. Weston
And, indeed, he was aware of the radiation
washing over her, leaving her untouched. Her chest
rose and fell, though there was no air for her to breath,
and her pulse had settled down to a steady, regular
rhythm, as if she were sleeping. Nevertheless, he
couldn’t keep himself from asking anxiously,
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, you can see for yourself. It’s done and it’s
time to go home.”
“Will we make it?”
“Oh, I think so. Her condition should actually
provide us with some protection while we carry her.”
He blinked to himself. It was too much. He
wouldn’t think about it anymore; he couldn’t think
about it anymore. He shook his head, gathered her in
his uninjured foreclaw, spread his wings wide to catch
the solar and aetheric winds, and headed for home.

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