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Save Point: Hints Of a Seven-Fold Symmetry

Somewhere On The 'Merican West Coast, 1910-

The Dragon, Cleo realizes, expresses hidden hints of a seven-fold symmetry in the layout of its body, which may offer a clue as to what it 'really looks like', although the concept is fundamentally flawed as it is hard to visualize something having more than just three dimensions. There are six tentacle-style manipulators along its back and spine, and one more when you count the spare that it uses as the erection she finds so deeply pleasing. Likewise there are six ventral collimation slits along the front of its torso, like inwardly angled horizontal gills, and one more when you include the additional slit between its legs that is only visible when used for propulsion while swimming or when it inexplicably decides to be female on occasion. The mouth and anus are of course quite separate to all of this and simply run down the middle, possibly without anything that resembles actual organs in the way (she's seen it do stuff; bizarre stuff; you wouldn't want to know).

She's only seen its wings once or twice, because it seems to feel exposed when they're out (paper thin planes, extended out into the cracks in reality and highly vulnerable?) but they also seem to match the pattern, one for each manipulator and an extra spare she only ever got the briefest look at, folded into the space between the two tips at the end of its tail where they diverged.

She suspects that mechanically, its flight is really more like a new biplane than a fighter jet, paper and canvas slapped together to create something only barely more sophisticated than a kite being flown from the inside. Because it's some higher-dimensional process, it looks epic and terrifying in her (and their?) own limited universe, but it's probably embarrassingly primitive as seen from the Outside, which might account for the Dragons unwillingness to attempt the process.

She takes a few seconds to fantasize about the 'real form' of the Dragon and mentally comes up with something resembling an angry directional drilling bit with teeth on the front end and a long slender hole down the middle to carry away the tailings from whatever it has swooped on and is eating this time, extremities ranged symmetrically around its elongate body to direct its flight and grasp the prey, vents ejecting brief bursts around it like a living spacecraft to propel it about. Yes, it's totally wrong, and it would actually look nothing like that, but there's something intriguingly hard about what she imagines that may or may not define her inexplicable attraction to it. It's sort of manliness implemented as a design principle, rather than as a gender stereotype.

Even when the Dragon is female it makes her shiver inside with excitement. And there she goes again, distracting herself off-topic with sex. She's lost all too many tenuous insights that way, even if she can't think of any use right now for what she's just understood. Maybe it'll come in handy later somehow, the way so many things in her life have. Combat medicine. Sexual violence. A very advanced grasp of how to set things on fire using conveniently available materials.

She records her thoughts and draws a quick sketch, then writes it to memory so she won't forget, although she has no idea what anyone who comes across the original might make of it. Sure she could burn it, but it's not like anyone else could actually use it for anything, right? And her instinct urges her not to destroy a hidden knowledge, because that's what fearful people do.

Secrets should be saved, even if they are concealed.

She slips the piece of paper into an aged book in the guest library. Let someone be confounded by her sketch, the miscegenated text born of both Azatlani and English with parts of each written in the characters of the other. Who knows what will happen?

~*~

Not one to waste the sunny day, she heads back down to the seaside. She's enjoying her holiday at this little coastal town, with its plentiful fish catches and decorative Polynesian tourist jewelry to fool the unwary (coated in the thinnest microscopic wafers of gold leaf? seriously?) an old scam of sorts born from trade to both Asia and the Pacific by the sailing vessels of previous centuries, in which the returning seamen combined the stylings of both to create false value in something that could be cheaply made from carved driftwood and shells. Everyone knows but that doesn't stop the new visitors from buying it.

Inland there are water-powered textile mills, making the town unusually environment-friendly even after the industrial age, and their thinner and more flawed cloth becomes available as part of the theme, used to make sarongs, cheongsams and other exotic clothings suitable to be bought as a cheap one-off purchase by the beach-going guest. The more predictable and prejudiced people of the surrounding and inland towns are always casting aspersions about the strange and foreign behaviours of these coastal dwellers, and she has no idea how this place would survive if it wasn't for the cheap housing (salt-preserved timber shacks too close to the beach, liable to last forever) in combination with the readily available seafood (hungry? jump in and catch a fish or two!).

She's going to enjoy it anyway until the world rolls over it, along with a whole host of retired ex-sailors with rum-bottle in hand and suspiciously recent wall-mounted cutlasses that still seem to have an edge. Buccaneer originally meant 'boat-person', after all, referring to those who chose to remain free and refused to pay taxes for services they didn't use in some Spanish city where they never lived, and the same is still true of men who've seen pretty much every country on earth that has a waterfront and discovered to their surprise that cultural traditions are really more of a local phenomenon than an absolute. The wharfside bars are an education in the international beverage smuggling trade, as undertaken entirely for fun instead of just profit, and the revenuers would be invading the place wholesale if they became aware of even the half of what was on offer.

Later in the day there'll be a swimming race out to the reef, which is only to be expected from the sailors and children of sailors who make up most of the permanent residents. The reef itself is rather hazardous, not of coral but a jagged basaltic outcropping rising from the sea-bed where the displacement on an off shore fault has thrust the underlying strata up out of the water slightly faster than it can erode, and so the race is actually to a line of buoys fastened to huge pyramidal lead sinkers a short distance before the reef itself. Nonetheless, the event is a little dangerous and a few of the swimmers are lost each year to excessive ambition and exhaustion, despite the row-boats on standby ready to recover the spent.

The full race is held only four times a year, at specific conditions of time and tide relating to the equinoxes intended to provide optimal swimming weather. The rest of the year, once weekly, they do a quarter or a half depending on the climate. There's a small shrine to the fallen on a rocky outcrop to one side of the bay, where their sacrifices to the sea are honored, although not with the usual candles, given that they'd swiftly blow out. Instead, kerosene lanterns are lit each night and glow next to the pinned up pictures and photographs of loved ones lost at sea, the papers allowed to yellow, aging naturally with the elements until one day they blow free of their pins and are lost to time. It's an oddly moving tribute to the simply missing and mostly never found.

Houses high on the distant headland look down, and she waves to the distant windows, draped in just a towel in a manner that would be taken as scandalous if she did it in public anywhere else within a thousand miles. She just can't help but to love this place. If the latest wave of settlers to America had somehow been able to land on this warm Western coast instead of the much colder Eastern one, things might have been considerably different.

~*~

"Movin' on up, gonna retire to Providence," explains the aging lady who runs the seaside hostel.

"That's where I'm from originally. Got a sister who works for the historical society up there, ain't seen her in donkeys years. This hot sun is all very well, but I've got a hankerin' to see some snow again before I go, if you take my meaning. End of the season this year, I'm gonna pack everything I can bothered to take and go visit her. Not as that's much, a'course - I'm taking some of the books and pamphlets and stuff, things I like, things as got memories or that she might be interested in. Give her somethin' else to read other'n old genealogies and family trees and whatnot, it'll do her a world of good."

Cleo can't help but express her disappointment. This has been a reliable holiday destination for quite some time now for the less than fully human crowd, flexible in its acceptance of outsiders.

"Things wear out, dearie, and people do too," sighs the old lady. "You can't take the heat anymore, round here, you know it's time to get out of the kitchen."

Reluctantly, Cleo wishes her well, and makes a mental note to sort out other arrangements if she finds herself back here again next year. Everything reaches its end time eventually, and you have to be accepting of this over the sort of scales they live to, but it's always a shame when something good finds itself stranded out beyond the end of the era that can support it, like a fish left lying on the sand by the descending tide, out of its element. There's a hint of oncoming change in the air.