The Painter of New Skies

Legend has it… every dragon hatches whole — and some hatch seeing colors nobody else has noticed yet. When the wind carries a seed far away to a strange new field, the seed doesn't grow into the field it came from. It grows into the color of the new light it lands in — the same seed all the way through, and a flower nobody back home has ever seen.

1

Lichen is old now. His snout has gone gray, his gray-green scales are still flecked with paint, and the paint flecks have silver ones among them now. The paint shop in Kilnport belongs to the painters who mix in it now, sold to them a tin at a time, with MADDER'S RED still on every tin. He still plants every seed. And this spring, with his two youngest — Rowan, who never stops asking questions, and Umber, who never stops drawing — he has done the bravest thing of his life. He has gone with the second ship, out past the moon, to the very first settlement on a new world. Swatch has come too, with its fan of color cards.

3

The settlement is small and new: a ring of glass domes on a wide red plain, gardens growing under the glass, clean sun-power on every roof. Gentle robots are everywhere, built by the Engine before anyone arrived, and they ask first about everything. It is safe, and warm, and very strange. And over it all, from morning to evening, the sky is the wrong color. Not blue. A soft, dusty butterscotch, from one red horizon to the other. Umber stands at the dome wall the first morning and stares up at it and doesn't draw a thing.

4

Lichen has always seen colors other dragons walk past, and here there are more than he can count. There are twelve kinds of rust in the plain, the pale gold of the frost at dawn, the two small moons, one quick and one slow. He wants to paint them all. But that night, Rowan cries into her pillow, and won't say why, and when Lichen finally coaxes it out of her, it's one word. "Blue," she says. "I miss blue."

5

It isn't just Rowan. All over the settlement the young ones are homesick for the sky they left. They paint blue skies on the inside of every bedroom wall. An old settler rigs the dome's lights to glow blue at breakfast. A glass company back home offers a blue tint for every dome, at a very fair price per square yard. And a council of the oldest families asks the Engine whether the whole great dome over the garden could be painted, from the inside, a clear home-blue — so the young ones can look up and feel at home. The Engine says it can. It asks Lichen, because he's the painter, what he thinks.

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Lichen doesn't know. So he does what he did as a young dragon in Kilnport: he mixes a sample patch. Over Rowan's bed, that night, he paints a small square of home-blue on the ceiling — the exact blue of a spring morning over the wind-turbine fields — with one white cloud in it. Rowan stares up at it for a long time and falls asleep smiling. Lichen sits on the end of her bed in the dark and looks at the little blue patch, and feels, for the first time in his life, that he has painted something to hide something.

7

At dusk the next day he walks out onto the red plain in his suit, alone, to think. And the sun goes down behind the far red hills — and the sky around it, the whole sky, turns blue. Not home-blue. A pale, cool, glowing blue, only at sunset, only on this world, the way the frost is only gold here at dawn. Lichen stands on the plain in the blue light with his mouth open. "Oh," he says. "You were waiting too." Every gray wall is waiting. Every sky, it turns out, is too.

8

He brings Rowan and Umber out onto the plain the next evening at sunset. Before they look, he says the three things out loud, the way his mother used to open her claw on payday: Is it good for me? Is it good for them? Is it good for the world? Then the sun goes down, and the sky turns its own strange blue all around them, and Umber sits down in the red dust and starts drawing, and doesn't stop until it's dark. Rowan holds Lichen's claw. "It's not our blue," she says. "No," says Lichen. "It's this one's."

9

The council isn't persuaded. "A blue sunset for ten minutes isn't home," says the eldest. "The young ones need to look up and see the sky they were hatched under." Other families agree: paint the dome. Make it home inside. One grandmother says it plainly: "We've come so far, Lichen. Let them have something that isn't strange." Lichen understands. He misses the blue too. He keeps his brushes in his satchel, and says he'll think.

10

While he thinks, he does what he knows. Every evening at sunset, he takes the young ones out onto the plain and shows them one new color, and they name it together: dust-rose, frost-gold, two-moon silver, rust-number-nine. Umber paints them on the outside of the domes, small, low down, where anyone walking past can see. Some of the homesick young ones start coming to the sunsets. Some of them start, very quietly, to paint.

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But the homesickness doesn't go away just because there are new colors to name. Every family's walls are blue now, inside. And at last the council votes, kindly and firmly: the great dome over the garden is to be painted home-blue, from the inside, all over, so that the whole settlement can look up and feel at home. They ask Lichen to do it, because there's no painter like him. He doesn't say no. He loves them. He takes out his brushes.

12

He paints it all through one long night, with no sample patch — the first wall in his whole life without one. It is the most beautiful sky he has ever made: a clear home-blue with soft white clouds, horizon to horizon across the inside of the great dome. In the morning the settlement stands in the garden looking up. The young ones cheer, the old ones cry, and Rowan holds his claw and won't let go. By the end of the week, the garden is dying. The painted sky doesn't let the real light through. The sun-panels on the dome go dark under the paint, and the heaters with them. The beans go pale. The young trees droop. And the seeds Lichen carried from Kilnport — great-grandchildren of the forty-one he once kept in a cracked pot of gray dirt — don't come up at all. High under the dome, the old cleaning robot that polishes the glass every night does something nobody asked. It climbs to the very top and, with one soft pad, cleans away one circle of paint, a window the size of a claw. The real butterscotch light falls through it onto one seedling.

13

Lichen walks out onto the plain, away from the domes, into a canyon where floods ran a very long time ago. The old flood-lines on its walls run in bands of rust and rose and gold — like the canyon country at home, a whole sky away. No words are written here. But the bands go up the wall the way a bellows fills, and rest, and come down long, and in his satchel he still carries the line: When you are afraid, breathe like me. The garden is dying. The young ones love their blue. Does Lichen bank the fire and breathe — and paint what is there — or blaze ahead and paint the whole settlement like home tonight?

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