Uncle Vic’s Last Gift

“I have a letter from my Uncle Vic,” Terry announced, looking at the envelope in his hand with an expression I couldn't quite identify.
I looked up from my book.
“I thought we went to his funeral. Wasn't that Uncle Vic in the casket?”
“That was him.”
“He sure has great penmanship for a corpse.”
“My mother always said he could have been a cartographer if he hadn't decided to be a genetic engineer.”
“An interesting career choice. Maps or monsters. I suppose they both have their attractions.” I put my book down. “You and your mother talk a lot about Uncle Vic, but I’ve only met him once, at our wedding.”
“He was always off somewhere working, but he never forgot about us. He called Mom regularly, and he sent me the greatest presents when I was a kid. Remember that air scooter I told you about? Uncle Vic gave me that. Mom nearly had a fit.”
“I remember him calling us, too. He was fun, always had a joke to tell,” I reminisced. “And what does your dead uncle have to say?”
I delivered the question in my best cartoon-vampire voice, complete with a dramatic intake of breath. Terry ignored the performance, which was disappointing. I thought it deserved at least a passing acknowledgment.
He opened the envelope and pulled out a letter. I waited patiently while he read, which I felt demonstrated considerable maturity on my part. After approximately forty seconds, I decided I'd been mature long enough.
“Anything interesting?”
He held up a finger, so I considered getting up and making coffee. Or dinner. Possibly breakfast, depending on how long this was going to take. Another minute passed before he finally lowered the pages and leaned back in his chair. By then, I was practically vibrating with curiosity.
“Well?”
“He wants me to have a dragon.”
I stared at him.
“I'm sorry. I thought you said dragon.”
“I did.”
“As in wings, scales, fire, eats the occasional knight?”
“Probably not the knight part.”
“That's reassuring.”
“It's his newest breed.”
My jaw dropped.
“His what now?”
Small house dragons were the newest thing. Small being a comparative term, of course. Not small the way a mouse is small, or a kitten is small, or a goldfish is small. Small in the sense that you could reasonably expect one to fit inside your house without removing a load-bearing wall.
The original dragons had been magnificent creatures, sixty feet long, fifteen tons, and possessed of wings large enough to provide shade for a respectable outdoor wedding. Keeping one required considerable acreage, a substantial food budget, and neighbors with a very understanding attitude toward livestock disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
House dragons were different.
They were a toy breed, averaging six feet from nose to tail and weighing around sixty-five pounds. Much more manageable, according to the brochures. Well, obviously. The alternative weighed fifteen tons and needed its own zip code.
Still, house dragons were extraordinarily popular. People had been fascinated by dragons for thousands of years, and now they could have one curled up beside the fireplace. Or serving as the fireplace, for that matter. Families with children discovered that roasting marshmallows was much more entertaining with a dragon. No firewood, no cleanup, and if a marshmallow fell off the stick, the dragon was perfectly happy to dispose of the evidence.
And now we'd learned that Uncle Vic hadn't just been involved in the breeding program; he'd been developing an entirely new line, and he wanted us to have one. His dying wish, apparently. There was something rather touching about the whole thing, once you got past the small matter of his having bequeathed us a potentially fire-breathing reptile without asking whether we wanted one.
“We’ve only had dogs and cats before,” said Terry. “A dragon is a bigger responsibility.”
“Not that much bigger than the poodle we had 20 years ago, Hobnob,” I replied with a giggle.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do, but I have seen the vids and the mag ads and I’ve daydreamed about having a dragon…”
“But the cost.”
“Exactly, the cost. And now your Uncle Vic has kindly solved that issue. We get a dragon!”
Unfortunately, acquiring a house dragon was not as simple as picking out a puppy. For one thing, dragons bonded for life, and not in the charming, sentimental way people said that about dogs who followed them into the bathroom. Dragons formed a permanent attachment to their families, and once placed in a home, they were expected to remain there. Rehoming almost never worked. If an owner died, if a family could no longer care for the animal, or if somebody discovered that sharing a household with a dragon wasn't quite the experience advertised, the results could be disastrous. The little creatures sometimes refused to eat, and some grieved so deeply they never recovered.
Consequently, the placement authorities took the entire business very seriously. There were applications, references, financial disclosures, interviews, background checks, and home visits. At one point I began to wonder whether we were adopting a dragon or applying for custody of a minor European principality.
Terry, being Terry, approached the process with the quiet determination of a man preparing to launch a spacecraft. He organized everything into folders, made lists, and cross-referenced the lists. I contributed by asking difficult questions and occasionally pointing out that our lives had been perfectly satisfactory before Uncle Vic decided to improve them from beyond the grave.
Then there was the equipment. We weren't receiving a dragon, after all. We were receiving an egg, and apparently it was essential that the family bond with it before hatching. The little creature needed to hear our voices, grow accustomed to our presence, and emerge into the world already familiar with the people who would become its permanent family. A sweet idea, but an expensive one.
There was the incubator, naturally. Not an ordinary incubator, but a specialized dragon incubator with temperature regulation, humidity controls, backup systems, and an impressive collection of warning lights. We also needed emergency supplies, approved bedding, feeding equipment, toys, and something called an enrichment tunnel, which looked suspiciously like a very expensive piece of reinforced plumbing.
The fencing around the yard needed upgrading, too. The placement officer explained that the improvements were for the dragon's protection as much as anyone else's, since a curious young dragon could get into a surprising amount of trouble. I looked at our existing fence, which had done an admirable job of keeping the dog inside and wandering livestock outside, and wondered what sort of trouble required that much reinforcement. I decided not to ask. Some questions are better left unanswered until after the invoice arrives.
Uncle Vic had thoughtfully provided the egg, but everything else was our responsibility. I had been so excited that he'd solved our little cost problem. By the time we finished purchasing the required equipment, I was beginning to think the old man had a rather peculiar sense of humor.
“What's special about this egg?” I asked one evening after dinner. “Did Uncle Vic say?”
Terry thought for a moment.
“I think it's from his new Chinese dragon line. All the established house dragons have been Western types.”
I stopped clearing the table.
“Chinese?”
“That's what the letter suggests.”
Western dragons had wings and legs and an unfortunate historical reputation for setting fire to things. Chinese dragons were long and sinuous, with whiskers, elaborate faces, and an entirely different approach to locomotion. At least, that was how they appeared in traditional artwork. I had no idea what genetic engineers had done with the concept.
“Does that mean it won't have wings?”
“I don't know.”
“Will it breathe fire?”
“I don't know.”
“Will it fly?”
“Kay, I don't know.”
“Well, you've been extremely helpful.”
He smiled.
I thought about the egg waiting somewhere in a carefully controlled facility, completely unaware that its future family was having a spirited discussion about its anatomy.
Then I smiled.
“I wonder what color she'll be.”
“You don't know it'll be a she.”
“You don't know she won't be.”
He gave me the look he used when he recognized that further discussion would accomplish absolutely nothing. It was a look I saw fairly often.
The placement company called the following morning to tell us our egg would arrive in two days. After months of paperwork, interviews, inspections, and the gradual conversion of one perfectly ordinary room into a state-of-the-art dragon nursery, we were finally going to receive our dragon. Well, our egg, which would eventually become our dragon, assuming we didn't accidentally do something catastrophic with the humidity.
I walked through the house checking things I had already checked several times. The incubator was ready, the supplies were organized, the fence was secure, and the toys were waiting. Terry had reviewed the instructions so many times that I suspected he could have recited the entire incubation manual while unconscious.
We were ready. Of course we were ready. Weren't we ready?

The placement officer carried our dragon egg into the house with both hands, which was touching but unnecessary.
The egg was inside a transport cradle rated to survive being dropped, overturned, struck by furniture, and, judging by the manufacturer’s demonstration video, attacked by a dining chair. I had watched the chair bounce off the lid three times because I wanted to know whether the egg was safe and twice more because someone in product development had clearly been having an excellent day.
None of this stopped the placement officer from carrying it as though a sudden sneeze might end the species.
I signed the final transfer form on the hall table.
“Incubator is warmed and stable?” she asked.
“Thirty-eight point two,” Terry said.
“Humidity?”
“Sixty-four percent.”
She looked at him.
“It was sixty-five ten minutes ago,” he added. “I assume we’re still within legal limits.”
“We are.”
I glanced at him. “Excellent. We’ve had custody for thirty seconds and already avoided prosecution.”
The officer did not smile. Placement officers probably had that trained out of them.
The egg was muted gray-green, darker toward one end, with a pebbled surface and a faint pattern underneath that appeared when the light caught it. It was large enough to be unmistakably Not A Chicken but still small enough that my brain could pretend this was a perfectly reasonable object to have sitting in the front hall. After months of dragon placement material, reasonable had become a flexible concept anyway. Mostly it meant we owned the correct fire blanket.
After the officer left, Terry took one handle of the cradle and I took the other.
“Ready?”
“No, but the incubator is.”
“That’ll do.”
We carried the egg into the small room off the kitchen, where the incubator sat on a sturdy table against the wall. It had a transparent lid, environmental controls, backup controls, three warning systems, and a display panel with more alerts than my first car. The placement authority recommended keeping dragon eggs somewhere quiet without isolating them from normal household noise because embryos apparently began responding to familiar voices before hatching.
For the next nine days, the egg did almost nothing, exactly as we had been told it would. Unfortunately, knowing that an egg was supposed to sit quietly was no protection against the conviction that ours was sitting quietly in some unusually suspicious way.
Every evening he would come home, put down whatever he was carrying, and lean into the room.
“Still an egg?”
“Still an egg.”
“Good. Nice to have some consistency.”
On the tenth morning…