The dragons were gone most of the night but somehow they managed to get up bright and early the next morning to start drawing what they'd seen.
Rosa had taken herself off to her art station and was busy mixing shades of blue to make a background, and not letting anyone else near her lest it disturb her artistic muse. Iggy had managed to extract some supplies from her before she'd shut herself off and had taken over the bed, supervised closely by Roxa, who had sourced a steel rule for him and wanted to make sure he used it properly, and Índigo, who was keen to prove that she was NOT waving as she'd been zooming along at the speed of light.
Iggy very carefully marked out where he thought he wanted the lines to go with the help of a pencil, lined them up carefully and spaced them out with the help of the steel rule so they looked nice and even just like the way he'd seen them up in space, and then when he thought it looked just right, he went over the lines with the same blue marker pen that I'd used on one of Índigo's wing tips.
This was the result...
He glanced nervously up at Roxa, who stared at the picture for a minute.
"Um, it looks like a sine-wave to me..." Roxa suggested.
"Are you sure you weren't waving, Índigo?"
"I was NOT waving!" Índigo insisted.
"I think it might look the same if you were flapping your wings, like you do when you fly.." suggested Iggy
"We were in space. You don't have to flap your wings to fly when you are in space. And anyway, Shiva threw me so I didn't need any extra wing-power."
"Maybe you flapped them anyway, out of habit?"
"I DID NOT FLAP MY WINGS!"
Poor Índigo was getting a bit annoyed, and indignant, by now.
"I held them out, like this." Ìndigo demonstrated
"And then zoomed along at the speed of light when Shiva threw me."
Ìndigo spread out her wings and stretched out her neck and zoomed around the bed as fast as her little legs could carry her. She's surprisingly long when she does that. I guess dragons are rather serpentine creatures in their way...
Iggy watched her carefully until he got dizzy. He had to admit that her wings did not flap. And now there was no sign of the waviness that he'd seen so clearly up in space.
He couldn't figure it out, so he pushed his picture towards me and asked for my opinion on what was happening.
"Well, let's have a think. Índigo, are you sure you were flying in a straight line?"
"Absolutely sure! Shiva threw me like the best quarterback there ever was. I was flying as straight as an arrow. And faster than a speeding bullet."
Roxa stared at the picture and thought very hard when she heard about arrows and bullets, but she wasn't quite sure where her thoughts were trying to lead her.
"And where were you, Iggy, relative to Ìndigo?"
"I went back quite a way, and set myself up at a right angle to where she was going to pass. I wanted to concentrate on just one short section so I could see it as it really was, without letting my head turn."
"That's a very good, scientific sort of approach." I agreed.
"And where was Rosa?"
"Oh she was much closer. She wanted to see Ìndigo zooming up towards her and then zooming off into the distance. I think it will look all distorted like that though and I wanted to see it properly."
I thought for a moment.
"Do you know the story about the blind men and the elephant?" I asked him.
"What elephant?"
"The elephant the blind men went to see."
"How can they see an elephant if they're blind?"
"Hang on. Let me go and find a video of it... Ah - here it is! I think we should watch it."
Iggy listened carefully to the story. He understood its meaning, but he didn't quite agree with it.
"But mum, none of them were actually wrong. They just weren't completely right. They didn't have the whole picture."
"So what should they have done, to get a more complete picture?" I asked him.
Iggy thought for a moment.
"I think they needed to communicate more. Share their findings instead of arguing about who was right. Because all of them had an insight to contribute, and together they could build a much better picture of what the elephant really was."
"So what do you think we should do next?"
The dragons on my bed glanced over to where Rosa was busy sprinkling white paint over her blue background to make stars.
"I think Rosa might have a better picture. If she ever finishes. She's still perfecting the background and hasn't even started on drawing the light wave yet."
"Maybe she won't even see it as a wave." I suggested.
"She's likely to have a completely different perspective..."
And so Iggy went off to read up about orthogonal and perspective viewpoints while Índigo went over to tell Vermelha all about her adventures and Roxa snuck into Austin's room to see how the feathers on his arrows were attached, and to peer down the barrel of his air rifle and to do a bit of research on how to throw a football.
And I will be back to let you all know how Rosa gets on, and to show you her painting. When she finishes it. She may be some time...
