The Dragon Man (12 page)

“The flowers don’t have to produce nectar,” Ms. Chatrian explained, mistaking the reason for her hesitation. “If you don’t want perfume, you don’t have to have it.”

“No, I want it,” Sara said. “It’s just that I haven’t studied the options. If you have some kind of sample kit....”

“Of course,” Ms. Chatrian said. “I’ll get it for you. Would you like a little time alone to make your choice?”

“If that’s no trouble,” Sara said. “I don’t want to hurry. It’s important.”

“Of course it is,” said Ms. Chatrian. “It’s no trouble at all.”

Sara guessed that the tailor, as a matter of professional courtesy, would never dream of pointing out that the only people likely to benefit from the scent of Sara’s rose in the near future were her eight parents, at least two of whom—and probably more—were sure to disapprove of whatever choice she made.

Ms. Chatrian ushered Sara into a tiny room that was little more than a cupboard with a wallscreen, with a hard round stool on which to sit. Patiently, the tailor showed her how to operate the equipment that would release scent into her nostrils, and then reabsorb the molecules to make way for the next sample. The position Sara had to take up in order that this could be done with maximum efficiency felt a trifle undignified, if not actually comical. Fortunately, Linda Chatrian had closed the door when she exited the room, to guarantee Sara’s privacy.

“Take it easy,” Sara murmured to herself, feeling that she was becoming slightly flustered by the unexpected sidetrack. “All the time in the world. Got to do this right.” She knew that it wasn’t just her parents who had to be shown that she could handle situations like this with calm authority; she needed to prove it to herself too. This was a big day, a day to set precedents.

As soon as she saw the catalogue list on the screen, though, the right choice leapt out at her with all the shock of a revelation. Even before she had sampled the scent, Sara knew that she had to have it. It was, she supposed, a bold decision—but this was a day to set precedents, and the rose itself was an advertisement of courage. Adding the right perfume was simply a matter of completing the design.

When she stepped out of the room again, Ms. Chatrian was waiting for her with an expression of exaggerated politeness that must have required centuries of practice to perfect. When Sara told the tailor exactly what color she required, and which scent she had chosen, Linda Chatrian merely nodded, as if she had expected Sara to make exactly that the decision.

The fitting eventually stretched to three and a half hours, and it cost a little more than Sara had anticipated—but she figured that her credit would just about stretch, provided that she kept her spending to a bare minimum until the end of August. Given that she hadn’t yet grown accustomed to the ready availability of credit, that didn’t seem too hard—and the sacrifice was surely justified.

She re-entered the house to find all eight of her parents lingering in the communal area. They weren’t arguing. In fact, they were so busy pretending that they were there purely by chance, rather than because they were waiting anxiously to see what Sara had done to herself, that they seemed to be in closer harmony than they had achieved for at least seven years. That was good, because it meant that no one was in a bad mood that might be taken out on Sara’s rose.

“The stem’s wound around quite artfully,” Mother Verena observed. “Linda’s done a good job. The foliage will spread very nicely. More than adequate to protect your modesty.” The last remark was accompanied by a sideways glance at Mother Quilla.

“I don’t doubt it,” Mother Quilla said, “but you’d have looked even lovelier—and better endowed—in a nice pair of shells.”

Sara blushed at that, although there was no need.

“Considering the position of that bud,” Father Gustave put in, “I think you’ll be more comfortable if you don’t grow too rapidly in that department.”

Sara was conscious that her blush must be deepening even further. The bud was very small at present, but it was positioned above her breastbone, in what would one day be her cleavage.

“It’s not going to get in the way when you sleep, is it?” asked Mother Jolene.

“Of course not,” Mother Verena answered for her. “Even when the bloom’s fully extended it’ll fold up flat into the smartsuit if Sara smoothes it down with her hand and hold it in position for a few moments. You ought to do that when you take a shower as well as when you go to sleep, Sara, and you’ll have to do it if you ever need to wear a spacesuit or a deep-diving surskin.”

Sara didn’t think there was any possibility of her taking an excursion into space or the remote depths of the sea in the near future, but she nodded anyway to show that she appreciated the flower’s potential discretion.

“Well, I hope you like it,” Father Aubrey said. “It’ll be an expensive decision if you want something else in six months’ time.”

“It is detachable,” Sara told him. “Ms. Chatrian told me that she can remove it and put it into storage any time—and that I could even do it myself if I followed the instructions very carefully. It can be stored warm for up to three years if the right provisions are made for its nutrition, or frozen down indefinitely.”

Mother Maryelle leaned over her to inspect the tips of the petals that were peeping out of the bud. She sniffed ostentatiously, although Sara was fairly sure that there wouldn’t be enough nectar in the flower to emit a perceptible scent for at least a week.

“Purple’s a terrible color for a rose,” Mother Maryelle opined. “At a distance, it’ll look as if you’re wearing a geranium.”

“It’s a bit dark,” Mother Quilla said, placing her face beside Mother Maryelle’s so that she too could inspect the tip of the bloom-to-be. “Imperial purple’s all very well in broad daylight, but it won’t show up well in less kindly light. You should have gone for a lighter shade. Mauve, perhaps.”

“White, perhaps,” Father Lemuel put in, a trifle mischievously. “All girls your age should wear white.”

“Except that she was born on the wrong side of the Pennines,” Father Stephen said, eager to show off his supposed expertise on the subject of pre-Crash culture, although there couldn’t have been anyone present who didn’t know that Lancashire’s emblem was a red rose and Yorkshire’s a white one. “She could hardly wear red, though, considering the kind of signals that would have given out—not to mention the fact that it would look as if she’d been shot in the chest. Or maybe in the back, given that it would look more like an exit-wound.”

“It’s not going to have thorns, is it?” Father Aubrey asked. “You’re spiky enough without, these days.” The last remark was sufficiently unfair to win a frown even from Mother Maryelle.

“Thorns,” Sara informed Father Aubrey, with all due dignity, “are optional.”

For a while, it almost seemed as if no one was going to ask about the as-yet-unmanifest perfume, but Mother Maryelle wasn’t going to let her ostentatious sniff go to waste. “I do hope it’s not going to be too strongly scented when it opens,” she said. “It might be your rose, but the hometree’s everyone’s personal space.”

“You’ll hardly notice it,” Sara promised. “It’s called colibri.”

Mother Maryelle—who knew no foreign languages—simply looked puzzled, but Father Gustave, always enthusiastic to occupy the intellectual high ground, tipped her off. “Colibri’s French for hummingbird,” he said. “Very nice, I’m sure.”

Mother Jolene was the only one who picked up the full implication of that revelation. “Does that mean that the flower will attract hummingbirds, when it’s mature enough to start producing nectar?” she asked.

Sara admitted that it would.

“There aren’t any hummingbirds in England,” said Father Stephen, frowning slightly because he already knew that he must be missing something.

“Oh yes there are,” said Mother Quilla. “More and more with every day that passes.”

“Those silly things that some women have started wearing on their shoulders and around their waists?” Father Gustave said. “But they’re not real hummingbirds—just fancy costume jewelry.”

“They might not be products of natural evolution,” Mother Quilla told him, “But they’re certainly real—a lot more solid than these astral tattoo things that all the young men are wearing, although some of them can apparently fly free too. Costume hummingbirds have real feathers, real wings and real beaks...and they have real appetites too. They drink nectar from flowers—and it seems that the flowers don’t have to grow in gardens. What possessed you, child? There aren’t any hummingbirds here. Or are you trying to drop heavy hints about
our
dress sense?”

“Of course not,” Sara assured her. “I just thought it would be nice, when I go into town, or down to Old Manchester for junk swaps. Any hummingbirds around, far from their gardens at home, will be grateful that I’m around...and if there aren’t any hummingbirds, the scent will just dissipate on the wind. It
is
discreet, just as Mother Maryelle wanted.”

Father Lemuel stifled a laugh.

“Well,” said Mother Jolene, with a sigh, “I suppose it’s a nice thought, in its way. The flower is sterile, I hope—the hummingbirds might be carrying pollen on their beaks from real roses.”

“Of course it is,” Sara assured her.

“As a matter of interest,” Father Stephen inquired, “do they make a nectar that attracts suicidal nightingales?”

Father Gustave was the only one who laughed out loud at that, and he didn’t take the trouble to explain why. He and Father Stephen had always had a penchant for keeping their private jokes under wraps.

Although four of her parents had voted against the rose, all eight of them seemed sympathetically interested in its progress during the following two weeks—but theirs weren’t the reactions in which Sara was most keenly interested. She did what Davy Bennett had done, adding an icon to her name-tag so that anyone in the school who cared to click on it could see a picture of her new costume—and she made sure that the rumor got around as quickly as possible, although that was hardly difficult.

As she had hoped, but had not dared to expect, the rose harvested a very satisfying crop of envious admiration. The only augmentation that offered any competition at all within her own age-group was Davy’s spider web, but his shadowspiders weren’t allowed to detach themselves from his person—not, at any rate, within the walls of his ManLiv town house.

In the mixed-age groups of the games sessions and hobby clubs the rose didn’t seem exceptional at all, because practically everyone in the years ahead of Sara had some sort of additional decoration by now, but it felt good to be a pioneer among her peers, even if everyone else caught up by Christmas. Indeed, Sara congratulated herself on having set a standard which others would now have to strive to meet.

“I’m having birds myself,” Gennifer reminded everyone, during morning break, although Sara knew that Gennifer had yet to negotiate this through her own house-meeting.

“I’m having snakes,” Luke Grey boasted. “Not shadowsnakes—solid ones.”

“With real poison?” Davy asked, oozing incredulity.

“As much real poison as your spiders,” was the inevitable retort, “and my snakes will be in color”—after which Luke and Davy drifted off to conduct an earnest discussion on whether or not spiders were supposed to be poisonous, or whether they were just as creepy without, and, if so, whether the same arguments were applicable to snakes.

Even Sara’s class teacher, Ms. Mapledean, was suitably impressed when Sara invited her to click on her new icon after class resumed. “What a pity we won’t get the benefit of the scent,” she said. “On the other hand, I suppose it might be inconvenient to have all the hummingbirds lurking behind the scenes in the year eleven classroom fighting amongst themselves to insert themselves behind the scenes this of one.”

Sara laughed dutifully at the weak joke.

“My snakes will eat hummingbirds,” Luke said, missing the point. “And they won’t need to smell them first—so the rest of you had better watch out for your accessories.”

“I think we ought to be able to duplicate our real suits in our school images,” Davy Bennett said.

“I don’t,” Leilah Nazir retorted. “I wouldn’t mind Sara’s rose, but there’s no way I’m going to sit in a classroom with your spiders.”

“You’d better be careful with that sort of talk,” Ms. Mapledean advised, “or the school governors will start talking about a real uniform again. It keeps coming up, you know. Allowing students to wear different colors was a hard-won compromise—if you start pressing for the right to display your animal, vegetable and mineral baubles, you might get the opposite result.”

“You can’t make us all wear identical smartsuits,” Leilah said, incredulously.

“They don’t have to, you idiot,” said Julian Sillings. “All they have to do is to make us reprogram our virtual images.”

“But it would be terrible if our images all looked exactly the same,” Gennifer complained. “We wouldn’t be ourselves any more. We’d be pretending to be all alike. That’s pre-Crash thinking.”

That’s silly too,” Julian observed. “Our
faces
wouldn’t have to be identical, would they, Ms. Mapledean?”

“Why do you say that it’s
pre-Crash thinking
?” Ms. Mapledean demanded, eager to set the discussion on a genuinely educational path.

As soon as normality was restored, Sara settled back into her customary half-attentive state of mind. She already knew why uniformity was one of many ideas that had been irredeemably tainted by the Crash, and knew that it had much more to do with armies than schools. Personally, she thought that all her teachers went on far too much about the sins of the pre-Crash world, given that everything was utterly different now and that no one had the slightest desire to make the same mistakes again.

When the lunch break rolled around and she could spend some time one-to-one with Gennifer, Sara voiced this opinion, and Gennifer readily agreed.

“It’s a pity about the nectar, though,” Gennifer said. “Living in the wilds, the way you do, you’re not going to attract many hummingbirds.”

“I don’t live in the wilds,” Sara said. “Blackburn’s a bigger town than Keswick—I just don’t happen to live in the middle of it.