The Dragon Man (13 page)

Mercifully, Gennifer didn’t want to argue about that. “It was a good decision anyway,” she said, generously. “I can’t wait till the flower opens out—it’ll really suit you. And it will attract hummingbirds, every time you go out. The only thing half as sexy as wearing the very best living jewelry is wearing flowers that attract the very best living jewelry. You’re going to have more blossoms than one, I hope?”

“In time,” Sara told her.

“Of course,” Gennifer agreed, oozing pretended sophistication, “You’ll have to mind your diet now, though. You’re eating for two. Drinking, anyway—the roots will be tapping your veins, even if the leaves and stem can...what’s the word?”

“Photosynthesize,” Sara supplied, automatically.

Father Gustave had told her, almost with nostalgia, that when he had been Sara’s age almost everyone had worn their smartsuits black because the suits themselves had been able to fix solar energy just as plants did—or, to be strictly accurate, just as SAP-systems did. SAP—which stood for Solid Artificial Photosynthesis—was even more efficient than Mother Nature’s chlorophyll, because it absorbed all the light falling upon it instead of reflecting the green part of the spectrum back again. Father Gustave had been trying to imply that he and Father Stephen had good reasons for continuing to wear black, but Sara knew that modern smartsuits were too complicated to get all the energy they needed from sunlight, even in places where it rained a lot less often than it did in Blackburn. Even so, she knew that he did have a point. All smartsuits might be parasitic nowadays, but some were undoubtedly more parasitic than others, and the energy supporting her suit’s further decoration would have to come out of her own metabolism.

Gennifer had used the phrase “eating for two” in order to echo another taboo of pre-Crash times, before artificial wombs had replaced the inefficient ones provided by Mother Nature, but even its literal meaning was not completely free from macabre undertones. The larger Sara’s new implant grew—whether it put out more flowers or not—the more support it would need. Quantity wouldn’t be a problem, but Linda Chatrian had warned her that she would have to make sure that the rose’s additional dietary requirements were met if she wanted the flower to reach it full potential. The kinds of whole-diet manna with which the hometree’s pantry was abundantly stocked had no special supplements for the manufacture of nectar or the pigments in rose petals, and the supposed luxuries in which her various parents routinely indulged were similarly underequipped. Sara was already paying more attention to the fine details of her diet than she ever had before.

“You’re right, of course,” she said, to Gennifer. “It’s a big responsibility. But I’m ready for it. So are you. Your parents will understand that—they’re a lot more fashion-conscious than mine.”

“I hope so,” Gennifer said, with a sigh. “I certainly hope so.”

CHAPTER XII

It would have been nice, Sara thought, once her own birthday party was over, if there had been a particular day on which her flower was due to open out—a sort of birthday of its own, which could be celebrated by a suitable invented ritual. Her party had been as much of a success as could be expected, given that all eight of her parents had been involved from start to finish. The virtual world in which it had been held had not only been selected but custom-designed by Father Lemuel, so it had been carefully tailored to her interests, but the great majority of the participants—parents as well as guests—had been using their hoods, so it had been little more than a light show. There had been dragons—not to mention roses and hummingbirds—but there had not been any real intensity, nor any particular sense of companionship...and nothing special, in any intimately personal sense.

Unfortunately, the flower’s expansion was too gradual to permit the identification of any unique moment of achievement. Thirteen days elapsed between the bud’s first tentative opening and the full display of the flower, which still had to acquire its final conformation and polish—a process which took a further week.

Sara’s eagerness to see the process through to its conclusion sometimes seemed almost unbearable. She was so obviously impatient that her edginess brought forth a veritable flood of thorn jokes, not just from Father Aubrey but from everyone else—except Father Lemuel, who had not been seen in the communal area of the house since graciously accepting everyone’s thanks for arranging her birthday extravaganza. He attended two house-meetings on camera, even though he would only have had to walk thirty metres to come to the table in person, because he didn’t want to unhook himself from some special neural interface he was busy testing.

Father Aubrey joked about Father Lemuel too, saying that he was nowadays too far adrift in the virtual multiverse to notice anything that happened in mere meatspace even if it were “handed to him on a plate”. The point of the remark was that Father Lemuel hadn’t seen a plate for a month or more, having been perfectly content to take all his nourishment intravenously within his cocoon. Sara didn’t think the joke was very funny, because she often worried about whether Father Lemuel was really safe when he spent such long periods in his cocoon. Father Aubrey and Father Stephen both liked telling scary stories about people who died in their cocoons and weren’t discovered for months—although Mother Quilla assured her that it couldn’t happen nowadays, because even the artificial idiots that passed for artificial intelligences in hometrees far less sophisticated than theirs could react immediately and effectively to medical emergencies.

When Sara repeated this assurance back to Father Aubrey and Father Stephen while they were in the garden one evening, they retaliated by telling her that modern smartsuits had now become so smart that they could walk around for days or weeks after the people inside them were dead. Father Stephen told her that such zombies were regularly to be found in attendance at junk swaps, offering the moon on a stick to any charlatan who claimed to have a ready-made elixir of life. That was far too tall a story to obtain an instant’s credence from Sara, but she couldn’t help wondering whether it might come true one day in the not-too-distant future.

“Of course,” Father Aubrey added, changing tack yet again when he saw that Sara wasn’t fooled, “Lem’s smartsuit is specially programmed to make sure nothing happens to his body while, as he quaintly insists on putting it,
his spirit is on the Other Side
, so....”

“He doesn’t say any such thing,” Sara said, cutting the new horror story off before it had a chance to become silly. “Father Lemuel’s a real explorer. And he
makes
new virtual universes, too. You shouldn’t say nasty things about him when he put so much money into the hometree.”

Father Aubrey had the grace to laugh at that, and apologize, but Father Stephen frowned as he jabbed his trowel into the soil of the herb garden. Weeding was a task he always performed with a slight attitude of disgust, even when Father Aubrey—who was the herb garden’s designer and principal apologist—was actually present. “Lem’s got no right to go on to you about how much he put into the hometree,” Father Stephen said. “We all put in our fair share. You never see Lem out here, getting his hands and knees dirty. We all worked for a living until we took time out, and I still go into the ManLiv factory three days a week. We can’t all do our jobs in Virtual Space—someone has to tend to the sharp end. No matter how smart your software is, you need machines to carry them out, and machines need engineers.
Real
engineers.”

“We all get our hands dirty now and again, Steve,” Aubrey said, soothingly. “Even if some of us are a bit reluctant to kneel down in the dirt. You need to be more careful with that trowel—you’ll injure the roots of the rosemary. Sara wasn’t accusing us of not doing our share, were you, Sara?”

“No,” Sara said. “I just didn’t like you being nasty about Father Lemuel.”

“You don’t have to take his side because you think he got you the vote in house meetings, and your precious rose,” Father Stephen said. “Everyone who casts a vote does it with the best of intentions.”

“Sara knows that, Steve,” Father Aubrey told him, speaking even more gently. “And she knows who takes her to junk meets, in spite of having to work three days a week, and who used to give her good stuff from his collection so that she could swap it for dragons.”

That did the trick. Father Stephen got up from his kneeling position and drew himself up to his full height—as he always did when he wanted to seem impressive, although Sara suspected that he’d merely been seized by a sudden awareness that his carping was only making him seem ungracious. “And that’s why you should take us seriously,” he said, “when we give you solemn warnings about zombies in smartsuits and cocoons that turn into coffins.
We
know about things like that.”

“And thanks to you,” Sara told them, grinning to show that she wasn’t serious, “so do I.”

And so the time went by, until the rose had not only opened all the way but had acquired its final veneer and begun to secrete its nectar. It was then that Sara realized that there
would
be a particular moment to mark its maturity after all: the moment when the rose was visited by its first nectar-seeking hummingbird.

Not unexpectedly, though, that didn’t happen right away, even though the perfume was a little less discreet than she had promised her parents. The nectar’s scent was certainly subtle, but it gradually built up in the dining room until it became distinctly noticeable.

“If this goes on,” Mother Jolene observed, when everyone except Father Lemuel was gathered for dinner one Wednesday evening, “we’ll have whole flocks of hummingbirds zeroing in on us from every point of the compass every time we open a window—and it is July, going on August.

“I don’t notice it myself,” Sara said, blushing slightly. “I’ve got used to it. But the scent dissipates very quickly in the open air—I’ve had my bedroom window open for three nights running, but not a single hummingbird’s picked up the scent as yet.”

Father Aubrey seemed to be amused by this admission, but it seemed that he couldn’t think of a joke in time to slip one in. Father Gustave took a more practical approach to the issue. “It’s just that no one has bothered to program the air-filters to take the perfume molecules out,” he said. “If you can’t stand it, Jo, you’re very welcome to pop down to the cellar and retune the system yourself. I could try if you want me to, but Lem’s the expert”

“There’s no need,” Mother Quilla put in. “The wallskin will adapt automatically—just give it a couple more days. You didn’t complain fifteen years ago when we had the nursery decked out with wallflowers, Jo.”

“I thought they were gillyflowers,” Mother Maryelle put in.

“Technically...,” Father Stephen began—but no one wanted a pedantic sermon on the precise etymological implications of the words “wallflower” and “gillyflower”. Mother Verena was quick to say: “Have you seen any hummingbirds yet, Sara?”

Sara admitted, by means of a shrug, that in spite of opening her window every evening to provide a means of getting in, she had not.

“It’ll be different when we next go to Blackburn,” Mother Verena assured her. “There’ll be plenty of people out and about showing off their living jewelry.”

“Your rose will probably be mobbed,” Father Aubrey suggested. “You’ll be fighting off hummingbirds with both hands. Mind you don’t damage any, though—we can’t afford a lawsuit, even if Maryelle offers her services for free.”

Mother Maryelle—who worked as an investigating magistrate, weighing up the cases put together by opposing sides in legal disputes—did not dignify this comment with a reply, so Sara felt free to do likewise. The conversation soon reverted back to the usual political issues, including profoundly unexciting commentaries from all and sundry on ongoing UN debates regarding the redevelopment of Antarctica, plans for the redevelopment of the Furness Tip, proposals for changing the livery of Blackburn’s robocab fleet and the chances of Yorkshire beating Lancashire in the annual cricket match at New Trafford.

When Sara went back to her room after dinner she opened her window immediately, and then called Gennifer for a chat.

Inevitably, “Any hummingbirds yet?” were Gennifer’s first words too—but Sara had her camera set to close-up, so there was no point in shrugging her shoulders again.

“Not yet,” she said. “If we lived closer to the cityplex it would be different, but hummingbirds are thin on the ground in these parts.”

“They never touch the ground,” Gennifer pointed out, pedantically, “so whatever they’re thin on, it isn’t the ground.”

“I’m not going to give up,” Sara said. “If I leave my window open long enough, one’s bound to pick up the scent eventually, even if the perfume has to drift as far as the outskirts of Blackburn. Sometimes, I wish my parents hadn’t decided that a rural environment was best for child-rearing.”

“You’ll have to visit me here before the summer’s over,” Gennifer said. “By August the twelfth we’ll both by fourteen, and it’s high time we met in the flesh. Isn’t it too late now, though? I mean, evening’s when people want their living jewelry about their person. You might do better to open the window tomorrow morning, if it weren’t for school. Maybe you’d do better to wait for the weekend, or the holiday—we’ll be out of school for a whole month after the end of next week.”

Sara didn’t want to wait for the weekend, although she could see the logic in what Gennifer had said about the evening not being the best time to expect other people’s finest feathered frippery to be flying free. She had said that she wasn’t going to give up, and she had meant it. She decided that instead of closing the window when she went to bed she would leave it open all night. The most likely time of all for costume jewelry to be left to its own devices, she figured, was when its owners had gone to sleep. Unlike roses, hummingbirds couldn’t just flatten themselves out; they would presumably have to be detached. How far might they fly when they were? They must have some sort of programming to restrict their range, but how far would they be allowed to roam? On the other hand, anyone who had a flock of hummingbirds had make her own provision for their nourishment, If so, there must be more than one garden in Blackburn where colibri-scented roses were blooming in their hundreds—in which case, far-flying birds might find more abundant supplies of nectar much closer to home than her bedroom....