The Dragon Man (16 page)

In any case, Sara thought, Father Lemuel’s surname wasn’t Lindley. She was named after her biological father, according to custom. How would eight parents ever have settled the question of which of them their child ought to be named after, if the custom had been otherwise?

“Everybody takes an interest in children, Miss Lindley,” the sublimate technologist said, mistaking her silence for confusion. “More than you’ll understand, until you’re a little older.” There was a peculiar wistfulness in the old man’s tone that made Sara feel uncomfortable.

“Ms. Chatrian says that you’re the man to talk to about shadowbats,” she said, deciding that it was time to get to the point.

“Very kind of her, I’m sure,” the old man said, equably. “Knowing Linda, though, I doubt that she’d be sending you to me if you wanted to order a few extra decorations in a different style. So what about shadowbats?”

“A flock of them came into my room the other night,” Sara told him. “They were attracted by the scent of my rose.”

The Dragon Man sniffed audibly. “Colibri?” he asked, after a slight pause.

Sara nodded, and the Dragon Man nodded too. “You left your window open expecting hummingbirds,” he deduced. “Your first hummingbirds, at a guess. I can see how a flock of shadowbats might have been a disappointment...and a puzzle.”

“You don’t seem very surprised,” Sara observed. “Ms. Chatrian agreed that the perfume might have attracted the bats—a glitch in the new technology, she said—but she didn’t believe me when I said that they seemed to be absorbing the scent from the air...and getting drunk on it.”

The Dragon Man shifted his position slightly, but he didn’t expose his face. He lifted his bony shoulders in what might have been a shrug. His shoulders, unlike Ms. Chatrian’s, had no talent at all for expressing contempt. “New technology always does more than it’s intended to,” he said, pensively. “Shaped sublimates are designed to soak up everything they need from their hosts, but the absorption process is necessarily crude; it’s not surprising that they sometimes soak up other things as well. Nobody notices, for the most part, but perfume is...well, more noticeable. You have to remember that they’re creatures like none that natural selection ever produced, and that they don’t know what they’re not supposed to do. They have built-in inhibitions about settling on anyone else’s surskin, but fluttering around is the name of their game. You weren’t afraid, I hope?”

“Of course not,” Sara said. “I knew they couldn’t hurt me, even if they touched me, or if I breathed one in—but I wondered if they might be in danger.”

The old man shifted in his seat again, as if Sara’s story were causing him some slight disturbance, but he clung stubbornly to his protective shadow.
He must have set things up this way to protect his clients from the sight of him,
Sara thought.
But if he’s willing to do that, why won’t he use the cosmetic potential of his smartsuit
?

“They seemed to be getting drunk, did they?” the Dragon Man murmured, as if he were trying to get the thought more securely into his head. “And you think they might have overdone it, poor things? I don’t think they’d readily take aboard anything that would do them harm...but new technology always has unexpected glitches, just as lovely Linda says. Who knows?” He paused for a few moments before adding: “It would be interesting, though, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?” Sara countered.

“Biochemically interesting, I mean. Colibri is a moderately complex cocktail, and the metabolic systems of sublimated quasi-life are straight off the drawing-board, so I doubt if they were ever formally introduced in the lab. It must be idiosyncratic to the flock, though—there are plenty of interaction opportunities in ManLiv, and even more down south. Linda doesn’t meddle much with her off-the-shelf products, so the scent must be standard, unless there’s been some weird interaction with your personal metabolism—but the shadowbats would be the prime suspects anyhow, given that they’re in the earliest stages of their evolution.” He stopped, and waited, as if to give Sara the opportunity to complain if the argument were beyond her comprehension.

She was having difficulty following the thread, but she didn’t want to admit it.” Do you meddle much with off-the-shelf products, Mr. Warburton?” she asked.

“You can call me Frank if I can call you Sara,” he said, amiably. “To answer the question, though—yes, I’m an inveterate tinkerer, just like your Father Lem. Old habits die hard, even when you’re in unfamiliar territory. I used to do beautiful work, you know, when I was younger. Birds, roses, hearts, mottoes...even dragons with gold and silver scales, like the one in the window, and angels with swans’ wings and breath like holy fire—but never Washington crossing the Delaware.” He waited a moment to see whether Sara would ask him what he meant by the last remark, but she didn’t want to seem ignorant and she knew that she could always ask one of her parents.

“I must be one of the last men alive who worked with needles, on bare skin,” the Dragon Man went on. “That’s why I keep them in the window, like whiskers dropped from the dragon’s snout. I’ve always kept pace, with the organics and the smartsuits, all the way from...well, not quite the beginning, but at least a time when a few of us were still willing and able to stand naked every time we took a bath or changed our poor dead clothes. I’ve always meddled, Sara. I carried the habit over when I qualified as a sublimate engineer, just as I’d carried it over into all the other retraining programs I had to go through in order to maintain the outer semblance of my career. I’m older than I look, you know.” He smiled to signal that the last comment was a joke, and that he knew exactly how old he looked, when he was clearly visible.

“Do you know who owns the shadowbats that came into my room?” Sara asked. It seemed more diplomatic than asking whether he had meddled with any shadowbats in such a way as to give them an appetite for hummingbird-food.

“I can find out,” he replied, confidently. “What do you want me to do about it if I do?”

Sara hesitated. She wasn’t sure. “Could you fix them?” she asked, curiously.

“Are you sure they’re broken?” he countered. “Perhaps they’ve acquired a whole new realm of experience, and discovered a brand new pleasure. Fixing them might be cruel, don’t you think?”

“They’re not hummingbirds,” Sara said. “I chose colibri because....” She trailed off, realizing that what she was saying was utterly irrelevant to the question he had posed. Her eyes had adjusted to the poor light now, and she could make out the vague lines of Frank Warburton’s features. She was suddenly convinced that was looking at her intently, with a very peculiar expression on his face. She immediately told herself that it must be a trick of the shadows, but she wouldn’t be convinced.

She had been told often enough that smartsuits were “emotionally intelligent”—which meant that they were designed to signal and signify, even better than unmasked faces, all the things that people needed to communicate face-to-face but couldn’t put into words. Their role was, however, essentially supportive. If the human being within was enigmatic, the extra layers of synthetic skin wouldn’t decipher the mystery. Frank Warburton suddenly seemed even more deeply enigmatic than the surrounding shadows forced him to be—more deeply enigmatic than Sara had ever imagined that any human being could seem.

“Do you know, Sara,” the old man said, apparently wanting to set her at her ease, “that you’re the first customer I’ve had this morning? On a Saturday! I have four appointments on the machine, but they’re all for this evening, after sunset. Why is that, do you think? Is it going to be bats all the way, now? Am I becoming a creature of the dusk myself? Sublimate entities don’t have to be shadows, you know. They can be bright, like creatures of pure radiance, or nearly invisible.”

“I know,” Sara said. “I thought about that. I thought about having a golden dragon fitted to my smartsuit—but my parents would never have let me do it.”

“Did you, indeed?” he said, as if he were genuinely impressed. “You’d have come to me, of course—what a fine time we might have had with
that
design. It’s not just dragons, though. We can make all manner of fays and phantoms. Imagine that! We could fill the world—the real world, that is, not one of its virtual parallels—with quasi-life that we can’t even see. For now, we have shadows, which only fade away in the twilight...but in time, there’ll be hosts of angels dancing around us in the broadest daylight, unseen and unsuspected. Or maybe we’ll want to reserve the word
angel
for the ones that glow like haloes. Fashion is a fickle thing, but I can’t help getting a little bit impatient with it...you can see what I mean, can’t you Sara? You really have thought about it.”

“I think I can see,” she said. “Yes, I really have thought about it. The spiders and the scorpions seem a little silly to me too—but the shadowbats are better, and the potential that’s still untapped...what you mean is that you meddle because you’re anxious to move on.”

“Old age breeds impatience,” Frank Warburton told her, as gravely if he were imparting a dark secret. “My kind of old age does, at any rate. You won’t find out about your kind for a very long time. I don’t frighten you, do I, Sara? I frighten children sometimes. I thought I might have frightened you, last time we met.”

“You remember that?” Sara said. It seemed astonishing.

“You were with Stephen and Quilla,” he reminded her, as if he felt obliged to provide proof. “I knew you were Lem’s girl. If Gus had been with you...or even Maryelle...but maybe not. Did I frighten you?”

“No,” Sara said, not quite sure that it was true but wanting it to be. “I was startled, that’s all. You didn’t have to turn away like that. You could have said hello.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I wish I had said hello, now. Better late than never. Did you tell your parents that you were coming to see me?”

“I didn’t know myself,” she said. “Actually, I didn’t even tell them I was coming to see Ms. Chatrian. I have my own credit account now, so I didn’t have to.”

“They’ll haul you up in front of a committee of enquiry as soon as you get home, regardless,” the Dragon Man observed. “If there’s one thing parents hate, it’s not being kept informed.... I can even remember that, you see, even though it’s been more than a hundred years since I was a parent, and more than two hundred since...well, it’s probably best not go into that. You can tell them all that I’ve promised to look into your little mystery, and that I’ll do my very best to solve the problem. Just between you and me, it might not be easy, but I’ll try. I have to respect client confidentiality, you understand, but I’ll certainly try to figure out what’s happened, and what can be done about it. Will you trust me to take care of it?”

“I suppose so,” Sara said, lamely. She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. He was as still as a statue now, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to go.

She stood up, a little unsteadily. He remained silent.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose...goodbye, then. She turned towards the door, but she moved slowly, in case he called her back. He didn’t get up.

It wasn’t until the door slid open that he spoke again. “If ever you need a new suit, Miss Lindley,” the seated Dragon Man said, his tone barely above a whisper, “you might want to look further afield than Linda Chatrian. She’s a little behind the times. But the rose does suit you. You made a good choice.”

Sara paused on the threshold to look back over her shoulder. “Thanks” she said—but Frank Warburton was no longer looking in her direction. His face was still invisible, but his head had slumped forward, so that he seemed to be staring at the keypad on his desk.

It didn’t occur to her until the door had closed behind her that perhaps Frank Warburton hadn’t been quite ready to say goodbye either, but that he simply hadn’t felt capable of continuing the conversation as comfortably as he wished. For a moment or two she considered going back into the shop to ask if he was all right, but she guessed readily enough that if he really had wanted her to go, he certainly wouldn’t want her to return.

Sara realized, a trifle belatedly, that she had been telling the truth, even though politeness would have compelled her to lie. She hadn’t been frightened of the Dragon Man—not this time, at any rate. She hadn’t been frightened at all. She didn’t know him well enough to know whether she liked him, but she felt—however absurdly—that they had something in common. She and he were both exceptional. She and he were so exceptional that everybody knew their names, and recognized them whenever and wherever they happened to be.

She resolved to talk to the Dragon Man about that, when—not if—she saw him again.

Given that he was so much older than she was, she thought, he might be able to give her one or two pointers on being exceptional that even Father Lemuel hadn’t yet had occasion to master.

CHAPTER XVI

That night, Sara left her window wide open again. It was simple curiosity—or so she told herself. She wanted to make sure that what she’d told the tailor and the sublimate technologist was really true: that the shadowbats were indeed intoxicating themselves on the evaporating nectar of her rose. She also wanted to take a longer look at the shadowbats themselves, in order to appreciate the ingenuity and the workmanship that had gone into the new kind of life.

She didn’t have long to wait, and felt a thrill of pleasure when she saw them emerge from the night. They knew the way, now; they knew she had a rose, and what it could do for them.

There were six of them, and Sara had no doubt that they were the same ones. She wondered, as she watched them fluttering around the room, whether they had returned to the hometree on all the nights when she had kept her window closed, hovering invisibly outside the plastic and waiting forlornly for a treat that never came, or whether this was the first time they had been allowed out since their mysterious temporary disappearance.

Either way, she realized, the further encouragement that she was now providing would only serve to reinforce their new habit. They would surely come back again and again, whether she condescended to let them in or not