The Dragon Man (17 page)

She lay still on the bed, with the rose fully extended, carefully watching the aerobatic display of the living shadows and measuring its quality. Having made their way around the bedroom twenty or thirty times, following incredibly intricate trajectories—presumably mopping up the molecules that had permeated the atmosphere before their arrival—the six phantom bats eventually came into a more orderly formation. They straightened out their courses, taking turns to skim the surface of the flower. They came from three different angles, cutting graceful arcs through the space above the flower. The arcs intersected at a point above the central style, from whose base the perfume was released.

They were perfectly coordinated, as if they were operating as a practiced team rather than a mere haphazard flock. They never seemed to be in the least danger of colliding, even though their flight was becoming more excited, and their speed was increasing. The scent emitted by the rose was no longer perceptible in her own nostrils; it was vanishing from the air almost as soon as it evaporated.

Were the shadowbats really getting drunk, Sara wondered, or was that merely the best analogy she could draw? It wasn’t a helpful one, in any case. She had never been drunk herself, and had never seen any of her parents drunk—they were very careful about setting a bad example while they were at home. All she knew about drunkenness was based on TV shows she had seen—mostly comedies, at that. She had no idea what being drunk felt like. She imagined it as a combination of dizziness and pleasurable excitement, a matter of getting
carried away
.

Sara had only ever been “carried away” by sheer excitement, and she realized as she watched the aerial display that it was something she no longer experienced very frequently. Without being quite aware of it, she had “grown out of” the capacity to laugh until she cried when she was tickled or chased...and it was possible that what the phantoms were experiencing was nothing like that at all. Perhaps it was more like the greed that sometimes inspired her to eat sweet things too quickly...or the sense of triumphant achievement she had felt, all too briefly, the day she had climbed the hometree.

That too, she realized, was something she had not felt for quite a while, although she couldn’t believe that it was something people grew out of, the way they lost the knack of being tickled to hysteria.

Perhaps, Sara thought, the effect of the perfume on the shadowbats was more like the drugs she had been warned about in school—but she found it hard to believe that such frail phantoms were capable of hallucination, or being interested in any hallucinations they might chance to experience.

The idea of a shadowbat, or a flock of shadowbats, lying down in a cocoon so that they could visit a fantasy world or take some kind of training program was absurd enough to bring a smile to Sara’s face. But was it really so absurd? If the shadowbats’ sensory apparatus was so much simpler than her own, wouldn’t that make it easier for them to be fooled by simulatory input?

Perhaps, she dared to think, shadowbats didn’t need hoods or cocoons, or even picture windows, to look out into alternative worlds. Perhaps they only needed an appropriate scent...perhaps, when they breathed colibri, they were transformed in their own tiny minds into hummingbirds, or dragons, or things of which only bats or phantoms were capable of dreaming....

It was all unbelievable—but Sara felt strangely proud of herself for having been able to imagine it, and wondered if Father Lemuel would be proud of her too, if she told him about it. She had no plans to tell him yet, of course; the sensation of having a real secret, much more personal and profound than the secret of her experiment in dragonflight, was far too precious. In time, though, when Mr. Warburton had found a solution to the puzzle and a means of tackling the problem, it might be enjoyable to talk the whole thing over with Father Lemuel....

Sara suddenly realized that the flight of the shadows was become ever more rapid, and their turns ever more hectic—and that as they gave themselves up to sheer madness, their uncertain shapes were becoming even more uncertain, less obviously bat-like.

It was as if the sublimate creatures were attempting some strange metamorphosis that they were not yet able to contrive; as if they were no longer content to be shadowbats, but wanted to be shadow-caterpillars, or shadow-tadpoles, on their way to becoming shadow-butterflies or shadow-frogs.

The limits of absurdity seemed to stretch then, as Sara found it abruptly possible to believe what she had not been able to believe before, to accept as an evident fact what had seemed a ridiculous fancy only a few moments ago.

Now, she was almost ready to be convinced that the vaporous creatures really did nurture a primitive hope that drinking their fill of volatilized colibri might actually turn them into hummingbirds, endowing them with marvelous brightness and color instead of their fugitive mock-darkness. What was actually happening to them, though, was that they were beginning to break up under the strain—to dissipate like curls of smoke.

If they continued, Sara felt sure that their “skins” would disintegrate, and whatever internal organization they had would decay into chaos.

Sara became suddenly anxious. She did not want the shadowbats to come to any harm—and even if they succeeded in re-forming, in transforming themselves into something else, that was surely a far more dangerous business than merely “getting drunk”. Her desire to know and understand what was happening was still increasing, but so was her fear that something bad might be happening, and that it would be her fault.

Acting on an urgent impulse, Sara sat up on the bed and swung her legs over the side. Her abrupt movement sent the invaders scattering in every direction.

She leapt to the floor and ran to her cupboard. As soon as the door slid sideways she rummaged among the clutter that had accumulated on the cupboard’s narrow floor, until she found an ancient screw-topped jar in which her younger self—who seemed by now to have been a very different person—had stored her kaleidobubbles.

The gelatin spheres had become sticky with age. When she tried to pour them out they resisted, clinging together in a stubborn adhesive mass, but Sara poked her forefinger into the jar to break up the mass, and shook the inverted jar as hard as she could. She persisted until she had dislodged them all, pouring them out into the shower-nook.

When the jar was empty, except for a few smears of translucent color on the inner surface of the clear plastic, she started chasing the shadowbats with the empty jar.

The dark phantoms evaded her amateurish scooping without the slightest difficulty, even though they were still confused and over-excited. They no longer seemed to be disintegrating, now that the flow of nectar had been interrupted, but the perfume of the flower was still diffusing into the air, and Sara had to suppose that the process had only been slowed down.

Realizing that she was going about her task in the wrong way, Sara lay down on the bed again and stretched herself out in a supine position. She lay quite still, and waited for the shadowbats to begin moving more purposefully again.

Gradually, she eased the open neck of the jar closer and closer to the rim of the rose’s ring of petals. She only needed to adjust its position two or three times before the momentum of a giddy dive sent one of the shadow-creatures straight into the trap. She had the lid in place within half a second, and screwed down it tight. She jumped down off the bed again, delighted with her success.

The captive shadowbat only needed a couple of minutes to measure out the dimensions of its cell, and to discover that there was no escape therefrom. Then it settled on the glass, positioned over one of the translucent smears as if it were a paint-daubed image. It did not move again.

The five remaining fliers seemed to realize that something was amiss. They fluttered around the nightlight as if they were taking account of their number and fretting over its inadequacy. Then, very suddenly, they shot out of the window into the night, and were gone.

Sara followed them, but they were invisible in the darkness. She had no idea which way they had gone.

“Is there anyone there?” she called, tentatively. She did not dare to shout, in case her parents heard her—although she realized soon enough that there was little prospect of that, given that the hometree was carefully designed to protect its residents from extraneous and unwelcome noises. She filled her lungs again, ready to repeat the question, but then she thought better of it, and let her breath out silently.

It was too silly. If someone
were
there, lurking behind the garden hedge, they would not reply to her call. Nor was there any real reason to expect that anyone
would
be there. The shadowbats might have flown for a kilometer or more, from any direction.

She stared out into the darkness for half a minute, pensively weighing the jar in her left hand. Then she closed the window, gently.

She went to her desktop and called up the local directory. When she had found the number she wanted she typed out a text message, taking care to avoid using conventional abbreviations or making any spelling mistakes. MR WARBURTON, the message read, I’VE CAPTURED ONE OF THE DRUNKEN SHADOWBATS. I’LL BRING IT TO YOU IN THE MORNING, SO THAT YOU CAN EXAMINE IT. SARA LINDLEY. After a moment’s hesitation, she pressed the SEND button.

She hesitated for several seconds more, her fingers hovering uncertainly above the keypad as she wondered what to do for the best.

The spirit of far play eventually moved her to log on to the local noticeboard and post a hastily-typed public message, which read: IF 1 OF 6 SHADOWBATS MISSING, DON’T WORRY. IS SAFE. NOT STOLEN. WILL RELEASE, OR TELL U WHERE U CAN COLLECT, SOON AS CHECK OUT ANOMALY IN ITS BEHAVIOUR. She knew that she ought to amend the final sentence in the interests of clarity, but eventually decided that it would serve its purpose. She also thought about signing the message, but decided not to. After all, she didn’t know who she was writing to, so why should he—or she—know who the message was coming from?

Satisfied, in the end, that she had done everything she needed to do, for the time being, Sara left the jar on her desk and went back to bed. She carefully smoothed her rose flat so that she could sleep unhindered by any further inconvenience.

CHAPTER XVII

When Sara got up the next morning and wandered absent-mindedly into the communal dining room she found all of her parents waiting for her—even Father Lemuel. She knew as soon as she stepped through the door that she was in trouble.

“What did I do?” she asked, although she knew well enough that trapping the shadowbat was likely to be the last straw that had broken the proverbial camel’s back. She was quick to add: “How did you know? Is my room being monitored? Or are you just keeping track of my mail?”

“The resident AI is programmed to take note of anything...unusual,” Father Gustave told her, having the grace to look slightly shamefaced about it.

“We already knew about your visit to the astral tattooist, of course,” Mother Maryelle put in.

“How?” Sara waned to know, having decided that she had a right to be annoyed. “Did he tell you—or Ms. Chatrian? What happened to client confidentiality?”

“It wasn’t either of them,” Father Stephen assured her. “We didn’t need any human informants, although...well, perhaps you didn’t realize how much notice people would take of your movements if they saw you without us. Not just people we know, or other parents—everybody.”

Sara was speechless, but she knew that her expression must speak volumes.

“It’s not that they’re
spying
,” Mother Verena said, defensively.

“People talk, you see,” Father Gustave said, hastening to take up the burden of explanation, “and they need things to talk about. After the weather, politics and the march of technology, children are a favorite topic. Anybody’s children.”

“It’s perfectly understandable,” Mother Maryelle added. “Now that people are directly involved in parenting for such a tiny fraction of their adult lifespan, it’s only natural that they take a greater interest in children they’re only indirectly involved with.”

“‘Indirectly’ meaning any that they see, even on an occasional basis, or any whose existence they know anything at all about,” Father Stephen put in, presumably intending to be helpful—although the way that Father Gustave scowled suggested that he wasn’t at all grateful for the pedantic definition.

Sara remembered what the Dragon Man had said about it taking a whole city to raise a child nowadays. She realized, belatedly, that he hadn’t meant to imply that the child needed the city, but rather that the city needed the child. Ms. Mapledean and Father Lemuel had both taken the trouble to explain to her that the Population Bureau was reluctant to grant child-rearing licenses to more than eight co-parents, partly because larger groups were notoriously prone to premature disintegration and partly because of the supposed limitation of a child’s primary-bonding capacity. Until this moment, she had left the fact unconsidered, like the vast majority of the facts her teachers and parents rained ceaselessly down upon her, but now she found herself rudely confronted with one of the more obvious implications of the policy.

“You mean,” she said, as the prospect became clear to her for the first time, “that wherever I go, and whatever I do, people won’t be content just to watch me go by... they’ll report it all back to you.”

“It’s not a matter of
reporting back
,” Father Stephen said. “Not in a sneaky way....”

“It’s more a matter of wanting to ask questions...,” Mother Jolene put in, before she was interrupted in her turn.

“In any case, it’s not something to worry about,” Mother Quilla took over. “It’s discreet, and it won’t last forever. In three or four years time—sooner if you grow as fast as I did—you’ll be indistinguishable from an adult by sight alone. You’ll become far less visible, or at least far less noticeable. You’re entering a difficult phase just now. Perhaps we should have warned....”