The Dragon Man (21 page)

“It’s a discovery,” Sara reminded him. “Even if we don’t get the credit, we did it. You and I.”

“And the customer...the boy who wanted the bats fitted, even though his smartsuit was overloaded.”

“Him too,” Sara agreed. “We can all be glad, and proud.”

“I’ll certainly try,” the Dragon Man promised. “You’re right, of course—I was just being melodramatic. My synthetic organs may not have the same capacity for feeling that your real ones do, but I can still be glad, and proud, after my own dull fashion. Lem’s right—no matter how hard the techs try to duplicate the emotional orchestra of hormonal rushes and neural harmonies, the music is always slightly out of tune—but that’s not the whole story. Not that the way I feel, or don’t, is anything I ought to be talking about with a guest, especially a guest as young as you, Sara Lindley. What ought to be exercising our minds, as you correctly observe, is that we’ve made a discovery. It may not lead to anything, but who can tell?”

“I’m sorry,” Sara said, feeling awkward without knowing exactly why. She wondered whether she’d somehow let the Dragon Man down by causing him to say things that he might rather have left unsaid.

“What for?” he said. “You’ve nothing to be sorry about—and you can tell your parents I said so, if they start on you again when you get home. If you hadn’t trapped the shadowbat, we might never have found out what went wrong.”

Frank Warburton set all ten of his fingers to the virtual keypad again, and began tapping, presumably making a record of what he had found. Sara couldn’t help noticing that the old man’s fingers were far less agile than they should have been, given the centuries of practice they’d had.

“I suppose I’d better be getting back,” she said, reluctantly. She had not the slightest doubt that her parents would “start on her” again as soon as she got home, and that the Dragon Man’s assurance that she’d done the right thing wouldn’t be nearly enough to stem the flow of criticism.

“I suppose you had,” the Dragon Man agreed—but there was something in his attitude that rang an alarm bell in her head. He hadn’t turned to look at her as he’d spoken; his eyes were glued to the screen in front of him. His body, propped against the tabletop, was rigid. Sara knew that it really was time for her to leave, and that her parents would not approve of her having stayed so long, but she couldn’t tear herself way from the stool. She watched the Dragon Man typing, hoping to see him relax.

He did relax, but not in a reassuring way. When his body lost its effortful rigidity it sagged against the edge of he bench, as if he couldn’t muster the energy to keep it upright any longer.

This time, Sara did pluck up enough courage to say: “Are you all right, Mr. Warburton?”

He stopped typing and turned to look at her, but she wasn’t sure whether he had stopped in order to give her his full attention or because his fingers were having difficulty picking out the right keys.

He seemed to be considering the question with all due seriousness, searching for a honest answer.

In the end, he said: “Yes, I am. I’m a little tired—you’d be surprised how tired a man can get, just talking—but the conversation’s done me more good than harm. I needed this, I think—the shadowbat, the mystery. Now I need a rest, and you need to pick up a robocab on the other side of the square. I’ll see you again, no doubt. Bring Lem, if he’ll come. Bring them all—it’s about time they started making ready for the twenty-fifth century. Between the two of us, we might just be able to persuade them that the SAPsuit look is one part of our heritage that doesn’t need preserving.”

While he was speaking, the Dragon Man laid both his palms flat on the bench, to make certain that he couldn’t fall. It seemed to Sara that he was almost literally
pulling himself together
.

She relaxed, and said: “It’s worth a try. They’ll have to respect the wisdom of your years, won’t they? Even Father Lemuel.”

“I remember when Lemuel was just a boy,” the astral tattooist said, forming a broad but slightly lop-sided smile. “And I met Jolene, when she was a little girl younger than you. The others didn’t grow up around here, although I met Gus long before your parents got together, and Maryelle too. God, I’ve been here such a long time—but I don’t get out much any more, except for the occasional junk swap. I’ve become lazy as well as old. Try not to do that, Sara, if you can possibly avoid it.”

“Get lazy?” Sara queried, because she genuinely wasn’t sure.

“That too,” he said, meaning that what he’d really been advising her not to do, if she could avoid it, was to get old.

Sara realized—realizing, too, that this was only the latest in a long string of crucial realizations that she had made during the last few days and hours—that for her, though not for the Dragon Man, getting old really might be a matter of choice, something to be avoided.

“I really will have to go,” Sara said, relieved now that it seemed safe to do so. “My parents will be keeping an eye on the clock. I don’t want them to worry.”

“Me neither,” the old man said. “I shouldn’t really have asked you to stay, and I shouldn’t have rambled on like that, but...well, given that I used up my own child-rearing license a long time ago, I can’t help feeling that I’m as entitled as anyone else to take a quasi-paternal interest in other people’s. If it takes a village, everyone in the village has a duty to do his part. I’ll make sure the shadowbat’s reunited with its flock, if that’s a possibility. If not...well, let’s try to console ourselves with the thought that it didn’t die in vain.”

Sara stood up, and moved toward the door. The Dragon Man shifted slightly, as if to go before her and open it politely—but the movement seemed painful and it was obvious that he’d be better off resting a while longer.

“It’s okay,” she said, swiftly. “I can let myself out.”

The old man unleashed the longest and deepest sigh that Sara had ever heard, but it wasn’t a despairing sound—it was more like a summary of all that had gone before. “I’ll square things with the owner and the manufacturer tonight, just as soon as the proteonome analysis has told me the full story,” he promised. “Got to be scrupulous now—but I’m glad to have some real work to do, some
real science
to do, and I’ll lie down for a while first to make sure I’m up to it. I’ll let you know how it all comes out. Thank Lem for me, will you?”

Sara nearly asked what for, but stopped herself just in time. She had worked it out. “I wanted to come myself,” she said. “I insisted.”

“I know,” the Dragon Man replied. “When I was your age, I’d have insisted too.”

Sara let herself out of the workroom, and out of the shop. The square wasn’t so crowded now—there were only two families staring dutifully at the fire fountain. She stood for a minute watching the multitudinous sparks rise and fall, elements in an endless stream that had been flowing for more than a hundred years, holding its phantom shape as securely as a healthy shadowbat. It was, she realized, a symbol of continuity as well as a pretty display.

She walked unhurriedly across the square, pausing again to let two hummingbirds take turns at her rose. “I’ve been a bird myself,” she murmured to them, “but only in my hood. It’s not like real flying. No speed trip at all. Someday, I’ll take a look at the world from your angle, and find out what a flower is like in your eyes.

Usually, she thought of getting into a cab for a homeward journey as the end of an excursion. She had been back and forth along the road so many times by now that everything lining it was perfectly familiar—but this time, it didn’t seem that her mission of exploration was over yet. This time, she looked out of the cab window with a sense of wonder she hadn’t been able to conjure up since her first trip into town eight years before. The world was the same—the liveried cabs, the convoys of trucks, the glittery stone facades, the distant skymasts, the bikers in their finery—but she seemed to be looking at it with new eyes.

“That’s the trick of it,” she said, aloud. “You just have to keep on finding things out, and the world will always look different, even when it’s exactly the same.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” the cab’s Artificial Intelligence replied, through the microphone mounted in the rear of the driver’s “seat”. “Do you wish to give me new instructions?”

Maybe I should, Sara thought. Maybe I should go home the pretty way, if there is one. Maybe I should turn around and head west to the sea, or north to Derwent Water, or east to the windfarms and the SAPorchards. Maybe I should go to see the ruins of London, or the Welsh mountains.

“No, thank you,” she said, aloud. “Just take me home.”

“Very good, miss,” the cab’s AI replied.

“Do you ever get bored?” Sara asked, on a sudden impulse.

“No, miss,” the AI assured her. “I am not programmed to experience boredom.”

“Nor am I,” she informed it. “But it happens anyway. It shouldn’t, but it does. How long have you been driving a robocab?”

“This robocab has been in service since January 2364, miss.” It wasn’t quite what she had asked, but robocabs had a limited conversational repertoire.

“You’re a teenager, then—just like me,” she said. She got no reply to that at all; the AI obviously had no subroutine set up to deal with comments of that kind. Sara had once thought that all AIs were as clever as adults, but she knew now why Father Gustave and Father Stephen were always calling them “artificial idiots”.

“Do you know how long you’ll be a robocab driver?” she asked, curiously.

“The current plan calls for the fleet of which this cab is a part to be kept in operation until December 2500, miss,” the AI told her. “If, however, there are significant technological advances in the meantime, which outstrip the capacity of its programming, significant aspects of its hardware and software may be replaced.”

“You’re Achilles’ robocab,” Sara said. “They’ll just keep chipping away, replacing one bit at a time, until you’ve turned into something else.”

“This is not an Achilles robocab, miss,” the AI told her. “It is a model 36J1, nicknamed Mercury, owned by the Blackburn Traffic Management Board.”

Sara laughed. Robocab AIs weren’t programmed to make jokes, either, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t play the comedian, with the aid of a sufficiently ingenious straight-person.

“It’s been a good day, Mr. Mercury,” she told it. “A really good day.”

“We aim to please, miss,” the cab assured her, as it rolled to a halt at the end of the drive leading to her hometree. “We hope to have the pleasure of your patronage again.”

CHAPTER XXI

As soon as Sara stepped across the threshold Mother Maryelle and Father Gustave descended upon her, having obviously laid elaborate plans for further discussion while she’d been out. She assured them that Mr. Warburton had solved the puzzle and had promised to take care of everything. Then she begged to be excused because she still had homework to do and needed to take a shower before the evening meal. As education and cleanliness were things Father Gustave and Mother Maryelle claimed to value very highly, they could hardly refuse.

Almost as soon as Sara was safely in her room, Gennifer called, madly impatient to hear “the whole story” of her adventure in the Dragon Man’s lair. It soon became obvious, however, that Gennifer’s idea of “the whole story” was rather less extensive than Sara’s; Gennifer had only the slightest interest in the underlying cause of the shadowbat’s distress, and even less in the Dragon Man’s accounts of the Crash, the Aftermath and the paradox of Achilles’ ship.

“That’s all ancient history,” was Gennifer’s peremptory verdict. “Whose shadowbats are they? Is it anybody we know? From school, I mean.”

Sara had to admit that she didn’t know, and hadn’t tried very hard to find out.

“You really should get your priorities in order,” Gennifer told her. “I’m sure you could have got it out of him if you’d gone about it the right way.”

“It’s not important,” Sara assured her. “Anyway, when the Dragon Man tells him what’s happened, he’ll probably come looking for me. I’ll have to explain why I trapped the shadowbat. I’m sorry, Gen, I really have to do my homework now—dinner will be awkward enough without giving them even more to complain about.”

This prophecy proved to be slightly less safe than it seemed. Only three of her parents put in an appearance in the communal dining-room, so Father Gustave, Mother Maryelle and Mother Quilla were able to take turns to lecture her in an unusually orderly fashion. Fortunately, they didn’t require any elaborate response from her, so it was a relatively simple matter to let it all wash over her, saving her best line for a parting shot.

“It
was
the right thing to do,” she said over her shoulder, as she returned to her room. “Mr. Warburton said so.”

“Well, maybe it was,” Father Gustave said, lamely, “but you didn’t know that at the time, did you?”

Before she went to the bed, Sara made sure that her bedroom window was closed and locked. She set it to display the star-filled skies of night on the dragonworld where she’d taken her maiden flight, but she didn’t linger there to watch out for the shadows of flying dragons moving amid the moonlit clouds.

She was still restless, but her Internal Technology helped her to calm her mind. She had descended through all the usual phases of relaxation, and had just lapsed into a peaceful oblivion, when she was summoned back by a peculiar noise.

At first she didn’t realize what it was. She wasn’t used to hearing sounds in the night, because the hometree’s walls were smart enough to deaden the rattle of the wind in its own branches and the sounds of traffic on the road. No soundproof wall could have suppressed this racket, though. Small stones were being hurled at her window, one by one at three-second intervals. The impacts made the plastic fabric reverberate like a sullen drum.

Sara lay dazedly in bed, counting the blows, expecting all the while that the house’s resident AI would take whatever action might be necessary to relieve the disturbance. When she had counted seven, though, curiosity took over. She got up, and went to the window.

The dragonworld was perfectly peaceful, but the dragonworld wasn’t really there. It only required a single instruction to make the window revert to transparency.