The Dragon Man (22 page)

The dazzling flood of unexpected light made her blink furiously, and she had to step back and rub her eyes before she could look out into the garden. The hometree’s security lights were on, but the resident AI obviously hadn’t yet registered an emergency of sufficient magnitude to warrant waking up her parents. Their windows must all have been tuned to pleasantly dim virtual spaces, so that the glaring light was as invisible to them as it had been to her.

The stone-thrower was shadowed by the garden hedge, and his smartsuit—assuming that it was
his
smartsuit—had been set to mask his face, but it was easy enough to pick out the stones as they soared with uncanny grace from hand to target, disdainful of the property’s boundary.

How does he know which window’s mine
? Sara thought—and then she realized that he must have followed his shadowbats. They had probably evaded his attention on the first night they had made their way to the rose, but on the second occasion he must have kept track of them, reckless of all inconvenience, until the hedge had placed an insurmountable obstacle in his path. There really had been someone there when she had called out into the night—someone who hadn’t had the courage to answer her.

He wasn’t ignoring the notice I put on the public board because he didn’t know that it applied to him, Sara deduced. He ignored it because he was busy watching over the five that came out, not knowing whether they’d recover if he let them feed and gave them time.

Because the stone-thrower was standing outside the garden’s boundary, he hadn’t triggered the kind of trespass alert that might lead to criminal charges, but he was determined to attract her attention. Seen from the outside, awash with the reflected light of the security beams, the window hadn’t changed significantly when she’d switched it from picture mode to transparency, so he didn’t know that she was standing in the darkened room looking out at him. He continued throwing the little stones, and his aim was remarkably good. He was probably an accomplished sportsman of some kind, although Sara wasn’t sure which kind of game would most readily lend its expertise to this kind of expertise.

When Sara’s eyes had fully adapted to the light, she was better able to judge the kind of person the shadowbats’ owner was. His face and body were hidden, but his throwing arm wasn’t, and it was easy enough to judge his height by comparison with the hedge. She guessed that he was probably a couple of years older than she was.

He could have waited till tomorrow, Sara thought.

She opened the window slightly—not enough to risk being hit by a stone, although most of them seemed to be too small to do more than sting her—and called out: “Stop that! You’ll wake the whole house!”

“So what?” a barely-broken male voice replied. “You killed my shadowbats, Sara Lindley! Why did you do that? They couldn’t do you any harm.” He obviously didn’t want to wake the whole house, though, because he was speaking just loud enough to be heard—not so loud that the sound couldn’t be damped down by the walls protecting her parents’ sleep. There was a slight chance that one or two of them might wake up anyway, but the only ones who had windows facing the same direction as Sara’s were Father Lemuel and Mother Quilla. Father Lemuel was almost certainly in his cocoon, safe from disturbance by anything short of a clamorous alarm, and Mother Quilla was also a sound sleeper.

“I didn’t do anything to your shadowbats,” Sara told him. “They did it to themselves. It was an accident. Who are you, anyway?”

“Never mind that, Sara Lindley. I know who
you
are. How did you lure them into your room? What did you do to them once they were in there? They were only supposed to fly around
me
. I want to know what you did to them.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she repeated, irritably. She knew that there was something very odd about what was happening, but she wasn’t sufficiently alert as yet to figure out exactly what it was.

“You poisoned my shadowbats, Sara Lindley,” he said again. “I’m going to get you for this, Sara Lindley. You’d better watch out. I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sara said, trying to cover up her anxiety—although she was more worried about the possibility that the hometree’s AI would react to the threat than the much slighter one that he might actually mean it. “Mr. Warburton knows who you are. Mask or no mask, I can find out easily enough. And I didn’t poison your shadowbats. They did it themselves. It was Mr. Warburton who tweaked them, but he didn’t mean to let them be poisoned. He tweaked them for
your
benefit. It was an unexpected side-effect—an accident, It wasn’t anybody’s fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t want the one I took him to die, but it wasn’t me who killed it. Catching it in the jar didn’t make any difference.”

She’d said far more than she’d initially intended, and she looked around guiltily when she finished, half-expecting to see Mother Quilla standing in the bedroom doorway looking daggers at her. There was no one there; until the hometree’s AI decided that there was sufficient reason to wake her parents up, she was safe from interruption...though not, she realized, from the eventual consequences of her actions. All this would be recorded, and it had to be “unusual” enough to be reported to her parents in the morning.

“You caught it in a jar?” the boy said, incredulously. “That’s impossible.”

“It was sick,” Sara said. “I thought it was for the best. I thought it would help the Drag—Mr. Warburton figure out what was wrong. And it did. We figured it out this afternoon. He said he’d call you when he’d finished the job. He should have called you. Didn’t he call you?”

“You had no right to catch it,” the boy said, although his manner was much more subdued now. “You should have let it come back. It was mine. I should have taken it back to the Dragon Man.”

Sara recalled the memory of the shadowbat sinking into the gel that Mr. Warburton had used to take a sample of its molecular make-up, and remembered the way he’d taken an image of the image, and rolled it up...but there was another, more troubling memory lurking behind that one much as the boy was lurking beyond the hedge: the memory of the Dragon Man’s lean frame
sagging
when he had momentarily let go of the edge of his desk. He had told her as she left the shop that he was going to lie down for a while before finishing the proteonome analysis and calling his client to pass on the bad news.

“He should have called you by now,” Sara said to the boy, anxiously. “He said that he would.”

“Well, he didn’t,” the shadowy figure beyond the garden fence replied. “And it wasn’t up to you. It was my shadowbat, and I should have been the one....”

“Shut up!” Sara said, so commandingly that he did. Was it possible, she wondered, that the old man had simply forgotten to call his client? Of course it was—just as it was possible that the proteonome analysis had taken longer than he’d expected. There could be any number of reasons why the Dragon Man hadn’t made the call yet. It wasn’t urgent. There were any number of reasons why he might have decided to leave it until tomorrow. It was nothing to worry about....

Sara glanced at the wristpad that lay on her bedside table. The luminous time-display was readable even at this distance. Seven hours and ten minutes had elapsed since she had stepped out of the Dragon Man’s shop. Perhaps he had yet to complete his analysis. Perhaps he had forgotten his promise to call the owner of the shadowbat...and perhaps not.

“Wait there!” she called to the masked figure. “Don’t move!” She realized immediately that he would probably take that as an indication that she was about to call her parents, and thus as a signal to run away as fast as he could, but she hadn’t time to worry about that. She turned away from the window, and went to her desktop.

The Dragon Man’s phone number was in the machine’s ready memory, so she only required a couple of keystrokes to make the call.

When Frank Warburton’s remarkable face appeared on the screen, looking considerably fuller and healthier than it had that morning, Sara sighed in relief—but then she realized that the image was a simulation, and that she was dealing with an answerphone AI. “I’m Sara Lindley,” she said. “I need to talk to Mr. Warburton in person. It’s urgent.”

“That’s not possible at the present time, miss,” the simulation replied, with the typical smoothness of the kind of Artificial Intelligence that was really just an Artificial Idiot.

Sara knew how literal Artificial Intelligences were, and the phrasing sent a chill into her heart. Surely the answerphone ought to have asked her to leave a message, and promised to deliver it as soon as it became convenient. The fact that it hadn’t made the promise suggested that it couldn’t keep it...but it was only a suggestion

“It
must
be possible,” Sara said, although she knew that her insistence was, in this instance, quite impotent. “This is top priority...emergency...red alert...whatever the keyword is. I have to speak to him
now
. I have to.”

“That’s not possible at the present time, miss,” the Dragon Man’s image repeated—and this time. Sara allowed herself take aboard the full significance of the statement.

“You mean he’s dead, don’t you?” she asked, flatly.

The image flickered slightly as a new subroutine kicked in. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be reached at present,” the sim said, although its pretence to be the person it represented seemed utterly hollow.

“Shit,” Sara murmured. She turned on her heel and ran back to the window.

The boy hadn’t run away. He was still there, waiting. His posture signaled annoyance and impatience, but he had done what he was told because he was curious to know what was going on.

“Hey, Bat Freak,” she called to him, a little louder than was strictly necessary. “How do I get an AI sim to tell me whether or not its master is dead?”

The boy’s mouth was already open, poised to utter a complaint, so he had no difficulty at all looking astonished, despite the fact that the rest of his face was obscured by his mask. Five seconds went by before he contrived to speak. “You think the Dragon Man’s
dead
?” he said, too amazed by the inference to object to the form of address she had used.

“How do I get his answerphone to tell me, one way or the other?” Sara demanded.

“You don’t,” the boy replied, mechanically. “You ask local news. Wow—do you know how
old
that guy was? People like him are rarer than little girls like you—and they aren’t making any more of his kind.”

Sara didn’t bother to react to the “little girl”. She had more important matters to attend to, and he was only retaliating to the unflattering form of address she had used. She cursed herself for having been so stupid as to have to ask, but she went back to the desk and called up local news.

There was nothing in the banners, so she typed Frank Warburton’s name with an open query. When she read the terse message that came up she didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. She went back to the window, because she felt she had to share the news with somebody, and there was only one person readily available who wanted and needed to know.

“He’s in the hospital,” she told the boy. “He never had a chance to call you. He’s comatose. Stable but unconscious.”

The boy didn’t reply for a few moments. Then he said: “They’ll switch him off. Bound to. He’s too old. They’ll give it a couple of days, then they’ll let him go.”

“No,” Sara said. “He was okay. This morning—this afternoon—he was okay. His brain’s fine. It’s just a matter....”

Sara trailed off as she heard her bedroom door open. She looked around. Mother Quilla appeared, then Mother Maryelle, but there was nobody else. Obviously, the call to local news had finally tripped the resident AI’s alarm, but not at a level of urgency that required the whole house to be woken up. There was obviously some kind of roster, whose existence she had never previously had cause to suspect, determining which of her parents were on call in case of
little
emergencies.

“What’s going on?” Mother Quilla demanded.

Sara suppressed the reflex that instructed her to say: “Nothing.” She was, after all, no longer a little girl. “It’s Frank Warburton, Mother Quilla,” she said. “He’s been taken to hospital. I was probably the last person who talked to him.”

“And you felt compelled to broadcast the news to the empty night, I suppose?” Mother Quilla said—but it was Mother Maryelle who was elbowing Sara out of the way in a conspicuously unmaternal manner so that she could peer out of the window. When Sara glanced back over her shoulder she saw that the boy had vanished from sight, presumably having ducked down behind the fence, but she knew that it would do no good. The hometree had eyes and ears aplenty, although no one ever bothered to interrogate their records unless they had a reason.

“What’s his name?” Mother Maryelle demanded, obviously thinking that this was a matter requiring intricate parental negotiations between their two households. “Where does he live?”

“I don’t know,” Sara muttered, in a forlorn tone. “It really doesn’t matter. Not now.”

CHAPTER XXII

Because the next day was Monday, Sara had no alternative but to return to her normal routine. She woke up tired and fractious, and breakfast was an unusually somber affair, but when nine o’clock came around she had to be at her desktop with her hood on, logged in to her virtual classroom.

She could tell by the way that the images of the other students looked at her that the news had got around that she’d visited the Dragon Man on Saturday and Sunday, before he’d collapsed at his desk on Sunday evening. The syllabus had its own momentum, though, and Ms. Mapledean couldn’t have been less inclined to let anything get in its way if she’d been a tightly-programmed AI—which, since she’d never actually seen her teacher in meatspace, Sara sometimes suspected that she might be.

When the first break came and the school’s population was distributed across a new series of virtual spaces, Gennifer suggested that she and Sara should escape into a hidden corner of their own, but Sara refused. She expected to be mobbed by a crowd eager for news, but that wasn’t what happened. She was in the main playground, accessible to anyone and everyone, but she found that her classmates were reluctant to flock around her. They seemed to prefer talking about her to talking to her. Gennifer was obviously annoyed with her, but it took some time for Sara to figure out that the others simply didn’t know what to say, and were waiting for her to make the first move. Eventually, she went to join Davy Bennett, Julian Sillings, and Margareta Madrovic, whose conversation fell silent as she approached.