The Dragon Man (7 page)

Fortunately, there seemed to be an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Sara was intrigued by dragons because she was intrigued by the Dragon Man, and—as more than one of her parents had pointed out to her—Father Lemuel knew the Dragon Man. At least, Father Lemuel had known the Dragon Man in some previous era of history, long before Father Lemuel had come together with her other parents to form the household in which she was now being brought up.

Sara knew that there was no need for Father Lemuel to emerge from his beloved cocoon to eat, excrete or exercise, but she also knew that he was not a man to ignore good medical advice. Even though people came to no particular harm if they remained in virtual space for weeks on end, popular opinion judged that it was healthier for the mind and body alike to spend time in the real world at regular intervals. Father Lemuel’s excursions into reality were unpredictable, except for house meetings, and often occurred while Sara was at school, but she was confident that an opportunity for private conversation would present itself eventually, and she was prepared to be patient.

As it happened, patience wasn’t required. Father Lemuel was as enthusiastic as all her other parents to follow in the footsteps of Father Stephen and Mother Quilla by taking her aside for a quiet chat. She didn’t have to lie in wait for him—he came to her, while she was playing in the garden on Thursday evening, ostentatiously keeping a generous distance between herself and the hometree’s wall. Mother Verena was weeding the vegetable patch and Father Aubrey was grooming his herbs, but they were both out of earshot from the swing on which Sara was sitting, rocking gently back and forth.

“Would you like a push?” Father Lemuel asked.

“No, that’s all right,” she said. “I can manage.” She felt that she was now too old to require any assistance, or to take pleasure in such simple things.

“Did you enjoy yourself at the junk swap last Sunday?”

“I made some good swaps, but I’ll need to find some new junk for the next one. Father Stephen did well, but he didn’t get as excited as he sometimes does. Mother Quilla looked around, but she didn’t swap very much.”

“Quilla doesn’t have quite the same attitude as Steve,” Father Lemuel observed. “Her heart’s not in it.”

“She likes looking, though,” Sara said. “She’s not a
real
junkie—but I’m not sure that I am, either. I just like dragons. I saw the Dragon Man at the swap.”

“Did you? How did he seem?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said, realizing that she didn’t have any standard for comparison. “He was in a robocab that pulled up behind us. He saw us, but he went the other way and we didn’t bump into one another again. I never saw anyone that old before. Will you look like that in another hundred years?”

“I doubt it,” Father Lemuel said, soberly. “Nobody knows how long people with my kind of IT will be able to live, or exactly what will happen when it begins it fail, but I won’t have to suffer the kind of ham-fisted repairs that he had to undergo when IT was in its infancy. He’s more cyborg than I’ll ever need to be.”

Sara knew that everyone with Internal Technology—or even a smartsuit—was a cyborg of sorts, but that the term was only used for people who had considerable quantities of inorganic material integrated into their bodies.

“Can’t they take the old repairs out and make new ones?” Sara asked.

“It’s not that easy. It’s safer to leave the old patches in place and keep adding new ones—if they tried to strip him back to the bare flesh, it would probably kill him. There aren’t many of his kind left—and most of the others spend even more time in virtual space than I do. He’s old in a way that people like us will probably never experience. People are picked off by accidents all the time, and there are still a few diseases that take their toll, but hardly anyone dies of
old age
any more. When Frank and his kindred are gone, we’ll never see their like again.”

Sara thought about that for a moment or two. “But he must have the same Internal Technology as you have,” she said. “Unless you’re much richer than he is. So why will he die of old age if you won’t?”

“Money doesn’t make that much difference,” Father Lemuel told her. “And I suppose I might get to die of old age if I’m lucky—or do I mean unlucky? Anyway, Frank had already done most of his aging before he was fitted with the first primitive IT suites; he’s been preserved, but not rejuvenated. He’s lasted a lot longer than he or anyone else expected, given that so much damage had already been done, and bearing in mind that he’s had a couple of bad accidents along the way. He’s tough—nobody knows what he might yet be capable of, including him.”

“He must remember the Crash,” Sara said, to prompt further revelations. “That must be weird.”

“After a fashion,” Father Lemuel agreed. “As you get older, your distant memories are edited down, but they never disappear. You lose the sense of having been there, though—I don’t suppose that Frank’s memories of the Crash are very much different from the impressions other people obtain by studying history, or surrounding themselves with collections of pre-Crash junk.”

“I always thought they called him the Dragon Man because of the dragon in his shop window,” Sara said. “I didn’t know he looked...different.”

“He doesn’t really have to,” Father Lemuel said, pensively. “He could program his smartsuit to provide the illusion of a face much like anyone else’s. I once asked him why he didn’t, but all he said was that other people could program their smartsuits to look like him if they wanted to, and if they weren’t prepared to take the trouble, why should he? It’s not so surprising, when you consider that he’s always made his living helping people to look different and distinctive. His smartsuit covers up his tattoos, though—and he still has those, from way back. He dresses very conservatively, but wearing a mask to complete the picture is a step too far, in his way of thinking. It’s just the way he is—I don’t think he’s trying to make a point, parading himself as a walking
memento mori
.”

“What’s a
memento mori
?” Sara asked.

“A reminder that we’re all mortal. Even now. Even if we can live forever—which we probably can’t—we won’t. Accident or disaster will get us in the end. We’re not immortal with an eye-double-em, and probably not even emortal with an ee. We can always be killed—any day, any moment. That’s why it’s really not a good idea to go climbing without the proper equipment, Sara. You really should take precautions.”

“That’s not what you said at the house meeting,” Sara reminded him.

“It’s not a good thing for parents to become too paranoid, or to put too many restrictions in place,” Father Lemuel said. “Where would it end? Forbidding you to leave the house...then your room...then your cocoon. You have to be free to calculate your own risks—and that’s why you ought to calculate them in a sensible manner. You were foolish, Sara, and you didn’t need to be. If you want to climb—and you should—you ought to make sure that you can’t fall, or won’t hurt yourself if you do. Frank Warburton’s always been a climber, but he didn’t get to two hundred and fifty, or however old he is, without taking precautions. You don’t get to be a Dragon Man without being careful. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

Sara nodded.

“Some of the younger ones think I’m not taking this parenting business as seriously as I should,” Father Lemuel observed. “They think I’m only doing it because it’s one more thing to tick off on my career list. They think that I think that the fact that I put in more money than anyone else entitles me to take things easy and leave the real parenting work to them. Well, they’re wrong. What I really think is that I’m a good deal older and wiser than they are, which might make me arrogant, but doesn’t necessarily make the judgment incorrect. Most of them will be applying for another license at some time in the future—maybe more than one, if things go well for the world and space colonization actually gets off the ground—but the chances are that you’re my one and only. I take it seriously, even if you think I’m just a boring old virtuality-addict.”

“I don’t,” Sara said. Sensing an opportunity, she said; “Can I ask you a favor, Father Lemuel?”

“Why?” he asked. “Do you think I owe you one?”

“No,” she said. “But I don’t think you think you owe me a
no
, if you see what I mean.”

“I think so,” Father Lemuel admitted, with a wry smile.

“I want to take a special state-of-the-art dragon ride, but I don’t have any credit...and my hood isn’t....” She trailed off, not wanting to say “good enough” in case she sounded horribly ungrateful.

“Why do you want to do it?” Father Lemuel wanted to know.

Sara didn’t know what sort of answer would be most acceptable, so it didn’t seem to be a good time to be economical with her explanation. “I don’t know,” she said. “But ever since I went to see the fire fountain when I was six, and saw the dragon in Mr. Warburton’s window, I’ve been...I mean, I know they were never real, like lions and camels, or even dinosaurs, but there’s something...well, I don’t suppose anyone ever went to Mr. Warburton and said
draw a camel on my back
, or even a
Tyrannosaurus rex
. But they did want dragons. Golden dragons with silver bellies. And it must have really hurt, to have needles pumping that much ink into their actual skin for hours on end. And he put one in his window, didn’t he? Out of all the things he’d ever drilled into anyone’s flesh, he chose to put the dragon in his window. So there must be something special about dragons...even if they’re all fantasy, all pretend. I want to find out what it is. I’ve ridden one in my hood, but that’s only pretend—I can float like that in school. I want to try the new Internal Technology that works in collaboration with a cocoon.”

Father Lemuel frowned when she mentioned the IT, but he didn’t react the way Father Gustave or Mother Maryelle would have, with automatic revulsion. Perhaps, Sara thought, he knew more about that sort of technology than she had assumed.

Father Lemuel wasn’t in any hurry to give her an answer, but he obviously didn’t want to keep her in suspense either. “It can probably be arranged, if it’s safe,” he said. “Let me look into it.”

“Thank you,” Sara said, warmly. She leapt off the swing and gave him a hug.

“But next time you take it into your head to do something silly,” he said. “I think you owe me a few moments’ thought and a
no
, don’t you?”

“I’ll try to remember,” she promised, that being all she could actually promise with any real hope of keeping her word.

Apparently, it was enough.

CHAPTER VII

Father Lemuel filled the syringe very carefully, then pointed the needle upwards and squeezed the plunger to expel a small air-bubble. “This might hurt, you know,” he said.

“No it won’t,” Sara assured him. “Just make sure you hit the right spot.” She had already primed her smartsuit so that it had marked the most convenient entry-point to a vein and secreted a modest amount of local anesthetic.”

Father Lemuel seemed more nervous than she was, but he got the job done. Then he gave a slight sigh. “You, er, might want to keep this just between the two of us,” he said.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she promised—perhaps a little too readily.

“It’s not that it needs to be kept secret,” he assured her. “I could have told the others—it’s just that they’d have wanted to call a special house meeting to discuss it, for hours on end, and I’d have had to listen to Gus and Maryelle banging on yet again about parental responsibility. Not that I have anything against parental responsibility. It’s just the thought of wasting all that time going over the same old ground. I’m too old for all that.”

So am I
, Sara wanted to say—but she daren’t voice the thought, even to Father Lemuel.

“Anyway,” Father Lemuel went on, “what kind of an example would we be setting if we were responsible all the time? You need to know that there’s such a thing as parental irresponsibility, even in the best-regulated of households. Are you all right?”

Sara felt slightly faint, but she knew that there was no need. The thought of all those nanobots sweeping through her bloodstream was a little disturbing, but she knew that she mustn’t let her imagination get the better of her intelligence—not until she was safely enclosed in Father Lemuel’s cocoon, when she would have to do her utmost to make sure that it did exactly that.

“Fine,” she said, holding herself rigid.

Father Lemuel nodded. His cocoon was built into a corner of his sparsely-decorated room, so discreetly that an uninformed observer might have assumed that it was nothing more than a blister. A hometree’s walls were prone to the occasional disease that generated swellings, and such swellings nearly always afflicted corners, rounding them out as if to suggest that nature hated right-angles. Nature’s swellings couldn’t be slit down the middle the way Father Lemuel’s cocoon could, however, and their interiors weren’t equipped with artificial nerve-nets with nearly as many connections as a human brain.

Stepping through the slit into the soft interior always made Sara feel claustrophobic for a moment or two, but the sensation was preferable to climbing into a gel-tank, which she had to do every time her smartsuit needed modification. Once the slit had sealed itself again there was a moment when the world seemed to turn upside-down, as the pull of actual gravity was cushioned and replaced by the apparent gravity of a virtual world. Once the moment of transition was over, however, she was fully committed to the Fantasyworld, and it only took a minute or so for her to enter into the illusion wholeheartedly.

The dragon she had come to ride was at least sixty metres from head to tail, but that was partly because it had such a long tail and a long neck. Its body wasn’t that much bigger than a robocab, if you didn’t count the enormous wings and the huge clawed feet.

Sara had been half-expecting four legs as well as the wings, and a body more like a lion’s than a chicken’s, but this was a world she had never looked into through her bedroom window. She was delighted to see that the colors were exactly right; the dragon’s scales were gold and silver—mostly gold on the back, but all pure silver on the belly—except for the hood behind its snaky head, which was intricately patterned in red and orange.