The Dragon Man (8 page)

Sara had elected to ride the dragon rather than be the dragon, so she found herself perched—precariously, it seemed—on a little saddle at the base of the neck. She had stirrups for her feet, and improbably long reins to hold on to, but it wasn’t easy to believe that any signal she sent to the creature’s distant head would actually elicit a response.

It was even harder to believe it once the long neck and coiled around so that the dragon could look back at her with its huge snaky green eyes, flickering its tongue as if it thought she might make a tasty meal, small enough to take at a single gulp.

The dragon didn’t say anything. She could have chosen a Fantasyworld in which dragons could and did talk, but that seemed like cheating. She wanted to fly with dragons that were just dragons, not pseudopeople in fancy costumes. The kind of dragon on which she was mounted was no more real than the other kind, of course, but it seemed somehow to be a little less contrived, a little less fake.

The dragon must have looked around to check that she was aboard and properly posed, because it only favored her with a single lofty glance of disdain before it turned back again to look down the precipitous slope of the mountain on whose pinnacle it was perched, and then up at the clear blue sky. Without further delay, it launched itself into the air.

Sara couldn’t help breathing in sharply. This was where the temporary IT was supposed to kick in, to work from inside her body to empower the illusion. For a moment, her mind clung hard to the knowledge that this was only a manufactured dream, and that she was still in the hometree, in Father Lemuel’s room—but then it relaxed. She wasn’t taken over in any kind of scary way; she just relaxed into the experience. She allowed her disbelief to be suspended; she gave her consent to the fantasy.

And it did feel as if she were actually moving, with the airstream flowing past her increasing to a gale as the dragon picked up speed. When she looked down, it really did seem that the ground was far below, and that she really might fall if she leaned too far to one side or the other.

She knew that if she tried to do anything the Environmental Rules wouldn’t permit, she really would “fall” out of the saddle. She wouldn’t be hurt when she hit the “ground,” and her own IT wouldn’t allow the IT that Father Lemuel had injected to scare her to death on the way down, but she had asked for a more realistic adventure and that was what she was going to get. The thrill of fear that lanced through her was as sharp as the thrill of fear she’d felt when she realized that she really might fall out of the hometree’s crown and hurt herself when she hit the ground. Compared with floating around the insipid and intangible corridors of her virtual school, flying through the thick, cool atmosphere of the Fantasyworld was vivid, penetrating and wildly exhilarating.

This, Sara thought, must be what Father Aubrey meant when he talked about “the speed trip.”

The dragon didn’t beat its wings; it merely spread them out, arching and tilting them to catch an updraft that surged up the side of the mountain. It settled into a glide almost immediately, and then began to turn in a lazy circle around the pinnacle, soaring higher on the ascending column of air.

Sara felt the rush of the wind in her hair and on her face, crisp and electric, but she felt quite stable in the saddle—if not quite
safe
, at least not unduly uncomfortable. She wasn’t in any hurry to look down again, though. She looked up, into the bright blue sky, squinting against the sunlight, and she looked out at the jagged horizon, where range after range of snow-capped mountains extended as if forever.

She had read the program’s supplementary literature carefully, even though she didn’t quite understand everything that it contained. She wanted to savor the imaginary world to the full, so she had ploughed on determinedly, even through the technical jargon. If this world had been an actual planet rather than an image in the mind’s eye of a machine, it would have been twice the size of Earth, with only a fifth of its surface covered by water—a multitude of lakes rather than a patchwork of oceans—and almost all the remainder crumpled like a rucked-up rug. Many of the peaks would have been worn down by erosion, their rough slopes gentled as if by millions of years of rainstorms and floods of melting snow. The program that was generating the world had grinding tectonic plates built into its binary bedrock, and new peaks would be thrusting up as the older ones were worn down.

Sara knew that the “world” had only existed for a hundred years or so, and that its actual evolution had been incredibly rapid—but within its world-soul it had an implicit existence that stretched billions of years into the past, and an assumption of evolution with all the patience necessary to bring dragons out of reptiles that had once been fish, which had once been wormlike invertebrates...and so on, all the way back to bacterial slime.

The world felt old. Sara was not quite sure whether that sensation was somehow being communicated to her by the nanobots, or whether it was something her own imagination was inventing—but either way, she was glad of it.

The dragon, on the other hand, did not seem old at all. For all its vast size and easy competence in the air, there was something youthful about it—or perhaps, Sara thought, she was only projecting her own youth upon it. And why not? She was here to enjoy herself, to be master of her own experience.

She drew slightly on the reins, trying to suggest to the dragon that they had circled the peak for long enough, and that it was time to undertake a more ambitious directional flight.

The dragon responded to her touch. It turned its back on the high-set sun, and straightened out its course, heading for a group of peaks so tall that they wore collars of cloud.

Now, Sara looked down into the valleys over which they passed, at forests and meadowlands, winding rivers and waterfalls, placid lakes. There was no sign of human habitation but there were other animals: great herds of shaggy herbivores making their way along their grazing trails.

If Sara had chosen to be a dragon she could have hunted as one, trying to pick off an infant herbivore, but dragons of this sort did not hunt with riders on their back. Sara wasn’t sorry about that, nor did she resolve to return one day in a fashion that would let her use her simulated talons and fangs to kill, and her simulated mouth to swallow her prey. She only wanted to fly. She was not here to pretend that dragons really lived, but only that they flew. What the dragon symbolized was more important to her than its seeming scaliness and fleshiness, even though she had only the vaguest notion of what it did symbolize, for her or for anyone.

Oddly enough, although the dragon seemed to be flying half a kilometer above the ground—more as it passed over the deep-set valleys—she did not have as acute a sense of height as she had had when she had finally paused in the hometree’s steeple-like crown. At first she thought that was because the new Internal Technology wasn’t living up to its promises, but there was another factor involved.

In the hometree’s crown she had felt as if she were still connected to the ground. The potential fall had been measurable against a solid vertical scale. Here, there was nothing between her and the ground but empty space, which had no sensible scale. The perceptible objects on the ground seemed very small, and she knew that their seeming smallness was a product of distance, but her kind of eyes could not make that distance meaningful—except when they flew close to a vertical slope, whose precipitousness would become abruptly obvious as her mind somehow changed gear. That never lasted for long, though; the dragon flew on and on, leaving all such tilted walls behind.

The special Internal Technology continued its efforts, but now that she had become accustomed to its effects she became increasingly aware of the differences between the sensations of “touch” it synthesized and the real thing. The texture of the Fantasyworld wasn’t quite right. The saddle and harness she was holding, and the scaly skin she could reach out and stroke, certainly seemed to be
there
, but they lacked the subtleties of real-world solidity. The air caressing her face as she moved through it was more convincing, but Sara couldn’t shake off the suspicion that it wouldn’t have convinced Father Aubrey, or anyone else who knew what a real speed trip was like.

Even so, it was new. It was wonderful. It was worth the effort.

As the flight extended, Sara tried to imagine what she might look like from a viewpoint even higher in the sky, from which the flying dragon might appear to be skimming the surface below, like a fiery cross moving across an infinite field of grey and green, flattened out by perspective. Was that, she wondered, what one of Frank Warburton’s tattooed dragons had looked like? Had they looked as if they were soaring over a body that was in fact a world?

No, she decided. The dragon in the shop window had been seen in profile, as if from an airship floating alongside it, as if the skin of the wearer were the sky and not the ground at all: an infinite absence rather than an immediate presence. Was that the impression his clients had been trying to achieve? Not magnification, but transformation?

She began to see other dragons now, some soaring around their domestic peaks, others perched on ledges close to nests where huge white eggs were resting. Were they near to hatching? There was no way to tell. Half a dozen smaller dragons fluttered upwards to fly alongside Sara’s mount in brief formation, but none carried a rider, and none turned its great green eye to stare at her. She was not invisible, but she was not of interest. She was an alien visitor, but her presence was not so disruptive that she needed to be noticed, let alone feared.

There are thousands of Fantasy worlds like this one, Sara thought, and there’ll be millions more—more than anyone could ever explore, even in a lifetime like mine.

CHAPTER VIII

Sara began to feel cold, and realized that her temporary IT was already preparing her for the end of her trip. In advance of being expelled, she would be slightly discomfited, so that she would not regret her return to her own reality and might even feel glad to be home and warm. The awareness that time was short made her concentrate harder, determined to make the most of the experience while it lasted. She stroked the dragon’s scales with her left hand, feeling their peculiar quality, like adamantine silk. She looked from side to side at the huge wings, marveling at the elegance of their curvature, the awesome precision of their form. She looked back at the extending tail, undulating ever so slightly like an eel in shallow water, then forward at the stretching neck, the arched hood, the strangely tinted head.

She looked up into the blue vault of the imaginary heavens, leaning back to let the sun’s radiance warm her swirling hair as if it were a halo. Then she looked down again at the valleys sweeping by, nourished by streams whose sources were snow-packed crevices, weeping as the sun’s glow eased their excess without ever cutting through the tresses dangling from the icy summits. She looked at the clouds clustered about the highest peaks, hugging them tightly, stirred at their outer edges by breezes that were not nearly strong enough to dislodge their grip and send them tumbling across the sky.

For the first time in her life, Sara was struck by the sensation that this particular virtual world was actually
more real
than the actual one. She was old enough to know that the sensation was subjective, arising as much from the particular way she was
paying attention
as the cleverness of Father Lemuel’s cocoon and the temporary IT, but did make her wonder why she never attended to her actual surroundings with as much intensity...and the answer, she realized, was that her actual surroundings were too familiar, that she had no choice but to take them for granted because that was the essence of her relationship with them. This was different; it had a dramatic quality that actuality could only produce in circumstances so extreme as to be terrifying. Only a virtual world could offer this special kind of vividness without anything but the most superficial, graceful and entertaining sense of threat. This was a purer kind of excitement than any available outside a cocoon.

Was that, she wondered, why people like Father Lemuel found themselves spending more and more time in virtual worlds, less and less in the real one. And what kind of virtual worlds did Father Lemuel live in, anyhow? Did he also ride dragons, or did he have better things to do?

It was, of course, impossible to ask. She was old enough now to know where the most significant taboos of adult life were set out, and to steer well clear of any violation.

Then the dragon began to descend again. It was, she had to suppose, a long way from home—much further than she was. Perhaps it would pick up another rider before it set off on the journey—or perhaps, for now, it had earned a rest.

“How was it?” Father Lemuel asked, when Sara emerged from the cocoon, stumbling as she readjusted to the drag of actual gravity.

“It was great,” she said, trying hard to sound suitably enthusiastic, so that Father Lemuel would think that his money had been well-spent. Actually, she felt dazed and disconcerted, not yet ready to evaluate the experience accurately.

Father Lemuel nodded, understandingly. “But not so very much different from watching them through a picture window?” he suggested. “Not quite as gripping as climbing the hometree.”

Sara looked up at her oldest father with a slight frown, but she didn’t say anything. She wondered exactly how good he was at following the train of her thought.

“It
was
different,” she assured him. “The new IT made it feel much more real.”

“It’s new to you,” Father Lemuel observed, implying that it was far from new to him. “You’ll get used to it.” Obviously, her parents—one of them, at least—were not as innocent in the ways of “entertainment IT” as Sara had assumed.

“If you get used to it...,” she began, before the suspicion that she might be asking a forbidden question made her pause.

Father Lemuel didn’t seem to mind the personal nature of the implicit enquiry. “Why do I spend so much of my time in virtual worlds, if the experience is always inferior?” he finished for her. “Some people argue that it ought not to be reckoned inferior just because it’s different, but that isn’t really the point. All VW addicts point out there’s an awful lot you can do in the virtual world that you wouldn’t attempt to do in the real world because it would be too dangerous—but that isn’t really the point either. You already understand that the real purpose of synthesized experience is to open up opportunities that have no parallel in the real world. Dragonriding is only the first step. In a VW you can reduce yourself to the size of an insect or a bacterium, ride a spacecraft through the solar system and beyond, etcetera, etcetera...and you can visit hypothetical worlds very different from ours, where everything—including the laws of physics—has been altered, not according to anyone’s constructive imagination but by manipulating the generative code. Do you understand what I mean by the generative code?”