The Dragon Man (9 page)

“I think so,” Sara said. “At bottom, everything in a machine is just a matter of switches being on or off. What you see in a window or a cocoon is a translation of a long string of ones and noughts.”

“That’s right. A lot of what you see on your desktop screen or through a window starts out as a picture, which is converted into generative code so that it can be reproduced—and the picture can then be made to move by means of an animating program. But you don’t have to start with the picture. You can use code to generate imagery that no one has ever seen or imagined before: whole virtual universes, which can then be explored at the sensory level. Do you see what I mean?”

“And that’s what you do all day—explore imaginary universes?”

“I used to, when I was working full-time. I wrote code to generate alien virtual environments from scratch, then checked them out, to see whether any of them were interesting. In those days, I was looking for commercial exploitability. It’s how I made my money. Nowadays, it’s more of a...well, I suppose Steve would call it a hobby, because that’s what I’d call his junk-collecting. I’d probably call it a vocation, because that sounds much more serious. Not that I turn down the opportunity to earn more credit if I find something I can sell. Dragons were never my sort of thing, though. Somebody else collected the royalties on your little trip.”

“I like dragons,” Sara said, defensively.

“So I’ve noticed,” Father Lemuel replied—although, so far as Sara knew, he had never actually come into her room to see the models on her shelves or look through her picture window. “It’s okay to like dragons. The reason I started telling you all that was to explain why you can only go so far with dragons—or any other conventional invention of the imagination. Your own senses—touch as well as sight—have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to deal with the world you walk around in. Even virtual worlds that mimic the actual world as closely as possible can only reproduce an appearance, and your brain is never completely fooled by it. My cocoon is state-of-the-art, but state-of-the-art will never quite catch up with the texture of actuality, even with the aid of clever IT. You’ll never get an adrenalin rush from climbing in a cocoon that’s the same as the one you got from climbing the hometree, because your brain and your body will always know the difference. There are some kinds of experience where it makes very little difference—including school, playing games and chatting to your friends—but whenever an experience is really important to you, or whenever you want an experience to be really important, you’ll be aware of that margin. That’s why so-called VW addicts never really lose touch with reality. Reality is the only place you can get the
whole
sensation of touch.”

Sara thought about that for a few moments before saying, “I really did enjoy it.”

“I’m glad,” Father Lemuel assured her. “It was new, closer to real experience than you’ve ever been in a Fantasyworld before—but next time, you’ll be more conscious of the difference. And the time after that...well, I suppose I should let you find out on your own. It’s that old parental responsibility coming through again, always making free with the warnings and the sermons. You have to learn from experience to get the full benefit from your senses—all you’re born with is the potential. You’ll notice that more and more as you get older. Maybe we should have created more opportunities for you already, but parental committees always tend to take things slowly. Maybe it was different in the old days—but maybe not. Maybe two parents did just as much worrying as eight, but couldn’t share it out so easily.”

“In the even older days long before the Crash,” Sara said, spotting an opportunity to show off her learning, “most people lived in extended families, not nuclear ones. Our way is a return to normality, if you look at it that way.”

“So they say,” Father Lemuel agreed, although the tone of his voice proclaimed that he didn’t believe it. “People will go a long way in search of arguments that support what they’re doing.
It takes a village to raise a child
is a slogan that’s been worked to death. Whatever we are, Sara, we’re not a village that’s been somehow collapsed into a single set of rooms and strewn around a fake tree like so many squirrels’ nests, and we’re certainly not a company of grandfathers and maiden aunts who’ve been drafted in to baby-sit—although I can see how it might seem that way to you.”

“There are birds’ nests in the branches,” Sara told him. “Lots of them. And things with lots of legs. It’s not just
our
hometree.”

“No, it’s not,” Father Lemuel agreed. “And that’s one of the reasons for making some houses look like trees, rather than hiding all their organic systems away in hollow walls, the way they do in town houses. It wasn’t just our Crash—the birds and the bees nearly went the same way as the large mammals. Ecologically speaking, it pays to look after your insects—and your insect-eaters.”

“Is that why you bought a hometree?” Sara asked.

“Not really,” Father Lemuel admitted. “It was more to do with the kind of environment we wanted to provide for you—good for climbing, among other things, although I’m not sure that all of us had given our full consideration to that aspect of it. But as I said, people will go a long way in search of arguments that support what they’re doing, and I never like to let one go to waste.”

“If I had my own credit account,” Sara dared to point out, although she knew that it might be taking a little too much advantage of Father Lemuel’s good mood, “I wouldn’t have to ask you to pay for educational trips to Fantasyworlds.”

Father Lemuel laughed. “And the difference would be?” he asked, meaning that what she was really asking for was to be given the money now rather than later.

“I wouldn’t have to ask so often,” she pointed out.

“Well,” said Father Lemuel, “that’s one of the advantages of having eight parents. There’s always someone around to ask, and you don’t have to put too much pressure on any one of them. Except that it’s always me you’d have to come to if you wanted to use a state-of-the-art cocoon. Which is why I was rather hoping that today’s little trip would have been sufficiently disappointing to make you think that it might not be worth the trouble of coming back to me on a regular basis. You can put it to the house-meeting if you like, but I bet you can guess what we’ll say, after we’ve discussed it for an hour or two.”

Sara nodded, glumly. “All in good time,” she said, glumly. “Maybe next year, or the year after that. I’m only ten, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to make changes.” She pronounced these sentences in a mocking way, to emphasize that she was not speaking on her own behalf.”

“Just between the two of us,” Father Lemuel said, “you might consider the possibility of sticking out for a firm timetable. It’s a lot easier for people to make promises about tomorrow than to get immediate action, especially when there’s a committee involved. But once something’s on the record, the promise has to be kept. I know it’s not as good as instant gratification, but the time passes—if you’re clever you can lay down a whole trail of useful promises stretching way into the future. Of course, I’m only telling you this because it’s educational. It’ll get you into the habit of making plans, thinking constructively about your future, and all that sort of stuff.”

Sara saw what Father Lemuel meant about people going a long way in search of arguments to support what they were doing, and knew that he would expect her to see it. When she grinned, he grinned back—and now they were both following one another’s trains of thought.

“Thanks,” she said, as she went to the door so that Father Lemuel could get back to his vocation. “I’ll try it, and see how it goes.

She was so anxious to try it out, in fact, that she became quite insistent at the following Thursday’s house-meeting, demanding that a date be set for the time when she could have a credit account of her own with sufficient funds in it to make serious purchases—not just trivia like new views from her picture window, but big things like major modifications to her smartsuit.

It was at that point that she realized that Father Lemuel’s cunning scheme had its downside. By going so far in search of arguments to support what she wanted, she overstepped the mark. She conjured up anxieties that might never have crossed her parents’ minds if she’d taken a softer line, and she’d done so within a matter of days of climbing the hometree—which already had stirred up a fine mess of anxieties that her parents had hoped to postpone for at least a little longer.

Once she had raised the possibility of her being able to order major modifications to her smartsuit without having to obtain specific parental permission that became a topic of discussion in its own right...as did several other, far more fanciful, suggestions that various Mothers and Fathers put forward as to how the kind of credit she was talking about might be spent. By the time the scarier items—mostly involving hallucinogenic drugs, entertainment IT, powergliders, or robocabs to venues so exotic she had never even heard of them—had been aired, her hopes of obtaining a promise to set up a substantial credit account on her next birthday had been utterly dashed. Indeed, her entire strategy was usurped by Father Gustave and Mother Maryelle, who contrived to rally a six-two majority behind the motion that Sara should not have a substantial credit account until her fourteenth birthday—which would given them a ready-made excuse to turn down any approach she might make in the meantime.

Father Lemuel voted against that motion, as did Mother Verena—but Sara wasn’t entirely certain, as she watched her future plans being wrenched horribly out of shape, that Father Lemuel hadn’t known all along that persuading committees to establish firm timetables could as easily work against one’s interests as for them. He was, after all, a hundred and fifty years old—give or take a few—and the time he spent in virtual worlds hadn’t yet caused him to forget how the real one worked.

CHAPTER IX

Sara knew, even at the time, that the decision taken at the house-meeting after the hometree-climbing incident hadn’t been a total disaster. It did mean that she had to keep on making special applications for credit every time she wanted to buy something substantial, but she had established the principle that when she eventually did get her own credit account, there would be no conditions attached to it.

In particular, because it was the example that had started the big argument, she had it on the record that she could pay for major modifications to her smartsuit.

When she had first mentioned that possibility, rather carelessly, Sara had not had any specific modifications in mind. It had merely been an example of the kind of major purchase that she would eventually have to make, plucked out of the air with only the vaguest notion of what it might eventually imply. Even at the age of ten, though, she had been conscious of the fact that the time would one day come when that might be an important principle.

Sara had long grown used to looking upon her smartsuit as a mere necessity, and it had never occurred to her to object to the simplicity of the appearance it presented. Babies were often displayed to the public eye in all the colors of the rainbow, but ever since she had started school, where her image was required to maintain an appropriate sobriety, she had taken it for granted that the only choice to be made regarding the configuration of her second skin was the color she would wear from the neck downwards. The vast majority of young children—not just in England but all over the world—wore plain costume, with the possible exception of a single decorative motif or an occasional venture into elementary patterns. Even at weekends, when children were taken out to be shown off to the neighbors, a few zebra-strips or abstract swirls were considered perfectly adequate as decorations. The faces of shy children might be ingeniously masked, but their bodies were rarely allowed much latitude for eccentricity.

Sara had taken this for granted for so long that it came as something of a surprise when her lessons in elementary biotechnology finally caused her to realize, as she approached her fourteenth birthday, what ought to have been obvious for a long time: that young children’s smartsuits were plain because they were, in certain key respects, technologically primitive. They were simply not equipped with the sorts of decorative opportunities of which adults sometimes took advantage. As children became teenagers, however, their smartsuits matured with them, and became considerably more hospitable to unusual decoration.

When she mentioned this realization to Gennifer during one of their on-camera chats, her friend inevitably pretended to have been aware of it for ages.

“It was different in the olden days,” Gennifer informed her, loftily. “When people wore dead clothes they had whole wardrobes full of all kinds of bizarre bits, which they put on in all kinds of weird combinations. All they—the clothes, that is—had to do was
hang there
, so of course they came in all kinds of different fabrics and colors, with all kinds of buttons and beads and things attached. The people put them on every morning and took them off at night, and sometimes changed them around half a dozen times a day. We get an extra layer of skin as soon as we’re born and it grows along with us for the next twenty or a hundred years...until something so new comes along that it’s easier to strip us naked and start again than it is to do a what-d’you-call-it....”

“Somatic conversion,” Sara put in, to show that no matter how smart her friend might pretend to be, she was the one had the more assured command of the jargon.

“Right,” Gennifer agreed. “But what I mean is,
clothing
is only one of the things our smartsuits have to be, and not the most important one while we’re growing up—at least the way our parents see it. There’s hygiene and protection and all kinds of other stuff to make sure we and the smartsuits grow properly. Adults don’t grow any more—unless they take up some kind of sport that needs longer legs or whatever—so their smartsuits don’t have so much other stuff to do, and they have metabolic capacity to spare for fancy decoration. We’re sort of half-way between, which is awkward. The opportunities are there, but we have to persuade our parents to let us take them. Have you seen Davy Bennett lately—out of school, I mean, on camera?”