The Dragon Man Part 1

THE DRAGON MAN.

by Brian Stableford.

CHAPTER I.

When she returned home after the funeral, the first impression that took form in Sara's mind was that everything had happened very quickly, in a mere matter of days. When she had thought about it for a while, though, she realized that her involvement in the Dragon Man's life-story had actually begun some time before she first spoke to him. Their fates had intersected even before she was forced to contact him about the perfume of her rose, and long before she first caught sight of his remarkable face.

Eventually, when she had put all the pieces of the story together, to her own satisfaction, she concluded that the Dragon Man's part in her life-story had begun on her sixth birthday....

On her sixth birthday, which fell on the eleventh of July 2374, five of Sara's parents decided at breakfast that they would take her to Blackburn to see the fire fountain in the New Town Square.

Father Lemuel could have come, but he didn't. He went back to his coc.o.o.n, saying, as he usually did when he left parental meetings, that he was "going to work," although Sara had once overheard Mother Quilla say that "Lem hasn't done a stroke of real work since he turned a hundred." Father Stephen and Mother Verena both worked away from the hometree somewhere in ManLiv, so they couldn't come. They called their own robocab to take them in the opposite direction.

"Maybe we ought to have called three cabs," Mother Jolene said, as the greater part of the family piled into the Blackburn-bound vehicle. "Five adults and a growing child would be a squeeze even if Steve's legs didn't take up more room than he can possibly need."

Father Stephen was the tallest of Sara's parents, although he wasn't an athlete. When Sara had asked him why, he'd explained to her that he hadn't actually planned to be as tall as he was; he'd just kept on growing a little longer than was fas.h.i.+onable nowadays.

"If all nine of us ever go out together," Mother Maryelle said, in response to Mother Jolene, "we'll have to hire a bus."

"It'll never happen," said Father Aubrey. "Lem comes out of his coc.o.o.n to attend house-meetings, but it'll take more than one of Sara's birthdays to get him out of the house."

Sara had overheard more than one of her parents complain about Father Lemuel's "att.i.tude problems". Mother Verena had said only three days before that "Lem only applied to be a parent now because he doesn't want to die without exercising his license." The remark had stuck in Sara's mind, even though she wasn't entirely sure what Mother Verena meant, because she'd been struck by the way that Mother Maryelle's reply had been delivered in the same severe tone that she used whenever she accused Sara of being naughty.

"Without Lem's money," Mother Maryelle had said, "we wouldn't have been able to afford a top-of-the-range hometree in such a good location." Sara wasn't sure why the hometree was so special, although she had been told several times that it was a whole kilometer away from its nearest neighbor.

When the robocab rolled out of the driveway into the lane Sara pressed her face to the window, which was made of transparent plastic and therefore incapable of displaying any other world than the one that was both real and present. All she could see through it was what was actually there, but that was the whole point; the journey was new to her, and she wanted to savor it.

Sara had looked out into the town through the picture window in her bedroom. She had seen the fire fountain that way-but looking through a picture window wasn't the same as being there. She had seen thousands of different places through the window, as many real as virtual, but she couldn't remember having been any further in the flesh than the lanes and fields around the hometree's garden. The last time she had been taken to Blackburn by her parents she had been a baby, unable to take notice of what was happening. She was old enough now to have learned to program the picture window herself, so that she could look out of it at any place in the real world or the virtual multiverse she cared to visit, but seeing the world wasn't the same thing as being able to go there.

Seen through her bedroom window, Blackburn was an uninteresting place by comparison with others Sara had looked at, but the fact that she could actually go there made it a great deal more exciting than any virtual world-even the virtual worlds contained in Father Lemuel's coc.o.o.n, which could be touched as well as seen and heard, unlike those she could look into wearing her own hood.

Sara didn't like using the hood to go into virtual worlds, partly because they never seemed quite as real as they appeared to be when seen through her bedroom window, and partly because the hood was what she wore to go to school. Now that she was six she would have to be at school for five hours a day instead of two, for at least another thirteen years thirteen years-which seemed, at present, an eternity.

Blackburn also seemed more exciting, as the robocab turned the corner into the main road, than ManLiv or Manhattan, Morecambe or Madras. All those were places to which she would one day be able to go, if she wanted to, but Blackburn was the one and only place she could go now now. She was already looking forward to setting foot on the pure white flagstones of New Town Square-which was actually very old now, having been called "New" when the town was rebuilt at the beginning of the twenty-second century, after the Crash. She'd checked it out in her window before running downstairs to join her eager parents, so she knew that the fire fountain stood in the north-western corner of the square, where the Cloistered Facade almost met the Munic.i.p.al Parade.

Sara didn't want to miss a thing. She wanted to be able to tell her best friend Gennifer all about her excursion, although Gennifer was sure to be unimpressed. Gennifer lived way up north, in Keswick, so she not only had a town right on her doorstep, but a lake called Derwent Water within walking distance.

As the cab accelerated along the road Sara looked back to see if she could still see her hometree. The only visible part of it was the top of the green crown that ent.i.tled it to be called a hometree rather than a mere house, and even that soon pa.s.sed out of sight, giving her a slight thrill of detachment.

The road was like a groove cut into the countryside-which, Sara realized, was why she couldn't see the traffic on it when she opened her bedroom window to look out over the fields beyond the garden hedge. The gra.s.s-covered banks to either side were starred with colored flowers, but that seemed a poor subst.i.tute for a long view over the fields, taking in facfarms and SAPorchards, other people's hometrees and distant skymasts.

There weren't as many other vehicles on the road as Sara had expected, but they were various in type. She was surprised to observe that only one robocab in three wore the blue-and-silver livery of Blackburn. Her parents never used any other, so all the cabs that had ever come into the hometree's drive had worn those colors, but there were plenty of cabs on the road displaying ManLiv's red-and-sky-blue, and it didn't take long to spot half a dozen other combinations. Some must be from Preston, but she had no idea where the rest might be based.

When Sara looked across at the southbound carriageway, she could see that the cabs there were dutifully flocking together as they coordinated their cruising speeds in the inside lane. The middle lane was the province of trucks, which came in many different shapes and sizes. There were occasional private cars too, but they were mostly uncustomized, as soberly clad as the trucks. The bikes in the outermost lane-the human drivers' lane-were even more brightly-decorated than the cabs, because bikes were what people rode for pleasure rather than purpose. Their riders were more colorful still.

"Bikers put extra surskins on over their smartsuits," Father Aubrey told her, when he noticed that Sara's flickering gaze had begun following the speeding machines on their own northbound carriageway as they zoomed past the cabs and trucks.

"I know," Sara told him. "Ms. Mapledean told us." Ms. Mapledean was her cla.s.s-teacher.

Father Aubrey frowned slightly, but he went on stubbornly, as if he were determined to find something to tell her that she didn't already know. "Their smartsuits could protect them from the wind perfectly well," he said, "but putting on the extra layer is like putting on a new personality. Bikers love to deck themselves out like birds in fancy plumage-much fancier than those silly things fas.h.i.+onable women in ManLiv have taken to wearing."

"Actually, they're more like wasps displaying warning coloration," Father Stephen put in, while Mother Jolene rolled her eyes in protest against Father Aubrey's insult to "fas.h.i.+onable women".

"They're not like wasps at all," Father Aubrey retorted. "You shouldn't say things that might confuse Sara. It's all about enjoyment-the speed trip."

"There's no need to sound so wistful, Aubie," Mother Quilla said. "If it's what you fancy...."

"I'm a parent now," Father Aubrey said. "There'll be time enough to get back into the fast lane when Sara's grown up."

"Bikers are slugs with delusions of grandeur," Father Gustave observed. "If you want to savor speed, you have to get a powerglider. That really does justify dressing up like a bird and pretending to be a hawk among the sparrows."

"Airspeed isn't really speed at all, Gus," Father Aubrey said, hotly. "If you haven't got the ground beneath your wheels, you don't get the sensation of traveling at all."

Sara had tried flying like a bird in virtual s.p.a.ce, not just in her hood but in Father Lemuel's coc.o.o.n, which was equipped to provide a much better simulation of reality. On that particular occasion the simulation had worked a little too well; she'd felt giddy and more than a little sick. If her Internal Technology hadn't calmed her down she might actually have been sick-which would have annoyed Father Lemuel dreadfully. Father Lemuel wasn't any more p.r.o.ne to annoyance than her other parents, but he was exceedingly fond of his coc.o.o.n and the wealth of virtual experience it provided.

The roadside scenery began to improve as the robocab came into the outskirts of the town, where there were walls and hedges with gardens and houses lurking behind. Sara caught fleeting glimpses of glittering walls that were quite unlike the bark-like exterior of her own hometree; hereabouts there were houses that did not try to hide their artificiality behind a vegetal mask, but seemed proud to be carved out of polished stone and roofed in stern jet black.

As the cab moved into denser but less varied traffic, slowing down as it neared the town centre, buildings cl.u.s.tered about the very edge of the road, looming up into the sky. There was an abundance of picture windows close to ground-level, many of them offering displays of goods and services for sale, although most were blank because they could only offer images of virtual worlds to people on the inside. A few offered views of barren deserts and ice-fields, teeming cities or lush forests to any and all pa.s.sers-by, as if taking care to remind them that Blackburn, like everywhere else on the planet, was part of a Global Village, a Commonwealth of Souls.

Sara would have preferred to leave the cab some distance from the New Town Square and walk along one or two of those fascinating streets, but her parents always seem to be worried about "overtiring" her. They still seemed to think that she'd only just learned to walk. She had complained about it once to Mother Quilla, who had apologized and explained that it was because parents had no real idea of the rate at which children changed-but it hadn't stopped her. Fortunately the traffic-management system forced the robocab to set them down in the south-eastern corner of the square, so they had a lot of shop-fronts to walk past as they made their way around, many of which were discreetly set back in the slightly mysterious alcoves of the Cloistered Facade.

"Thanks," said Father Gustave, as they all got out. He was speaking to Father Aubrey, who's offered him a supportive hand.

"We aim to please, sir," the cab's Artificial Intelligence replied, automatically. "We hope to have the pleasure of your patronage again."

By the time they got half way along the cloister, Sara had stopped peering into the picture-windows on her right because her eyes had fixed themselves on the prospect ahead-not so much on the fire fountain itself, oddly enough, but on the crowd gathered around it.

The fact that there were twenty-five or thirty adults standing around the fire fountain was uninteresting, so Sara was hardly aware of it. The fact that they had brought their own children was a different matter.

Sara had met hundreds of other children in dozens of different virtual s.p.a.ces, in addition to the fifteen cla.s.smates of her own age who were her regular companions in school. She often played with other children, in the many and various ways that children could play together while they were wearing hoods in their separate rooms. She was perfectly used to being with other children-but the only one she had ever met "in the flesh" was an older boy named Mike whom she had encountered on two occasions, quite by chance, when her parents had taken her for a walk in the countryside surrounding her hometree.

Because Mike and Sara had each been accompanied, on both occasions, by at least four adults, and because they were so obviously not the same age, their meetings had been guarded and wary, and certainly had not involved any actual physical contact. Although Mike attended Sara's school he was two years ahead of her, and had not so far deigned to recognize her during a.s.semblies, break times or club sessions. Sara didn't even know his second name. Now, though, she found herself close-actually close-to no less than five other children of a.s.sorted ages. They ranged from a babe in arms to a boy twice as tall as Sara, who might have been nine or ten. close-to no less than five other children of a.s.sorted ages. They ranged from a babe in arms to a boy twice as tall as Sara, who might have been nine or ten.

It was these other children, rather than the fountain, that drew Sara's eyes. As she approached them, in company with her parental escort, all of them-even the big boy-turned their eyes towards her, with similar curiosity.

When she recalled this experience at the age of fourteen, after the Dragon Man's funeral, Sara wondered why she hadn't noticed at the time that it wasn't only the children who were looking at her avidly, consumed with curiosity. The simple answer was that her own attention had been too narrowly focused-but there was a little more to it than that.

Six-year-old Sara was accustomed to being the centre of her own parents' attention, so it didn't seem to her that being looked at by adults as anything out of the ordinary. She had been too young, at that time, to realize that there was anything to be noticed, or pondered upon, in the fact that other adults were looking at her too. Children were a different matter. The fact that she could meet their eyes in real s.p.a.ce-"meats.p.a.ce", as Father Lemuel insisted on calling it-had seemed extraordinarily significant.

And so it had been, fourteen-year-old Sara thought. It had been as significant, in its own way, as the shop whose window of which her six-year-old self had not yet caught sight.

CHAPTER II.

Sara knew that the other children who had been brought to see the fire fountain that day must all attend the same school she did. Blackburn was not the kind of town that attracted tourists from outside the county. She was surprised, therefore, that she could only put a name to one of them: a girl wearing a pale blue smartsuit not unlike her own. Her name was Samantha Curtyn, and she was eight.

The boy in dark green standing next to Samantha-close enough to touch her, although his hands were at his sides-also seemed to be about eight, but Sara couldn't remember seeing him in school.

It wasn't surprising that Sara couldn't identify the other girl in the crowd, or guess her age, because the part of her smartsuit covering her face wasn't conventionally invisible; it had been temporarily reset to make a cat-like mask, complete with fake whiskers. The second girl was shorter than Samantha Curtyn, and might therefore have been intermediate between her age and Sara's, but there was no way to be sure. Sara felt slightly resentful of the fact that the other girl could almost certainly recognize her, and put a name to her too, without granting a similar privilege to others.

The other boy, whose height marked him out as the oldest, was also clad in unusual finery, but his face was clear; it was only his suit that was tuned up to show off, displaying a slightly dizzying kaleidoscopic effect. She presumed that he didn't wear it that way at home, although she couldn't actually be sure. In school, of course, he would only present an image synthesized by his hood; the sober dress required of that image didn't have to reflect what he was actually wearing.

Sara studied them all, and they studied her. In school, their virtual images would have been equipped with tags, and she would have been able to use her private cursor to click on the tags in order to discover their names, their ages, which cla.s.ses they were in, where they lived and what their desktop numbers were. Their actual bodies had no such tags, and were therefore intrinsically mysterious.

In school, Sara rarely bothered to click on anyone's tag, unless she had forgotten a name she ought to know, and when she did she never took much notice of the additional information. Because the information was always available, only a click away, it wasn't necessary to commit it to memory. Now that there were no tags available, though, she couldn't help feeling curious about who the other children were and where they had come from.

She knew that her frustration was temporary, and slightly silly. Tomorrow, when she saw these other children in school, she would know that she had met them in the flesh-except for the annoying girl who only had courage enough to venture into the real world if her face was hidden-and they would know that they had met her. They would all be able to click away to their hearts' content, learning everything they wanted to know...but they probably wouldn't feel the need.

Remembering the moment fourteen years later, Sara was able to appreciate the paradoxes inherent in her wary observation of the other children more fully than she had at the time.

At six, Sara's awareness of the fact that none of them were likely to become her close friends had been vague and inconsequential. At fourteen, though, she could see a certain irony in the fact that they had been-and were likely to remain-socially distant, even though they lived far closer to her hometree, in meats.p.a.ce terms, than Gennifer Corcoran, who was the only one of her cla.s.smates with whom the six-year-old had regular conversations on camera, desktop-to-desktop.

At fourteen, Sara could see a certain unfortunate perversity in the fact that chance and the whim of the Population Bureau Licensing Authority had ordained that she was to be the only child born within fifty kilometres of her hometree in the year 2367-with the result that none of her cla.s.smates lived near enough to make a casual meeting in real s.p.a.ce likely. And she knew, at fourteen, that no such meeting had yet occurred-nor would it, without a great deal of preparation and careful interparental negotiation.

Thanks to the presence of the other children and their reaction to six-year-old Sara's arrival in the square, the fire fountain went almost unheeded by its audience for a full three minutes. Those who had been brought to marvel at its display were too busy marveling at one another.

When Sara did try to focus on the fountain, she found it quite uninteresting by comparison. Some trick of perspective made it seem smaller now than it had when she had stared at it through her bedroom window, and the fact that the sparks did not seem substantial, or even warm, when they drifted far enough from their source to land on her head and shoulders was strangely disappointing. They should have seemed more real, given that she was actually there, but they didn't.

Even when you were standing right next to it, Sara realized, the fire fountain was just a special effect.

For that reason, the fact that the fountain was doing what it did in real s.p.a.ce rather than virtual s.p.a.ce didn't seem half as significant as the fact that the other children were actually present, rather than being images carved in light. The sparks jetting forth from the fountain to follow dozens of strange trajectories weren't real sparks at all. They were only bits of light. They weren't hot; when they landed on someone, they simply winked out of existence, leaving no trace behind of their brief existence. The children, on the other hand, were people. They were solid, intelligent flesh.

That was why it only required two minutes more for Sara's attention to wander again.

It was then that she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of the Dragon Man's shop window.

Looking back, eight years later, Sara wondered why her six-year-old self had been so abruptly captivated by that glimpse, when she couldn't have been certain of what it was that she was looking at. She remembered that she had stared for thirty seconds or so at the golden dragon that formed the centerpiece of the display before it had dawned on her that the window, like the window of the robocab, really was a window and not a screen pretending to be a window.

Had that really seemed significant, at the time?

No, not significant. Just odd-but odd enough to command a long, hard look.

Sara realized, belatedly, that she wasn't looking through the eye of a camera at a rather poor three-dimensional visualization of a dragon in flight. She was looking through a plate of clear plastic at a rather fine two-dimensional picture of a dragon in flight: a dragon whose scales were golden on top and silver beneath, with a head like....

She couldn't find anything with which to compare that head among the ranks of living mammals, birds, and reptiles, nor among the much more extensive ranks of the extinct mammals, birds, and reptiles she had seen in virtual reproduction. There was something dog-like about the jaw and brow, something pig-like about the ears, something lizard-like about the teeth and something hawk-like about the eyes, but the head was no haphazard compound. It had its own integrity and its own ident.i.ty, in spite of being fabulous.

Was it a painting? she wondered. Was it inscribed on paper, or polished stone? She wasn't sure.

Sated by the glory of the dragon, Sara refocused her gaze to take account of the rest of the window-display-which, because the window was only transparent plastic, had to be composed of actual objects.

There were instruments of several different shapes and sizes, many with cables dangling or inartistically coiled, whose purpose she could not begin to grasp, although she could see easily enough that what Father Stephen would have called "the business end" of each device was something like a tiny drill...or a needle.

Looking back from the age of fourteen, Sara could not remember how much of what her six-year-old self had seen had been immediately or eventually understandable. Because she understood it so well now, she could not tell how much she had added to the preserved memory as a result of subsequent research.

She did not doubt, though, that there had been an immediately-perceptible strangeness about the window that was even more profound and remarkable than the sight of the five children.

Sara tugged Mother Quilla's arm, and said: "What's that, Mother Quilla?"

Mother Quilla turned-and Sara noticed that her other four parents immediately turned too, obedient to her curiosity.

"It's supposed to be a dragon," Mother Quilla said.

"I know that," Sara said. "But what sort of shop is it? Why does it have a painting in the window instead of a virtual display?"

"That's the Dragon Man's shop," said Mother Maryelle. "It's been here much longer than I can remember-maybe since the square was new. It's an antique in its own right."

"Yes," Sara said, "but what sort of shop is it?"

"He's just a tailor, really, much like any other tailor," said Mother Jolene.

"No, he's not," said Father Aubrey. "He doesn't do regulation smartsuits, the way Linda Chatrian does. It's all fancy work. Sublimate technology, isn't that what they call it? Moving pictures. Spiders-that sort of thing."

"Biker gear," Father Gustave put in.

"Flyer gear too," Father Aubrey was quick to retort. "But that's not what Sara means. The Dragon Man's very old, Sara. He was a decorator of sorts long before there were smartsuits to decorate-but in those days tailors were people who dealt in dead clothes. The Dragon Man never sold clothes. He worked on skin, so he wouldn't have been thought of as a tailor at all. He was a tattooist, before the art became redundant. As Maryelle says, that display's probably been there for two hundred years-his own private monument. He's still open for business, though. No second pre-childhood for him."

"Don't be silly, Aubie," Mother Maryelle said. "She's only six. How's she supposed to follow all that?"

Even though she hadn't understood everything that Father Aubrey had said, Sara felt free to be offended by Mother Maryelle's a.s.sumption that she wouldn't be able to follow it. She knew, for instance, that Father Aubrey's reference to "a second pre-childhood" was an insult aimed at Father Lemuel's habit of spending at least twenty-three hours a day in his coc.o.o.n, living his whole life-except for house-meetings and the occasional meal, which didn't really qualify as "life"-in Virtual s.p.a.ce. What she didn't know was what a "tattooist" was, or why one might be likened to a modern tailor even though he hadn't been one. Alas, she wasn't able to ask, because the adult conversation had already flowed on, as it so often did, acquiring the kind of mad momentum that made certain parental conversations impossible to interrupt.

"Lem used to know him, didn't he?" said Mother Quilla.