The Dragon Man Part 12

"Are you going to the funeral?" Gennifer asked. "They say it's going to be big. A man that age knows a lot of people-my Mother Leanne says that she and Father Jacob both met him, although Father Jacob claims to have forgotten all about it. I wish my parents would take me, but they won't. You and I will still have to wait for Christmas for our first meeting in meats.p.a.ce."

"Yes," Sara said, when she was finally able to get a word in. "I am going. I'll be in the Hall, in fact."

Gennifer was impressed. "How did your parents w.a.n.gle that?"

"They didn't," Sara said, proudly. "I might not have made the national news, but I was a witness to his last hours-that's how the executor put it. When I say I'll be in the Hall, that's what I mean. Just me. Not even Father Lemuel, although he's known the Dragon Man for more than a century, off and on, and he's determined to be in the memorial garden in the flesh even though he's practically a coc.o.o.n-addict nowadays."

Gennifer was now beyond being impressed; she was awestruck. "My G.o.d!" she said. "Imagine how many women wearing hummingbirds there'll be at a do like that! Thousands!"

"They won't be allowed to fly in the Hall," Sara reminded her. "There's such a thing as decorum. In fact, they won't be flying in the memorial garden either. It says so on the invitation, in so many words. All mobile accessories must remain fixed for one hour after the revelation of the memorial stone."

"Why?" Gennifer asked.

"Decorum," Sara repeated, with all the dignity she could muster. "It's a funeral, not an eight-way marriage or a naming day." Even as she said it, though, she remembered seeing funeral ceremonies on the TV in which the memorial gardens had been filled with flocks of colored birds, which couldn't possibly have been natural. Perhaps, she thought, the Dragon Man had left special instructions.

"Lucky you had that rose fitted, isn't it?" Gennifer observed.

"Is it?" Sara said. "He's dead, Gen. I don't call that lucky."

"He'd have died anyway. This way, you get a front seat at a really big funeral. You didn't kill him, you know. It wasn't your fault he was working on a Sunday evening, and even if he'd been cozily coc.o.o.ned in his bedroom he'd still have pegged out on the Monday."

"It's still not lucky," Sara insisted. "It's just not the right word. Father Gustave says that it's been good for me to make the intimate acquaintance of death, but that's not right either. It's not luck, and it's not good. It's...well, I don't know what it is, but there is such a thing as decorum."

"So you keep saying. Well, I envy you. Will Mike Rawlinson be there, do you think? It was his shadowbat, after all."

"I don't know," Sara said. "I haven't had a chance to talk to him today. I'll call him later if he doesn't call me first."

"Will you, now? Maybe you'll be going to stay with him him for Christmas." for Christmas."

"He only lives just down the road," Sara reminded her. "I can walk to his hometree as easily as he can walk to mine. This whole thing wouldn't have happened otherwise. We don't need to fix up formal visits."

"He's two years older than you are," Gennifer pointed out, cattily. "You're not old enough to be his best friend.

"In the great scheme of things, two years is nothing," Sara told her. In a hundred years time, our ages will be closer than the ages of any two of my parents, or his...or yours, for that matter."

"Oh, be like that," Gennifer said. "Anyway, I won't say enjoy yourself at the funeral, given that you've come over so sensitive, but you still have to tell me the whole story, in more detail than you tell it to anyone else, okay? We're sisters, remember-or as close as anyone ever gets to being sisters nowadays, or ever will again."

"Sisters," Sara repeated, glad to find that the word sounded appropriate.

Gennifer was right, Sara thought; now that all children were born in artificial wombs, from eggs and sperm dutifully deposited in the bank by parents who's been far too polite to exercise their right of replacement while they were still alive, it was unlikely that earthbound humankind would ever again produce any biological sisters, although things were different in the Lagrange colonies. If the earthbound ever did produce any more biological sisters, it was unlikely in the extreme that the sisters in question would be alive at the same time-but that only meant that the word "sister" had been liberated, as the word "junkie" had been, and was now free to acquire new meanings. Yes, she and Gennifer were were sisters, in a brand new sense that made the fact all the more remarkable and all the more exciting. "I'll tell you everything," she added, when Gennifer made no further response. "Everything." sisters, in a brand new sense that made the fact all the more remarkable and all the more exciting. "I'll tell you everything," she added, when Gennifer made no further response. "Everything."

As soon as she had broken the link, she called Mike Rawlinson. "You heard the news?" she said.

"Yes," he said. "I got a whisper during history. I wanted to come and talk to you, but I had things on-commitments I couldn't break. My parents have been bending my ear ever since I logged off. I've only just only escaped. Same with you?"

"No," Sara said. "Either they're being diplomatic and leaving it up to me to mention it first, or they've said everything that had to say already. The last ten days has been a long time. Are you going to the funeral?"

"Yes, of course. I'll see you in the memorial gardens-but I'll have my parents with me, so it'll just be a matter of waving h.e.l.lo and goodbye."

"I'll be in the Hall for the eulogies," Sara told him, not in the least triumphantly.

"That's fair," he said. "You were the last person to see him. If you'd stayed a little longer you'd probably have seen him collapse."

"He didn't want that," Sara told him. "I couldn't have done anything. His IT was rigged to send out an immediate distress call-the ambulance wouldn't have got to him any sooner."

"I know," Mike a.s.sured her. "I only meant that it's right that you should be in the Hall. I'll still see you in the gardens afterwards. I wish I still had the shadowbats-the manufacturers offered me another flock, but I said no. It wouldn't have seemed right."

"I'd quite like to have something to remember him by," Sara said. "Nothing big-a little figure of some kind, on my arm or shoulder. Just a picture, not a flyer or one of Davy's creepy spiders. A golden dragon, like the one in his window."

"It's not there any more," Mike told her. "The shop's been cleared out. It's up for sale. I don't know what happened to all his stock, or his archives. My Father Benjamin says that he must have had a ma.s.sive archive, but I'm not so sure he was the kind of man to keep all his old stuff in drawers and cupboards."

"I saw him at a junk swap once," Sara said. "He collected old tattooing equipment."

"That's different. Anyway, it's all gone, whatever there was. His executor will probably sell it off. Do you know his executor? Someone called Janis Leggett, apparently."

"She lives on the south coast, in Hove," Sara told him, having looked the woman up. "She's his daughter."

"His biological daughter?"

"He wasn't that that old. He was a natural born himself, but he was a parent like our parents. She's like me-the product of an anonymously-donated egg from the early days of the great plague. I'll be interested to meet her." old. He was a natural born himself, but he was a parent like our parents. She's like me-the product of an anonymously-donated egg from the early days of the great plague. I'll be interested to meet her."

"Is she a sublimate technologist too?" Mike wanted to know.

"No. She's an oceanographer in the UN's Climate Bureau. Must have followed in the footsteps of one of her other parents, unless she struck out on her own."

"I might do that," Mike said. "Oceanography, that is, not strike out on my own. My Mother Gaea's a marine ecologist."

"You have a mother called Gaea?" Sara asked. "I bet Father Stephen and Father Aubrey made up some nice jokes about that after the big joint meeting. I'm surprised they haven't told them all to me."

"It's not an uncommon name," Mike said, a little stiffly. "Anyway, the jokers in my family had some fun with Lemuel. We're lucky that kind of thing's gone out of fas.h.i.+on. What do you you want to do when you grow up?" want to do when you grow up?"

"Lots of things," Sara told him. "There'll be time enough to try all sorts of work, on Earth and off it. Someday, I'll go to the moon. By then, who knows what further horizons there'll be?"

"Which of your parents said that to you?"

"All of them, at one time or another. Haven't yours?"

"They're more a don't-rush-into-things-and-don't-try-to-run-before-you-can-walk don't-rush-into-things-and-don't-try-to-run-before-you-can-walk sort of crowd. It's a wonder they ever got around to applying for a license at all, let alone with one another. Did you ever hear the one about a camel being a horse designed by a parental house-meeting?" sort of crowd. It's a wonder they ever got around to applying for a license at all, let alone with one another. Did you ever hear the one about a camel being a horse designed by a parental house-meeting?"

"Camels were extinct before parental house-meetings started," Sara pointed out. "I believe the original reference was to committees in general."

"Well," Mike said, theatrically, "they'd have been extinct a long quicker if my parents had been the committee in question, if they'd ever got off the drawing board in the first place. I bet Janis Leggett's parents could have done a much better job-they had the Dragon Man. He wouldn't have been content with a horse, though. He'd have given it wings, and a horn on its forehead too."

"Yes he would," Sara agreed. "There'll never be anyone like him again. Never. And no matter how long people like Father Lemuel may have known him, we'll be the ones who remember him longest-you and I. We were part of his last adventure."

The older boy smiled at that, but not condescendingly. He smiled to show that he knew what she meant, and felt the same way. "See you at the funeral, Stinky Rose," he said.

"You too, Bat Freak," she replied.

CHAPTER XXIV.

The indoor funeral ceremony was rather tedious, in Sara's opinion. It might have been more interesting if the information about Frank Warburton contained in the various eulogies had been new to her, but by the time the big day came she'd been trawling the web for days and she probably knew more about the man than any mere human acquaintance could possibly remember. The eulogists had undoubtedly consulted the same sources, but propriety demanded that they pretend to be speaking from memory as well as from the heart, so the word-pictures they painted were as hazy as shadowbats in the dusk.

Janis Leggett was, alas, no exception. More than a hundred years had pa.s.sed since Frank Warburton had been one of her adoptive parents, but Sara had always been a.s.sured by her own Mothers and Fathers that although the collective household would not remain together for more than twenty years or so, they would remain her parents forever. Although Sara had never given the matter intensive thought, she had a.s.sumed that she would remain in contact with all her parents, and that she would probably draw closer to them as individuals once she no longer had to confront them as a barely-organized mob on a daily basis.

The Dragon Man's daughter, by contrast, freely confessed that she had not seen Father Frank in the flesh for seventy years, and only ever talked to him on the phone when he called her. She made what was obviously intended to be a humorous reference to his inept.i.tude in calculating time differences when he called her in the South Atlantic-supplemented by a joke about the time-zone difficulties the UN would face if it really did relocate to the south pole-but Sara could see nothing funny in the fact that Frank Warburton had had to try so hard to obtain the attention of his daughter that he had chosen to ignore his desktop AI whenever it told him that she was likely to be fast asleep, because she was somewhere so distant from him that she was living ten or eleven hours ahead of him.

In spite of her determination to remain focused on the speakers, Sara found her attention wandering. She never went so far as to stop thinking about the man whose absence her presence was supposed to be honoring, but she did take leave to wonder how much of his work was on display in the solemn crowd.

There were, as Gennifer had prophesied, an inordinate number of hummingbirds among the living jewelry on display. They were not merely perched on dozens of shoulders like fancy epaulettes but cl.u.s.tered around dozens of elaborate head-dresses and occasionally distributed about in meticulously-linked flocks around the billowing sleeves and pleats of the most ostentatious costumes Sara had ever seen in meats.p.a.ce. None of these, Sara felt sure, were Frank Warburton's work. In his youth, when "tattoos" really had been tattoos, his work might have seemed garish to some-especially when he inscribed brightly-colored dragons in the real flesh of people's upper arms, torsos and ankles-but by today's standards a sublimate engineer was a subtle artist, whose works were exceptionally discreet.

Sara remembered the tone of the Dragon Man's voice as he had told her that sublimate accessories didn't have to be shadows-that they could be as bright as angels or as subtle as phantoms. She had not thought about it much at the time, but she was convinced, now, that he must have been nursing plans for designs far more subtle than any that had yet been advertised. In the meantime, he had fitted Davy's spiders and Mike's bats, glad to help out with their adolescent pretences-but his ambitions, Sara knew, had far exceeded the scope that had yet been granted to him. He had been waiting patiently for the slow wave of fas.h.i.+on to move beyond gimmickry and frippery, and for the potential of the new technology to unwind into a spectrum of splendid opportunity. Alas, he had not had the time to wait.

Unlike the females in the audience-all but a few of whose personal embellishments made Sara's purple rose seem modest in the extreme-the males had set their smartsuits to black, mimicking the formal mourning-dress of the Lost World rather than more recently obsolete SAPsuits. Even if a few shadowy sublimates had been allowed to cling to such costumes-while brighter angels and diaphanous ghosts were hidden away, along with the more substantial produce of former fas.h.i.+on-eras-they were quite invisible.

There was not a dragon to be seen anywhere in the room, and certainly nothing flamboyantly pictorial, in the vein of Was.h.i.+ngton crossing the Delaware. Not one of her parents had been able to interpret that particular joke for Sara, but the phrase was sufficiently exotic not to call up too many hits on a search engine when fed in as a unit; there was even a pre-Crash audio file available, whose survival of the centuries was even more remarkable than Frank Warburton's. Sara suppressed the irreverent tune as it rose unbidden into her memory, and concentrated harder on the present speaker, who had been introduced as the president of some sort of trade union of sublimate engineers. So far as Sara could tell, he had never even met Frank Warburton, although he did seem to be speaking with genuine appreciation about his work-not just his astral tattoos but all his work, including the golden dragon in his window.

It would have been nice, Sara thought, if the image of that dragon, which had hung for so many years in Mr. Warburton's shop window, had been mounted on the wall behind the speaker's podium. She had no idea what had happened to it; as Mike Rawlinson had told her, the shop had been stripped bare and no one seemed to know what had become of its fittings.

"It should be here," Sara murmured, not meaning to speak aloud. She blushed as she realized that she had translated the insistent thought into an audible whisper, but calmed herself when she decided that it had been too quiet for anyone else to hear-not even Linda Chatrian, who was sitting beside her, having promised her parents to "keep an eye on her".

It should be here, Sara repeated to herself, more discreetly. He should be here, but he's not.

Sara savored the layers of meaning contained in the two observations. Frank Warburton was indeed, not here; that was why the funeral was taking place. But he was not present, either, in the eulogies that were being offered, turn and turn about, by people who had known him well a hundred or two hundred years before or had some slight acquaintance with his current work. Nor was he present in the hundreds of smartsuits gathered in the Hall to which he might have made some small decorative contribution. It was as if he had been buried-not literally, even though he was the product of an era when the dead sometimes had been buried-but buried in the minds of his closest friends beneath murky layers of forgetfulness, and buried in the second skins of all his myriad clients by stubborn strata of fas.h.i.+on and convention.

Sara felt a new significance in the fact that she had been "a witness to his last hours". She felt, in fact, that, by virtue of that freak of chance, she had come as close to the real Frank Warburton-as close, that is, to the person he had been at the moment of his death-as anyone in the world.

She had looked around for Mike Rawlinson before she entered the Hall of Remembrance, but she had not found him in the slowly-gathering crowd that was a.s.sembling in the Memorial Garden to watch the ceremony on the hall's exterior display-screen. It seemed to her unjust that Linda Chatrian was sitting beside her rather than him. Mike had, after all, been the catalyst that had brought her together with the Dragon Man, thus allowing her to form a unique bond with him, quite unlike any she had formed with her various parents. Mike was the one who had been moved by grief and wrath to trek across country for a whole kilometer to confront her at the window through which his Gothic emblems had been mistakenly lured. He, too, was not here.

And the eulogists droned on.

"This is pointless," Sara murmured. Again she spoke the words aloud, but too quietly to be overheard-or so she thought, until Linda Chatrian said "Sss.h.!.+" loudly enough for at least half a dozen of their neighbors to hear.

Sara blushed, and bit her tongue.

After that, she hardly dared to form a coherent sentence in the privacy of her own thoughts, for fear that it might escape and attract the censorious attention of the whole crowd. Fortunately, the eulogies had not much further to run, and the indoor part of the ceremony was concluded soon enough.

It seemed to take forever for the crowd to file out through the doors of the Hall of Remembrance. The weight of the occasion made every step ponderous, and provoked an excessive politeness whenever two people came into compet.i.tion to occupy the same s.p.a.ce-with the result that s.p.a.ces which could have been put to perfectly good use often went begging for thirty or forty seconds, until someone finally accepted the necessity of moving ahead of whoever was gesturing them forward with ever-increasing urgency.

Sara was one of the last to leave, although Ms. Chatrian made an ostentatious display of ushering her out in advance of her own venerable presence.

Ms. Chatrian was wearing neither flowers nor avian jewelry, although she had not gone so far as to manifest herself in masculine black. She was clad in all the colors of precious metal, from platinum white through gold to burnished copper-all of which seemed to melt as she moved.

While she was a child, Sara had never thought of Ms. Chatrian as anything less than the perfect embodiment of grace, deportment and fas.h.i.+onability, but she was close enough now to detect a certain stiffness of limb and awkwardness of gait that had to be symptoms of ageing, and it was all too obvious that the tailor's sense of what was in vogue really had fallen behind the times. Sara knew now, because she had checked, that Linda Chatrian was more than two hundred years old-considerably older than any of her parents.

Sara had rejoined her Mothers and Fathers before she finally caught sight of Mike Rawlinson, who was similarly surrounded by his family. Although the two families had met up en ma.s.se en ma.s.se in virtual s.p.a.ce to discuss the stone-throwing incident, they were ostentatiously ignoring one another now-but that calculated ignorance extended as far as giving no sign that anyone in either party noticed the greetings that their children pantomimed to one another. in virtual s.p.a.ce to discuss the stone-throwing incident, they were ostentatiously ignoring one another now-but that calculated ignorance extended as far as giving no sign that anyone in either party noticed the greetings that their children pantomimed to one another.

Ten days earlier, the fact that Sara was able to meet the eyes of an older boy so forthrightly, and exchange conspiratorial grimaces with him, would have seemed highly significant, if not utterly amazing. Now, though, it seemed entirely natural.

There were a dozen other boys close enough not to be obscured by the crowd, whose ages ranged from about twelve to seventeen. Sara knew that every one of them was aware of her presence, and that every single one of them would look longer and harder at her than at any of the other girls within their their sight. Ten days earlier, that knowledge would have terrified her-but not now. sight. Ten days earlier, that knowledge would have terrified her-but not now.

"How was the ceremony, Sara?" whispered Mother Verena. As well as the fixed screen on the outer wall of the Hall there was another on the top of the hill on which the memorial stones were ranked, so everyone in the larger crowd must have been able to see the eulogists in close-up and hear every word they had to say-but Sara knew that Mother Verena hadn't asked the question because she wanted to know what had happened. She had asked the question because she wanted to give Sara the opportunity to give voice to her feelings.

"It was very moving," Sara lied, as she felt obliged to do.

Linda Chatrian was still close enough to favor her with a sharp glance, but the tailor said nothing-as she, in her turn, doubtless felt obliged to do.

"They're about to unveil the stone," said Father Gustave. "What took you so long?"

"No they're not," said Father Lemuel. "It'll take another ten minutes for all the people from the Hall to get into position."

"The stewards are having a terrible time trying to distribute the newcomers," Father Aubrey observed.

"I can't think why they're being so fussy," Mother Quilla said. "Why does everything have to be just so?"

"It's because they're men," Mother Jolene said. "Old men. Very hierarchical. Everyone wants the exact spot that was allocated to him. Men at the top of the hill, women at the bottom. The trouble with living so long is that att.i.tudes no longer change at the same pace as technology."

"They never did, Jo," said Father Lemuel.

"Well, Lem, the gap's getting wider every day," Mother Jolene came back. "Let that be a lesson to you, Sara. You may be living in the twenty-fourth century, but all those old fogies elbowing one another out of the way on the crest of the hill will never get out of the twenty-first, even if they manage to live till the next double-zero year."

Sara followed the direction of Mother Jolene's disapproving gaze with her own eyes, to the place where a company of "old fogies" really did seem to be jockeying for position with undue haste and force. She recognized the president of the sublimate engineers' trade a.s.sociation, who seemed to be trying to restore order. Fortunately, he seemed to be succeeding. Everyone lining the ridge of the sloping garden now seemed to be arranged, more or less, in some sort of pre-planned formation.

"They're not all old," Father Stephen pointed out, punctiliously.

"They are all men, though," Mother Maryelle put in, as if she'd only just noticed.

"Not all," said Mother Quilla, ever avid to match Father Stephen in pedantry. "Just because they're almost all wearing black, it doesn't mean that...."

Mother Quilla stopped in mid-sentence, partly because of the shock and partly because her pedantic judgment had just been overtaken by events.

Sara blinked in surprise, and drew in her breath sharply.

The people gathered in orderly ranks at the top of the hill were no longer wearing black-not all of them, at any rate. They had activated metamorphic transformations preprogrammed into their smartsuits, and they were undergoing a spectacular collective transformation.

It would have been even more spectacular, Sara judged, if they had coordinated their timing a little better, but they were too many for that, and there still seemed to be a certain residual confusion about exactly who was supposed to be positioned exactly where.

Father Lemuel's estimate proved, in the end, to be conservative. Even though it had now become obvious that something was afoot, the minutes dragged on and on as the people making ready continued to make ready, presumably chiding one another for inept timing as rudely as they had earlier demanded more s.p.a.ce.

Some little time before the display progressed to its next phase, Sara had worked out what was going to happen-but that only made waiting for it all the more testing. She understood now why the invitations had specified that all detachable decorations were to remain attached for an hour after the revelation of the memorial stone.

At the moment when the stone was finally revealed, Frank Warburton's work took to the air.