The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “It’s not going to have thorns, is it?” Father Aubrey asked. “You’re spiky enough without, these days.” The last remark was sufficiently unfair to win a frown even from Mother Maryelle.

  “Thorns,” Sara informed Father Aubrey, with all due dignity, “are optional.”

  For a while, it almost seemed as if no one was going to ask about the as-yet-unmanifest perfume, but Mother Maryelle wasn’t going to let her ostentatious sniff go to waste. “I do hope it’s not going to be too strongly scented when it opens,” she said. “It might be your rose, but the hometree’s everyone’s personal space.”

  “You’ll hardly notice it,” Sara promised. “It’s called colibri.”

  Mother Maryelle—who knew no foreign languages—simply looked puzzled, but Father Gustave, always enthusiastic to occupy the intellectual high ground, tipped her off. “Colibri’s French for hummingbird,” he said. “Very nice, I’m sure.”

  Mother Jolene was the only one who picked up the full implication of that revelation. “Does that mean that the flower will attract hummingbirds, when it’s mature enough to start producing nectar?” she asked.

  Sara admitted that it would.

  “There aren’t any hummingbirds in England,” said Father Stephen, frowning slightly because he already knew that he must be missing something.

  “Oh yes there are,” said Mother Quilla. “More and more with every day that passes.”

  “Those silly things that some women have started wearing on their shoulders and around their waists?” Father Gustave said. “But they’re not real hummingbirds—just fancy costume jewelry.”

  “They might not be products of natural evolution,” Mother Quilla told him, “But they’re certainly real—a lot more solid than these astral tattoo things that all the young men are wearing, although some of them can apparently fly free too. Costume hummingbirds have real feathers, real wings and real beaks...and they have real appetites too. They drink nectar from flowers—and it seems that the flowers don’t have to grow in gardens. What possessed you, child? There aren’t any hummingbirds here. Or are you trying to drop heavy hints about our dress sense?”

  “Of course not,” Sara assured her. “I just thought it would be nice, when I go into town, or down to Old Manchester for junk swaps. Any hummingbirds around, far from their gardens at home, will be grateful that I’m around...and if there aren’t any hummingbirds, the scent will just dissipate on the wind. It is discreet, just as Mother Maryelle wanted.”

  Father Lemuel stifled a laugh.

  “Well,” said Mother Jolene, with a sigh, “I suppose it’s a nice thought, in its way. The flower is sterile, I hope—the hummingbirds might be carrying pollen on their beaks from real roses.”

  “Of course it is,” Sara assured her.

  “As a matter of interest,” Father Stephen inquired, “do they make a nectar that attracts suicidal nightingales?”

  Father Gustave was the only one who laughed out loud at that, and he didn’t take the trouble to explain why. He and Father Stephen had always had a penchant for keeping their private jokes under wraps.

  Although four of her parents had voted against the rose, all eight of them seemed sympathetically interested in its progress during the following two weeks—but theirs weren’t the reactions in which Sara was most keenly interested. She did what Davy Bennett had done, adding an icon to her name-tag so that anyone in the school who cared to click on it could see a picture of her new costume—and she made sure that the rumor got around as quickly as possible, although that was hardly difficult.

  As she had hoped, but had not dared to expect, the rose harvested a very satisfying crop of envious admiration. The only augmentation that offered any competition at all within her own age-group was Davy’s spider web, but his shadowspiders weren’t allowed to detach themselves from his person—not, at any rate, within the walls of his ManLiv town house.

  In the mixed-age groups of the games sessions and hobby clubs the rose didn’t seem exceptional at all, because practically everyone in the years ahead of Sara had some sort of additional decoration by now, but it felt good to be a pioneer among her peers, even if everyone else caught up by Christmas. Indeed, Sara congratulated herself on having set a standard which others would now have to strive to meet.

  “I’m having birds myself,” Gennifer reminded everyone, during morning break, although Sara knew that Gennifer had yet to negotiate this through her own house-meeting.

  “I’m having snakes,” Luke Grey boasted. “Not shadowsnakes—solid ones.”

  “With real poison?” Davy asked, oozing incredulity.

  “As much real poison as your spiders,” was the inevitable retort, “and my snakes will be in color”—after which Luke and Davy drifted off to conduct an earnest discussion on whether or not spiders were supposed to be poisonous, or whether they were just as creepy without, and, if so, whether the same arguments were applicable to snakes.

  Even Sara’s class teacher, Ms. Mapledean, was suitably impressed when Sara invited her to click on her new icon after class resumed. “What a pity we won’t get the benefit of the scent,” she said. “On the other hand, I suppose it might be inconvenient to have all the hummingbirds lurking behind the scenes in the year eleven classroom fighting amongst themselves to insert themselves behind the scenes this of one.”

  Sara laughed dutifully at the weak joke.

  “My snakes will eat hummingbirds,” Luke said, missing the point. “And they won’t need to smell them first—so the rest of you had better watch out for your accessories.”

  “I think we ought to be able to duplicate our real suits in our school images,” Davy Bennett said.

  “I don’t,” Leilah Nazir retorted. “I wouldn’t mind Sara’s rose, but there’s no way I’m going to sit in a classroom with your spiders.”

  “You’d better be careful with that sort of talk,” Ms. Mapledean advised, “or the school governors will start talking about a real uniform again. It keeps coming up, you know. Allowing students to wear different colors was a hard-won compromise—if you start pressing for the right to display your animal, vegetable and mineral baubles, you might get the opposite result.”

  “You can’t make us all wear identical smartsuits,” Leilah said, incredulously.

  “They don’t have to, you idiot,” said Julian Sillings. “All they have to do is to make us reprogram our virtual images.”

  “But it would be terrible if our images all looked exactly the same,” Gennifer complained. “We wouldn’t be ourselves any more. We’d be pretending to be all alike. That’s pre-Crash thinking.”

  That’s silly too,” Julian observed. “Our faces wouldn’t have to be identical, would they, Ms. Mapledean?”

  “Why do you say that it’s pre-Crash thinking?” Ms. Mapledean demanded, eager to set the discussion on a genuinely educational path.

  As soon as normality was restored, Sara settled back into her customary half-attentive state of mind. She already knew why uniformity was one of many ideas that had been irredeemably tainted by the Crash, and knew that it had much more to do with armies than schools. Personally, she thought that all her teachers went on far too much about the sins of the pre-Crash world, given that everything was utterly different now and that no one had the slightest desire to make the same mistakes again.

  When the lunch break rolled around and she could spend some time one-to-one with Gennifer, Sara voiced this opinion, and Gennifer readily agreed.

  “It’s a pity about the nectar, though,” Gennifer said. “Living in the wilds, the way you do, you’re not going to attract many hummingbirds.”

  “I don’t live in the wilds,” Sara said. “Blackburn’s a bigger town than Keswick—I just don’t happen to live in the middle of it.

  Mercifully, Gennifer didn’t want to argue about that. “It was a good decision anyway,” she said, generously. “I can’t wait till the flower opens out—it’ll really suit you. And it will attract hummingbirds, every time yo
u go out. The only thing half as sexy as wearing the very best living jewelry is wearing flowers that attract the very best living jewelry. You’re going to have more blossoms than one, I hope?”

  “In time,” Sara told her.

  “Of course,” Gennifer agreed, oozing pretended sophistication, “You’ll have to mind your diet now, though. You’re eating for two. Drinking, anyway—the roots will be tapping your veins, even if the leaves and stem can...what’s the word?”

  “Photosynthesize,” Sara supplied, automatically.

  Father Gustave had told her, almost with nostalgia, that when he had been Sara’s age almost everyone had worn their smartsuits black because the suits themselves had been able to fix solar energy just as plants did—or, to be strictly accurate, just as SAP-systems did. SAP—which stood for Solid Artificial Photosynthesis—was even more efficient than Mother Nature’s chlorophyll, because it absorbed all the light falling upon it instead of reflecting the green part of the spectrum back again. Father Gustave had been trying to imply that he and Father Stephen had good reasons for continuing to wear black, but Sara knew that modern smartsuits were too complicated to get all the energy they needed from sunlight, even in places where it rained a lot less often than it did in Blackburn. Even so, she knew that he did have a point. All smartsuits might be parasitic nowadays, but some were undoubtedly more parasitic than others, and the energy supporting her suit’s further decoration would have to come out of her own metabolism.

  Gennifer had used the phrase “eating for two” in order to echo another taboo of pre-Crash times, before artificial wombs had replaced the inefficient ones provided by Mother Nature, but even its literal meaning was not completely free from macabre undertones. The larger Sara’s new implant grew—whether it put out more flowers or not—the more support it would need. Quantity wouldn’t be a problem, but Linda Chatrian had warned her that she would have to make sure that the rose’s additional dietary requirements were met if she wanted the flower to reach it full potential. The kinds of whole-diet manna with which the hometree’s pantry was abundantly stocked had no special supplements for the manufacture of nectar or the pigments in rose petals, and the supposed luxuries in which her various parents routinely indulged were similarly underequipped. Sara was already paying more attention to the fine details of her diet than she ever had before.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said, to Gennifer. “It’s a big responsibility. But I’m ready for it. So are you. Your parents will understand that—they’re a lot more fashion-conscious than mine.”

  “I hope so,” Gennifer said, with a sigh. “I certainly hope so.”

  CHAPTER XII

  It would have been nice, Sara thought, once her own birthday party was over, if there had been a particular day on which her flower was due to open out—a sort of birthday of its own, which could be celebrated by a suitable invented ritual. Her party had been as much of a success as could be expected, given that all eight of her parents had been involved from start to finish. The virtual world in which it had been held had not only been selected but custom-designed by Father Lemuel, so it had been carefully tailored to her interests, but the great majority of the participants—parents as well as guests—had been using their hoods, so it had been little more than a light show. There had been dragons—not to mention roses and hummingbirds—but there had not been any real intensity, nor any particular sense of companionship...and nothing special, in any intimately personal sense.

  Unfortunately, the flower’s expansion was too gradual to permit the identification of any unique moment of achievement. Thirteen days elapsed between the bud’s first tentative opening and the full display of the flower, which still had to acquire its final conformation and polish—a process which took a further week.

  Sara’s eagerness to see the process through to its conclusion sometimes seemed almost unbearable. She was so obviously impatient that her edginess brought forth a veritable flood of thorn jokes, not just from Father Aubrey but from everyone else—except Father Lemuel, who had not been seen in the communal area of the house since graciously accepting everyone’s thanks for arranging her birthday extravaganza. He attended two house-meetings on camera, even though he would only have had to walk thirty metres to come to the table in person, because he didn’t want to unhook himself from some special neural interface he was busy testing.

  Father Aubrey joked about Father Lemuel too, saying that he was nowadays too far adrift in the virtual multiverse to notice anything that happened in mere meatspace even if it were “handed to him on a plate”. The point of the remark was that Father Lemuel hadn’t seen a plate for a month or more, having been perfectly content to take all his nourishment intravenously within his cocoon. Sara didn’t think the joke was very funny, because she often worried about whether Father Lemuel was really safe when he spent such long periods in his cocoon. Father Aubrey and Father Stephen both liked telling scary stories about people who died in their cocoons and weren’t discovered for months—although Mother Quilla assured her that it couldn’t happen nowadays, because even the artificial idiots that passed for artificial intelligences in hometrees far less sophisticated than theirs could react immediately and effectively to medical emergencies.

  When Sara repeated this assurance back to Father Aubrey and Father Stephen while they were in the garden one evening, they retaliated by telling her that modern smartsuits had now become so smart that they could walk around for days or weeks after the people inside them were dead. Father Stephen told her that such zombies were regularly to be found in attendance at junk swaps, offering the moon on a stick to any charlatan who claimed to have a ready-made elixir of life. That was far too tall a story to obtain an instant’s credence from Sara, but she couldn’t help wondering whether it might come true one day in the not-too-distant future.

  “Of course,” Father Aubrey added, changing tack yet again when he saw that Sara wasn’t fooled, “Lem’s smartsuit is specially programmed to make sure nothing happens to his body while, as he quaintly insists on putting it, his spirit is on the Other Side, so....”

  “He doesn’t say any such thing,” Sara said, cutting the new horror story off before it had a chance to become silly. “Father Lemuel’s a real explorer. And he makes new virtual universes, too. You shouldn’t say nasty things about him when he put so much money into the hometree.”

  Father Aubrey had the grace to laugh at that, and apologize, but Father Stephen frowned as he jabbed his trowel into the soil of the herb garden. Weeding was a task he always performed with a slight attitude of disgust, even when Father Aubrey—who was the herb garden’s designer and principal apologist—was actually present. “Lem’s got no right to go on to you about how much he put into the hometree,” Father Stephen said. “We all put in our fair share. You never see Lem out here, getting his hands and knees dirty. We all worked for a living until we took time out, and I still go into the ManLiv factory three days a week. We can’t all do our jobs in Virtual Space—someone has to tend to the sharp end. No matter how smart your software is, you need machines to carry them out, and machines need engineers. Real engineers.”

  “We all get our hands dirty now and again, Steve,” Aubrey said, soothingly. “Even if some of us are a bit reluctant to kneel down in the dirt. You need to be more careful with that trowel—you’ll injure the roots of the rosemary. Sara wasn’t accusing us of not doing our share, were you, Sara?”

  “No,” Sara said. “I just didn’t like you being nasty about Father Lemuel.”

  “You don’t have to take his side because you think he got you the vote in house meetings, and your precious rose,” Father Stephen said. “Everyone who casts a vote does it with the best of intentions.”

  “Sara knows that, Steve,” Father Aubrey told him, speaking even more gently. “And she knows who takes her to junk meets, in spite of having to work three days a week, and who used to give her good stuff from his collection so that she could swap it for dragons.”

&
nbsp; That did the trick. Father Stephen got up from his kneeling position and drew himself up to his full height—as he always did when he wanted to seem impressive, although Sara suspected that he’d merely been seized by a sudden awareness that his carping was only making him seem ungracious. “And that’s why you should take us seriously,” he said, “when we give you solemn warnings about zombies in smartsuits and cocoons that turn into coffins. We know about things like that.”

  “And thanks to you,” Sara told them, grinning to show that she wasn’t serious, “so do I.”

  And so the time went by, until the rose had not only opened all the way but had acquired its final veneer and begun to secrete its nectar. It was then that Sara realized that there would be a particular moment to mark its maturity after all: the moment when the rose was visited by its first nectar-seeking hummingbird.

  Not unexpectedly, though, that didn’t happen right away, even though the perfume was a little less discreet than she had promised her parents. The nectar’s scent was certainly subtle, but it gradually built up in the dining room until it became distinctly noticeable.

  “If this goes on,” Mother Jolene observed, when everyone except Father Lemuel was gathered for dinner one Wednesday evening, “we’ll have whole flocks of hummingbirds zeroing in on us from every point of the compass every time we open a window—and it is July, going on August.

  “I don’t notice it myself,” Sara said, blushing slightly. “I’ve got used to it. But the scent dissipates very quickly in the open air—I’ve had my bedroom window open for three nights running, but not a single hummingbird’s picked up the scent as yet.”

  Father Aubrey seemed to be amused by this admission, but it seemed that he couldn’t think of a joke in time to slip one in. Father Gustave took a more practical approach to the issue. “It’s just that no one has bothered to program the air-filters to take the perfume molecules out,” he said. “If you can’t stand it, Jo, you’re very welcome to pop down to the cellar and retune the system yourself. I could try if you want me to, but Lem’s the expert”