The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  Sara had been aware for a long time that heads would turn whenever she came into town, and that her presence was always being noticed by passers-by. On the whole, though, the people who noticed her did so discreetly. It simply wasn’t done for strangers to look too long and hard at a child, let alone speak to one. Sara always looked at other children herself, and almost always recognized any who were within two or three years of her own age, but the etiquette involved in two groups of parents coming together to negotiate any contact more elaborate than a casual nod and a friendly smile was complicated, and there never seemed to be any pressing need to make contact in real space when contact in virtual space was so easy and relaxed.

  This was different. For one thing, she was unescorted. She was also sporting a decoration manifestly designed to be noticed and admired—not to mention the two hummingbirds dancing in the air before her.

  For the first time in her life, Sara became acutely conscious of the difference between merely being noticed and being the centre of attention.

  She didn’t wait to find out when and how the hummingbirds would settle their dispute. She bolted for the door of Linda Chatrian’s shop. It wasn’t until she heard it slide shut behind her that she paused to regret the fact that she must have looked like a silly coward to thirty, forty or even fifty pairs of interested eyes.

  She had to pull herself together as she approached the desktop in reception, glad that it was only manned by a screen-based AI. Start again, she instructed herself, firmly. You have to get used to being out and about without half a dozen parents forming a protective wall between you and the world.

  Fortunately, Ms. Chatrian wasn’t busy. Sara didn’t have to sit in reception for long—which was perhaps as well, given that Sara had always found the tailor’s reception area rather uncomfortable. It was so very clean and orderly by comparison with the communal rooms in the hometree that she was always anxious about the possibility of leaving accidental smudges on the glossy furniture, or misting the polished surfaces of the desk and occasional table by breathing out too vigorously.

  “It’s coming along nicely,” the tailor observed, warily, when Sara was admitted to her presence. “Any hummingbirds come fluttering round it yet?”

  “Two, when I got out of the cab,” Sara admitted. “There might be a problem.”

  “What problem?” Ms. Chatrian asked, through slightly-pursed lips.

  “I left my window open the other night,” Sara explained, “but no hummingbirds flew in. I got shadowbats instead.”

  “Really?” said the tailor. “They’re quite pretty when they’re in flight, aren’t they? I’ve had a few requests for sublimate accessories, but they’re not quite my style. Sublimation technology is progressing by leaps and bounds, so I suppose we’ll all get used to it soon enough, but detachable shadows...I was talking about them to your Father Stephen only the other week, and he called them ‘airy-fairies from Cloudcuckooland’. It’s a joke, you see....”

  “I know,” Sara said, patiently. “Father Aubrey told it to me before he told it to Father Stephen, and Father Gustave explained it. The shadowbats were attracted by the scent of the rose. They were soaking it up from the air—getting drunk on it.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Sara,” Ms. Chatrian said, in her most imperious adults-know-best voice.

  “I’m sure I’m not,” Sara countered, feeling that she had been cowardly enough for one day.

  Linda Chatrian was too worldly wise to be so easily wrong-footed. “What did your parents say about it?” she asked.

  “I haven’t told them,” Sara said, flatly. “I thought it was a matter between you and me.”

  “Me?” the tailor said, disingenuously. “I don’t see that it concerns me. I supplied exactly what you asked for. Colibri is designed to attract hummingbirds...but I suppose that whatever smells sweet to hummingbirds is bound to smell sweet to other things as well. Shaped sublimates may be simple entities by comparison with creatures of flesh and blood, but they need some kind of sensory apparatus to guide themselves around, and smell is the obvious one to use. It’s not entirely surprising that they might be attracted by a strange scent.”

  “They were absorbing the perfume,” Sara said, doggedly, although she knew that she had no proof of it but her own conviction. “It had an effect in them.”

  Ms. Chatrian made as if to shrug her shoulders, but thought better of it. Her slim shoulders, conspicuously unadorned by hummingbirds or any other modern frippery, were perfectly designed to illustrate contempt—but that wasn’t an attitude Ms. Chatrian wanted to display to a customer whose family were regulars. “I’m very sorry, Sara,” the tailor said, “but I don’t think there’s anything I can do anything about that. If there’s a complaint to be made—and if what you say is true, I certainly agree that there might be—then it ought to be addressed to the manufacturers of the shadowbats. I’m sure they’ll be interested to know that their nice new technology has a good old-fashioned glitch.”

  Sara observed that Ms. Chatrian’s voice was slightly smug as well as casual. As a tailor who hadn’t yet involved herself with the new technics, Linda Chatrian was not in the least displeased by the thought that they might have thrown up an unfortunate side-effect—but she obviously didn’t want to get involved if she could avoid it.

  Sara thought about insisting that Ms. Chatrian ought to help her find out what had happened, but decided that the tailor was right. If she had a complaint to make, she really ought to take it up with the people who had made the intoxication-prone shadowbats. If, on the other hand, she were merely curious—Sara hadn’t quite made up her mind about that—the supplier would be more likely than a tailor to be able to give her further information.

  “If the shadowbats were local,” Sara said, determined to get some profit from the meeting, “Who’s most likely to have fitted them?”

  “It’s not really my field,” Ms. Chatrian replied, cautiously. “I wouldn’t like to make accusations based on guesswork. There’s a matter of professional ethics, you see...but I can check the local section of the web-directory for you, if you like.”

  Sara made no reply, but the tailor turned to the desktop anyway, tapping away at the keypad with a single slim finger, as if she were too refined to type with all ten fingers. After a few seconds she said: “There are three sublimate technologists in Blackburn, five if you include Preston. If you widen the search as far as ManLiv....”

  “That’s all right,” Sara said. “Perhaps the Dragon Man will know. His shop’s just around the corner.”

  Ms. Chatrian turned back to look at her then, obviously relieved to have the matter taken out of her hands. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Bats would be his sort of thing, wouldn’t they? He’s quite cutting-edge, in spite of the fact that his window-display’s all needles and blades, and he certainly attracts clients interested in...the macabre. Your Father Lemuel would probably patronize his establishment rather than mine, if he cared about appearances at all.”

  Sara knew an opportunity to score a point when she saw one, so she said: “Well, perhaps I’ll take a look at his catalogues myself.”

  Unfortunately, Linda Chatrian wasn’t in the least intimidated. “I’m sure he’ll be only too pleased to help you,” was all she said in reply, without the slightest twitch of her professional smile.

  Sara made the most dignified exit she could contrive, and squared her shoulders as she stepped back into the street, ready to defy the crowd no matter how intense its stares became. While she was standing there, preparing to take her first step in the direction of the New Town Square, the two waiting hummingbirds resumed their intricate dance—but now they were quickly joined by two more.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” Sara murmured, just loud enough to be heard by the nearest passers-by. She marched off, nursing a growing sense of resentment at the fact that the long-anticipated moment hadn’t worked out at all as she’s hoped and expected.

  The four hummingbirds followed her, fl
uttering around her head as if in panic. It was obvious that that none of them was ever going to be able to find time and space enough to hover before her rose and sip its lovely nectar, unless she intervened in their contest. For ten or fifteen paces she refused to do that, intending to hurry as quickly as she could to the door of the Dragon Man’s shop—but then she remembered the pang of regret that had afflicted her when she heard Linda Chatrian’s door close behind her.

  What a fool the watching crowds would think her, to have fitted a rose with colibri perfume, and then to think that questing hummingbirds were a nuisance to be avoided.

  She slowed down as she crossed the square, until she finally came to a halt beside the fire fountain. There were parents with little children ringed around it, posed in attitudes of dutiful awe—but the parents were already glancing surreptitiously in Sara’s direction, and some few of the children had already tired of the rain of shimmering sparks.

  When she first reached out with her hands Sara felt very awkward, and was afraid of seeming as awkward as she felt, but the hummingbirds’ tiny brains were programmed to expect and respect human guidance. She had no difficulty at all in waving three of the birds away, so that they paused in patient expectation while the fourth took up a position at the mouth of her rose, and politely extended its beak. Then, as easily as if she were a practiced expert—although the skill was all to the birds’ credit—she let the others descend, one by one, to take their turns.

  Because she was in a place where everyone routinely stopped to stand and stare, there seemed nothing particularly unusual in the fact that she was surrounded by curious gazes.

  Why shouldn’t they watch? she said to herself, silently. Why shouldn’t they enjoy it, given that it’s there to be enjoyed?

  A few cool sparks from the over-energetic fire-fountain drifted sideways in the breeze, falling upon and around her, extinguished as soon as they made contact with the flesh of her smartsuit. She couldn’t tell whether the adults watching her were admiring her flower or secretly condemning her as a pathetic show-off who ought to be old enough by now to be less avid for adult attention, but she was confident that the rapt attention of the little children was honest. After all, she had once been a child herself

  Ten minutes later, the hummingbirds were sated and Sara had more than enough courage in reserve to step up to the Dragon Man’s shadowed door. She passed through it as soon as it opened to her touch.

  CHAPTER XV

  Unlike Ms. Chatrian, the sublimate technologist manned his own reception desk—which was situated in a room as different from Ms. Chatrian’s tastefully sterile, user-friendly, pastel-shaded antechamber as anyone could imagine.

  The Dragon Man’s shop was dingy and dusty, and the walls were covered in dead pictures rather than window-screens. So far as Sara could tell, the only screen in the room was the one on the desk on which the proprietor was currently resting the absurdly boot-like soles of his smartsuit. The lamp on his desk was placed so that it illuminated the chair on which clients might sit; his own face was in shadow.

  Sara knew that the Dragon Man looked older than anyone else she had ever seen in the flesh, but, even though she was standing much closer to him now than she had been when they had exchanged a single speculative glance four years before, she couldn’t she him clearly enough to make out the details of his remarkable face. What she could see clearly, though, was that there wasn’t anything remotely like the image of a dragon on his delicately-patterned smartsuit. His nickname suddenly seemed woefully ill-fitting. There didn’t seem to be as much of him within his extra skin as there was of most people, and Sara was slightly embarrassed to be reminded of Father Stephen’s gleeful recitation of the urban legend about people who wore suits so smart that they kept right on going when their wearers died, until nothing was left of the individual inside but a mere skeleton.

  “Hello, Miss Lindley,” the Dragon Man said, speaking from the shadows in an unexpectedly warm voice. “That’s a nice rose—it really suits you. What can I do for you?” He took his feet off the desk but he remained seated, and shadowed.

  Sara felt perversely annoyed with herself when the only thing that she could find to say in response to this greeting was: “How do you know my name?”

  “Please sit down, Miss Lindley,” the Dragon Man said—and waited until she did so before continuing. “Children are a rare and precious commodity nowadays,” the astral tattooist said, softly. “Not just to their elective parents. Did you ever hear the saying that it takes a village to raise a child?”

  “Everyone has,” Sara told him. She leaned forward, but the lamp was too cleverly-positioned; the Dragon Man’s face was as deeply shadowed from this angle as it had been when she was standing up.

  “Well, it might have been true once,” the Dragon Man told her. “Nowadays, though, it can easily take a whole city. I think you’ll find that everybody in town knows your name, Miss Lindley—even people you’ve never spoken to, and wouldn’t recognize if you bumped into them on the street. It’s a quiet sort of celebrity, but it’s more substantial in its way than anything brokered by TV. You were the only one in your year, you see, this side of Kendal or ManLiv. Think of that! No...don’t. It seems quite normal to you, of course—but even people of your parents’ ages, let alone mine....” He left the sentence dangling.

  Sara remembered the people who had been looking at her earlier that day. She remembered how she had fled from them once, and refused to flee a second time. Would it have made a difference, she wondered, if she’d realized that every one of them, save perhaps for the children, had known her name?

  “You know Father Lemuel and Father Gustave,” she said, accusingly. “That’s how you know my name.”

  The Dragon Man shook his head slightly, as if to deny that he’d been exaggerating, although the gesture was barely visible. “I haven’t seen Lem in twenty years,” he said. “Before you were born.” But he didn’t say it is as if were a denial of her accusation; he said it as if it were something he regretted slightly—as if he should have kept in closer contact with Father Lemuel, but hadn’t.

  In any case, Sara thought, Father Lemuel’s surname wasn’t Lindley. She was named after her biological father, according to custom. How would eight parents ever have settled the question of which of them their child ought to be named after, if the custom had been otherwise?

  “Everybody takes an interest in children, Miss Lindley,” the sublimate technologist said, mistaking her silence for confusion. “More than you’ll understand, until you’re a little older.” There was a peculiar wistfulness in the old man’s tone that made Sara feel uncomfortable.

  “Ms. Chatrian says that you’re the man to talk to about shadowbats,” she said, deciding that it was time to get to the point.

  “Very kind of her, I’m sure,” the old man said, equably. “Knowing Linda, though, I doubt that she’d be sending you to me if you wanted to order a few extra decorations in a different style. So what about shadowbats?”

  “A flock of them came into my room the other night,” Sara told him. “They were attracted by the scent of my rose.”

  The Dragon Man sniffed audibly. “Colibri?” he asked, after a slight pause.

  Sara nodded, and the Dragon Man nodded too. “You left your window open expecting hummingbirds,” he deduced. “Your first hummingbirds, at a guess. I can see how a flock of shadowbats might have been a disappointment...and a puzzle.”

  “You don’t seem very surprised,” Sara observed. “Ms. Chatrian agreed that the perfume might have attracted the bats—a glitch in the new technology, she said—but she didn’t believe me when I said that they seemed to be absorbing the scent from the air...and getting drunk on it.”

  The Dragon Man shifted his position slightly, but he didn’t expose his face. He lifted his bony shoulders in what might have been a shrug. His shoulders, unlike Ms. Chatrian’s, had no talent at all for expressing contempt. “New technology always does more than it’s intended to,” he sa
id, pensively. “Shaped sublimates are designed to soak up everything they need from their hosts, but the absorption process is necessarily crude; it’s not surprising that they sometimes soak up other things as well. Nobody notices, for the most part, but perfume is...well, more noticeable. You have to remember that they’re creatures like none that natural selection ever produced, and that they don’t know what they’re not supposed to do. They have built-in inhibitions about settling on anyone else’s surskin, but fluttering around is the name of their game. You weren’t afraid, I hope?”

  “Of course not,” Sara said. “I knew they couldn’t hurt me, even if they touched me, or if I breathed one in—but I wondered if they might be in danger.”

  The old man shifted in his seat again, as if Sara’s story were causing him some slight disturbance, but he clung stubbornly to his protective shadow. He must have set things up this way to protect his clients from the sight of him, Sara thought. But if he’s willing to do that, why won’t he use the cosmetic potential of his smartsuit?

  “They seemed to be getting drunk, did they?” the Dragon Man murmured, as if he were trying to get the thought more securely into his head. “And you think they might have overdone it, poor things? I don’t think they’d readily take aboard anything that would do them harm...but new technology always has unexpected glitches, just as lovely Linda says. Who knows?” He paused for a few moments before adding: “It would be interesting, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Would it?” Sara countered.

  “Biochemically interesting, I mean. Colibri is a moderately complex cocktail, and the metabolic systems of sublimated quasi-life are straight off the drawing-board, so I doubt if they were ever formally introduced in the lab. It must be idiosyncratic to the flock, though—there are plenty of interaction opportunities in ManLiv, and even more down south. Linda doesn’t meddle much with her off-the-shelf products, so the scent must be standard, unless there’s been some weird interaction with your personal metabolism—but the shadowbats would be the prime suspects anyhow, given that they’re in the earliest stages of their evolution.” He stopped, and waited, as if to give Sara the opportunity to complain if the argument were beyond her comprehension.