The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “Hello again, Miss Lindley,” the Dragon Man said, very mildly. He had apparently forgotten their agreement to call one another by their first names.

  “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Warburton,” she said, stiffly, “but I thought it would help you to figure out what had gone wrong if I brought you one of the shadowbats.”

  The sublimate engineer took the jar from her and peered at the dormant shadowbat. “What’s the colored stuff on the walls?” he asked.

  “My kaleidobubbles must have leaked,” Sara said, apologetically. “They were in there for a long time. It won’t have harmed the shadowbat, will it?”

  The Dragon Man shrugged his bony shoulders. “If the perfume of your rose has weird effects, who knows what the decay products of old kaleidobubbles might do?” he said. “Can’t tell anything by looking. I’ll probably need to do a complete proteonomic analysis, although I might be able to narrow the possibilities down with a quick gel-spread. Do you want to watch?”

  Sara was mildly surprised by the invitation, which she accepted with alacrity. She was in no hurry to go back home again.

  “Better come through, then,” he said, leading the way into an inner room.

  Sara wasn’t surprised to discover that the sublimate technologist’s workshop had as little in common with Linda Chatrian’s consulting-room as his reception area had with the tailor’s. Some of the labtop equipment was similar, although Frank Warburton had nothing like the vats where the tailor grew her embryonic smartsuits or the suspension-clambers where she fitted them. Whatever he meant by a “gel-spread”, he obviously didn’t do it in the kind of tank in which Sara had been laid out while the winding stem of her rose had integrated itself into her surskin.

  Ms. Chatrian liked whiteskin walls and a lightly-perfumed but reassuringly sterile atmosphere; she also favored extra-large windowscreens and Morris chairs upholstered in royal blue and chocolate brown. In stark contrast, the Dragon Man’s walls and furniture were stone dead, and his wallscreens were more like portholes than casement windows. Unlike Ms. Chatrian, the Dragon Man obviously liked shelves. He had lots of shelves, many of them filled with jars charged with what looked like colored smoke but obviously wasn’t. The air was loaded with a rich cocktail of barely-perceptible odors—as was only to be expected, given the lack of smart walls—and there was more clutter piled up in each and every corner than Sara had ever had in her cupboard, giving the room a curiously rounded aspect. The labtops were clean, though, and the equipment to which the Dragon Man turned his attention seemed to be ready-primed and set to go.

  Sara half-expected the shadowbat to make a bid for freedom as soon as the screw-top of the jar was removed, but it remained quiescent. It had to be prompted with the point of a long needle before it would condescend to slide on to a gelatinous sheet in the bottom of a rectangular tray. After waiting for a couple of minutes, Mr. Warburton coaxed it on to a rag of synthetic skin. Sara saw that it had left an imprint on the gel, like a ghostly shadow—or, given that it was a shadow of sorts itself, a ghost of a ghost.

  “Sit down,” the Dragon Man said to Sara.

  In the absence of Morris chairs, Sara had no alternative but to perch on a stool beside the rag. She looked down at the shadowbat, hoping that it would be all right. She wondered whether it was feeding, and whether it would be able to fly again once it had.

  In the meantime, the Dragon Man laid a paper-thin sheet of something soft and white over the shadow on the gel in order to take yet another, even fainter, imprint. This one he carefully rolled up; then he set the scroll on the edge of another rectangular bath of gel. This bath was fitted with a cluster of external wires and numerous dials. Three eye-like red circles were lit up as he tripped a hidden switch.

  Mr. Warburton watched the placid surface for two minutes, although nothing as happening to it that Sara could detect. Then he went back to the first imprint, whose supportive medium had now become so viscous as almost to have set hard. This time, the Dragon Man used a scalpel to cut out the imprint, and a broad spatula to lift it from the tray. He slid the near-solid lump into a beaker half-full of another viscous liquid, into which it seemed to dissolve entirely. Then he poured a measure of the solution into the maw of a pot-bellied machine which put Sara in mind of the inorganic parts of the hometree’s plumbing systems—the parts that were so ugly they were tastefully hidden away in the cellar. Nothing now remained in the gel-bath but a cartoonish cut-out, which was only slightly reminiscent of a bat with extended wings.

  “Right,” said the Dragon Man, pulling another stool from under the bench so that he could sit down too. “The full proteonome analysis will take at least four hours, probably six, even though the poor little devil only has a few dozen pseudogenes. The chromo-trace should tell if there’s anything untoward going on, though, and ought to offer a few clues as to how and why....” He broke off as he seemed to realize, suddenly, that Sara didn’t understand what he was telling her. “Sorry,” he said. “Just a second.”

  His fingers danced on a virtual keyboard projected on the desk in front of one of the wallscreens, which was displaying a series of diagrams far more complicated than anything Sara had yet studied in school. She did her best to look as if she were capable of taking an intelligent interest.

  “Right,” the Dragon Man said. “It’s getting on with the job. There’s time to explain, if I’m up to it. Do you know what a proteonome is?”

  Sara shook her head.

  “What about a genome?”

  “It’s a set of genes,” Sara said. “Chromosomes. DNA. A set of instructions for making a person—or an animal.”

  “That’s right. Every genome has an equivalent proteonome—the full set of proteins that its genes can produce. Some genes work in collaboration, you see, to produce whole populations of related proteins. Different sets of genes are active in different kinds of cells, producing different sets of proteins, so that tissues and organs can do different jobs within the body. When I was born, human bodies had to get by with the genes and proteins that nature provided, but you and I are both equipped with several extra sets. Your smartsuit has the most obvious one, but various bits of your internal technology have minigenomes of their own. It’s not as marvelous as it might seem—pre-Crash humans had resident bacteria, and every cell had mitochondria with genes of their own, as well as the genes in the chromosomes. We’ve just taken the process a little further. Are you with me so far?”

  Sara didn’t feel that a mere nod was sufficient, so she tried to anticipate the next step in the argument. “And the shadowbat’s just an extra bit of smartsuit, or an extra piece of IT,” she said. “Another genome, another pre-pro....”

  “Proteonome,” the Dragon Man finished for her, as her tongue faltered over the unfamiliar word. “That’s right—except that DNA isn’t equipped to produce vaporous entities, so what the shadowbat has instead makes up what we call pseudogenes...although they still produce proteins, so we can still talk about its proteonome without having to modify the term, even though many of the proteins have never been generated before by natural or artificial genomes. Sorry, that’s probably unnecessarily complicated. To cut a long story short, although sublimate organisms—astral tattoos, in the advertising jargon—have gone through all the standard tests to make sure that they’re safe to wear, that doesn’t mean that every possible interaction between shadowbat proteins and the proteins produced by natural and artificial genomes has been investigated. There’s still scope for surprises, especially when one new technology comes into contact with another.”

  “Just because it’s safe for us to wear shadowbats,” Sara said, looking down at the dark patch on the rag of synthetic skin, “it doesn’t mean that it’s safe for the shadowbats to be worn.”

  “That’s true,” the Dragon Man conceded. “Sublimate organisms—sublimate just means that they can pass from the solid to the vaporous state without going through a liquid phase, by the way—are rather delicate. It may not have been very w
ise for the owner of the flock you encountered to let them stray. Having said that, though, there hasn’t been any previous report of shadowbats reacting oddly to colibri nectar. I checked that very carefully. Which probably means that someone—probably me—has altered these particular shadowbats in such a way as to open up the possibility.”

  “Why would you—or someone else—have done that?” Sara asked, warily.

  “I’m not the only inveterate tinkerer in the world,” Frank Warburton said, defensively. “Everyone does it. Everyone with an atom of curiosity. Anyhow, although the full analysis will take a few hours, tickling the secondary trace with a little electricity in this bath here will separate the organic compounds into a line-spectrum, like the ones police scientists and the newsvids call genetic fingerprints. Comparing that to the print the bat is supposed to produce should tell us in a matter of twenty or thirty minutes whether there is an anomaly, and might offer a clue as to its nature. Until then we might as well make polite conversation. Your parents know about the shadowbat, I suppose?”

  “Oh yes,” said Sara. “They also know about every move I made yesterday.”

  “Ah,” the Dragon Man murmured. “The old jungle telegraph. It never fails to deliver the news. Are they annoyed with me too?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sara reassured him. “Father Lemuel sent you his best wishes, and he wouldn’t have done that if he’d been annoyed. In fact, he wouldn’t have persuaded the others to let me bring the shadowbat in if he’d been seriously annoyed with either of us. I think it was more a matter of them thinking that they had to make a point.”

  “That’s understandable,” the Dragon Man observed, obviously feeling that he ought to be supportive of Sara’s parents. “Do you mind if I send Lem a message to let him know I’ve invited you to wait for the preliminary results of my inquiry? I don’t want your parents to worry.”

  “Not at all,” Sara replied, politely. She waited until he had dispatched the text message before saying: “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “About my horrid face?”

  Sara blinked in surprise. “No!” she said. “No...it was just...well, as you’ve known Father Lemuel for such a long time, and as you knew my name before ever seeing me...I wanted to ask you whether you knew the man I was named after—Gerard Lindley, my biological father?”

  It was the Dragon Man’s turn to look surprised. “Why would I?” he blurted out. “Sorry...I mean, no, I don’t think so. Do you have some reason to think that I might have known him?”

  “Not really,” Sara confessed. “I suppose it’s because I don’t know very much about him myself, except that he lived in these parts during his later years, that I thought you might...although I suppose Father Lemuel might have mentioned it, if he thought...sorry. It’s just that most of the kids in my class know quite a bit about their biological parents, because at least some of their parents knew them when they were alive. I’ve asked my parents why they decided to look after the child of people they didn’t know, but all they said was that someone had to look after the children of parents that nobody knew, and they’d decided it was a good thing to do. There doesn’t seem to be any record of my biological mother at all, because she died during the Crash, and all I can find out about my biological father is his name, dates and some of his places of residence. He didn’t live very long, but he didn’t die till 2161. That’s long before Father Lemuel was born but...you were alive then, weren’t you?”

  “Yes I was,” Mr. Warburton answered, softly. “So it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that I did meet your biological father, even though I can’t remember it. He could even have been a customer—all my records of that era are long-lost. Your parents are right, you know. A great many people deposited sperm and eggs during the Crash, not knowing whether they’d ever be used—or even whether there’d be anyone around to use them. If today’s parents all insisted on exercising the rights of people they knew personally, the genetic heritage of most of the Crash’s victims would be lost. You’ve probably been told in school that loss of genetic variety within a species is always a bad thing, but modern genetic engineering can cope with the practical problems—what’s really at stake is a point of principle.”

  “The right to found a family,” Sara said, to demonstrate that she could easily keep up with this phase of the conversation.

  “There was a time, during the Crash, when we thought everybody might have lost that right,” the old man told her, in a somber tone.

  Sara knew that, of course, as a bare fact—she had been informed of it at least once by nearly every adult she had ever come into contact with—but this was the first time that any of her informants had ever been able to mean “we” in a more literal sense than “the human race”. Frank Warburton had actually lived through the latter years of the Crash.

  Sara waited for him to go on.

  CHAPTER XIX

  “I was born a little too early to be a miracle child myself,” the Dragon Man said, with a faint sigh. “The plague of sterility was running riot, but children were still being born, and the panic hadn’t yet extinguished hope that cures could be found to make the infertile fertile again. The banks of sperm and eggs still seemed to most of us to be a precautionary measure—something we’d only have to fall back on if the worst came to the worst, and just to help out for a while even then.”

  Sara nodded, to let him know that she understood what he was saying, and wanted him to continue.

  “When I was your age—that would be 2112 or so, I guess—we had no idea that the historians of the future would decide that the Crash was already completed and that we were already into the Aftermath. We didn’t know that there were too many different viruses, or that too many of them had already wormed their way permanently into the genome. We didn’t understand that the old world had already ended. Imagine that! The world as we knew it was finished, and we didn’t even know. Our own parents...our own biological parents...were still trying to save it. Except, I suppose, for those who were still trying to destroy it. Do they tell you in school that the plagues came out of biological warfare labs, or have they drawn a polite curtain over that sort of thing?”

  “I think they tell us the truth,” Sara said, slightly shocked by the idea that they might not. “Ms. Mapledean says there’s no way to be sure of the origin of any particular virus, because they were mutating so quickly and no one ever admitted to anything, but that it was definitely a war of sorts.”

  “Of sorts,” the Dragon Man echoed. “That’s right. Sorts that people had never been able to fight before. At least you had to meet your enemy face to face when people used to fight with clubs and swords—you even had to know who he was. In a plague war, everyone who hasn’t had the right injections becomes an enemy by default...and nobody had all the right injections, no matter who he was or how deep his bunker might be. Anyway, no one had actually accepted the fact, as yet, that the world would have to be comprehensively reinvented and totally redesigned. No one had yet grasped the fact that no human female would be able to bear a child of her own for...I don’t know how long. I suppose we could put the clock back, now, if we ever wanted to. We have the technology now—but we didn’t have it during the Aftermath.

  “I don’t remember there being a day, or a year, when we all recognized that things had changed forever. It crept up on us. Artificial wombs were designed, perfected, used...but there wasn’t a point in time when everybody accepted that they weren’t just a stopgap, or an emergency measure. We kept on anticipating a future that never came, until the realization dawned that we’d been living in a new world for decades, and that it was now the world, a way of life we were stuck with. It was evolution, not revolution, too gradual to be clearly perceived.

  “The natural miracle children became rarer and rarer, and the technological miracle children gradually became commonplace. I suppose they teach you in school that it all worked out for the best, that it was necessary as well as lucky—and so it was—but i
t didn’t seem like that when we were living through it. We lived it as tragedy, and those of us who are left still remember it that way.”

  “But it was necessary,” Sara murmured, when the old man looked for a response.

  “Yes, it was,” he agreed. “In a world where everyone might live to be three hundred, or three thousand, it’s necessary as well as polite that we should all postpone the exercise of our right to have children—our right of replacement—until we’re dead. It’s the only way we can live on the Earth without bringing about another ecocatastrophe even worse than the Crash. It’s the way it has to be.”

  “And it was lucky,” Sara added, echoing what Ms. Mapledean had said about the matter. “The ecocatastrophe would have been even worse if it hadn’t been for the plague of sterility.”

  “Maybe,” conceded the Dragon Man. “Some said, even then, that we’d have been a lot luckier if the plague had hit a hundred years earlier, in the 1980s instead of the 2080s. If it had, we might have prevented a lot more extinctions. On the other hand, it would have been a lot harder to develop the technologies we needed to save the situation before we became extinct. There was no ideal time for any of it to happen. I guess we were lucky to come through it at all.”

  “Not just lucky,” Sara said, seeking further confirmation of the story she’d been told so many times. “Clever and brave.”

  “Clever and brave,” the Dragon Man repeated. “Which, loosely translated, means that when people finally had no choice but to do what was necessary, they did it. Some of them. Enough of them, at any rate. Yes, it needed ingenuity—and yes, it needed heroism. You should feel glad—proud, even—of the fact that the sperm and egg your parents chose to combine as you came out of the old banks, from people whose life histories have been lost. The very fact of their being lost proves that they lived and died in desperate times, heroically...and whether I ever met them or not, I can certainly assure you that if they had known that you would one day be their child, they’d be very, very glad, and very, very proud indeed.”