The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “Me neither,” the old man said. “I shouldn’t really have asked you to stay, and I shouldn’t have rambled on like that, but...well, given that I used up my own child-rearing license a long time ago, I can’t help feeling that I’m as entitled as anyone else to take a quasi-paternal interest in other people’s. If it takes a village, everyone in the village has a duty to do his part. I’ll make sure the shadowbat’s reunited with its flock, if that’s a possibility. If not...well, let’s try to console ourselves with the thought that it didn’t die in vain.”

  Sara stood up, and moved toward the door. The Dragon Man shifted slightly, as if to go before her and open it politely—but the movement seemed painful and it was obvious that he’d be better off resting a while longer.

  “It’s okay,” she said, swiftly. “I can let myself out.”

  The old man unleashed the longest and deepest sigh that Sara had ever heard, but it wasn’t a despairing sound—it was more like a summary of all that had gone before. “I’ll square things with the owner and the manufacturer tonight, just as soon as the proteonome analysis has told me the full story,” he promised. “Got to be scrupulous now—but I’m glad to have some real work to do, some real science to do, and I’ll lie down for a while first to make sure I’m up to it. I’ll let you know how it all comes out. Thank Lem for me, will you?”

  Sara nearly asked what for, but stopped herself just in time. She had worked it out. “I wanted to come myself,” she said. “I insisted.”

  “I know,” the Dragon Man replied. “When I was your age, I’d have insisted too.”

  Sara let herself out of the workroom, and out of the shop. The square wasn’t so crowded now—there were only two families staring dutifully at the fire fountain. She stood for a minute watching the multitudinous sparks rise and fall, elements in an endless stream that had been flowing for more than a hundred years, holding its phantom shape as securely as a healthy shadowbat. It was, she realized, a symbol of continuity as well as a pretty display.

  She walked unhurriedly across the square, pausing again to let two hummingbirds take turns at her rose. “I’ve been a bird myself,” she murmured to them, “but only in my hood. It’s not like real flying. No speed trip at all. Someday, I’ll take a look at the world from your angle, and find out what a flower is like in your eyes.

  Usually, she thought of getting into a cab for a homeward journey as the end of an excursion. She had been back and forth along the road so many times by now that everything lining it was perfectly familiar—but this time, it didn’t seem that her mission of exploration was over yet. This time, she looked out of the cab window with a sense of wonder she hadn’t been able to conjure up since her first trip into town eight years before. The world was the same—the liveried cabs, the convoys of trucks, the glittery stone facades, the distant skymasts, the bikers in their finery—but she seemed to be looking at it with new eyes.

  “That’s the trick of it,” she said, aloud. “You just have to keep on finding things out, and the world will always look different, even when it’s exactly the same.

  “I beg your pardon, miss,” the cab’s Artificial Intelligence replied, through the microphone mounted in the rear of the driver’s “seat”. “Do you wish to give me new instructions?”

  Maybe I should, Sara thought. Maybe I should go home the pretty way, if there is one. Maybe I should turn around and head west to the sea, or north to Derwent Water, or east to the windfarms and the SAPorchards. Maybe I should go to see the ruins of London, or the Welsh mountains.

  “No, thank you,” she said, aloud. “Just take me home.”

  “Very good, miss,” the cab’s AI replied.

  “Do you ever get bored?” Sara asked, on a sudden impulse.

  “No, miss,” the AI assured her. “I am not programmed to experience boredom.”

  “Nor am I,” she informed it. “But it happens anyway. It shouldn’t, but it does. How long have you been driving a robocab?”

  “This robocab has been in service since January 2364, miss.” It wasn’t quite what she had asked, but robocabs had a limited conversational repertoire.

  “You’re a teenager, then—just like me,” she said. She got no reply to that at all; the AI obviously had no subroutine set up to deal with comments of that kind. Sara had once thought that all AIs were as clever as adults, but she knew now why Father Gustave and Father Stephen were always calling them “artificial idiots”.

  “Do you know how long you’ll be a robocab driver?” she asked, curiously.

  “The current plan calls for the fleet of which this cab is a part to be kept in operation until December 2500, miss,” the AI told her. “If, however, there are significant technological advances in the meantime, which outstrip the capacity of its programming, significant aspects of its hardware and software may be replaced.”

  “You’re Achilles’ robocab,” Sara said. “They’ll just keep chipping away, replacing one bit at a time, until you’ve turned into something else.”

  “This is not an Achilles robocab, miss,” the AI told her. “It is a model 36J1, nicknamed Mercury, owned by the Blackburn Traffic Management Board.”

  Sara laughed. Robocab AIs weren’t programmed to make jokes, either, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t play the comedian, with the aid of a sufficiently ingenious straight-person.

  “It’s been a good day, Mr. Mercury,” she told it. “A really good day.”

  “We aim to please, miss,” the cab assured her, as it rolled to a halt at the end of the drive leading to her hometree. “We hope to have the pleasure of your patronage again.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  As soon as Sara stepped across the threshold Mother Maryelle and Father Gustave descended upon her, having obviously laid elaborate plans for further discussion while she’d been out. She assured them that Mr. Warburton had solved the puzzle and had promised to take care of everything. Then she begged to be excused because she still had homework to do and needed to take a shower before the evening meal. As education and cleanliness were things Father Gustave and Mother Maryelle claimed to value very highly, they could hardly refuse.

  Almost as soon as Sara was safely in her room, Gennifer called, madly impatient to hear “the whole story” of her adventure in the Dragon Man’s lair. It soon became obvious, however, that Gennifer’s idea of “the whole story” was rather less extensive than Sara’s; Gennifer had only the slightest interest in the underlying cause of the shadowbat’s distress, and even less in the Dragon Man’s accounts of the Crash, the Aftermath and the paradox of Achilles’ ship.

  “That’s all ancient history,” was Gennifer’s peremptory verdict. “Whose shadowbats are they? Is it anybody we know? From school, I mean.”

  Sara had to admit that she didn’t know, and hadn’t tried very hard to find out.

  “You really should get your priorities in order,” Gennifer told her. “I’m sure you could have got it out of him if you’d gone about it the right way.”

  “It’s not important,” Sara assured her. “Anyway, when the Dragon Man tells him what’s happened, he’ll probably come looking for me. I’ll have to explain why I trapped the shadowbat. I’m sorry, Gen, I really have to do my homework now—dinner will be awkward enough without giving them even more to complain about.”

  This prophecy proved to be slightly less safe than it seemed. Only three of her parents put in an appearance in the communal dining-room, so Father Gustave, Mother Maryelle and Mother Quilla were able to take turns to lecture her in an unusually orderly fashion. Fortunately, they didn’t require any elaborate response from her, so it was a relatively simple matter to let it all wash over her, saving her best line for a parting shot.

  “It was the right thing to do,” she said over her shoulder, as she returned to her room. “Mr. Warburton said so.”

  “Well, maybe it was,” Father Gustave said, lamely, “but you didn’t know that at the time, did you?”

  Before she went to the bed, Sara made s
ure that her bedroom window was closed and locked. She set it to display the star-filled skies of night on the dragonworld where she’d taken her maiden flight, but she didn’t linger there to watch out for the shadows of flying dragons moving amid the moonlit clouds.

  She was still restless, but her Internal Technology helped her to calm her mind. She had descended through all the usual phases of relaxation, and had just lapsed into a peaceful oblivion, when she was summoned back by a peculiar noise.

  At first she didn’t realize what it was. She wasn’t used to hearing sounds in the night, because the hometree’s walls were smart enough to deaden the rattle of the wind in its own branches and the sounds of traffic on the road. No soundproof wall could have suppressed this racket, though. Small stones were being hurled at her window, one by one at three-second intervals. The impacts made the plastic fabric reverberate like a sullen drum.

  Sara lay dazedly in bed, counting the blows, expecting all the while that the house’s resident AI would take whatever action might be necessary to relieve the disturbance. When she had counted seven, though, curiosity took over. She got up, and went to the window.

  The dragonworld was perfectly peaceful, but the dragonworld wasn’t really there. It only required a single instruction to make the window revert to transparency.

  The dazzling flood of unexpected light made her blink furiously, and she had to step back and rub her eyes before she could look out into the garden. The hometree’s security lights were on, but the resident AI obviously hadn’t yet registered an emergency of sufficient magnitude to warrant waking up her parents. Their windows must all have been tuned to pleasantly dim virtual spaces, so that the glaring light was as invisible to them as it had been to her.

  The stone-thrower was shadowed by the garden hedge, and his smartsuit—assuming that it was his smartsuit—had been set to mask his face, but it was easy enough to pick out the stones as they soared with uncanny grace from hand to target, disdainful of the property’s boundary.

  How does he know which window’s mine? Sara thought—and then she realized that he must have followed his shadowbats. They had probably evaded his attention on the first night they had made their way to the rose, but on the second occasion he must have kept track of them, reckless of all inconvenience, until the hedge had placed an insurmountable obstacle in his path. There really had been someone there when she had called out into the night—someone who hadn’t had the courage to answer her.

  He wasn’t ignoring the notice I put on the public board because he didn’t know that it applied to him, Sara deduced. He ignored it because he was busy watching over the five that came out, not knowing whether they’d recover if he let them feed and gave them time.

  Because the stone-thrower was standing outside the garden’s boundary, he hadn’t triggered the kind of trespass alert that might lead to criminal charges, but he was determined to attract her attention. Seen from the outside, awash with the reflected light of the security beams, the window hadn’t changed significantly when she’d switched it from picture mode to transparency, so he didn’t know that she was standing in the darkened room looking out at him. He continued throwing the little stones, and his aim was remarkably good. He was probably an accomplished sportsman of some kind, although Sara wasn’t sure which kind of game would most readily lend its expertise to this kind of expertise.

  When Sara’s eyes had fully adapted to the light, she was better able to judge the kind of person the shadowbats’ owner was. His face and body were hidden, but his throwing arm wasn’t, and it was easy enough to judge his height by comparison with the hedge. She guessed that he was probably a couple of years older than she was.

  He could have waited till tomorrow, Sara thought.

  She opened the window slightly—not enough to risk being hit by a stone, although most of them seemed to be too small to do more than sting her—and called out: “Stop that! You’ll wake the whole house!”

  “So what?” a barely-broken male voice replied. “You killed my shadowbats, Sara Lindley! Why did you do that? They couldn’t do you any harm.” He obviously didn’t want to wake the whole house, though, because he was speaking just loud enough to be heard—not so loud that the sound couldn’t be damped down by the walls protecting her parents’ sleep. There was a slight chance that one or two of them might wake up anyway, but the only ones who had windows facing the same direction as Sara’s were Father Lemuel and Mother Quilla. Father Lemuel was almost certainly in his cocoon, safe from disturbance by anything short of a clamorous alarm, and Mother Quilla was also a sound sleeper.

  “I didn’t do anything to your shadowbats,” Sara told him. “They did it to themselves. It was an accident. Who are you, anyway?”

  “Never mind that, Sara Lindley. I know who you are. How did you lure them into your room? What did you do to them once they were in there? They were only supposed to fly around me. I want to know what you did to them.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she repeated, irritably. She knew that there was something very odd about what was happening, but she wasn’t sufficiently alert as yet to figure out exactly what it was.

  “You poisoned my shadowbats, Sara Lindley,” he said again. “I’m going to get you for this, Sara Lindley. You’d better watch out. I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Sara said, trying to cover up her anxiety—although she was more worried about the possibility that the hometree’s AI would react to the threat than the much slighter one that he might actually mean it. “Mr. Warburton knows who you are. Mask or no mask, I can find out easily enough. And I didn’t poison your shadowbats. They did it themselves. It was Mr. Warburton who tweaked them, but he didn’t mean to let them be poisoned. He tweaked them for your benefit. It was an unexpected side-effect—an accident, It wasn’t anybody’s fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t want the one I took him to die, but it wasn’t me who killed it. Catching it in the jar didn’t make any difference.”

  She’d said far more than she’d initially intended, and she looked around guiltily when she finished, half-expecting to see Mother Quilla standing in the bedroom doorway looking daggers at her. There was no one there; until the hometree’s AI decided that there was sufficient reason to wake her parents up, she was safe from interruption...though not, she realized, from the eventual consequences of her actions. All this would be recorded, and it had to be “unusual” enough to be reported to her parents in the morning.

  “You caught it in a jar?” the boy said, incredulously. “That’s impossible.”

  “It was sick,” Sara said. “I thought it was for the best. I thought it would help the Drag—Mr. Warburton figure out what was wrong. And it did. We figured it out this afternoon. He said he’d call you when he’d finished the job. He should have called you. Didn’t he call you?”

  “You had no right to catch it,” the boy said, although his manner was much more subdued now. “You should have let it come back. It was mine. I should have taken it back to the Dragon Man.”

  Sara recalled the memory of the shadowbat sinking into the gel that Mr. Warburton had used to take a sample of its molecular make-up, and remembered the way he’d taken an image of the image, and rolled it up...but there was another, more troubling memory lurking behind that one much as the boy was lurking beyond the hedge: the memory of the Dragon Man’s lean frame sagging when he had momentarily let go of the edge of his desk. He had told her as she left the shop that he was going to lie down for a while before finishing the proteonome analysis and calling his client to pass on the bad news.

  “He should have called you by now,” Sara said to the boy, anxiously. “He said that he would.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” the shadowy figure beyond the garden fence replied. “And it wasn’t up to you. It was my shadowbat, and I should have been the one....”

  “Shut up!” Sara said, so commandingly that he did. Was it possible, she wondered, that the old man had simply forgotten to call his
client? Of course it was—just as it was possible that the proteonome analysis had taken longer than he’d expected. There could be any number of reasons why the Dragon Man hadn’t made the call yet. It wasn’t urgent. There were any number of reasons why he might have decided to leave it until tomorrow. It was nothing to worry about....

  Sara glanced at the wristpad that lay on her bedside table. The luminous time-display was readable even at this distance. Seven hours and ten minutes had elapsed since she had stepped out of the Dragon Man’s shop. Perhaps he had yet to complete his analysis. Perhaps he had forgotten his promise to call the owner of the shadowbat...and perhaps not.

  “Wait there!” she called to the masked figure. “Don’t move!” She realized immediately that he would probably take that as an indication that she was about to call her parents, and thus as a signal to run away as fast as he could, but she hadn’t time to worry about that. She turned away from the window, and went to her desktop.

  The Dragon Man’s phone number was in the machine’s ready memory, so she only required a couple of keystrokes to make the call.

  When Frank Warburton’s remarkable face appeared on the screen, looking considerably fuller and healthier than it had that morning, Sara sighed in relief—but then she realized that the image was a simulation, and that she was dealing with an answerphone AI. “I’m Sara Lindley,” she said. “I need to talk to Mr. Warburton in person. It’s urgent.”

  “That’s not possible at the present time, miss,” the simulation replied, with the typical smoothness of the kind of Artificial Intelligence that was really just an Artificial Idiot.

  Sara knew how literal Artificial Intelligences were, and the phrasing sent a chill into her heart. Surely the answerphone ought to have asked her to leave a message, and promised to deliver it as soon as it became convenient. The fact that it hadn’t made the promise suggested that it couldn’t keep it...but it was only a suggestion

  “It must be possible,” Sara said, although she knew that her insistence was, in this instance, quite impotent. “This is top priority...emergency...red alert...whatever the keyword is. I have to speak to him now. I have to.”