The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  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 fashion 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 assembling 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 “Sssh!” 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 competition to occupy the same space—with the result that spaces 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 fashionability, 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 masse in virtual space 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 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 attitudes 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 association, 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 space.

  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.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Because a little of Mother Quilla’s and Father Stephen’s pedantry had rubbed off on her, Sara knew that it couldn’t really be all of Frank Warburton’s work that was taking to the air, because sublimate accessories had only been a part of his most recent endeavors. She knew, too, that most of the accessories he’d actually fitted to his customers’ smartsuits had been things of no great distinction—which meant that only the tiniest fraction of this display could actually have consisted of creatures he’d made and supplied. But this was neither a duplication of nor a tribute to his mundane accomplishments.

  It was a mirror of his dreams.

  Sara knew that by far the greater part of what survived of the Dragon Man’s everyday labours was bound into the real and artificial flesh of his customers, many of whom were long dead, and other miscellaneous living canvases, many of which were long discarded. Most of his accomplishments were lost in the infinite obscurity of the past. What remained was doubtless spectacular, but this was far more than a remainder.

  There were shadowbats by the thousand. Most of them were tiny, but some of were them so large that they could have folded themselves around a living person—even an athlete—like a cloak. Some of them were huger still, unwearable by anyone but a giant, designed as if for human beings who were yet to be, but in reality not for human beings at all. These were shadowbats whose only reason for existence was to be shadowbats, not accessories to other beings’ lives and costumes.

  There were shadowbirds and shadowbees, and shadow beings that were no mere mimics, but potential inhabitants of whole shadow worlds—not virtual worlds contained within the illusory glass of picture windows, but worlds in real space, like the islands where genetic engineers were trying to recreate all the species lost to extinction during the Crash, or the planets of alien suns which no interstellar probe had yet contrived to reach.

  There were creatures made of fire—fiery flies and fiery birds and fiery serpents—which reminded Sara of something Ms. Mapledean had one told her class about life being a process of slow combustion, in which the body burned the food it took in as fuel, not merely to provide the energy of movement but the energy of thought and the energy of imagination.

  There were other bright creatures too, like the angels of which Frank Warburton had spoken, entities not of living fire but of a purer living light.

  There were UFOs.

  There were Chinese kites.

  There were flying fish and flying flowers.

  There were even flying pigs.

  The display was neither solemn nor entirely serious. It was playful and exuberant. It was hectic, as if with irrepressible laughter.

  Suddenly, the jostling of the “old fogies” on the hilltop no longer seemed silly or irreverent. Only a few of them had ever met Frank Warburton, or had even been familiar with his work, but they had been his colleagues, his peers, his fellow tinkerers, his fellow adventurers. They had been the people capable of giving form to the dreams that he had entertained, but to which he had not yet been able to give form himself. They were the people capable of constructing his real memorial, and they had not merely been willing to do that but eager to do it.

  There was a sense, Sara knew, in which they were advertising themselves and their profession. There was a sense in which this was all publicity, calculated to generate commercial gain. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a fitting celebration of Frank Warburton’s life and career. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t an appropriate tribute to Frank Warburton’s long survival and still-unfulfilled ambitions.

  There were dragons, too.

  Most of all—because they were so large, so imperious and so magnificent, and because Frank Warburton had, after all, been a Dragon Man among Dragon Men—there were dragons.

  Some were red and some were gold. Some were royal blue and some were imperial purple. Some were every color under the sun, not to mention quite a few that defied the sun to illuminate their mystery.

  Oh yes, there were dragons a-plenty.

  The most remarkable thing of all, however, was not the presence of the dragons, nor their number. It was the quality of their flight.

  Sara had thought it remarkable that six shadowbats could form a flock, coordinating their own movements—even when intoxicated, or poisoned—with the movements of their fellows, so that as they ducked and dived and soared and swooped and swerved, looped the loop and curled and whirled themselves into shapes as improbable as their formations, they remained a kind of unit. People, as she had just witnessed, could not organize themselves as economically and as gracefully as that even while they were shuffling about at less than walking pace. Here, though, was a flock whose members must have numbered in the tens of thousands, and whose species must have numbered at least a thousand...and yet they were flocking together, maintaining a collective identity as a cloud of clouds: a supercloud as disciplined in its flight and its momentary metamorphoses as a crystal, despite the fact that it was as energetic as a flame.

  There was nothing untidy about the astounding legion, however hectic its movement was. It was more orderly than any flicker-winged flock of solid birds. It was more graceful than any multifinned school of silver fish. It was more shapely than the fire fountain in Blackburn’s New Town Square.

  At first, the dragons flew above the rest of the vaporous host, organizing themselves into a peculiar hierarchy, at whose summit was a single creature larger and more glorious than all the rest—which Sara recognized immediately as an embodiment of the design which had hung in Frank Warburton’s shop window for far longer than she had been alive.

  It was not long, however, before the flock of dragons merged with the greater flock, to form a company even greater and far more various than their own.

  The light and the darkness that danced around one another in a ceaseless ballet as the creatures of brightness mingled with creatures of shadow seemed perfectly natural. The ensemble was dignified in spite of the rapidity with which its components moved, decorous in spite of their delicacy.

  Sara remembered how the shadowbats, disturbed by the nectar of her rose, had become even vaguer than artifice had intended, as if they had been attempting to change into something other than bats. None of the individuals in the cloud that soared and streamed above Frank Warburton’s monument was drunk, and none was attempting to become something other than it was, but the whole formation seemed to her to be far more t
han the sum of its parts, in versatility as well as substance. It was only what it was, and yet it held the promise of mysterious changes, the hope of unpredictable progress and metamorphosis.

  She knew that it was only vapor. The entire host had no more mass than a storm-cloud—but the vapor was almost alive, and no matter how stupid its individual elements might be, the whole had a kind of intelligence. That intelligence was manifest in the way the cloud played so cleverly and so exuberantly with light and color, and Sara had no doubt at all that it was the Dragon Man’s intelligence: the intelligence that had made Frank Warburton a Dragon Man.

  It was beautiful, and it was unprecedented. There had never been a display like it in the history of humankind. Given the furious pace at which technology continued to advance, there would probably never be another with quite the same balance of naivety and sophistication. So, at least, Sara was eager to believe. And why should she not be eager to believe it, given that she had known the Dragon Man more intimately, on the last day of his life, than anyone else?

  Sara remembered what the Dragon Man had said about her being more aware of the ceaselessness of change than most of his clients, and what he had said about knowing how much he himself had changed, and the extent to which he had lost the sense of being his true self. She wanted to believe that if he had been here, he would have been able to recognize his true self in that marvelous flight of angels, bats and dragons, and know that it had not been lost even though he could no longer embody it.

  She took particular care to remember the words that Frank Warburton had regretted having spoken—the words that had revealed more of himself than seemed polite at the time. He had confirmed Father Lemuel’s judgment that synthetic organs did not have the same capacity for feeling that real ones did, because biotechnology had not yet progressed to the point at which its practitioners could duplicate the emotional orchestra of hormonal rushes and neural harmonies accurately enough to make the music of real life come out in tune. She wanted to believe that the vast cloud of clouds pirouetting above her head was dancing to the tune of real life, which was coming out absolutely and gloriously right.