The Dragon Man (18 page)

“Perhaps we should at least have talked to you about it,” Mother Verena said, effortlessly taking up the relay baton despite Mother Quilla’s obvious reluctance to relinquish it, “but we thought it would make you more self-conscious if it were actually pointed out, so we....”

“None of which is relevant to the matter in hand,” Father Gustave broke in, testily. “Which is that
you
should be keeping us informed, so we wouldn’t have to rely on second hand information.”

“We gave you every chance to tell us,” Father Aubrey pointed out. “We didn’t say anything at all yesterday, thinking that you’d probably feel able to tell us everything today, when you’d had a chance to sleep on it....”

“But this is simply too much,” Father Stephen said. “You can’t go around setting traps for other people’s bodywear. It’s not even legal, let alone moral.”

Sara was still trying to work out who might have said what to whom, and when, but the change of subject forced her to abandon that train of thought and deflect her attention to the question of why, if her parents knew about the captured shadowbat, they hadn’t taken the trouble to interfere at the time. If, as Father Gustave said, the hometree’s Artificial Intelligence was programmed to take note of anything unusual, it was presumably also programmed only to wake them up in case of emergency. If this didn’t qualify as an emergency, at least by the programmed standards of the resident AI, the trouble she was in couldn’t be very bad.

“I can explain...,” she began—but her parents were too anxious to get their own thoughts on record to allow her to complete the statement. Even though she was used to it, the interruption annoyed her. If her parents weren’t even going to listen to her explanation, she thought, what was the point of the hastily-convened meeting? Were they just taking the opportunity to let off steam themselves?

“Actually, Steve,” Mother Maryelle said, “we’re perfectly entitled, in law, to capture any stray creature that wanders into our house, and I really don’t think that Sara’s action can be classified as
immoral
....”

Sara watched the expressions on her other parents’ faces change as they realized that Mother Maryelle was playing the lawyer yet again—but she was careful to keep her own face straight.

“This isn’t about the legality of catching the shadowbat, Maryelle,” Mother Quilla interrupted, recklessly. “It’s about trust. It’s about Sara keeping us informed of what she’s doing....”

“It isn’t about that either,” Mother Jolene put in. “The real issue, to my mind, is the matter of recklessly posting notices on the public boards....”

“To my mind...,” Father Aubrey began—but he didn’t have time to finish before Father Gustave used the power of his baritone voice to shout for quiet.

“This is not the way to go about things,” Father Gustave said, when he finally had everyone’s grudging attention. “Sara, would you like to tell us what’s going on?”

It’s about time
, Sara thought, all apologetic impulses having evaporated like the scent from her rose. “You all seem to know far more about what’s going on than I do,” she said, not quite succeeding in ridding her tone of sarcasm. “I didn’t know that I had to call a house-meeting before leaving the hometree, and I thought you might be pleased that I was using my initiative instead of asking one of you to sort out a problem with a rose that I chose and paid for. It’s no big thing. Shadowbats aren’t supposed to be attracted by my rose, and they certainly aren’t supposed to be getting high on its nectar, so I thought I’d better grab one while I could so that the Drag—I mean, Mr. Warburton—could check it out and report back to the manufacturer. It’s not exactly kidnapping, is it?”

She counted five deep frowns, but no one took her to task for her combative attitude.

“No,” said Father Gustave, who still had the floor, “it’s not kidnapping. I assume that we can take Maryelle’s word that it’s not a crime at all, in spite of Steve’s anxieties. The whole thing is just a slight failure of diplomacy. Do you know whose shadowbats they are?”

“No,” Sara retorted. “Do you?”

“Not yet,” Father Gustave admitted. “I dare say that we can find out easily enough. Has the Drag—I mean, Mr. Warburton—replied to your message yet?”

Sara checked her wristpad, then said; “No. There’s no response to the message on the board, either. But it’s early—and it’s Sunday.”

“Then you’d better give the jar to me,” Father Gustave said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“It’s Sunday,” Sara repeated.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Father Gustave demanded. He was obviously making heroic efforts to hold his irritation in check; having seized control of the argument, he was under an obligation to handle it responsibly.

“There’s no school today,” Sara said. “I can take it to the Dragon Man myself. He’ll know what to do with it.”

Father Gustave opened his mouth to reply, but was overtaken by a sudden fit of doubt. His eyes flickered from side to side—not so much in search of support, Sara guessed, as to make sure that he still had a license to speak for everyone. The moment he surrendered the conversational initiative, though, he was swamped. “No, you can’t,” said Mother Quilla and Father Aubrey, in unison, while Father Stephen was saying “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mother Jolene “Shouldn’t one of us go with you?” and Father Lemuel “Well I’m glad that’s settled.”

Sara saw Mother Maryelle waiting patiently for the cacophony to decay into muttering chaos, choosing exactly the right moment to raise her own voice above the fading hubbub to say: “Your credit won’t stretch to another two-way cab ride to Blackburn, Sara. I’m surprised it stretched to one, after what you paid for that rose.”

Sara had momentarily forgotten her budget problems. She had already realized that her newly-granted freedom to handle her own finances had its downside, but she hadn’t expected to hit the rocks quite so soon. “These are special circumstances,” she said, rallying her argumentative reserves. “I mean, this is a new technology displaying an unexpected side-effect. I’m the one who discovered it. It could be news. National news, even.”

“As we’ve been trying to explain, Sara,” Mother Quilla said, with an affected world-weariness that didn’t suit her at all, “everything you do that’s at all out of the ordinary is news, at least locally—and not in a good way.”

“Not necessarily in a bad way, though,” Mother Jolene was quick to put in.

“Exactly,” said Sara, seeing an opportunity and moving swiftly to seize it. “Don’t you think it would reflect better on you, as parents, if I....”

“Don’t you dare take that tone...,” Father Aubrey began, at exactly the same time as Mother Quilla said “That’s not your...,” and Father Stephen said “That’s not the point at....”

None of them got to finish, because Father Gustave was lying in wait for another opportunity to play the tyrant; he shouted for quiet again.

“Oh, shut up yourself, Gus,” Father Lemuel said, brutally. “She’s right, damn it. Nothing’s likely to win us prizes from the self-appointed jury of our peeping peers that passes judgment on our every move, but we can at least try not to look stupid. I’ll pay for the cab if Sara wants to take the thing to Frank’s shop by herself—the important thing is to get it out of our cabbage-patch and make it someone else’s problem. Is everybody okay with that?”

Mother Quilla began to say “I don’t think...,” but it was her eyes that were flickering from side to side now. The words died on her lips as she found no conspicuous support for a tough line.

“Lem’s right,” said Mother Verena, although Sara guessed that she said it as much to get in a dig at Father Gustave as for any other reason.

“Well, all right,” said Father Aubrey. “Jo has a point when she says that not all news is bad, and Sara has a point about showing initiative. And we did all agree that it was time she took a little responsibility for herself. Let’s not get hung up about a cab fare to town. Gus?”

“If you think so,” Father Gustave said, stiffly.

“Well,” Father Lemuel repeated, with grim determination, “I’m glad that’s settled.”

“But we still need...,” Mother Maryelle began.

“Save it for the regular meeting,” Father Lemuel said. “Give my regards to Frank, Sara. Tell him it’s been far too long—my fault entirely. I’ll drop in on him one of these days, when I’m not too busy.”

Sara observed several sneers forming in response to Father Lemuel’s remark about being too busy, but all of them were politely suppressed before flowering into expressions of open contempt. “I’ll have my breakfast first,” she said. “In my room, if that’s okay.” In the absence of any manifest dispute, she assumed that she was free to go, and she wasted no time at all in turning on her heel.

While she ate her breakfast she called Gennifer. Their conversation about the total unreasonableness of parents far outlasted the meal, and might have gone on for a great deal longer if Sara’s desktop hadn’t posted a flag telling her that she had a message from Frank Warburton waiting to be read.

Sara pasted the message into a window and reported its contents to Gennifer. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she read aloud, “but since you have, you’d better bring it in as soon as you can. Text me an ETA. Give my regards to Lem, Gus and the others and say ‘long time no see’. See you soon. Frank Warburton.”

“Very Frank,” Gennifer observed. “Fancy your Fathers and Mothers knowing a tattooist. If it’s been a long time, they must have known him when he really was a tattooist, working on skin instead of smartsuit flesh.”

“I don’t think they can have known him
that
long ago,” Sara said, wishing that she’d done some research into the likely sequence of Mr. Warburton’s artistic technologies. “Before all this sublimate stuff, obviously—but there must have been lots of other things between that and using needles to drill ink into
naked flesh
. Smart cellulite, migratory chromocytes, lepidopteran alate scaling....”

“Bioluminescent auras,” Gennifer added, not wanting to be left out of the list-making, “metaspectral melanin, dermal ivory inlays....”

Sara knew that Gennifer’s suggestions must have been plucked almost at random from ads on the more exotic shopping channels—the ones she and Gennifer supposedly weren’t allowed to watch—because that was where she’d borrowed a couple of her examples from, but she daren’t challenge Gennifer to tell her what any of the terms meant for fear of instant retaliation.

“I don’t have time to gossip, Gen,” Sara said, imperiously. “I have important things to do.” It seemed like something she had been waiting all her life to say—or, at least, to say with real meaning.

CHAPTER XVIII

As usual, the traffic management system compelled the robocab to let Sara out at the corner of the square most distant from Mr. Warburton’s shop, so Sara had to walk diagonally across the open space towards the fire-fountain. No less than six groups of parents had brought infant offspring of various ages to look at the fountain—surely a record for a Sunday morning in Blackburn—and they formed a crowd so large and dense that the children had to be held aloft in order to watch the cascade of sparks. Even so, Sara didn’t feel nearly as conspicuous as she had the day before. With that sort of competition, she told herself, no one was likely to be staring at a teenager.

Frank Warburton was waiting for her. He was standing up behind his desk, so his face was no longer in shadow. Sara felt a slight shock, not so much because his face seemed so gaunt and twisted but because his whole body was so very thin and frail. Had he been as thin as that four years earlier, when she’d seen him in Old Manchester? She couldn’t be sure. She pulled herself together, determined not to let the least trace of horror or alarm show on her face as she met his eyes.

“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.