The Dragon Man (2 page)

Because Mike and Sara had each been accompanied, on both occasions, by at least four adults, and because they were so obviously not the same age, their meetings had been guarded and wary, and certainly had not involved any actual physical contact. Although Mike attended Sara’s school he was two years ahead of her, and had not so far deigned to recognize her during assemblies, break times or club sessions. Sara didn’t even know his second name. Now, though, she found herself close—
actually
close—to no less than five other children of assorted ages. They ranged from a babe in arms to a boy twice as tall as Sara, who might have been nine or ten.

It was these other children, rather than the fountain, that drew Sara’s eyes. As she approached them, in company with her parental escort, all of them—even the big boy—turned their eyes towards her, with similar curiosity.

* * * *

When she recalled this experience at the age of fourteen, after the Dragon Man’s funeral, Sara wondered why she hadn’t noticed at the time that it wasn’t only the children who were looking at her avidly, consumed with curiosity. The simple answer was that her own attention had been too narrowly focused—but there was a little more to it than that.

Six-year-old Sara was accustomed to being the centre of her own parents’ attention, so it didn’t seem to her that being looked at by adults as anything out of the ordinary. She had been too young, at that time, to realize that there was anything to be noticed, or pondered upon, in the fact that other adults were looking at her too. Children were a different matter. The fact that she could meet their eyes in real space—“meatspace”, as Father Lemuel insisted on calling it—had seemed extraordinarily significant.

And so it had been, fourteen-year-old Sara thought. It had been as significant, in its own way, as the shop whose window of which her six-year-old self had not yet caught sight.

CHAPTER II

Sara knew that the other children who had been brought to see the fire fountain that day must all attend the same school she did. Blackburn was not the kind of town that attracted tourists from outside the county. She was surprised, therefore, that she could only put a name to one of them: a girl wearing a pale blue smartsuit not unlike her own. Her name was Samantha Curtyn, and she was eight.

The boy in dark green standing next to Samantha—close enough to touch her, although his hands were at his sides—also seemed to be about eight, but Sara couldn’t remember seeing him in school.

It wasn’t surprising that Sara couldn’t identify the other girl in the crowd, or guess her age, because the part of her smartsuit covering her face wasn’t conventionally invisible; it had been temporarily reset to make a cat-like mask, complete with fake whiskers. The second girl was shorter than Samantha Curtyn, and might therefore have been intermediate between her age and Sara’s, but there was no way to be sure. Sara felt slightly resentful of the fact that the other girl could almost certainly recognize her, and put a name to her too, without granting a similar privilege to others.

The other boy, whose height marked him out as the oldest, was also clad in unusual finery, but his face was clear; it was only his suit that was tuned up to show off, displaying a slightly dizzying kaleidoscopic effect. She presumed that he didn’t wear it that way at home, although she couldn’t actually be sure. In school, of course, he would only present an image synthesized by his hood; the sober dress required of that image didn’t have to reflect what he was actually wearing.

Sara studied them all, and they studied her. In school, their virtual images would have been equipped with tags, and she would have been able to use her private cursor to click on the tags in order to discover their names, their ages, which classes they were in, where they lived and what their desktop numbers were. Their actual bodies had no such tags, and were therefore intrinsically mysterious.

In school, Sara rarely bothered to click on anyone’s tag, unless she had forgotten a name she ought to know, and when she did she never took much notice of the additional information. Because the information was always available, only a click away, it wasn’t necessary to commit it to memory. Now that there were no tags available, though, she couldn’t help feeling curious about who the other children were and where they had come from.

She knew that her frustration was temporary, and slightly silly. Tomorrow, when she saw these other children in school, she would know that she had met them in the flesh—except for the annoying girl who only had courage enough to venture into the real world if her face was hidden—and they would know that they had met her. They would all be able to click away to their hearts’ content, learning everything they wanted to know...but they probably wouldn’t feel the need.

* * * *

Remembering the moment fourteen years later, Sara was able to appreciate the paradoxes inherent in her wary observation of the other children more fully than she had at the time.

At six, Sara’s awareness of the fact that none of them were likely to become her close friends had been vague and inconsequential. At fourteen, though, she could see a certain irony in the fact that they had been—and were likely to remain—socially distant, even though they lived far closer to her hometree, in meatspace terms, than Gennifer Corcoran, who was the only one of her classmates with whom the six-year-old had regular conversations on camera, desktop-to-desktop.

At fourteen, Sara could see a certain unfortunate perversity in the fact that chance and the whim of the Population Bureau Licensing Authority had ordained that she was to be the only child born within fifty kilometres of her hometree in the year 2367—with the result that none of her classmates lived near enough to make a casual meeting in real space likely. And she knew, at fourteen, that no such meeting had yet occurred—nor would it, without a great deal of preparation and careful interparental negotiation.

* * * *

Thanks to the presence of the other children and their reaction to six-year-old Sara’s arrival in the square, the fire fountain went almost unheeded by its audience for a full three minutes. Those who had been brought to marvel at its display were too busy marveling at one another.

When Sara did try to focus on the fountain, she found it quite uninteresting by comparison. Some trick of perspective made it seem smaller now than it had when she had stared at it through her bedroom window, and the fact that the sparks did not seem substantial, or even warm, when they drifted far enough from their source to land on her head and shoulders was strangely disappointing. They should have seemed more real, given that she was actually there, but they didn’t.

Even when you were standing right next to it, Sara realized, the fire fountain was just a special effect.

For that reason, the fact that the fountain was doing what it did in real space rather than virtual space didn’t seem half as significant as the fact that the other children were actually present, rather than being images carved in light. The sparks jetting forth from the fountain to follow dozens of strange trajectories weren’t real sparks at all. They were only bits of light. They weren’t hot; when they landed on someone, they simply winked out of existence, leaving no trace behind of their brief existence. The children, on the other hand, were people. They were solid, intelligent flesh.

That was why it only required two minutes more for Sara’s attention to wander again.

It was then that she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of the Dragon Man’s shop window.

* * * *

Looking back, eight years later, Sara wondered why her six-year-old self had been so abruptly captivated by that glimpse, when she couldn’t have been certain of what it was that she was looking at. She remembered that she had stared for thirty seconds or so at the golden dragon that formed the centerpiece of the display before it had dawned on her that the window, like the window of the robocab, really was a window and not a screen pretending to be a window.

Had that really seemed significant, at the time?

No, not significant. Just odd—but odd enough to command a long, hard look.

* * * *

Sara realized, belatedly, that she wasn’t looking through the eye of a camera at a rather poor three-dimensional visualization of a dragon in flight. She was looking through a plate of clear plastic at a rather fine two-dimensional picture of a dragon in flight: a dragon whose scales were golden on top and silver beneath, with a head like....

She couldn’t find anything with which to compare that head among the ranks of living mammals, birds, and reptiles, nor among the much more extensive ranks of the extinct mammals, birds, and reptiles she had seen in virtual reproduction. There was something dog-like about the jaw and brow, something pig-like about the ears, something lizard-like about the teeth and something hawk-like about the eyes, but the head was no haphazard compound. It had its own integrity and its own identity, in spite of being fabulous.

Was it a painting? she wondered. Was it inscribed on paper, or polished stone? She wasn’t sure.

Sated by the glory of the dragon, Sara refocused her gaze to take account of the rest of the window-display—which, because the window was only transparent plastic, had to be composed of actual objects.

There were instruments of several different shapes and sizes, many with cables dangling or inartistically coiled, whose purpose she could not begin to grasp, although she could see easily enough that what Father Stephen would have called “the business end” of each device was something like a tiny drill...or a needle.

* * * *

Looking back from the age of fourteen, Sara could not remember how much of what her six-year-old self had seen had been immediately or eventually understandable. Because she understood it so well now, she could not tell how much she had added to the preserved memory as a result of subsequent research.

She did not doubt, though, that there had been an immediately-perceptible strangeness about the window that was even more profound and remarkable than the sight of the five children.

* * * *

Sara tugged Mother Quilla’s arm, and said: “What’s that, Mother Quilla?”

Mother Quilla turned—and Sara noticed that her other four parents immediately turned too, obedient to her curiosity.

“It’s supposed to be a dragon,” Mother Quilla said.

“I know that,” Sara said. “But what sort of shop is it? Why does it have a painting in the window instead of a virtual display?”

“That’s the Dragon Man’s shop,” said Mother Maryelle. “It’s been here much longer than I can remember—maybe since the square was new. It’s an antique in its own right.”

“Yes,” Sara said, “but what sort of shop is it?”

“He’s just a tailor, really, much like any other tailor,” said Mother Jolene.

“No, he’s not,” said Father Aubrey. “He doesn’t do regulation smartsuits, the way Linda Chatrian does. It’s all fancy work. Sublimate technology, isn’t that what they call it? Moving pictures. Spiders—that sort of thing.”

“Biker gear,” Father Gustave put in.

“Flyer gear too,” Father Aubrey was quick to retort. “But that’s not what Sara means. The Dragon Man’s very old, Sara. He was a decorator of sorts long before there were smartsuits to decorate—but in those days tailors were people who dealt in dead clothes. The Dragon Man never sold clothes. He worked on skin, so he wouldn’t have been thought of as a tailor at all. He was a tattooist, before the art became redundant. As Maryelle says, that display’s probably been there for two hundred years—his own private monument. He’s still open for business, though. No second pre-childhood for him.”

“Don’t be silly, Aubie,” Mother Maryelle said. “She’s only six. How’s she supposed to follow all that?”

Even though she hadn’t understood everything that Father Aubrey had said, Sara felt free to be offended by Mother Maryelle’s assumption that she wouldn’t be able to follow it. She knew, for instance, that Father Aubrey’s reference to “a second pre-childhood” was an insult aimed at Father Lemuel’s habit of spending at least twenty-three hours a day in his cocoon, living his whole life—except for house-meetings and the occasional meal, which didn’t really qualify as “life”—in Virtual Space. What she didn’t know was what a “tattooist” was, or why one might be likened to a modern tailor even though he hadn’t been one. Alas, she wasn’t able to ask, because the adult conversation had already flowed on, as it so often did, acquiring the kind of mad momentum that made certain parental conversations impossible to interrupt.

“Lem used to know him, didn’t he?” said Mother Quilla.

“Who?” asked Mother Jolene.

“Frank Warburton,” said Mother Quilla.

“Who’s Frank Warburton?” asked Father Aubrey.

“The Dragon Man,” said Mother Maryelle.

“Everybody knows the Dragon Man,” said Mother Jolene.

“
I
know Frank Warburton,” said Father Gustave, at the same time as Mother Quilla was saying, “I mean, knew him
personally
,” and Mother Maryelle was saying, “Nobody really
knows
the Dragon Man—how can they?” After which, all five of them were trying to speak at once, aiming their remarks in every possible direction but Sara’s. She had to wait for her chance to break in on them.

When the chance finally came, Sara said: “What do you mean by
work on skin
? A smartsuit is a sort of skin, isn’t it? A surskin.”

“The Dragon Man’s very old,” Father Aubrey repeated, as if he thought that Sara hadn’t been listening the first time. “When he started work, people still wore dead clothes...well, clothes that you had to put on in the morning and take off at night, and change in between if you wanted to look different. Some of them were pretty smart, maybe smart enough to be thought of as alive....”

“You’re confusing her again,” Mother Quilla broke in, accusingly. “It’s not so very different nowadays, Sara. We still wear clothing; it’s just that over the years...the centuries...our clothing has come to resemble a new outer layer—which is why smartsuits are sometimes called surskins. Yours is so versatile that it grows along with you, and you probably won’t have to change it more than two or three times in your lifetime, unless there’s a big leap forward in the technology, although you’ll start adding new accessories to it once you’re in your teens, and keep on adding more and more as you get older....”