The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  * * * *

  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....”

  “Especially if you’re fashion-conscious,” Father Stephen put in, making it sound like an insult.

  “Which you probably will be,” Mother Jolene said, giving Father Stephen another dark look, “if you take after me, or Verena, instead of....”

  “To answer Sara’s question,” Mother Maryelle broke in, in her most commanding voice, “what Mr. Warburton used to do, a very long time ago, was make pictures in people’s skin. Their natural skin, that is.”

  “You mean, “Sara said, carefully, “that he was a kind of painter.”

  “No,” said Mother Maryelle. “He used a motorized needle, to drive the ink into the skin, so that it would be permanently integrated into it—in much the same way that the colors and textures of your smartsuit are built into it, but much more crudely.”

  Sara knew that she had to get in quickly if she wanted to remind her parents about her other question before they started bickering again, so she said: “So the dragon isn’t a painting, then? It’s inside somebody’s skin?”

  Strangely enough, that precipitated a moment’s silence before Father Gustave—who liked to think of himself as a natural diplomat, capable of handling the touchiest situations—said: “No, Sara. That dragon in the window is only a hundred and fifty years old or thereabouts. About the same age as Father Lemuel, I think. It’s inscribed on—or in—synthetic skin. It’s not from an actual person.”

  “Oh,” said Sara, trying as hard as she could to present the appearance of the highly intelligent, sophisticated child that all eight of her parents so obviously wanted her to be. “I see.”

  * * * *

  On many an occasion, in the years that followed, Sara had thought that it must have been a great deal easier to be a child in the days before the Crash, when all parental conversations had been two-way, and even seven- or eight- or nine-year-olds must have stood a fair-to-middling chance of interrupting. Once five adults—let alone the eight who gathered at house-meetings—began talking at cross purposes, the task of restoring order required a much more powerful voice than that of the tiny creature whose care and education had brought them all together in the first place.

  Two parents, fourteen-year-old Sara thought, couldn’t possibly have put as much pressure on a six-year-old child as eight, even if they had entertained such high expectations. In the days when children only had two parents, of course, genetic engineering hadn’t been sufficiently advanced to make certain that all children were highly intelligent—but the combined expectations of eight parents, Sara now understood, were massive enough to outweigh any advantage conferred by science.

  At six—and, indeed, at every other age she had passed through on her arduous journey to the present—Sara had always felt that she had been lagging behind, not yet capable of being the child her parents wanted and expected her to be. When, exactly, had she begun to wonder whether it was her parents that might be asking too much rather than she who might be failing? Was it before or after she had first defied them in a flagrant and spectacular fashion by climbing the hometree? Or was it, perhaps, climbing the hometree that had brought the long-held suspicion to the surface? She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember.

  What she did know, and could remember, was that when her six-year-old self had gone home on the day of her sixth birthday, after a short walk through the streets of Blackburn, during which a hundred other things had been pointed out to her by five eager index fingers, the one enduring image that her mind had retained was the golden dragon. That image had somehow succeeded in seeming more interesting, and more precious, than the momentary presence of the other children.

  In retrospect, Sara could see that the brief glimpse of the dragon within the cloister had been the only aspect of the experience that had actually started something: a chain of ideas and actions that had run, unsteadily but unbroken, all the way to the day when she actually entered that mysterious shop, in order to confront the exotic creature whose lair it was.

  CHAPTER III

  Even at six, Sara had been old enough to look up “tattoos” with the aid of her desktop. She still had enough curiosity left when she returned home on that birthday to try.

  Unfortunately, the torrent of information released by her enquiry had too much in it that was impenetrably confusing. What did “sublimate technology” mean? Why were its products sometimes called “astral tattoos” if they weren’t tattoos at all? What had “military tattoos” got to do with it? The questions were too awkward—and the information which didn’t raise questions seemed, for the most part, rather repulsive.

  Dragons, on the other hand, were easy for the six-year-old mind to get a grip on, and considerably more fascinating than tattoos. The most immediate legacy of Sara’s first trip into town, therefore, was a interest in dragons which became intense for a matter of months and lingered within her for years afterwards.

  In Father Stephen’s room, which housed the most prized items of his collection of pre-Crash junk, six-year-old Sara found two statuettes formed in the image of dragons. One was made of plastic, the other of glass. He gave her the plastic one immediately, when she expressed an interest, but he told her the other was too fragile. He obviously felt guilty about keeping it, though, because he gave her a bag full of old CDs and diskettes and volunteered to take her to the next junk swap in Old Manchester, so that she could go dragon-hunting on her own behalf.

  Sara’s excitement at Father Stephen’s gift was only slightly muted when Father Lemuel asked to have a look at the contents of the bag. “I know that the word junk is supposed to have been stripped of all its pejorative connotations, Steve,” he said, talking over Sara’s head, “but this stuff really is junk. She won’t get anything much in exchange for this rubbish.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Father Stephen said. “I wouldn’t get much for it, because I’d be bartering on level terms—but Sara only has to smile sweetly, and every carpet-trader in St Anne’s Square will be only too willing to give her model dragons in exchange for any old rubbish she has to trade. Plastic ones, anyway.”

  “That’s exploitation!” Mother Quilla objected.

  “No it’s not,” Father Stephen retorted. “It would be exploitation if I were asking her to barter on my behalf for things I wanted—which certain parents in ManLiv are only too happy to do—but if she’s bartering on her own behalf she’s perfectly entitled to take advantage
of her opportunities. I’m just furthering her education.”

  After that, the argument became heated and quite impenetrable, but Sara found out soon enough that what Father Stephen had said was true. Children did have a tremendous advantage at junk swaps, where even the traders who had so little regard for etiquette that they would take credit seemed absolutely delighted that a child so young could take an interest in their collections. They were so enthusiastic to welcome her to the community of junkies—or “Preservers of the Heritage of the Lost World,” as they preferred to call themselves—that they would have let her give them anything at all in exchange for ordinary items to which they were not sentimentally attached. In effect, they were giving them to her, and gladly—but junkie etiquette demanded that some exchange of goods should take place, no matter how contrived. And how else could she learn to be a good junkie?

  By taking advantage of her youth and Father Stephen’s seemingly-infinite supply of junk so rubbishy that he “couldn’t swap it for dust” Sara soon built up a collection of dragons modelled in several kinds of plastic. She also acquired a fine set of old paperback books with pictures of dragons on the covers, including a few that would have been quite valuable if the pages hadn’t been so badly acid-burned that they splintered into fragments if they were turned.

  Although she hardly qualified as a “real junkie” Sara was infected by the glamour of the past to the extent that she prized the figurines and paperback covers more than the whole dragon-filled worlds that could be conjured up on the other side of her bedroom window, or visited by means of her hood. Throughout her seventh and eight years she tuned her window to dragonworlds more often than not, but there was a magic in fondling the pre-Crash fabrications that mere sightseeing could not provide.