The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  She had to turn away, though, when a cloud of dust suddenly blew into her eyes. It had been whipped up by four bikes that had just roared past along the edge of the square. The riders—all male, she assumed, although it was impossible to tell—were decked out in all their finery, but Old Manchester wasn’t the best place to show off peacock feathers and tiger-striped fur, because they always picked up a grayish patina of powdered concrete. The ancient city was being slowly ground down by the scourge of the westerly wind and the rainstorms it carried in from the Irish Sea. The dirt on the ground was thick and murky, having as much red brick and ground glass in it as concrete residues—but whenever a few sunny days allowed it to dry out it was the tiny particles of concrete dust that rose into the air like a miasma as the passage of pedestrians and vehicles disturbed its rest.

  When she had rubbed her weeping eyes clear, Sara saw that a second cab in Blackburn’s blue-and-silver livery had drawn up behind the one in which she had travelled. It was just disgorging its lone passenger.

  Sara didn’t expect for an instant that she would recognize the passenger, even though the cab must have kept close company with their own for almost the whole of its southward journey, but nor did she expect to be so astonished by the sight of him.

  The man who got out of the other cab was almost as unfashionably tall as Father Stephen, and even thinner. Like Father Stephen, he had darkened the color of his smartsuit almost to black for outdoor wear, and there were hundreds of other people in the square whose dress was equally sober—but the resemblance ended at the neatly-shaped collar. Like Father Stephen and almost everyone else in the square, the newcomer had politely left his face exposed to public view, the smartsuit’s overlay remaining quite transparent...but Sara had never seen a face like his before.

  There seemed to be hardly any natural flesh lying upon the bones of the skull, and what there was bare hardly any resemblance to the soft contours of conventional adult appearance. It had a slight quasi-metallic sheen, which made it seem more like the skin of a lizard than a man...or like the polished plastic face of an android robot.

  Although Father Lemuel was fifty-six years older than Father Stephen, and nearly a hundred years older than Mother Jolene, no one but a doctor or a master tailor could have read the difference in their features; whatever signs of aging Father Lemuel’s flesh was prey to, his smartsuit cancelled them out. This man was different. This man’s face was afflicted with all manner of stigmata, for which his smartsuit could not compensate, and which it could not conceal. Something terrible must have happened to him, Sara thought; it was as if he had been so badly burned in a fire that the even cleverest biotechnicians had been unable to repair the scars.

  While Sara stared at him, he did not see her at first. He was looking in another direction. Then, as he began to turn his head to scan the crowd, he caught sight of her. He looked straight at her, and met her eyes. His expression changed, although it was not until some time afterwards that Sara, replaying the scene in her memory realized why. He had seen the horror on her face.

  Oddly enough, Sara had not actually been conscious of feeling horror—she had interpreted her own reaction as surprise—but her face had shown it anyway. The man had been concerned, anxious to reassure her—but no sooner had he raised his arm slightly, and taken half a step in her direction, than he changed his mind. Abruptly, he turned away, thus hiding his face, and marched off into the crowded marketplace.

  At the time it seemed rather rude; Sara did not realize for several minutes that he had done it for her sake, because he had thought it the simplest and easiest way to set her mind at rest.

  “Who was that?” she whispered, as the man with the terrible face hurried away, clutching a rucksack twice the size and weight of Father Stephen’s.

  Mother Quilla followed the direction of her gaze easily enough.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Mother Quilla said. “It’s only Frank Warburton. They call him the Dragon Man.”

  The image of the shop window in the Cloistered Facade of New Town Square surged out of Sara’s memory with an uncanny brilliance, perfectly fresh, in spite of all the time that had elapsed since she had gone to see the fire fountain.

  She had always assumed, without even knowing that she was making an assumption, that the Dragon Man had been called the Dragon Man because his shop had a dragon in the window. It had never occurred to her, and nothing anyone had ever said to her had carried the least suggestion of it, that the Dragon Man might be some kind of dragon himself.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Sara demanded.

  “He’s very old,” Mother Quilla said, in what seemed to Sara to be a remarkably off-hand manner. “He was quite old—by the standards of his time, that is—when the first Internal Technologies came on to the market, and the preservative measures he took then weren’t as effective as the ones that came later. He’s not the oldest person in the world, by any means, but...well, you don’t get many people his age turning up to junk swaps. Everybody in the north-west knows him. He’s been around all our lives. I suppose it is a bit of a shock when you see him for the first time, though. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Lem knows him from way back—Gustave too, I think. Well, know might be putting it a bit strongly. They were acquainted, maybe did some skintech business. He’s into sublimate technology now. An example to us all—in the sense that it’s good to know that you can still keep up with the times, even if you’re two hundred and fifty years old.”

  “Two hundred and fifty?” Sara echoed, wondering why the number seemed so much larger than one hundred and fifty, which was Father Lemuel’s age, give or take a few years. A quick calculation assured her that even two hundred and fifty wasn’t old enough to remember the world before the Crash; it seemed just as remarkable, though, that Frank Warburton must have been born during the Crash, into a world in mid-collapse.

  Frank Warburton, Sara realized, must not only have had to make do with two parents, or even one, but must actually have been born from his mother’s own womb. In terms of human evolution, he was practically a dinosaur.

  Or, at least, a Dragon Man: something rare and strange.

  “He used to be a tattoo artist,” Mother Quilla added, as if the thought had only just resurfaced in her mind. “He’s probably here hunting for obsolete equipment. Electric needles, that sort of thing.”

  The way she pronounced the words told Sara that Mother Quilla hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of equipment Frank Warburton had used in the long-gone days when he was a tattooist, even though she must have looked into the window of his shop a dozen or a hundred times.

  Most of the people at the junk swap, Sara knew, would be trading ancient communications technology: primitive computers and mobile phones, sound systems and TVs. The currency of junk swap culture wasn’t invisibly inscribed in smartcards and hologram-bubbles, but it consisted very largely of plastic wafers and discs—every obsolete means of data-storage that had ever been invented. Such wares were exchanged even by the minority of traders who had come to trade jewelry and toys, pottery and glassware, paintings and snowing globes, although none of them would ever have admitted that they were compromising the etiquette of barter by introducing any kind of “money”. According to Mother Quilla, though, the Dragon Man was different. Even here, he was an anachronism, an outsider, an exotic specimen. He might not be the only collector of tattooing technology in England, or even in Lancashire, but could there possibly be another who had ever used that technology in his work...or in his art? Could there possibly be another who was so fully entitled to style himself a Preserver of the Legacy of the Lost World?

  “Come on,” said Mother Quilla, taking Sara’s hand and drawing her gently away from the spot to which she had become rooted. “He’s not that unusual. You must have seen people as old as him in virtual space.”

  It wasn’t until Mother Quilla said it that Sara realized that she had not. She had certainly seen people from the old world—even the world before the Cras
h—but she had never seen them as she had just seen Frank Warburton, still carrying the damage inflicted on his flesh before the biotechnologists found ways to repair all wounds and set aside all signs of aging.

  In virtual space, it was said, you could see everything. All the world was there, and all the world’s accessible history, and imaginary worlds by the thousand as well...but that didn’t mean that if you took the obvious paths through the Global Village you would be certain to see everything it contained. Some things went unheeded, even when they weren’t hidden. That seemed, for a moment or two, to be an important revelation—but then Sara and Mother Quilla lost themselves in the crowd, and in the strange simmering excitement of the possibility of making discoveries.

  CHAPTER VI

  The first effect of Sara’s unexpected encounter with the Dragon Man was to renew her interest in dragons—an inspiration that took hold of her while she was still in Old Manchester. She used up every scrap of her junk hoard to acquire three more figurines and an old flag depicting a red dragon on a green-and-white background.

  When she returned home—after another long lecture from Father Stephen and Mother Quilla about the importance of family life—she dusted off her entire collection of models and repositioned them on her shelves. That evening, she went back to her desktop to discover what reference-texts that had previously seemed “too old” for her had to say about the subject, but rapidly tired of their tedious commentaries on the different kinds of dragon favored by various ancient cultures and the special significance of dragons in Chinese tradition. She was, however, drawn to a number of advertisements on one of the shopping channels, which offered “dragon experiences”.

  Sara already knew that there were numerous Fantasyworlds populated wholly or partly by dragons. She had looked out into several of them from her bedroom window. She had even entered one or two of them by means of her hood, which had placed her within the virtual worlds in question, allowing her to “ride” dragons as they flew through their virtual native skies. She had not found such experiences very satisfactory, because they had been far too obviously artificial. The “dragon experiences” that had now caught her eye boasted of a far greater degree of realism, whether one entered the imaginary worlds in question as a dragonrider or as a dragon. The ads promised that “you’ll really believe that you’re there”—and Sara couldn’t help wondering whether they might be able to deliver.

  The snag was that the “dragon experiences” in question needed not one but two supportive technologies. They required a cocoon capable of producing the sensations of touch and smell that a mere hood could not provide, and they required an injection of special nanobots whose purpose was to enhance such sensations from within.

  Father Lemuel owned a state-of-the-art cocoon, which he was occasionally prepared to let Sara use for educational purposes. The nanobots were another matter entirely. So far as Sara knew, none of her parents was a habitual user of “entertainment IT,” and it was not the kind of thing of which they usually approved. When the price of the bots was added to the Fantasyworld’s access charge, the total was the kind of sum that could make Mother Maryelle roll her eyes in horror.

  Unfortunately, Sara had no credit of her own with which to make direct purchases in the virtual world. When she became a teenager, an account would doubtless be set up for her, but there would be little point in asking for one now, even if she had not rendered herself open to an automatic refusal by climbing the hometree less than a week before. If she wanted to ride a dragon, or to be a dragon for a while, she would have to ask one or all her parents to fund the trip—and it was a lot to ask, even if she could convince them that the experience had real educational value.

  There seemed little point in raising the matter at a house meeting, where it would only provide yet another issue about which her parents could argue. Father Lemuel was the only one who possessed a cocoon’s whose inner lining could interact with her smartsuit cleverly enough to simulate the physical sensations required by the “dragon experience”, and he also seemed to be the parent with the most money, so the sensible thing to do was to approach him privately. That wouldn’t be easy, given that Father Lemuel spent so much of his time in the cocoon that he was rarely around to answer requests, but it was certainly possible. He was not a man who welcomed interruption, so it would be necessary to wait for the right moment, and to make the approach in the right way, but Sara was convinced that it could be done.

  Fortunately, there seemed to be an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Sara was intrigued by dragons because she was intrigued by the Dragon Man, and—as more than one of her parents had pointed out to her—Father Lemuel knew the Dragon Man. At least, Father Lemuel had known the Dragon Man in some previous era of history, long before Father Lemuel had come together with her other parents to form the household in which she was now being brought up.

  Sara knew that there was no need for Father Lemuel to emerge from his beloved cocoon to eat, excrete or exercise, but she also knew that he was not a man to ignore good medical advice. Even though people came to no particular harm if they remained in virtual space for weeks on end, popular opinion judged that it was healthier for the mind and body alike to spend time in the real world at regular intervals. Father Lemuel’s excursions into reality were unpredictable, except for house meetings, and often occurred while Sara was at school, but she was confident that an opportunity for private conversation would present itself eventually, and she was prepared to be patient.

  As it happened, patience wasn’t required. Father Lemuel was as enthusiastic as all her other parents to follow in the footsteps of Father Stephen and Mother Quilla by taking her aside for a quiet chat. She didn’t have to lie in wait for him—he came to her, while she was playing in the garden on Thursday evening, ostentatiously keeping a generous distance between herself and the hometree’s wall. Mother Verena was weeding the vegetable patch and Father Aubrey was grooming his herbs, but they were both out of earshot from the swing on which Sara was sitting, rocking gently back and forth.

  “Would you like a push?” Father Lemuel asked.

  “No, that’s all right,” she said. “I can manage.” She felt that she was now too old to require any assistance, or to take pleasure in such simple things.

  “Did you enjoy yourself at the junk swap last Sunday?”

  “I made some good swaps, but I’ll need to find some new junk for the next one. Father Stephen did well, but he didn’t get as excited as he sometimes does. Mother Quilla looked around, but she didn’t swap very much.”

  “Quilla doesn’t have quite the same attitude as Steve,” Father Lemuel observed. “Her heart’s not in it.”

  “She likes looking, though,” Sara said. “She’s not a real junkie—but I’m not sure that I am, either. I just like dragons. I saw the Dragon Man at the swap.”

  “Did you? How did he seem?”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said, realizing that she didn’t have any standard for comparison. “He was in a robocab that pulled up behind us. He saw us, but he went the other way and we didn’t bump into one another again. I never saw anyone that old before. Will you look like that in another hundred years?”

  “I doubt it,” Father Lemuel said, soberly. “Nobody knows how long people with my kind of IT will be able to live, or exactly what will happen when it begins it fail, but I won’t have to suffer the kind of ham-fisted repairs that he had to undergo when IT was in its infancy. He’s more cyborg than I’ll ever need to be.”

  Sara knew that everyone with Internal Technology—or even a smartsuit—was a cyborg of sorts, but that the term was only used for people who had considerable quantities of inorganic material integrated into their bodies.

  “Can’t they take the old repairs out and make new ones?” Sara asked.

  “It’s not that easy. It’s safer to leave the old patches in place and keep adding new ones—if they tried to strip him back to the bare flesh, it would probably kill him. There aren’t many
of his kind left—and most of the others spend even more time in virtual space than I do. He’s old in a way that people like us will probably never experience. People are picked off by accidents all the time, and there are still a few diseases that take their toll, but hardly anyone dies of old age any more. When Frank and his kindred are gone, we’ll never see their like again.”

  Sara thought about that for a moment or two. “But he must have the same Internal Technology as you have,” she said. “Unless you’re much richer than he is. So why will he die of old age if you won’t?”

  “Money doesn’t make that much difference,” Father Lemuel told her. “And I suppose I might get to die of old age if I’m lucky—or do I mean unlucky? Anyway, Frank had already done most of his aging before he was fitted with the first primitive IT suites; he’s been preserved, but not rejuvenated. He’s lasted a lot longer than he or anyone else expected, given that so much damage had already been done, and bearing in mind that he’s had a couple of bad accidents along the way. He’s tough—nobody knows what he might yet be capable of, including him.”

  “He must remember the Crash,” Sara said, to prompt further revelations. “That must be weird.”

  “After a fashion,” Father Lemuel agreed. “As you get older, your distant memories are edited down, but they never disappear. You lose the sense of having been there, though—I don’t suppose that Frank’s memories of the Crash are very much different from the impressions other people obtain by studying history, or surrounding themselves with collections of pre-Crash junk.”

  “I always thought they called him the Dragon Man because of the dragon in his shop window,” Sara said. “I didn’t know he looked...different.”

  “He doesn’t really have to,” Father Lemuel said, pensively. “He could program his smartsuit to provide the illusion of a face much like anyone else’s. I once asked him why he didn’t, but all he said was that other people could program their smartsuits to look like him if they wanted to, and if they weren’t prepared to take the trouble, why should he? It’s not so surprising, when you consider that he’s always made his living helping people to look different and distinctive. His smartsuit covers up his tattoos, though—and he still has those, from way back. He dresses very conservatively, but wearing a mask to complete the picture is a step too far, in his way of thinking. It’s just the way he is—I don’t think he’s trying to make a point, parading himself as a walking memento mori.”