The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “What’s a memento mori?” Sara asked.

  “A reminder that we’re all mortal. Even now. Even if we can live forever—which we probably can’t—we won’t. Accident or disaster will get us in the end. We’re not immortal with an eye-double-em, and probably not even emortal with an ee. We can always be killed—any day, any moment. That’s why it’s really not a good idea to go climbing without the proper equipment, Sara. You really should take precautions.”

  “That’s not what you said at the house meeting,” Sara reminded him.

  “It’s not a good thing for parents to become too paranoid, or to put too many restrictions in place,” Father Lemuel said. “Where would it end? Forbidding you to leave the house...then your room...then your cocoon. You have to be free to calculate your own risks—and that’s why you ought to calculate them in a sensible manner. You were foolish, Sara, and you didn’t need to be. If you want to climb—and you should—you ought to make sure that you can’t fall, or won’t hurt yourself if you do. Frank Warburton’s always been a climber, but he didn’t get to two hundred and fifty, or however old he is, without taking precautions. You don’t get to be a Dragon Man without being careful. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  Sara nodded.

  “Some of the younger ones think I’m not taking this parenting business as seriously as I should,” Father Lemuel observed. “They think I’m only doing it because it’s one more thing to tick off on my career list. They think that I think that the fact that I put in more money than anyone else entitles me to take things easy and leave the real parenting work to them. Well, they’re wrong. What I really think is that I’m a good deal older and wiser than they are, which might make me arrogant, but doesn’t necessarily make the judgment incorrect. Most of them will be applying for another license at some time in the future—maybe more than one, if things go well for the world and space colonization actually gets off the ground—but the chances are that you’re my one and only. I take it seriously, even if you think I’m just a boring old virtuality-addict.”

  “I don’t,” Sara said. Sensing an opportunity, she said; “Can I ask you a favor, Father Lemuel?”

  “Why?” he asked. “Do you think I owe you one?”

  “No,” she said. “But I don’t think you think you owe me a no, if you see what I mean.”

  “I think so,” Father Lemuel admitted, with a wry smile.

  “I want to take a special state-of-the-art dragon ride, but I don’t have any credit...and my hood isn’t....” She trailed off, not wanting to say “good enough” in case she sounded horribly ungrateful.

  “Why do you want to do it?” Father Lemuel wanted to know.

  Sara didn’t know what sort of answer would be most acceptable, so it didn’t seem to be a good time to be economical with her explanation. “I don’t know,” she said. “But ever since I went to see the fire fountain when I was six, and saw the dragon in Mr. Warburton’s window, I’ve been...I mean, I know they were never real, like lions and camels, or even dinosaurs, but there’s something...well, I don’t suppose anyone ever went to Mr. Warburton and said draw a camel on my back, or even a Tyrannosaurus rex. But they did want dragons. Golden dragons with silver bellies. And it must have really hurt, to have needles pumping that much ink into their actual skin for hours on end. And he put one in his window, didn’t he? Out of all the things he’d ever drilled into anyone’s flesh, he chose to put the dragon in his window. So there must be something special about dragons...even if they’re all fantasy, all pretend. I want to find out what it is. I’ve ridden one in my hood, but that’s only pretend—I can float like that in school. I want to try the new Internal Technology that works in collaboration with a cocoon.”

  Father Lemuel frowned when she mentioned the IT, but he didn’t react the way Father Gustave or Mother Maryelle would have, with automatic revulsion. Perhaps, Sara thought, he knew more about that sort of technology than she had assumed.

  Father Lemuel wasn’t in any hurry to give her an answer, but he obviously didn’t want to keep her in suspense either. “It can probably be arranged, if it’s safe,” he said. “Let me look into it.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said, warmly. She leapt off the swing and gave him a hug.

  “But next time you take it into your head to do something silly,” he said. “I think you owe me a few moments’ thought and a no, don’t you?”

  “I’ll try to remember,” she promised, that being all she could actually promise with any real hope of keeping her word.

  Apparently, it was enough.

  CHAPTER VII

  Father Lemuel filled the syringe very carefully, then pointed the needle upwards and squeezed the plunger to expel a small air-bubble. “This might hurt, you know,” he said.

  “No it won’t,” Sara assured him. “Just make sure you hit the right spot.” She had already primed her smartsuit so that it had marked the most convenient entry-point to a vein and secreted a modest amount of local anesthetic.”

  Father Lemuel seemed more nervous than she was, but he got the job done. Then he gave a slight sigh. “You, er, might want to keep this just between the two of us,” he said.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she promised—perhaps a little too readily.

  “It’s not that it needs to be kept secret,” he assured her. “I could have told the others—it’s just that they’d have wanted to call a special house meeting to discuss it, for hours on end, and I’d have had to listen to Gus and Maryelle banging on yet again about parental responsibility. Not that I have anything against parental responsibility. It’s just the thought of wasting all that time going over the same old ground. I’m too old for all that.”

  So am I, Sara wanted to say—but she daren’t voice the thought, even to Father Lemuel.

  “Anyway,” Father Lemuel went on, “what kind of an example would we be setting if we were responsible all the time? You need to know that there’s such a thing as parental irresponsibility, even in the best-regulated of households. Are you all right?”

  Sara felt slightly faint, but she knew that there was no need. The thought of all those nanobots sweeping through her bloodstream was a little disturbing, but she knew that she mustn’t let her imagination get the better of her intelligence—not until she was safely enclosed in Father Lemuel’s cocoon, when she would have to do her utmost to make sure that it did exactly that.

  “Fine,” she said, holding herself rigid.

  Father Lemuel nodded. His cocoon was built into a corner of his sparsely-decorated room, so discreetly that an uninformed observer might have assumed that it was nothing more than a blister. A hometree’s walls were prone to the occasional disease that generated swellings, and such swellings nearly always afflicted corners, rounding them out as if to suggest that nature hated right-angles. Nature’s swellings couldn’t be slit down the middle the way Father Lemuel’s cocoon could, however, and their interiors weren’t equipped with artificial nerve-nets with nearly as many connections as a human brain.

  Stepping through the slit into the soft interior always made Sara feel claustrophobic for a moment or two, but the sensation was preferable to climbing into a gel-tank, which she had to do every time her smartsuit needed modification. Once the slit had sealed itself again there was a moment when the world seemed to turn upside-down, as the pull of actual gravity was cushioned and replaced by the apparent gravity of a virtual world. Once the moment of transition was over, however, she was fully committed to the Fantasyworld, and it only took a minute or so for her to enter into the illusion wholeheartedly.

  The dragon she had come to ride was at least sixty metres from head to tail, but that was partly because it had such a long tail and a long neck. Its body wasn’t that much bigger than a robocab, if you didn’t count the enormous wings and the huge clawed feet.

  Sara had been half-expecting four legs as well as the wings, and a body more like a lion’s than a chicken’s, but this was a world she had never looked into through her bedro
om window. She was delighted to see that the colors were exactly right; the dragon’s scales were gold and silver—mostly gold on the back, but all pure silver on the belly—except for the hood behind its snaky head, which was intricately patterned in red and orange.

  Sara had elected to ride the dragon rather than be the dragon, so she found herself perched—precariously, it seemed—on a little saddle at the base of the neck. She had stirrups for her feet, and improbably long reins to hold on to, but it wasn’t easy to believe that any signal she sent to the creature’s distant head would actually elicit a response.

  It was even harder to believe it once the long neck and coiled around so that the dragon could look back at her with its huge snaky green eyes, flickering its tongue as if it thought she might make a tasty meal, small enough to take at a single gulp.

  The dragon didn’t say anything. She could have chosen a Fantasyworld in which dragons could and did talk, but that seemed like cheating. She wanted to fly with dragons that were just dragons, not pseudopeople in fancy costumes. The kind of dragon on which she was mounted was no more real than the other kind, of course, but it seemed somehow to be a little less contrived, a little less fake.

  The dragon must have looked around to check that she was aboard and properly posed, because it only favored her with a single lofty glance of disdain before it turned back again to look down the precipitous slope of the mountain on whose pinnacle it was perched, and then up at the clear blue sky. Without further delay, it launched itself into the air.

  Sara couldn’t help breathing in sharply. This was where the temporary IT was supposed to kick in, to work from inside her body to empower the illusion. For a moment, her mind clung hard to the knowledge that this was only a manufactured dream, and that she was still in the hometree, in Father Lemuel’s room—but then it relaxed. She wasn’t taken over in any kind of scary way; she just relaxed into the experience. She allowed her disbelief to be suspended; she gave her consent to the fantasy.

  And it did feel as if she were actually moving, with the airstream flowing past her increasing to a gale as the dragon picked up speed. When she looked down, it really did seem that the ground was far below, and that she really might fall if she leaned too far to one side or the other.

  She knew that if she tried to do anything the Environmental Rules wouldn’t permit, she really would “fall” out of the saddle. She wouldn’t be hurt when she hit the “ground,” and her own IT wouldn’t allow the IT that Father Lemuel had injected to scare her to death on the way down, but she had asked for a more realistic adventure and that was what she was going to get. The thrill of fear that lanced through her was as sharp as the thrill of fear she’d felt when she realized that she really might fall out of the hometree’s crown and hurt herself when she hit the ground. Compared with floating around the insipid and intangible corridors of her virtual school, flying through the thick, cool atmosphere of the Fantasyworld was vivid, penetrating and wildly exhilarating.

  This, Sara thought, must be what Father Aubrey meant when he talked about “the speed trip.”

  The dragon didn’t beat its wings; it merely spread them out, arching and tilting them to catch an updraft that surged up the side of the mountain. It settled into a glide almost immediately, and then began to turn in a lazy circle around the pinnacle, soaring higher on the ascending column of air.

  Sara felt the rush of the wind in her hair and on her face, crisp and electric, but she felt quite stable in the saddle—if not quite safe, at least not unduly uncomfortable. She wasn’t in any hurry to look down again, though. She looked up, into the bright blue sky, squinting against the sunlight, and she looked out at the jagged horizon, where range after range of snow-capped mountains extended as if forever.

  She had read the program’s supplementary literature carefully, even though she didn’t quite understand everything that it contained. She wanted to savor the imaginary world to the full, so she had ploughed on determinedly, even through the technical jargon. If this world had been an actual planet rather than an image in the mind’s eye of a machine, it would have been twice the size of Earth, with only a fifth of its surface covered by water—a multitude of lakes rather than a patchwork of oceans—and almost all the remainder crumpled like a rucked-up rug. Many of the peaks would have been worn down by erosion, their rough slopes gentled as if by millions of years of rainstorms and floods of melting snow. The program that was generating the world had grinding tectonic plates built into its binary bedrock, and new peaks would be thrusting up as the older ones were worn down.

  Sara knew that the “world” had only existed for a hundred years or so, and that its actual evolution had been incredibly rapid—but within its world-soul it had an implicit existence that stretched billions of years into the past, and an assumption of evolution with all the patience necessary to bring dragons out of reptiles that had once been fish, which had once been wormlike invertebrates...and so on, all the way back to bacterial slime.

  The world felt old. Sara was not quite sure whether that sensation was somehow being communicated to her by the nanobots, or whether it was something her own imagination was inventing—but either way, she was glad of it.

  The dragon, on the other hand, did not seem old at all. For all its vast size and easy competence in the air, there was something youthful about it—or perhaps, Sara thought, she was only projecting her own youth upon it. And why not? She was here to enjoy herself, to be master of her own experience.

  She drew slightly on the reins, trying to suggest to the dragon that they had circled the peak for long enough, and that it was time to undertake a more ambitious directional flight.

  The dragon responded to her touch. It turned its back on the high-set sun, and straightened out its course, heading for a group of peaks so tall that they wore collars of cloud.

  Now, Sara looked down into the valleys over which they passed, at forests and meadowlands, winding rivers and waterfalls, placid lakes. There was no sign of human habitation but there were other animals: great herds of shaggy herbivores making their way along their grazing trails.

  If Sara had chosen to be a dragon she could have hunted as one, trying to pick off an infant herbivore, but dragons of this sort did not hunt with riders on their back. Sara wasn’t sorry about that, nor did she resolve to return one day in a fashion that would let her use her simulated talons and fangs to kill, and her simulated mouth to swallow her prey. She only wanted to fly. She was not here to pretend that dragons really lived, but only that they flew. What the dragon symbolized was more important to her than its seeming scaliness and fleshiness, even though she had only the vaguest notion of what it did symbolize, for her or for anyone.

  Oddly enough, although the dragon seemed to be flying half a kilometer above the ground—more as it passed over the deep-set valleys—she did not have as acute a sense of height as she had had when she had finally paused in the hometree’s steeple-like crown. At first she thought that was because the new Internal Technology wasn’t living up to its promises, but there was another factor involved.

  In the hometree’s crown she had felt as if she were still connected to the ground. The potential fall had been measurable against a solid vertical scale. Here, there was nothing between her and the ground but empty space, which had no sensible scale. The perceptible objects on the ground seemed very small, and she knew that their seeming smallness was a product of distance, but her kind of eyes could not make that distance meaningful—except when they flew close to a vertical slope, whose precipitousness would become abruptly obvious as her mind somehow changed gear. That never lasted for long, though; the dragon flew on and on, leaving all such tilted walls behind.

  The special Internal Technology continued its efforts, but now that she had become accustomed to its effects she became increasingly aware of the differences between the sensations of “touch” it synthesized and the real thing. The texture of the Fantasyworld wasn’t quite right. The saddle and harness she was holding,
and the scaly skin she could reach out and stroke, certainly seemed to be there, but they lacked the subtleties of real-world solidity. The air caressing her face as she moved through it was more convincing, but Sara couldn’t shake off the suspicion that it wouldn’t have convinced Father Aubrey, or anyone else who knew what a real speed trip was like.

  Even so, it was new. It was wonderful. It was worth the effort.

  As the flight extended, Sara tried to imagine what she might look like from a viewpoint even higher in the sky, from which the flying dragon might appear to be skimming the surface below, like a fiery cross moving across an infinite field of grey and green, flattened out by perspective. Was that, she wondered, what one of Frank Warburton’s tattooed dragons had looked like? Had they looked as if they were soaring over a body that was in fact a world?

  No, she decided. The dragon in the shop window had been seen in profile, as if from an airship floating alongside it, as if the skin of the wearer were the sky and not the ground at all: an infinite absence rather than an immediate presence. Was that the impression his clients had been trying to achieve? Not magnification, but transformation?

  She began to see other dragons now, some soaring around their domestic peaks, others perched on ledges close to nests where huge white eggs were resting. Were they near to hatching? There was no way to tell. Half a dozen smaller dragons fluttered upwards to fly alongside Sara’s mount in brief formation, but none carried a rider, and none turned its great green eye to stare at her. She was not invisible, but she was not of interest. She was an alien visitor, but her presence was not so disruptive that she needed to be noticed, let alone feared.