The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “It was different in the olden days,” Gennifer informed her, loftily. “When people wore dead clothes they had whole wardrobes full of all kinds of bizarre bits, which they put on in all kinds of weird combinations. All they—the clothes, that is—had to do was hang there, so of course they came in all kinds of different fabrics and colors, with all kinds of buttons and beads and things attached. The people put them on every morning and took them off at night, and sometimes changed them around half a dozen times a day. We get an extra layer of skin as soon as we’re born and it grows along with us for the next twenty or a hundred years...until something so new comes along that it’s easier to strip us naked and start again than it is to do a what-d’you-call-it....”

  “Somatic conversion,” Sara put in, to show that no matter how smart her friend might pretend to be, she was the one had the more assured command of the jargon.

  “Right,” Gennifer agreed. “But what I mean is, clothing is only one of the things our smartsuits have to be, and not the most important one while we’re growing up—at least the way our parents see it. There’s hygiene and protection and all kinds of other stuff to make sure we and the smartsuits grow properly. Adults don’t grow any more—unless they take up some kind of sport that needs longer legs or whatever—so their smartsuits don’t have so much other stuff to do, and they have metabolic capacity to spare for fancy decoration. We’re sort of half-way between, which is awkward. The opportunities are there, but we have to persuade our parents to let us take them. Have you seen Davy Bennett lately—out of school, I mean, on camera?”

  “No,” Sara admitted. She rarely talked to any of her other classmates desktop-to-desktop.

  “Well, he’s rigged his tag so that you can get a picture of his new outfit just by clicking. Spiders aren’t my thing at all, and I can’t imagine how he persuaded his parents to let him have them, but it’ll give you some idea of what’s possible.”

  “Davy has spiders on his smartsuit?” Sara said, incredulously.

  “Shadowspiders. Just an example. Margareta says she’s going to get a pair of doves, but she hasn’t got permission yet. Are any of your mothers into birds? Mother Jenna’s got bluebirds, and Mother Luisa’s thinking about hummingbirds. I told her hummingbirds would be great, but she doesn’t rate my opinion very highly, so maybe I should have said I hated them.”

  As it happened, none of Sara’s mothers had yet been caught up by this particular wave of fashion, but she didn’t want to give Gennifer an opportunity to imply that the members of her family were country bumpkins, so she dodged the question.

  “Does that mean that your mothers have to eat a lot more?” she said. “I mean, if their shoulder-pads and head-dresses are going to fly around when they’re out and about, they must soak up a lot of energy.”

  “They don’t have to eat more unless they want to,” Gennifer said, “but they do have to eat slightly different things. The birds are designed to pick up some of their own nourishment, but I think that’s just an option—a gimmick.”

  “You mean they eat flies?”

  “I suppose they could,” Gennifer admitted. “Mother Jenna’s bluebirds are vegetarians, though. Hummingbirds live on nectar from flowers, so Mother Luisa asked the last house-meeting about the possibility of re-planting the garden with special roses. Mother Leanne’s all in favor, but Father Guy’s against it because of his herbs.”

  “Our garden’s big enough for flowers and herbs, and a lot more besides,” Sara said, automatically taking the opportunity to score a point.

  “So you’re always telling me,” Gennifer retorted. “I’ll have to come visit one day, so that I can get lost in it. When you come to see me, we can go to the lake. You haven’t got a lake, have you?”

  “We’re not very far from the river,” Sara said, but she knew that it was a weak defense so she quickly changed tack. “Mother Verena wears flowers,” she said. “Only little ones. It’s more for the stem than the blooms, I think—it makes such a lovely pattern as it winds around her body. The flowers are like little blue stars. And she has leaves over her breasts. Mother Quilla and Mother Maryelle have shells, but Mother Jolene doesn’t have anything decorative at all—just her smartsuit, although it has to be a bit thicker in places to provide extra support. In a way, though, that’s more decorative. Mother Maryelle keeps looking at me and dropping hints about shells, but I don’t want shells, certainly not in all the other places Mother Maryelle wears them. I’d rather have flowers, like Mother Verena. One way or another, I’m going to get whisked off to the tailor fairly soon.”

  Gennifer had her desktop camera zoomed in on her face, so Sara couldn’t see anything below her neck, but when Gennifer glanced down critically Sara knew that the other girl must be making calculations of her own.

  “I’d like birds myself,” Gennifer said, “but they’d never let me wear birds there. They’d say it would be too provocative when they took off.”

  “Flowers,” Sara said, firmly. “Better that than the kinds of feathers and furs that bikers wear. I think Father Aubrey has a couple of radical surskins hidden away, but he doesn’t think that sort of thing fits in with being a parent.”

  “My Father Jacob’s the same,” Gennifer said. “And I bet Father Guy’s got a skeleton or two hidden in his cupboard. But that won’t make them any more sympathetic to any requests I make. Mother Jenna and Mother Luisa might take my side, because they’d be glad to think they’d inspired me, but I’d never get it through the house meeting. The moment I mentioned it, they’d all start pushing their own ideas. I’d probably end up in chain mail. Parents, eh?”

  Sara contented herself with a sympathetic nod, but the conversation set off a train of thought in her own mind that was still running long all through the evening meal, when no less than five of her parents put in an appearance at the communal table to engage in hearty conversation about the latest ecological management statistics, the reclamation of Antarctica, the Gaean Lib anti-SAP demonstrations in the South Saharan Republic and the latest scheme cooked up by the Continental Engineers to speed up work on the sixth continent without re-raising the sea-level to the point at which New Shanghai and the Brahmaputran Confederacy disappeared beneath the waves again. Sara could never quite work out whether anyone except Father Gustave—who had done long service as a UN bureaucrat before taking time out for parenthood—was actually interested in such matters, or whether they thought that it was the sort of thing they ought to talk about at communal mealtimes for the benefit of her political education. Either way, she felt no particular compulsion to listen, even at the best of times, and now she had more pressing matters on her mind.

  Until she’d complained about it to Gennifer, she hadn’t really given much thought to the matter of an imminent trip to the tailor, partly because her early experiences of smartsuit checkups had seemed to her to be on a par with visits to the hospital to have her ever-growing population of nanobot assistants monitored, enhanced and reprogrammed—not the sort of thing that one wanted to dwell upon. Now that she was growing up, though, she had to adopt a different attitude, and see such expeditions as matters of opportunity rather than mere obligation.

  She studied the costumes of her fellow diners more carefully than she had ever bothered to do before. Father Gustave and Father Stephen were wearing plain black, the mass of their smartsuits carefully bulked up on the shoulders and at other strategic points. Father Aubrey was slightly more daring, opting for a dark blue base with several extra decorations, including a silk-effect cummerbund and purple leg-stripes. Mother Jolene wore a lighter shade of blue, but her attire was as plain and conservative, in its way, as Father Gustave’s. Only Mother Quilla seemed to be taking much trouble to individualize her appearance, although Sara didn’t think that green—even ocean green—was the right backcloth to show off her seashell decorations to good effect.

  Suddenly, the accidental detail of the promise that she’d extracted nearly four years earlier, that she could use her credit acco
unt to pay for major smartsuit modifications, clicked into clearer focus. She really did have an opportunity that she must be careful not to waste. If she didn’t want her parents to decide whether—or how—her appearance ought to be adjusted to take account of her increasing maturity of form, then she ought to conceive a plan of her own, and be ready to put it into action. If she wanted flowers, then she ought to decide what kind of flowers she wanted, and if she wanted birds....

  Even birds, she suddenly thought, were not the limit of potential ambition. If she were to decide that she wanted dragons....

  So far as Sara knew, no fashion designer had yet got around to engineering solid dragons that could enjoy the same symbiotic relationship with a person’s smartsuit as the synthetic bluebirds and hummingbirds that were all the rage in the more civilized parts of north-west England, but animal and mineral decorations were not the only ones available. The easiest—and perhaps the cheapest—way to augment the display capabilities of a relatively primitive smartsuit was to use sublimate technology: images made out of vaporous substances that had enough molecular memory to form cloudy shapes in two or three dimensions, bounded by “smokeskins”. When they lay flat on the surface of a smartsuit, they were “astral tattoos,” but those which could take flight could reform themselves as phantom bats or owls—or even spiders, if she had taken the correct inference from Gennifer’s comments on Davy Bennett’s new costume.

  The astral tattoos that Sara had actually seen were mostly black, formulated as the silhouettes of bats, birds or swimming fish—but images of that sort were almost exclusively worn by males. There was no reason at all why astral tattoos shouldn’t be any color their wearer might desire, or any shape their wearer might desire. They might, for instance, be golden dragons—and Sara was certain that she knew where a man could be found who would be only too pleased to make that possibility an actuality: Frank Warburton, the Dragon Man.

  For ten minutes or so, while she slowly savored her dessert—cassata siciliana, flavoured with three traditional fruits and three brand new products of ingenious genetic engineering—Sara solemnly considered the possibility of becoming host to a family of two-dimensional dragons, which would flow around her body, taking off from time to time to fly free like phantoms of eerie light, effortlessly upstaging any lumpen bluebirds or hummingbirds that happened to be around.

  In the meantime, Father Gustave was earnestly explaining to Fathers Stephen and Aubrey and Mothers Quilla and Jolene why the as-yet-unbuilt supermetropolis of Amundsen City was the only appropriate home for the new United Nations Headquarters, with an enthusiasm that brought forth a mixture of laughter and astonishment.

  “Surely, Gus,” Father Stephen said, “even you can’t actually want to live at the South Pole.”

  “It won’t be cold inside,” Father Gustave said, the reddening of his face uninhibited by the transparent surskin overlaying his native flesh.

  “No, of course not,” said Mother Jolene. “But think of the scenery! Even if they recreated penguins and polar bears from the gene banks....”

  Sara was sure that Mother Jolene was joking, firstly because she had to know perfectly well that penguins and polar bears had lived a opposite ends of the Earth, and secondly because the Continental Engineers planned to reshape the glaciers in a massive crown-like rim around the reclaimed region where Amundsen City was supposed to be—but Father Gustave was blushing even more deeply as his frustration increased.

  Whether the sight of that blush of annoyance that had anything to do with her own realization, Sara couldn’t tell, but it came to her all of a sudden that it wouldn’t do to be too original in her choice of sophisticated clothing. No matter what sort of promise was on the house record from four years before, she had to be careful not to overstep the mark, or the promise would simply be revoked. Politics, as Father Gustave was exceedingly fond of saying, was the art of the attainable.

  Reluctantly, Sara set aside the idea of becoming a Dragon Girl, postponing further contemplation of that prospect until she was old enough to be a Dragon Lady. If she wanted to decorate her costume more elaborately now, she had to pick something that at least some of her parents would consider reasonable—which, given the constitution of the household, probably meant that birds were out of the question, let alone dragons.

  Flowers, on the other hand....

  While Father Gustave continued his pointless lecture on the virtues of Antarctica as a “Continent Without Nations” Sara thought about flowers, and their possibilities as bodywear.

  “If you’ve had enough, Sara,” Mother Jolene said, breaking in on her fierce concentration, “just put your spoon down and let the table get on with clearing itself. Don’t play with your food.”

  “I’m eating it,” Sara protested. “I’m just taking my time. I was listening. I don’t see why Father Gustave shouldn’t want to live at the South Pole when his work’s done here. It’ll be new, won’t it? New’s good, isn’t it?”

  No one seemed to suspect that this was the opening of a propaganda campaign, and it wasn’t just Father Gustave who was grateful for her expression of opinion. All her parents liked to see her taking an interest in their topics of discussion, especially if they were only discussing them for the benefit of her education.

  “Thank you, Sara,” Father Gustave said, warmly. “It’s good to have a sensible contribution to the conversation. “You really ought to set the child a better example, Jo.”

  “If I have to take your plans for the UN seriously,” Mother Jolene retorted, “you ought to be a little more sympathetic to my interests.”

  “There’s politics and politics,” Father Gustave said, impatiently. “Gaean Lib nonsense isn’t practical politics—it’s romantic nonsense.”

  “That’s a bit steep, Gus,” Father Aubrey put in. “I suppose you think the sixth continent is romantic nonsense too.”

  “It is when people start calling it Atlantis re-risen,” Mother Maryelle said.

  “I didn’t,” Father Aubrey protested.

  “And I didn’t say that I was a Gaean Lib supporter,” Mother Jolene put in. “What do you think of the Gaean Liberation Movement, Sara?”

  “I think they’re a necessary pressure group,” Sara said, quoting an earlier remark of Mother Jolene’s word for word, “but the same is true of the Continental Engineers—and in the meantime, the UN has to get on with the day-to-day running of the world.”

  No one seemed to notice that the second part of this careful judgment was borrowed from Father Aubrey, or the third from Father Gustave.

  “That’s very sensible,” Father Gustave said. “Very mature, for your age.”

  “Well, I am nearly fourteen,” Sara said. “I’ll have my own credit account in a couple of weeks. I have to think of sensible and mature ways of using it.”

  While her parents were still congratulating themselves on the success of their educational discussion, Sara finished off the cassata in two gulps so that the table could get on with the next task in its schedule—which it did with such rapidity that she could almost have suspected it of impatience. The attention she had drawn to herself wasn’t entirely complimentary, though. Mother Quilla was looking at her with a suspicious and slightly critical expression.

  “Yes,” Mother Quilla said, “you are growing up, aren’t you?”

  Sara could almost see the images of twin scallop shells forming in the mind behind Mother Quilla’s contemplative gaze. Having made her impression, it was time to retreat.

  “I’ve got homework to do,” Sara announced, brightly. “Good night for later, in case I don’t see some of you again.”

  So saying, she moved swiftly away to her room, barely pausing to wonder what the five of them would talk about over coffee, now that they no longer had to give such earnest consideration to her educational needs.

  CHAPTER X

  By the time the weekly house-meeting came around Sara had decided exactly what to ask for, and how to go about it. She didn’t need to remind her
eight parents that her fourteenth birthday was now imminent; they were almost as excited about it as she was. Nor did she have to remind them about the solemn promise that they had made four years earlier; the household’s so-called artificial intelligence was slavishly dutiful about such matters of record.

  There was the usual list of routine items to be sorted out. The hometree’s roots had picked up yet another fungal infection, and because it was a new mutant the treatment might not be covered by the standard maintenance contract. The picture window in Father Stephen’s room had developed a glitch and he thought that the replacement component ought to be bought out of the general household budget rather than coming out of his own pocket. Et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, though, the way was clear for Sara to make her bid.

  “As soon as my credit account comes into operation,” she announced, as though it were merely a matter of notifying them of something that needed no discussion, “I’ll be going into Blackburn to have some modifications made to my smartsuit. I don’t need anyone to accompany me, so it shouldn’t interfere with anyone else’s schedule.”

  “You can’t go alone,” Mother Verena said, immediately—picking up, as Sara had hoped she might, on the lesser of her two claims. It was the one she was prepared to surrender, if need be.

  “She has to be allowed out some time,” Father Aubrey obligingly chipped in.

  “Yes,” said Mother Verena, “but....”

  “Hold on a minute,” said Father Gustave, sending Sara’s opening stratagem crashing to defeat. “What modifications? Your smartsuit doesn’t need any modifications, Sara.”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that myself, Gus,” Mother Quilla said. “I’ve mentioned it to Maryelle, and Verena too. Sara’s growing up. Whether she’s allowed out on her own or not, it’s only natural that she should begin thinking more carefully about her appearance.”

  “She’s at school all day,” Father Gustave said. “She has to follow the dress code.”