The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “Her image has to follow the dress code,” Mother Quilla pointed out, with slight exasperation at Father Gustave’s willful stupidity. “Gus, even you must take note of what other children her age are wearing at weekends.”

  “We never see any other children her age in Blackburn,” Father Gustave replied.

  “Well, some of us go further afield than Blackburn,” Mother Verena said. “Quilla’s right—and so is Sara. This is something we need to talk about.”

  “Actually...,” Sara began—but she wasn’t allowed to get any further.

  “From what I see down in ManLiv,” Father Stephen put in, “teenage self-differentiation is more a boy thing than a girl thing....”

  “Teenage self-differentiation!” said Father Gustave, scornfully. “Where on Earth did you pick up an expression like that?”

  “You’re a fine one to complain about jargon!” Father Stephen came back, testily. “It’s what people are....”

  Father Aubrey, who was in the chair, wasn’t one to hesitate over using the claw-hammer. He brought it down with a sudden loud bang. “No childish arguments!” he said, abruptly. “Civilized discussion only, focused on the subject. Which is, if I read the direction of the discussion right, Sara cultivating a more grown-up appearance. Well, I for one think that if Sara wants to adopt a more adult image, we ought to encourage her.”

  “Why?” demanded Mother Jolene. “She’ll have hundreds of years of adulthood. What’s the rush? She doesn’t have to be a fashion victim, now or ever. We ought to be helping her to resist that sort of pressure.”

  “At least for now,” Father Stephen put in. “She can make up her own mind later.”

  Sara was strongly tempted to remind all her parents that they shouldn’t be referring to her as “she” while she was actually present, but she knew from long experience that it would only waste more time. She sighed very audibly, but nobody noticed, so she leaned back in her chair while all eight parents continued to compete, pontificating about their various views on adult images and fashion victims. So far as she could tell, there wasn’t the slightest possibility of a consensus emerging.

  While the dispute continued its descent into chaos Sara took the trouble once again to look closely at the appearances her parents’ smartsuits had been programmed to project. There was not the slightest variation in the five she’d previously inspected, and Father Lemuel’s suit was even less elaborate than Father Gustave’s, its thicker sections being even more sternly functional in the cause of decency. Mother Maryelle was obviously making more of an effort, but Mother Verena’s flowers were the only example on view of anything that could pas for modern finery. The fact that Mother Verena worked outside the hometree, in ManLiv, had obviously given her a very different set of priorities; although everyone else in the household watched TV, it would have been a betrayal of their notion of parental responsibility to give any credence to the cults of celebrity that were driving the fashionability of smartsuit augmentations.

  In the end, Father Aubrey had to reach for the claw-hammer again, in an ostentatiously purposeful manner, but the others were sufficiently alert to his intention to fall silent before he actually started banging. This gave Father Lemuel the opportunity to raise the big question.

  “What kind of modifications did you have in mind, Sara?” he said, mildly.

  “Well,” Sara said, after taking a deep breath, “I’ve thought about it very carefully, and I’ve studied the examples set by all four of my mothers—and my four fathers too—so that I could see what each of you has done to make your smartsuits reflect your personalities. I’ve studied my classmates on camera, and the people on TV, to make sure I’d taken everything into account. After mature consideration, I’ve decided that what I like best is the kind of thing Mother Verena has—except that instead of a lot of little flowers, I’d like to start with just one, and see how that suits me before letting things get too elaborate.”

  All in all, she was satisfied with the speech. She particularly liked the reference to “mature consideration” and the final cautionary note about “letting things get too elaborate”. They expressed the kind of sentiment that was sue to go down well—and she’d tried to make sure that no one could criticize her too harshly without seeming to criticize Mother Verena too.

  Fortunately for Sara, Father Gustave was still in a stick-in-the-mud mood. When he said “Well, I don’t approve of all this personal vegetation; it’s almost as bad as phantom bats and ghostly scorpions—it looks absurd,” he started a virtual stampede of disagreement, of which Mother Verena was merely a member.

  Father Aubrey, having the chairperson’s advantage, won the race. “I’m a conservative dresser myself, Gus,” he said, unnecessarily, “but I never begrudged other people a little color. In our day, the technics weren’t up to much more than that, so we never had the chance to play the kind of games that progress has opened up. We shouldn’t be slaves to habit—it sets a bad example. We’re supposed to be figuring out how to live for hundreds of years without getting bogged down in utter tedium. We need to be receptive to new ideas, new opportunities.”

  “That’s fair,” Father Stephen agreed, unexpectedly shifting his position. “There’s such a thing as progress, Gus.”

  Father Gustave opened his mouth, probably to point out that Father Stephen was a man so deeply enmired in the past that his room was crammed from floor to ceiling with pre-Crash junk, but Mother Verena was keen to take up her own defense. “I’m not making any outrageous claims for my own taste, Gus,” she said, “but I think wearing flowers makes a powerful statement about our relationship with the natural world. Two hundred years on, there’s a danger that we might forget what our ancestors did to the world when they caused the worst ecocatastrophe since the Permian extinction. You must have some sympathy with that, or we wouldn’t be living in a hometree. We thought that was the most appropriate place to bring up our child, and we were right—isn’t it natural that a child brought up in a house whose organic systems are so flamboyantly manifest should want to accessorize that message in her own costume?”

  That was a little too pretentious for Mother Quilla and Father Lemuel, whose simultaneous objections opened the floodgates. Everyone was suddenly trying to speak at once, and the claw-hammer had to restore order yet again. Patiently, the other seven took turns to respond to Mother Verena’s argument with varying degrees of sympathy.

  Sara put on a show of listening politely, carefully keeping her face straight. She didn’t mind them arguing about the fine detail of Mother Verena’s apologetic case. The more they bickered about matters of mere detail, she figured, the more likely it was that they’d forget to dispute the basic principle. She watched the arguments fly back and forth, as if they were moves in some ultra-complicated virtual game. There had been a time when the combative aspect of house-meetings had alarmed her, when she had wondered whether her parents might split up—as so many households seemed to do—but the anxiety had passed. Then, for a while, she had tried hard to be amused, in order to avoid being totally bored. Now, she sometimes found it interesting, if only as an insight into the vast differences of temperament, sensibility and opinion manifest in the little community that had come together purely for the purpose of raising her from birth to early adulthood.

  Now, Sara was sensitive to the wonder of the fact that these eight strikingly contrasted people had formed an alliance, which consciously embodied a wide spectrum of jobs, ages and interests, in order that she should have a rich mixture of formative influences. In a way, the fact that they were always arguing was a great compliment to her importance in their lives—although, in another way, it just reflected the fact that they were all just a little to pig-headed for their own good.

  In the end, a typically clumsy motion was finally put to the vote. It proposed that Sara should be allowed to take a robocab into Blackburn unescorted, in order to commission the family’s tailor, Linda Chatrian, to augment her smartsuit with a discreet floral augmentatio
n.

  The result was a tie, four against four. Father Lemuel, Father Stephen, Mother Quilla and Mother Verena voted in favor, the others against. In theory, the casting vote was the prerogative of the chairperson—which was Father Aubrey, who had voted against—but Sara had a plan ready for this eventuality too.

  “I think I ought to have a vote,” she said, raising her voice just a little, so as to be clearly hard without sounding shrill. “I’ll be fourteen by the time we meet again, and I think I ought to have a vote now.”

  Not unnaturally, her parents split four against four on the matter of whether to let Sara vote—and this time, Father Lemuel pointed out that it would be unjust to let Father Aubrey have a casting vote on that issue, because it was Father Aubrey’s right to the casting vote that was in question.

  Before Father Aubrey had time to point out that letting Sara decide would simply invert the problem by conceding the issue. Father Lemuel added: “The fact that we’re taking a vote at all is a commitment to democracy, so why not extend that commitment to Sara? It’s her life we’re talking about, and her smartsuit. Does anyone here really think that she’s too stupid to be allowed a voice in her own affairs?”

  Two years before, or even one, someone would have been sure to bring up the matter of her climbing the hometree as an example of Sara’s irresponsibility, but time had healed that particular wound. It turned out that nobody wanted to take on Father Lemuel in an argument of this delicate kind.

  “Well,” said Father Lemuel, “that’s settled. Everyone agreed?”

  Everyone nodded, no one except Father Gustave with any manifest reluctance.

  “Good,” said Father Lemuel. “By the way, Sara, what kind of flower did you have in mind?” He smiled mischievously as he said it, and Sara smiled back, because they both knew that the opposition had missed that particular trick.

  “Wait and see,” Sara said, smugly. “You’ll love it—but you’ll have to wait and see.”

  And so it was that Sara called her own robocab the following Tuesday, charging it to her own account, and rode in solitary splendor into the centre of Blackburn, where she presented herself at the establishment of Linda Chatrian, Couturier.

  CHAPTER XI

  Sara had made an appointment in advance, and she was dead on time, so she was whisked through the reception area into the fitting-room without an instant’s delay. Sara didn’t doubt that Ms. Chatrian’s patience had been severely tested by a bombardment of suggestions, pleas and warnings from her various parents, but the tailor smiled as politely as she would have smiled at any client of moderate means, and asked her what kind of augmentation she had in mind.

  “I’d like a rose,” Sara said. “One flower, to begin with, just here.”

  “Would you like to look at a color chart?” Ms. Chatrian asked.

  “That’s all right,” Sara said. “I know exactly what shade I want. How long will it take? I won’t have to undress, will I?”

  “No, of course not. You’ll have to lie still for a while in the gel tank, but you’ve done that before. Roses are very popular, so I’ll have no difficulty sorting out a cutting from stock, unless the color you have in mind is very unusual. I’ll have to position it carefully, then program a growth-pattern into the resident nanobots...let’s say two hours tank time, then a quick check-up, shower and home. The bud will take ten days or a fortnight to come fully into bloom. What about perfume?”

  “Perfume?” Sara echoed. She realized immediately that although she’d spent a great deal of time at her bedroom window looking at florally-decorated smartsuits, she hadn’t thought about scent at all—to study that, she’d have needed much better software, or the actual physical presence of the models.

  “The flowers don’t have to produce nectar,” Ms. Chatrian explained, mistaking the reason for her hesitation. “If you don’t want perfume, you don’t have to have it.”

  “No, I want it,” Sara said. “It’s just that I haven’t studied the options. If you have some kind of sample kit....”

  “Of course,” Ms. Chatrian said. “I’ll get it for you. Would you like a little time alone to make your choice?”

  “If that’s no trouble,” Sara said. “I don’t want to hurry. It’s important.”

  “Of course it is,” said Ms. Chatrian. “It’s no trouble at all.”

  Sara guessed that the tailor, as a matter of professional courtesy, would never dream of pointing out that the only people likely to benefit from the scent of Sara’s rose in the near future were her eight parents, at least two of whom—and probably more—were sure to disapprove of whatever choice she made.

  Ms. Chatrian ushered Sara into a tiny room that was little more than a cupboard with a wallscreen, with a hard round stool on which to sit. Patiently, the tailor showed her how to operate the equipment that would release scent into her nostrils, and then reabsorb the molecules to make way for the next sample. The position Sara had to take up in order that this could be done with maximum efficiency felt a trifle undignified, if not actually comical. Fortunately, Linda Chatrian had closed the door when she exited the room, to guarantee Sara’s privacy.

  “Take it easy,” Sara murmured to herself, feeling that she was becoming slightly flustered by the unexpected sidetrack. “All the time in the world. Got to do this right.” She knew that it wasn’t just her parents who had to be shown that she could handle situations like this with calm authority; she needed to prove it to herself too. This was a big day, a day to set precedents.

  As soon as she saw the catalogue list on the screen, though, the right choice leapt out at her with all the shock of a revelation. Even before she had sampled the scent, Sara knew that she had to have it. It was, she supposed, a bold decision—but this was a day to set precedents, and the rose itself was an advertisement of courage. Adding the right perfume was simply a matter of completing the design.

  When she stepped out of the room again, Ms. Chatrian was waiting for her with an expression of exaggerated politeness that must have required centuries of practice to perfect. When Sara told the tailor exactly what color she required, and which scent she had chosen, Linda Chatrian merely nodded, as if she had expected Sara to make exactly that the decision.

  The fitting eventually stretched to three and a half hours, and it cost a little more than Sara had anticipated—but she figured that her credit would just about stretch, provided that she kept her spending to a bare minimum until the end of August. Given that she hadn’t yet grown accustomed to the ready availability of credit, that didn’t seem too hard—and the sacrifice was surely justified.

  She re-entered the house to find all eight of her parents lingering in the communal area. They weren’t arguing. In fact, they were so busy pretending that they were there purely by chance, rather than because they were waiting anxiously to see what Sara had done to herself, that they seemed to be in closer harmony than they had achieved for at least seven years. That was good, because it meant that no one was in a bad mood that might be taken out on Sara’s rose.

  “The stem’s wound around quite artfully,” Mother Verena observed. “Linda’s done a good job. The foliage will spread very nicely. More than adequate to protect your modesty.” The last remark was accompanied by a sideways glance at Mother Quilla.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mother Quilla said, “but you’d have looked even lovelier—and better endowed—in a nice pair of shells.”

  Sara blushed at that, although there was no need.

  “Considering the position of that bud,” Father Gustave put in, “I think you’ll be more comfortable if you don’t grow too rapidly in that department.”

  Sara was conscious that her blush must be deepening even further. The bud was very small at present, but it was positioned above her breastbone, in what would one day be her cleavage.

  “It’s not going to get in the way when you sleep, is it?” asked Mother Jolene.

  “Of course not,” Mother Verena answered for her. “Even when the bloom’s fully ext
ended it’ll fold up flat into the smartsuit if Sara smoothes it down with her hand and hold it in position for a few moments. You ought to do that when you take a shower as well as when you go to sleep, Sara, and you’ll have to do it if you ever need to wear a spacesuit or a deep-diving surskin.”

  Sara didn’t think there was any possibility of her taking an excursion into space or the remote depths of the sea in the near future, but she nodded anyway to show that she appreciated the flower’s potential discretion.

  “Well, I hope you like it,” Father Aubrey said. “It’ll be an expensive decision if you want something else in six months’ time.”

  “It is detachable,” Sara told him. “Ms. Chatrian told me that she can remove it and put it into storage any time—and that I could even do it myself if I followed the instructions very carefully. It can be stored warm for up to three years if the right provisions are made for its nutrition, or frozen down indefinitely.”

  Mother Maryelle leaned over her to inspect the tips of the petals that were peeping out of the bud. She sniffed ostentatiously, although Sara was fairly sure that there wouldn’t be enough nectar in the flower to emit a perceptible scent for at least a week.

  “Purple’s a terrible color for a rose,” Mother Maryelle opined. “At a distance, it’ll look as if you’re wearing a geranium.”

  “It’s a bit dark,” Mother Quilla said, placing her face beside Mother Maryelle’s so that she too could inspect the tip of the bloom-to-be. “Imperial purple’s all very well in broad daylight, but it won’t show up well in less kindly light. You should have gone for a lighter shade. Mauve, perhaps.”

  “White, perhaps,” Father Lemuel put in, a trifle mischievously. “All girls your age should wear white.”

  “Except that she was born on the wrong side of the Pennines,” Father Stephen said, eager to show off his supposed expertise on the subject of pre-Crash culture, although there couldn’t have been anyone present who didn’t know that Lancashire’s emblem was a red rose and Yorkshire’s a white one. “She could hardly wear red, though, considering the kind of signals that would have given out—not to mention the fact that it would look as if she’d been shot in the chest. Or maybe in the back, given that it would look more like an exit-wound.”