The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  “There’s no need,” Mother Quilla put in. “The wallskin will adapt automatically—just give it a couple more days. You didn’t complain fifteen years ago when we had the nursery decked out with wallflowers, Jo.”

  “I thought they were gillyflowers,” Mother Maryelle put in.

  “Technically...,” Father Stephen began—but no one wanted a pedantic sermon on the precise etymological implications of the words “wallflower” and “gillyflower”. Mother Verena was quick to say: “Have you seen any hummingbirds yet, Sara?”

  Sara admitted, by means of a shrug, that in spite of opening her window every evening to provide a means of getting in, she had not.

  “It’ll be different when we next go to Blackburn,” Mother Verena assured her. “There’ll be plenty of people out and about showing off their living jewelry.”

  “Your rose will probably be mobbed,” Father Aubrey suggested. “You’ll be fighting off hummingbirds with both hands. Mind you don’t damage any, though—we can’t afford a lawsuit, even if Maryelle offers her services for free.”

  Mother Maryelle—who worked as an investigating magistrate, weighing up the cases put together by opposing sides in legal disputes—did not dignify this comment with a reply, so Sara felt free to do likewise. The conversation soon reverted back to the usual political issues, including profoundly unexciting commentaries from all and sundry on ongoing UN debates regarding the redevelopment of Antarctica, plans for the redevelopment of the Furness Tip, proposals for changing the livery of Blackburn’s robocab fleet and the chances of Yorkshire beating Lancashire in the annual cricket match at New Trafford.

  When Sara went back to her room after dinner she opened her window immediately, and then called Gennifer for a chat.

  Inevitably, “Any hummingbirds yet?” were Gennifer’s first words too—but Sara had her camera set to close-up, so there was no point in shrugging her shoulders again.

  “Not yet,” she said. “If we lived closer to the cityplex it would be different, but hummingbirds are thin on the ground in these parts.”

  “They never touch the ground,” Gennifer pointed out, pedantically, “so whatever they’re thin on, it isn’t the ground.”

  “I’m not going to give up,” Sara said. “If I leave my window open long enough, one’s bound to pick up the scent eventually, even if the perfume has to drift as far as the outskirts of Blackburn. Sometimes, I wish my parents hadn’t decided that a rural environment was best for child-rearing.”

  “You’ll have to visit me here before the summer’s over,” Gennifer said. “By August the twelfth we’ll both by fourteen, and it’s high time we met in the flesh. Isn’t it too late now, though? I mean, evening’s when people want their living jewelry about their person. You might do better to open the window tomorrow morning, if it weren’t for school. Maybe you’d do better to wait for the weekend, or the holiday—we’ll be out of school for a whole month after the end of next week.”

  Sara didn’t want to wait for the weekend, although she could see the logic in what Gennifer had said about the evening not being the best time to expect other people’s finest feathered frippery to be flying free. She had said that she wasn’t going to give up, and she had meant it. She decided that instead of closing the window when she went to bed she would leave it open all night. The most likely time of all for costume jewelry to be left to its own devices, she figured, was when its owners had gone to sleep. Unlike roses, hummingbirds couldn’t just flatten themselves out; they would presumably have to be detached. How far might they fly when they were? They must have some sort of programming to restrict their range, but how far would they be allowed to roam? On the other hand, anyone who had a flock of hummingbirds had make her own provision for their nourishment, If so, there must be more than one garden in Blackburn where colibri-scented roses were blooming in their hundreds—in which case, far-flying birds might find more abundant supplies of nectar much closer to home than her bedroom....

  A further flaw in her plan, Sara realized soon enough, was that if she were actually going to witness any crucial moment that did arrive, she would have to stay awake herself—which might not be easy. She had to remind herself that she didn’t have to stay awake all night, but only long enough for the first questing hummingbird to appear. Nor did she have to stay fully awake, so long as she dozed lightly enough to become alert at the first flutter of tiny wings.

  It was with this thought uppermost in her mind that she finally laid her head on her pillow—having refrained from dimming her nightlight, on the grounds that it would be no use hearing the flutter of tiny wings if she couldn’t see them beating.

  CHAPTER XIII

  It was the repeated momentary eclipse of the nightlight that eventually brought Sara out of a light doze with a sudden start. She hadn’t heard wings because the flyers that were zooming around her room weren’t making any noise.

  As she emerged from sleep Sara’s heart leapt with anticipatory joy—but it only took two fleeting moments for her delight to turn to confusion, and then to disappointment.

  The flyers weren’t birds at all. They weren’t even solid. They were like dark clouds seen in a speeded-up videotape, moving with impossible rapidity—except that real clouds were chaotic, never holding the merest semblance of shape for more than a moment. These clouds were very precisely shaped, sculpted into the image of living beings by some mysterious internal force.

  They were, she realized, bats—not real bats, but shadowbats. They were astral tattoos.

  She had seen astral tattoos on people’s costumes at least a hundred times by now. From the relative safety of the virtual schoolyard, she had clicked on Davy Bennett’s tag in order to watch his ghostly spiders quit their spectral webs to flow across the floor of his bedroom-which was, it appeared, the only place save for the contours of his body where they were currently allowed to flow. Flowing across flat surfaces was what all shadows did, though, and the astral tattoos she’d seen—including Davy’s spiders—hadn’t seemed particularly remarkable even in the absence of real objects to cast the shadows in question.

  The shadowbats flying about her room, on the other hand, were doing something that no shadow ever had, or could: moving through space with effortless ease, maintaining distinct three-dimensional forms in spite of the fact that they had no solidity.

  Father Lemuel had once shown her the interior of a gas-giant world—not a real one, but a serious simulation put together by experimental xenobiologists—which was populated by thousands of different kinds of vaporous life-forms. Many of them had been far more spectacular than these invaders, which were mere mimics of solid creatures that still existed in spite of the Crash, no bigger than her adolescent hand—but the gas-giant’s inhabitants had been phantoms in a virtual world, where phantoms belonged. The shadowbats were in her own world, in her own bedroom, where phantoms had no possible right to be. That made them bizarre and disturbing.

  Sara knew that there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of young men in Blackburn, Preston and ManLiv whose smartsuits had been adapted to support shadowbats. The augmentation was slightly less expensive, and far less troublesome, than the one she had undertaken. People who routinely wore black to go abroad in the world, like Father Stephen, could wear such augmentations unobtrusively even to their places of work. There was, in consequence, nothing very surprising about the fact that she should eventually see shadowbats in flight, nor about the shadowbats themselves. Even so, they seemed bizarre—and their presence in her bedroom, where they had no right to be, was disturbing.

  Sara wondered, briefly, whether the bats might belong to Father Stephen, who could have been concealing them about his black-clad person for months, but she quickly rejected the idea as absurd. It did not even seem conceivable that they might belong to Father Gustave. In fact, the only one of her parents Sara could imagine as a potential shadowbat-wearer was the youngest of them all, Mother Jolene—but Mother Jolene was so adamant about her immunity to fashion trends
that she surely would not contemplate such a step until everyone else had passed on to a new fad. Anyway, it was absurd to imagine that any of her parents could have been keeping a secret flock of shadowbats, so the shadowbats could not possibly belong in the hometree.

  They must, therefore, have come from further afield—which meant that they must have flown a long way...unless there was someone lurking in the darkness just beyond the garden hedge.

  That thought made Sara sit up on the bed, looking anxiously at the open window—but she stayed where she was, and watched the shadowbats.

  There were six of them. They were as graceful in flight as only semi-substantial creatures could be. They spiraled and soared, dived and looped.

  As soon as Sara sat up on the bed, the rose began to open out. It had obediently flattened itself out when she had smoothed it with her hand, so that its petals would not be crushed as she turned over on the bed, but it responded automatically to her change of attitude.

  Immediately, the flock of shadowbats moved towards her—or rather, towards the flower. Now, when they dived, they descended one by one upon Sara’s not-quite-flattened rose, banking as they slid past its burgeoning surface, like swallows skimming the surface of a wind-rippled lake.

  For a moment or two, Sara assumed that they were only playing, perhaps attracted by the unusual color of the flower. She quickly realized, though, that they really were taking turns, moving past the flower in strict rotation, as if they were sharing its effluence.

  Unlike hummingbirds, the shadowbats could not hover; nor did they possess beaks which they could intrude into the centre of the flower so that they might drink directly from the nectar-glands at the base of the style. In any case, because they were vaporous themselves, they had no need for vulgar liquid nourishment...but Sara realized that this did not mean that they needed no nourishment at all, nor that they were unequipped to take it from the air.

  It took Sara several minutes to become convinced of the fact, but in the end she could not resist the conclusion that the sublimate organisms really were taking in the volatilized scent of her rose’s nectar, absorbing the perfume into their cloudy bodies a few molecules at a time. They had neither mouths nor noses, so they were not drinking or breathing it, but they were certainly mopping it up—her own nose told her that much.

  It was only a short step from that conviction to another, which was that the shadowbats’ aerial frolics were becoming more hectic by the moment. It seemed to Sara that they were not merely absorbing the intangible perfume of her purple rose, but also becoming intoxicated by it, as if it were a drug.

  For a few moments Sara remained absolutely still in her sitting position, marveling at the unexpectedness of it all—but then a sense of violation began to build.

  A rose perfumed by colibri nectar should not be attracting shadowbats. None of the scents in the catalogue shown to her by her family’s ultra-respectable tailor were designed to attract shadowbats, nor had she ever seen such an advertisement on TV, even on the more exotic shopping channels. The shadowbats that had invaded her room might not be guilty of theft, given that the scent exuded by her flower could not be reckoned to be hers once it was released into the air, but they certainly seemed to her to be guilty of some strange as-yet-unnamed perversion.

  So far as Sara knew, shadowbats were designed to draw their nourishment parasitically from the bodies of their hosts. Unlike ornamental birds and bees, they were not intended to seek out “food” elsewhere. Their flight was not supposed to be purposeful. But Sara was old enough to know that “so far as she knew,” at the ripe old age of fourteen, was not very far. The world was still full of mysteries that her schooling, her parents and her TV-viewing had not yet contrived to illuminate. What she did not know about sublimate technology would easily fill a catalogue, if not a whole virtual world.

  Her train of thought suddenly turned back on itself, returning to her supposition that shadowbats were nourished “from the bodies of their hosts”—or, more likely, host in the singular, if she were only concerned with the particular flock of night-visitors turning somersaults around her nightlight.

  These were not just any shadowbats; they belonged to someone. In fact, they belonged to the kind of person who was likely to wear, at least some of the time, an elaborate network of quasi-Gothic astral tattoos. Someone like Davy Bennett, but probably older. One of the year elevens or twelves in webschool...or someone even older than that. Not necessarily male, but very probably. Someone who lived nearby, at least insofar as “near” could be defined by the flight of an insubstantial bat...or someone who was nearby now, wherever he might live....

  This time, Sara did jump to the floor and move away from the bed, scattering the shadowbats as she did so. Not one of them touched her, nor even came close enough to her face to let her feel the faint wind of their passage. She went to her east-facing window and looked out into the sultry late-July night.

  The stars were bright, only a few of them hidden by wisps of cirrus cloud. The moon was in its third quarter, a crisp white crescent. Away to her left, the muted streetlights of Blackburn—which were designed to minimize light pollution, but could not prevent some leakage of their emissions—imparted an eerie glow to the northern horizon. The familiar sky seemed almost neighborly in spite of being out of reach—but the ground was cloaked in black, and might have hidden a hundred silent watchers who could see her silhouette quite clearly, while remaining utterly invisible themselves. So far as she could tell, the whole surrounding countryside might have been swarming with people...or shadowspiders, shadowscorpions and shadowdragons.

  Her parents had always assured her that the hometree was absolutely secure. Nothing could get past the perimeter undetected, they had told her. The hometree’s resident artificial intelligence was clever enough to identify any intruder, and frustrate any malevolent plan that any intruder might have. Burglary was one of the many crimes that had been put away with the sins of the pre-Crash world.

  Even so, there were people who liked to wander about by night, especially in the season when the normally dreary north-west of England retained a calm echo of Greenhouse Crisis subtropicality. There might easily be someone out there beyond the property’s boundary... someone whose presence might be entirely innocent, quite devoid of any criminal intent, but which could still be reckoned disturbing.

  Sara reached out into the night to pull the window shut—and as soon as she did so the shadowbats reacted. Vaporous entities had very little scope for awareness, let alone intelligence, but whatever organizing power controlled their bat-like shape was sensitive to the fact that the window was their only means of escape.

  They flew past her in tight formation, and were gone. The night dissolved them, almost as though it were absorbing them into its own vast void. It was as if they were themselves no more than a perfume to be obliterated even as they were sensed.

  For a few seconds, Sara remained frozen in mid-motion, unable to complete her intention. Then she was free again, and she drew the window closed, without undue violence. The intense darkness she looked into now was not the darkness outside but the darkness of another world, which the pane was programmed to display. It was not one of her favorite dragonworlds but a forestworld...a lush tropical jungle, of a kind where hummingbirds might live wild, if the natural species had not been exterminated by the collateral damage of the ecocatastrophic Crash. No stars were visible through her window now, because the rainforest canopy was too dense to let even one shine through...but Sara had never been sure whether that meant that the virtual world in question was bounded by the opaque canopy, or whether the stars were somehow “there” even if they could never be seen.

  As her Internal Technology calmed any unnecessary fear that the strange visitation had excited, Sara began to feel very tired indeed. She moved back to her bed, and lay down upon it. She curled herself up slightly as she smoothed her rose with her hand, until its petals merged with the gentle contours of her flesh.

  It
was only a dream, she told herself, silently, although she knew perfectly well that it had not been a dream at all. It was all shadows and illusions, she added—but she was old enough to know that she lived in a world where shadows and illusions had to be taken seriously, because they were usually meaningful products of ingenious design.

  CHAPTER XIV

  In spite of the deep dent in her credit inflicted by the rose, Sara decided to take a robocab into town on the following Saturday morning in order to consult Linda Chatrian about the shadowbats. A few eyebrows were raised when she told the five parents lingering in the dining room that it was expected, but they conscientiously respected the rights they had recently conceded by asking no further questions when she told them that she was “only going into town”. After much thought, she had decided against telling any of her parents about the strange visitation. She was afraid that one of the four who had supported her initial request might decide to switch sides and begin a campaign to have the rose removed and put in storage until the mystery was sorted out.

  The moment she had been waiting for arrived almost as soon as she stepped out of the cab. The street was crowded with strollers and shoppers, at least some of whom had come out to parade their finery. Two hummingbirds appeared as if by magic, and began to engage in an intricate competitive dance to determine which of them would have the privilege of taking the first sip from Sara’s rose.

  Sara paused, knowing that she ought to be savoring the moment and storing it away as a precious memory, but she was suddenly overtaken by a flood of self-consciousness. Although the pedestrian traffic hadn’t actually come to a standstill, it had visibly slowed. People were not only looking at her but actually modifying their pace, or even coming to a halt, in order to watch her.