The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  She was having difficulty following the thread, but she didn’t want to admit it.” Do you meddle much with off-the-shelf products, Mr. Warburton?” she asked.

  “You can call me Frank if I can call you Sara,” he said, amiably. “To answer the question, though—yes, I’m an inveterate tinkerer, just like your Father Lem. Old habits die hard, even when you’re in unfamiliar territory. I used to do beautiful work, you know, when I was younger. Birds, roses, hearts, mottoes...even dragons with gold and silver scales, like the one in the window, and angels with swans’ wings and breath like holy fire—but never Washington crossing the Delaware.” He waited a moment to see whether Sara would ask him what he meant by the last remark, but she didn’t want to seem ignorant and she knew that she could always ask one of her parents.

  “I must be one of the last men alive who worked with needles, on bare skin,” the Dragon Man went on. “That’s why I keep them in the window, like whiskers dropped from the dragon’s snout. I’ve always kept pace, with the organics and the smartsuits, all the way from...well, not quite the beginning, but at least a time when a few of us were still willing and able to stand naked every time we took a bath or changed our poor dead clothes. I’ve always meddled, Sara. I carried the habit over when I qualified as a sublimate engineer, just as I’d carried it over into all the other retraining programs I had to go through in order to maintain the outer semblance of my career. I’m older than I look, you know.” He smiled to signal that the last comment was a joke, and that he knew exactly how old he looked, when he was clearly visible.

  “Do you know who owns the shadowbats that came into my room?” Sara asked. It seemed more diplomatic than asking whether he had meddled with any shadowbats in such a way as to give them an appetite for hummingbird-food.

  “I can find out,” he replied, confidently. “What do you want me to do about it if I do?”

  Sara hesitated. She wasn’t sure. “Could you fix them?” she asked, curiously.

  “Are you sure they’re broken?” he countered. “Perhaps they’ve acquired a whole new realm of experience, and discovered a brand new pleasure. Fixing them might be cruel, don’t you think?”

  “They’re not hummingbirds,” Sara said. “I chose colibri because....” She trailed off, realizing that what she was saying was utterly irrelevant to the question he had posed. Her eyes had adjusted to the poor light now, and she could make out the vague lines of Frank Warburton’s features. She was suddenly convinced that was looking at her intently, with a very peculiar expression on his face. She immediately told herself that it must be a trick of the shadows, but she wouldn’t be convinced.

  She had been told often enough that smartsuits were “emotionally intelligent”—which meant that they were designed to signal and signify, even better than unmasked faces, all the things that people needed to communicate face-to-face but couldn’t put into words. Their role was, however, essentially supportive. If the human being within was enigmatic, the extra layers of synthetic skin wouldn’t decipher the mystery. Frank Warburton suddenly seemed even more deeply enigmatic than the surrounding shadows forced him to be—more deeply enigmatic than Sara had ever imagined that any human being could seem.

  “Do you know, Sara,” the old man said, apparently wanting to set her at her ease, “that you’re the first customer I’ve had this morning? On a Saturday! I have four appointments on the machine, but they’re all for this evening, after sunset. Why is that, do you think? Is it going to be bats all the way, now? Am I becoming a creature of the dusk myself? Sublimate entities don’t have to be shadows, you know. They can be bright, like creatures of pure radiance, or nearly invisible.”

  “I know,” Sara said. “I thought about that. I thought about having a golden dragon fitted to my smartsuit—but my parents would never have let me do it.”

  “Did you, indeed?” he said, as if he were genuinely impressed. “You’d have come to me, of course—what a fine time we might have had with that design. It’s not just dragons, though. We can make all manner of fays and phantoms. Imagine that! We could fill the world—the real world, that is, not one of its virtual parallels—with quasi-life that we can’t even see. For now, we have shadows, which only fade away in the twilight...but in time, there’ll be hosts of angels dancing around us in the broadest daylight, unseen and unsuspected. Or maybe we’ll want to reserve the word angel for the ones that glow like haloes. Fashion is a fickle thing, but I can’t help getting a little bit impatient with it...you can see what I mean, can’t you Sara? You really have thought about it.”

  “I think I can see,” she said. “Yes, I really have thought about it. The spiders and the scorpions seem a little silly to me too—but the shadowbats are better, and the potential that’s still untapped...what you mean is that you meddle because you’re anxious to move on.”

  “Old age breeds impatience,” Frank Warburton told her, as gravely if he were imparting a dark secret. “My kind of old age does, at any rate. You won’t find out about your kind for a very long time. I don’t frighten you, do I, Sara? I frighten children sometimes. I thought I might have frightened you, last time we met.”

  “You remember that?” Sara said. It seemed astonishing.

  “You were with Stephen and Quilla,” he reminded her, as if he felt obliged to provide proof. “I knew you were Lem’s girl. If Gus had been with you...or even Maryelle...but maybe not. Did I frighten you?”

  “No,” Sara said, not quite sure that it was true but wanting it to be. “I was startled, that’s all. You didn’t have to turn away like that. You could have said hello.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “I wish I had said hello, now. Better late than never. Did you tell your parents that you were coming to see me?”

  “I didn’t know myself,” she said. “Actually, I didn’t even tell them I was coming to see Ms. Chatrian. I have my own credit account now, so I didn’t have to.”

  “They’ll haul you up in front of a committee of enquiry as soon as you get home, regardless,” the Dragon Man observed. “If there’s one thing parents hate, it’s not being kept informed.... I can even remember that, you see, even though it’s been more than a hundred years since I was a parent, and more than two hundred since...well, it’s probably best not go into that. You can tell them all that I’ve promised to look into your little mystery, and that I’ll do my very best to solve the problem. Just between you and me, it might not be easy, but I’ll try. I have to respect client confidentiality, you understand, but I’ll certainly try to figure out what’s happened, and what can be done about it. Will you trust me to take care of it?”

  “I suppose so,” Sara said, lamely. She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. He was as still as a statue now, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to go.

  She stood up, a little unsteadily. He remained silent.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose...goodbye, then. She turned towards the door, but she moved slowly, in case he called her back. He didn’t get up.

  It wasn’t until the door slid open that he spoke again. “If ever you need a new suit, Miss Lindley,” the seated Dragon Man said, his tone barely above a whisper, “you might want to look further afield than Linda Chatrian. She’s a little behind the times. But the rose does suit you. You made a good choice.”

  Sara paused on the threshold to look back over her shoulder. “Thanks” she said—but Frank Warburton was no longer looking in her direction. His face was still invisible, but his head had slumped forward, so that he seemed to be staring at the keypad on his desk.

  It didn’t occur to her until the door had closed behind her that perhaps Frank Warburton hadn’t been quite ready to say goodbye either, but that he simply hadn’t felt capable of continuing the conversation as comfortably as he wished. For a moment or two she considered going back into the shop to ask if he was all right, but she guessed readily enough that if he really had wanted her to go, he certainly wouldn’t want her to return.

  Sara
realized, a trifle belatedly, that she had been telling the truth, even though politeness would have compelled her to lie. She hadn’t been frightened of the Dragon Man—not this time, at any rate. She hadn’t been frightened at all. She didn’t know him well enough to know whether she liked him, but she felt—however absurdly—that they had something in common. She and he were both exceptional. She and he were so exceptional that everybody knew their names, and recognized them whenever and wherever they happened to be.

  She resolved to talk to the Dragon Man about that, when—not if—she saw him again.

  Given that he was so much older than she was, she thought, he might be able to give her one or two pointers on being exceptional that even Father Lemuel hadn’t yet had occasion to master.

  CHAPTER XVI

  That night, Sara left her window wide open again. It was simple curiosity—or so she told herself. She wanted to make sure that what she’d told the tailor and the sublimate technologist was really true: that the shadowbats were indeed intoxicating themselves on the evaporating nectar of her rose. She also wanted to take a longer look at the shadowbats themselves, in order to appreciate the ingenuity and the workmanship that had gone into the new kind of life.

  She didn’t have long to wait, and felt a thrill of pleasure when she saw them emerge from the night. They knew the way, now; they knew she had a rose, and what it could do for them.

  There were six of them, and Sara had no doubt that they were the same ones. She wondered, as she watched them fluttering around the room, whether they had returned to the hometree on all the nights when she had kept her window closed, hovering invisibly outside the plastic and waiting forlornly for a treat that never came, or whether this was the first time they had been allowed out since their mysterious temporary disappearance.

  Either way, she realized, the further encouragement that she was now providing would only serve to reinforce their new habit. They would surely come back again and again, whether she condescended to let them in or not

  She lay still on the bed, with the rose fully extended, carefully watching the aerobatic display of the living shadows and measuring its quality. Having made their way around the bedroom twenty or thirty times, following incredibly intricate trajectories—presumably mopping up the molecules that had permeated the atmosphere before their arrival—the six phantom bats eventually came into a more orderly formation. They straightened out their courses, taking turns to skim the surface of the flower. They came from three different angles, cutting graceful arcs through the space above the flower. The arcs intersected at a point above the central style, from whose base the perfume was released.

  They were perfectly coordinated, as if they were operating as a practiced team rather than a mere haphazard flock. They never seemed to be in the least danger of colliding, even though their flight was becoming more excited, and their speed was increasing. The scent emitted by the rose was no longer perceptible in her own nostrils; it was vanishing from the air almost as soon as it evaporated.

  Were the shadowbats really getting drunk, Sara wondered, or was that merely the best analogy she could draw? It wasn’t a helpful one, in any case. She had never been drunk herself, and had never seen any of her parents drunk—they were very careful about setting a bad example while they were at home. All she knew about drunkenness was based on TV shows she had seen—mostly comedies, at that. She had no idea what being drunk felt like. She imagined it as a combination of dizziness and pleasurable excitement, a matter of getting carried away.

  Sara had only ever been “carried away” by sheer excitement, and she realized as she watched the aerial display that it was something she no longer experienced very frequently. Without being quite aware of it, she had “grown out of” the capacity to laugh until she cried when she was tickled or chased...and it was possible that what the phantoms were experiencing was nothing like that at all. Perhaps it was more like the greed that sometimes inspired her to eat sweet things too quickly...or the sense of triumphant achievement she had felt, all too briefly, the day she had climbed the hometree.

  That too, she realized, was something she had not felt for quite a while, although she couldn’t believe that it was something people grew out of, the way they lost the knack of being tickled to hysteria.

  Perhaps, Sara thought, the effect of the perfume on the shadowbats was more like the drugs she had been warned about in school—but she found it hard to believe that such frail phantoms were capable of hallucination, or being interested in any hallucinations they might chance to experience.

  The idea of a shadowbat, or a flock of shadowbats, lying down in a cocoon so that they could visit a fantasy world or take some kind of training program was absurd enough to bring a smile to Sara’s face. But was it really so absurd? If the shadowbats’ sensory apparatus was so much simpler than her own, wouldn’t that make it easier for them to be fooled by simulatory input?

  Perhaps, she dared to think, shadowbats didn’t need hoods or cocoons, or even picture windows, to look out into alternative worlds. Perhaps they only needed an appropriate scent...perhaps, when they breathed colibri, they were transformed in their own tiny minds into hummingbirds, or dragons, or things of which only bats or phantoms were capable of dreaming....

  It was all unbelievable—but Sara felt strangely proud of herself for having been able to imagine it, and wondered if Father Lemuel would be proud of her too, if she told him about it. She had no plans to tell him yet, of course; the sensation of having a real secret, much more personal and profound than the secret of her experiment in dragonflight, was far too precious. In time, though, when Mr. Warburton had found a solution to the puzzle and a means of tackling the problem, it might be enjoyable to talk the whole thing over with Father Lemuel....

  Sara suddenly realized that the flight of the shadows was become ever more rapid, and their turns ever more hectic—and that as they gave themselves up to sheer madness, their uncertain shapes were becoming even more uncertain, less obviously bat-like.

  It was as if the sublimate creatures were attempting some strange metamorphosis that they were not yet able to contrive; as if they were no longer content to be shadowbats, but wanted to be shadow-caterpillars, or shadow-tadpoles, on their way to becoming shadow-butterflies or shadow-frogs.

  The limits of absurdity seemed to stretch then, as Sara found it abruptly possible to believe what she had not been able to believe before, to accept as an evident fact what had seemed a ridiculous fancy only a few moments ago.

  Now, she was almost ready to be convinced that the vaporous creatures really did nurture a primitive hope that drinking their fill of volatilized colibri might actually turn them into hummingbirds, endowing them with marvelous brightness and color instead of their fugitive mock-darkness. What was actually happening to them, though, was that they were beginning to break up under the strain—to dissipate like curls of smoke.

  If they continued, Sara felt sure that their “skins” would disintegrate, and whatever internal organization they had would decay into chaos.

  Sara became suddenly anxious. She did not want the shadowbats to come to any harm—and even if they succeeded in re-forming, in transforming themselves into something else, that was surely a far more dangerous business than merely “getting drunk”. Her desire to know and understand what was happening was still increasing, but so was her fear that something bad might be happening, and that it would be her fault.

  Acting on an urgent impulse, Sara sat up on the bed and swung her legs over the side. Her abrupt movement sent the invaders scattering in every direction.

  She leapt to the floor and ran to her cupboard. As soon as the door slid sideways she rummaged among the clutter that had accumulated on the cupboard’s narrow floor, until she found an ancient screw-topped jar in which her younger self—who seemed by now to have been a very different person—had stored her kaleidobubbles.

  The gelatin spheres had become sticky with age. When she tried to pour them out they resisted,
clinging together in a stubborn adhesive mass, but Sara poked her forefinger into the jar to break up the mass, and shook the inverted jar as hard as she could. She persisted until she had dislodged them all, pouring them out into the shower-nook.

  When the jar was empty, except for a few smears of translucent color on the inner surface of the clear plastic, she started chasing the shadowbats with the empty jar.

  The dark phantoms evaded her amateurish scooping without the slightest difficulty, even though they were still confused and over-excited. They no longer seemed to be disintegrating, now that the flow of nectar had been interrupted, but the perfume of the flower was still diffusing into the air, and Sara had to suppose that the process had only been slowed down.

  Realizing that she was going about her task in the wrong way, Sara lay down on the bed again and stretched herself out in a supine position. She lay quite still, and waited for the shadowbats to begin moving more purposefully again.

  Gradually, she eased the open neck of the jar closer and closer to the rim of the rose’s ring of petals. She only needed to adjust its position two or three times before the momentum of a giddy dive sent one of the shadow-creatures straight into the trap. She had the lid in place within half a second, and screwed down it tight. She jumped down off the bed again, delighted with her success.

  The captive shadowbat only needed a couple of minutes to measure out the dimensions of its cell, and to discover that there was no escape therefrom. Then it settled on the glass, positioned over one of the translucent smears as if it were a paint-daubed image. It did not move again.