The Dragon Man

by Brian Stableford

  Sara watched the Dragon Man’s face very carefully. It had grown familiar by now. In spite of the seeming thinness and hardness of the natural flesh sandwiched between the smartsuit and the skull, the face no longer seemed in the slightest degree unhuman.

  There was nothing really new in what the Dragon Man was telling her; she had heard it all from her parents as well as her teachers—but this time, it was coming from the source, from someone who had actually lived through it. Whether Frank Warburton had ever met her biological parents or not, he was of their world; when he spoke for them, he spoke with proper authority.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied. “About the face....”

  “That’s not important,” she assured him.

  “Yes it is,” He told her. “It’s ugly, and it doesn’t need to be. I could use my smartsuit to form a mask indistinguishable from a normal face: a handsome face. Nowadays, somatic engineering gives everyone the opportunity to have a handsome face...and everybody takes the opportunity, except me. There are people older than me, you know, even in Lancashire—but they hide their wrinkles and patches. I don’t, even though I know it scares people. I owe you an explanation, if not for scaring you that time in Old Manchester, for pretending just now that there’s nothing unusual about me at all.”

  Sara shook her head. “I’m an apprentice junkie,” she said. “Maybe I’ll never be a real one, like Father Stephen, but I know what they’re doing. They’re Preservers of the Heritage of the Lost World. That’s what you’re doing—showing the world something lost. I understand.”

  The Dragon Man stared at her, seeming even more uncomfortable than he had before. “It’s not just age,” he murmured. “I had a bad accident once...two of them, in fact. The synthetic flesh they used in those days...but you’re right. This isn’t necessary. You do understand. I’m sorry. Sometimes, I forget just how far the world’s evolved while I’ve been watching it go by...well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to ramble on at you. That shadowbat did me a huge favor—which will add a welcome hint of dramatic irony if it turns out to be one of mine. Let’s see, shall we?”

  He got up from his own stool and leaned over the bath in which he’d put the rolled-up fabric bearing the secondary trace. He peered at the faint, blurred lines that had appeared in the gel. Then he moved to a desktop whose screen was displaying an image of the surface, and began playing with the keypad. He was only typing with the fingers of his right hand, because his left was gripping the edge of the desk, supporting him in his standing position. He had been moving freely enough when he took the imprints of the shadowbats and set up his equipment, but his body seemed to have stiffened upon while he was perched on the stool. Eventually, he straightened up again.

  “Well,” he said, after yielding a slight sigh. “I always figured that it would be my fault. No surprise there. See this?”

  Sara could indeed see the part of the screen at his finger was pointing, but what it was pointing at she had no idea. She nodded her head anyway.

  “It was only a little tweak,” he said. “Strictly speaking, the client should have reduced the apparatus he’d already fitted to his suit before adding sublimates to the mix, but you know what teenagers are like—teenagers a few years older than you, that is. They’ve always wanted more gadgets than synthetic flesh will readily bear. You’re sensible enough to take things easy for now, of course. One nice, tasteful rose...but the temptations will come. Boys have to try even harder now than they did in my day. More masks, more hardware, more gimmicks and party tricks. Competition takes different forms, you see.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said, plucking up her courage at last, “but I don’t have the least idea what you’re pointing at.”

  Mr. Warburton half-turned to look over his shoulder, his expression slightly rueful. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been reading proteonomic spectra so long that it’s almost like looking at a picture. This trace here”—he tapped the screen with his fingernail—“is probably the fly in the ointment...except that in this case, it’s more a case of the ointment in the flyer. I’ll have to wait for the proteonome register to put the whole story together, and I probably won’t have the tees crossed and the eyes dotted for another four or five hours, but there’s enough of a clue here to help me figure out the vague outlines of what must have happened.

  “The problem with sublimate organisms, you see—one of the problems, that is—is that they’re a trifle oversensitive. They’re built to feed on a very limited range of substances secreted by a standard smartsuit. The downside of their ultra-simple diet is that there are a lot of compounds that disagree with them.”

  “Poisons, you mean?” Sara said, helpfully

  “In a way. Let’s say that shadowbats have something like an allergy problem. They can lose their shape, or their ability to fly, if they come into intimate contact with the wrong things...which, unfortunately, include some other kinds of suit-fitment. Not roses, or anything that Linda Chatrian deals in, but...do you ever look at the ads on the shopping channels your parents have told you not to watch?”

  “Migratory chromocytes,” Sara said. “Lepidopteran alate scaling...metaspectral melanin...dermal ivory inlays... those sorts of thing?”

  “Those sorts of things,” the Dragon Man confirmed, with a wry grin. “Well, I knew that there was a strong possibility of quasi-allergic reactions to one or two of the client’s other suit-based systems, so I tweaked a couple of the pseudogenes to strengthen the sublimate’s permeability barrier—what wearers would call its smokeskin. I did wonder why the manufacturers hadn’t done that themselves, and now I know. The molecular networks that serve to keep bad chemicals out can also operate as traps. When I strengthened the shadowbat’s smokeskin so that it would keep more dangerous substances out, I accidentally made it into a sponge for some not-quite-so-dangerous ones...one of which must be a key component of the artificial nectar designed for cosmetic hummingbirds to drink. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think so,” Sara said. “You can never do just one thing—that’s the first rule of genetic engineering.”

  “Exactly. Every planned effect has unplanned side-effects. The nectar wouldn’t normally do any harm, but once the shadowbats began soaking it up and concentrating it...well, while we’re quoting slogans, you’ve probably heard the one that says that the poison is the dose. The shadowbats couldn’t get rid of the stuff, and it began to disrupt their metabolism. To say that they were getting drunk is probably putting it mildly. Blowing their tiny minds might give a slightly more accurate impression.”

  “Can you cure it?” Sara asked, looking down at the stricken shadowbat clinging to its shard of flesh.

  “I doubt it,” the Dragon Man confessed. “The rest of the flock probably didn’t make it back to base—which means, I suppose, that you did the right thing to grab one while you could, so I apologize for telling you that you shouldn’t have. Their owner probably wouldn’t have understood what you meant about one of six even if he had looked at the public noticeboard. I’ll contact him this evening, when I can give him a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.”

  “Will you get into trouble?” Sara asked.

  “Perhaps. If the manufacturer wanted to take the matter to court, I suppose my tweaking license could be revoked. I’ll have to hope that they take the view that the inherent interest of the finding compensates for the manner in which it was made.”

  “So I did discover something,” Sara said. “It really might be news.”

  “It’s not the kind of news that makes TV, or even the local notice boards, but yes—it’s something new, something unexpected, something that might even open up a profitable line of scientific and technological inquiry. If I get any credit, I’ll made sure you get credit too, but long experience suggests that the manufacturers will keep all the credit that’s going for themselves, as the price of letting me keep my tweaking license...which is hardly fair to you, but nothing e
ither of us can do anything about.”

  “That’s okay,” Sara said. “I don’t mind, really. I don’t want you to lose your license.”

  The Dragon Man smiled. “Nor do I,” he confessed. “Not that I’m likely to need it much longer, of course—but I’m rather attached to it. I’ve had it well over a hundred years, you know, although I’ve had to update it three times and only had it modified for sublimates three years ago. I was in business for well over a hundred years before I got it, but I could hardly go back to the kinds of work I was doing in those days. There’s no demand for tricks as old as that nowadays.”

  “They might come back into fashion,” Sara suggested, although she was thinking of dragons rather than needles.

  “I don’t think so,” the Dragon Man said, “but I’m not worried. I think I lost my ability to worry a while ago, including my ability to worry about whether the loss of my ability to worry is something I ought to be worried about...and my ability to care much one way or the other seems to have gone with it. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s so hard to give a damn about anything because my emotional spectrum has gone to hell or because there really isn’t much worth giving a damn about when you get to my age. Comes to the same thing in the end, I guess.”

  “Father Lemuel says that it gets harder to feel things as you get older,” Sara told him. “He says it’s because Internal Technology isn’t as messy as the natural systems it has to substitute for. He says we’re all turning into robots, although we’re doing it so slowly that we don’t really notice it.”

  “Evolution, not revolution,” the Dragon Man quoted. “Well, he’s only half right. I notice it more and more, nowadays. It gets harder to feel things, and harder to bring back the feelings that go with your memories, but that doesn’t prevent you being all too well aware that you aren’t the man you used to be. Tell Lem he’s too young yet to know what old age really feels like...and with luck, he never will. He’s had IT all his life, but I was already old before I got anything more than a few squirts of friendly bacteria. I missed out on being a miracle child, but I’m certainly a miracle now. You have no idea how smart this suit is, or how much help it has from all the deep cyborgery I’ve taken aboard...but nothing lasts forever, Sara, especially when it’s done as much ageing as I have. With luck, you might really be emortal, but I was born too soon. If I thought I had a serious chance to be Achilles’ ship I’d be happy to be the guinea-pig, but Achilles’ ship didn’t have a brain.”

  “What’s Achilles ship?” Sara asked. She had taken note of the fact that the Dragon Man had begun using her first name, but she didn’t yet feel able to address him as “Frank”.

  “An old conundrum,” he told her. “Achilles’ ship kept going in for repairs. The hull was patched up time and time again, the mast replaced, and then the keel...until there came a time when there wasn’t a single one of the original timbers left. Compared to the original, it was a completely new ship—but there was never an identifiable point in time when it had ceased to be the old one. As I said, it’s a matter of evolution, not revolution. I’ve had quite a few replacements myself, and if I thought I could go on living by replacing every bit of natural flesh I had with some ultra-modern synthetic, evolving into a robot, I’d certainly go for it...but my brain can’t take that kind of rebuilding, and my body has reached the limits of its tolerance. And if I could go on and on...well, would I still be me, even if I couldn’t put my finger on the precise moment that I’d stopped being me?”

  Sara frowned in concentration, trying to work out the implications of what the old man was saying. This was the first time she had ever been called upon to ask herself in all seriousness, what might become of her in hundreds of years time.

  “But you wouldn’t know you’d changed,” she said, hesitantly. “You’d still be you, even if it wasn’t quite the same you as before. We all change, all the time—but we’re always the same person.”

  The Dragon Man shook his head, although his expression was thoughtful. “I know I’ve changed,” he said, quietly. “I know how much I’ve changed...and to tell you the truth, Sara, I haven’t been quite myself for a while, now. I still remember me...but I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything actually left of me but memories.”

  CHAPTER XX

  Sara thought about what the Dragon Man had said for a moment or two, not knowing how to reply. Then she figured it out. “You tweaked the shadowbats,” she pointed out. “You’re still doing new things.”

  The Dragon Man smiled again. “And while I can still make mistakes, I can be certain that I’m still alive and as stupid as I ever was,” he said. There was a hint of hoarseness in his dry voice, but he sounded more cheerful.

  “It’s a discovery,” Sara reminded him. “Even if we don’t get the credit, we did it. You and I.”

  “And the customer...the boy who wanted the bats fitted, even though his smartsuit was overloaded.”

  “Him too,” Sara agreed. “We can all be glad, and proud.”

  “I’ll certainly try,” the Dragon Man promised. “You’re right, of course—I was just being melodramatic. My synthetic organs may not have the same capacity for feeling that your real ones do, but I can still be glad, and proud, after my own dull fashion. Lem’s right—no matter how hard the techs try to duplicate the emotional orchestra of hormonal rushes and neural harmonies, the music is always slightly out of tune—but that’s not the whole story. Not that the way I feel, or don’t, is anything I ought to be talking about with a guest, especially a guest as young as you, Sara Lindley. What ought to be exercising our minds, as you correctly observe, is that we’ve made a discovery. It may not lead to anything, but who can tell?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said, feeling awkward without knowing exactly why. She wondered whether she’d somehow let the Dragon Man down by causing him to say things that he might rather have left unsaid.

  “What for?” he said. “You’ve nothing to be sorry about—and you can tell your parents I said so, if they start on you again when you get home. If you hadn’t trapped the shadowbat, we might never have found out what went wrong.”

  Frank Warburton set all ten of his fingers to the virtual keypad again, and began tapping, presumably making a record of what he had found. Sara couldn’t help noticing that the old man’s fingers were far less agile than they should have been, given the centuries of practice they’d had.

  “I suppose I’d better be getting back,” she said, reluctantly. She had not the slightest doubt that her parents would “start on her” again as soon as she got home, and that the Dragon Man’s assurance that she’d done the right thing wouldn’t be nearly enough to stem the flow of criticism.

  “I suppose you had,” the Dragon Man agreed—but there was something in his attitude that rang an alarm bell in her head. He hadn’t turned to look at her as he’d spoken; his eyes were glued to the screen in front of him. His body, propped against the tabletop, was rigid. Sara knew that it really was time for her to leave, and that her parents would not approve of her having stayed so long, but she couldn’t tear herself way from the stool. She watched the Dragon Man typing, hoping to see him relax.

  He did relax, but not in a reassuring way. When his body lost its effortful rigidity it sagged against the edge of he bench, as if he couldn’t muster the energy to keep it upright any longer.

  This time, Sara did pluck up enough courage to say: “Are you all right, Mr. Warburton?”

  He stopped typing and turned to look at her, but she wasn’t sure whether he had stopped in order to give her his full attention or because his fingers were having difficulty picking out the right keys.

  He seemed to be considering the question with all due seriousness, searching for a honest answer.

  In the end, he said: “Yes, I am. I’m a little tired—you’d be surprised how tired a man can get, just talking—but the conversation’s done me more good than harm. I needed this, I think—the shadowbat, the mystery. Now I need a rest, and you
need to pick up a robocab on the other side of the square. I’ll see you again, no doubt. Bring Lem, if he’ll come. Bring them all—it’s about time they started making ready for the twenty-fifth century. Between the two of us, we might just be able to persuade them that the SAPsuit look is one part of our heritage that doesn’t need preserving.”

  While he was speaking, the Dragon Man laid both his palms flat on the bench, to make certain that he couldn’t fall. It seemed to Sara that he was almost literally pulling himself together.

  She relaxed, and said: “It’s worth a try. They’ll have to respect the wisdom of your years, won’t they? Even Father Lemuel.”

  “I remember when Lemuel was just a boy,” the astral tattooist said, forming a broad but slightly lop-sided smile. “And I met Jolene, when she was a little girl younger than you. The others didn’t grow up around here, although I met Gus long before your parents got together, and Maryelle too. God, I’ve been here such a long time—but I don’t get out much any more, except for the occasional junk swap. I’ve become lazy as well as old. Try not to do that, Sara, if you can possibly avoid it.”

  “Get lazy?” Sara queried, because she genuinely wasn’t sure.

  “That too,” he said, meaning that what he’d really been advising her not to do, if she could avoid it, was to get old.

  Sara realized—realizing, too, that this was only the latest in a long string of crucial realizations that she had made during the last few days and hours—that for her, though not for the Dragon Man, getting old really might be a matter of choice, something to be avoided.

  “I really will have to go,” Sara said, relieved now that it seemed safe to do so. “My parents will be keeping an eye on the clock. I don’t want them to worry.”