The Dragon Man Read online

  “That’s not possible at the present time, miss,” the Dragon Man’s image repeated—and this time. Sara allowed herself take aboard the full significance of the statement.

  “You mean he’s dead, don’t you?” she asked, flatly.

  The image flickered slightly as a new subroutine kicked in. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be reached at present,” the sim said, although its pretence to be the person it represented seemed utterly hollow.

  “Shit,” Sara murmured. She turned on her heel and ran back to the window.

  The boy hadn’t run away. He was still there, waiting. His posture signaled annoyance and impatience, but he had done what he was told because he was curious to know what was going on.

  “Hey, Bat Freak,” she called to him, a little louder than was strictly necessary. “How do I get an AI sim to tell me whether or not its master is dead?”

  The boy’s mouth was already open, poised to utter a complaint, so he had no difficulty at all looking astonished, despite the fact that the rest of his face was obscured by his mask. Five seconds went by before he contrived to speak. “You think the Dragon Man’s dead?” he said, too amazed by the inference to object to the form of address she had used.

  “How do I get his answerphone to tell me, one way or the other?” Sara demanded.

  “You don’t,” the boy replied, mechanically. “You ask local news. Wow—do you know how old that guy was? People like him are rarer than little girls like you—and they aren’t making any more of his kind.”

  Sara didn’t bother to react to the “little girl”. She had more important matters to attend to, and he was only retaliating to the unflattering form of address she had used. She cursed herself for having been so stupid as to have to ask, but she went back to the desk and called up local news.

  There was nothing in the banners, so she typed Frank Warburton’s name with an open query. When she read the terse message that came up she didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. She went back to the window, because she felt she had to share the news with somebody, and there was only one person readily available who wanted and needed to know.

  “He’s in the hospital,” she told the boy. “He never had a chance to call you. He’s comatose. Stable but unconscious.”

  The boy didn’t reply for a few moments. Then he said: “They’ll switch him off. Bound to. He’s too old. They’ll give it a couple of days, then they’ll let him go.”

  “No,” Sara said. “He was okay. This morning—this afternoon—he was okay. His brain’s fine. It’s just a matter....”

  Sara trailed off as she heard her bedroom door open. She looked around. Mother Quilla appeared, then Mother Maryelle, but there was nobody else. Obviously, the call to local news had finally tripped the resident AI’s alarm, but not at a level of urgency that required the whole house to be woken up. There was obviously some kind of roster, whose existence she had never previously had cause to suspect, determining which of her parents were on call in case of little emergencies.

  “What’s going on?” Mother Quilla demanded.

  Sara suppressed the reflex that instructed her to say: “Nothing.” She was, after all, no longer a little girl. “It’s Frank Warburton, Mother Quilla,” she said. “He’s been taken to hospital. I was probably the last person who talked to him.”

  “And you felt compelled to broadcast the news to the empty night, I suppose?” Mother Quilla said—but it was Mother Maryelle who was elbowing Sara out of the way in a conspicuously unmaternal manner so that she could peer out of the window. When Sara glanced back over her shoulder she saw that the boy had vanished from sight, presumably having ducked down behind the fence, but she knew that it would do no good. The hometree had eyes and ears aplenty, although no one ever bothered to interrogate their records unless they had a reason.

  “What’s his name?” Mother Maryelle demanded, obviously thinking that this was a matter requiring intricate parental negotiations between their two households. “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know,” Sara muttered, in a forlorn tone. “It really doesn’t matter. Not now.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  Because the next day was Monday, Sara had no alternative but to return to her normal routine. She woke up tired and fractious, and breakfast was an unusually somber affair, but when nine o’clock came around she had to be at her desktop with her hood on, logged in to her virtual classroom.

  She could tell by the way that the images of the other students looked at her that the news had got around that she’d visited the Dragon Man on Saturday and Sunday, before he’d collapsed at his desk on Sunday evening. The syllabus had its own momentum, though, and Ms. Mapledean couldn’t have been less inclined to let anything get in its way if she’d been a tightly-programmed AI—which, since she’d never actually seen her teacher in meatspace, Sara sometimes suspected that she might be.

  When the first break came and the school’s population was distributed across a new series of virtual spaces, Gennifer suggested that she and Sara should escape into a hidden corner of their own, but Sara refused. She expected to be mobbed by a crowd eager for news, but that wasn’t what happened. She was in the main playground, accessible to anyone and everyone, but she found that her classmates were reluctant to flock around her. They seemed to prefer talking about her to talking to her. Gennifer was obviously annoyed with her, but it took some time for Sara to figure out that the others simply didn’t know what to say, and were waiting for her to make the first move. Eventually, she went to join Davy Bennett, Julian Sillings, and Margareta Madrovic, whose conversation fell silent as she approached.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Whatever the Dragon Man has, it isn’t catching.”

  “It wouldn’t be catching in virtual space anyway,” Davy pointed out, ingenuously.

  “Exactly,” Sara said. “So why are you avoiding me?”

  “We’re not,” Margareta was quick to say.

  “It wasn’t my fault he collapsed,” Sara said. “He was glad of the chance to have something to do—something to discover. He’d have collapsed anyway.”

  “Nobody thinks it was your fault, Sara,” Julian told her. “Has anyone...talked to you about it?”

  “The police, you mean? Of course not. So it’s all right for you to talk to me about it, if you want to.”

  “What do you mean, something to discover?” Davy wanted to know. Sara didn’t know whether or not to be glad that the full story hadn’t yet got around. She opened her mouth to start explaining why she had gone to the Dragon Man’s shop for a second time, but shut it again when someone else joined the group, approaching from behind so that the first evidence Sara had of his presence was the change in her companions’ attitudes. As she turned her head, the slight resistance of the hood’s cables provided a sharp reminder of the fact that she was peering into a virtual world at mere simulacrum. She changed stance, so that the newcomer could join the group.

  Sara knew immediately who the older boy was—not just his name, but that he must be the shadowbats’ owner. She was surprised to find that he seemed shorter than he had the previous night, perhaps because of the angle at which she’d been looking down at him, but that wasn’t why she hadn’t recognized him.

  “Sara Lindley,” he said.

  “You know I am,” she retorted. “Come to get me, have you? Where everyone can watch?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I came to say sorry. I’m Michael Rawlinson, year eleven.”

  “I know who you are,” she said. “We’ve met, remember—in the flesh. I was five and you were seven.”

  He blushed. “I should have realized that you’d have guessed,” he said. “Wouldn’t take a detective to work out that the likeliest suspect was the boy next door. I should have come right out with it.”

  “Actually, I hadn’t guessed,” Sara confessed. “And telling me who you were would have ruined the Masked Avenger act.”

  “I suppose it would,” he conceded. “Afterwards, when
I realized that you hadn’t poisoned my shadowbats—not deliberately, anyhow...well, here I am, and I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Sara said, putting on a fine show of maturity. “It’s really not important. I’m afraid my parents will be in touch with your parents by now, though. I’ve already run the gauntlet once—your turn is still to come.”

  “I know,” he said. “Shady deals with the Dragon Man...my bats invading a young girl’s bedroom...then the Masked Avenger act. When they get their teeth into all of that it’ll be the most fun they’ve had since I crashed a glider into the best greenhouse. Only a little one, mind—not the kind you actually sit in. Now I can tell them that I’ve apologized to you, that might help cut the barrage short, maybe by as much as an hour.”

  “Is that why you did it?” Sara asked.

  “No, I really am sorry. I jumped to the wrong conclusion. It was stupid.”

  “In that case,” Sara said, glad to have the opportunity to take the moral high ground, “you can tell your parents I forgive you. In your place. I’d probably have jumped to the wrong conclusion too. If something had happened to my rose....”

  “It’s a nice rose,” Michael Rawlinson told her. “I couldn’t really see it last night, but I clicked on your tag just now to get the picture. It really suits you.”

  If he’d phrased the compliment slightly differently, Sara might have been delighted by it—and astonished by its source—but it echoed far too closely the first words the Dragon Man had ever spoken to her. She felt tears welling up in her eyes, and felt profoundly grateful that she was wearing a hood instead of sitting in front of her desktop camera. All that the older boy and her three classmates could see was a synthesized image of her face; they knew which way she was looking, but they couldn’t see the tears. The hood was sensitive to her expression, though, and it was feeding that emotional intelligence to the program synthesizing her appearance.

  “Are you all right?” asked Julian Sillings.

  “Of course she’s all right,” Michael Rawlinson said, snappishly.

  “Why did she call you the Masked Avenger?” Davy Bennett inquired, obviously feeling that Julian’s question had opened up the conversation to anyone who cared to join in.

  “None of your business,” the older boy retorted, glaring at Davy before turning back to Sara. “Are you all right?” he asked, in a very different tone.

  “Of course I’m all right,” she said, having recovered her composure. “You said so yourself, didn’t you?”

  “Yes I did,” he agreed, as if that were absolute proof. “Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I can call you if you like, to let you know how the thing with my parents works out.”

  Sara almost said “Why would I want to know?” but she stopped herself just in time, partly because she caught a glimpse of the expression on Margareta’s face. She swallowed the intention, and waited until she was sure that she could form the words clearly before saying: “Yes—do that. We might have to compare notes to figure out how to get both lots off our backs.”

  “Right,” Michael Rawlinson said, before floating away in an elegant, rather dreamlike fashion that real space would never have tolerated.

  “It’s the rose,” Sara told Margareta, airily. “You ought to think about getting one yourself.

  “What was all that about?” Davy wanted to know—but the time available for explanations was already gone, and they all had to return to the classroom for a dose of Mid-level Multiversal Navigation.

  The story came out anyway, as it was bound to do, in dribs and drabs. Sara only had to tell her side of the story once, and leave the grapevine to take care of its dissemination. She was careful, though, not to make Mike Rawlinson’s actions seem unreasonable—and she hoped that he would do likewise. By the time the school day was concluded, everyone in the school must have heard about what had happened to Mike’s shadowbats, and what the Dragon Man had found out about them, and at least some rumor of what had taken place on either side of the Lindley household’s garden fence in the small hours.

  When Sara finally put the hood aside for the last time there was an almost immediate knock at her door. She guessed that the resident AI had been commanded to notify her parents—or one of them, at least—that she was free. She was expecting one of her Mothers, but it was actually Father Lemuel. He came in and sat down in her armchair, leaving her to remain perched on the swivel-chair at the desk.

  “I tried to see Frank,” he told her. “Not possible. Stupid, isn’t it? I haven’t seen him for...I don’t know, twenty years at least, and never even realized we were out of touch. Now....” He didn’t attempt to finish the sentence.

  “He’s going to die.” Sara said.

  Father Lemuel eyed her warily. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid he is.”

  “He knew that,” Sara said. “He as good as told me, only I wasn’t quick enough on the uptake. Not that he expected it as soon as last night—but soon enough. He asked me to give you his regards, and to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For letting me take the shadowbat to him. For not taking over.”

  “I only paid the cab fare,” Father Lemuel told her. “You were the one who insisted.”

  “You know what I mean,” she told him. “Mike said they’d be bound to switch him off. Do you know when they’ll do it?”

  “Mike?” Father Lemuel queried.

  “Rawlinson. Hasn’t Father Aubrey contacted the chairperson of his parental committee yet?”

  “Oh, that Mike,” Father Lemuel said, with a faint grin. “You know, Sara, there’s only one thing in the world worse than a meeting of eight disgruntled parents, and that’s a meeting of two sets of eight disgruntled parents. I’d give anything to miss that one, but I suppose I have to put in an appearance.”

  “If you didn’t,” Sara pointed out, “our side would be outnumbered. When will they do it, Father Lemuel—turn Mr. Warburton’s life-support off, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Father Lemuel told her. “They’ll want to make sure that they’ve explored every possibility. Dying’s such a rare event these days that the doctors are reluctant to let anyone go—even people as old as Frank.”

  “They can’t replace his brain,” Sara told him. “He told me that. Did he ever mention Achilles’ ship to you?”

  Father Lemuel shook his had, but said: “I know the story, though. Actually, his brain’s in good shape, all things considered. Twenty-second-century neuronal renewal technologies might have been primitive by today’s standards, but Frank always had a good brain—never a trace of senility. It was his body let him down, then and now. A person isn’t just a brain, you know—even leaving the brain out of it, you can’t just keep switching bits of body like the spars and rigging of Achilles’ ship. A whole person is a lot more than the sum of his parts.”

  “He tried to explain that to me,” Sara admitted. “He couldn’t quite find words that he was sure I’d understand.”

  “I know the problem,” Father Lemuel said. “I’m only a hundred and forty-nine, but it still seems a long time since I was a child. Modern parenting requires us to build some strange and difficult bridges.”

  “I think I understand, though,” Sara said. “He was glad to have the chance to do one more thing, solve one last puzzle....”

  “Slay one last dragon,” Father Lemuel supplied.

  “No,” Sara said. “He was a dragon-maker, not a dragon-slayer.”

  “Right,” said Father Lemuel, accepting the correction. “He was an artist. Nobody ever reckoned him a great artist, because he was content to stay in his own corner doing his own thing for year after year after year, never clamoring for attention or attracting much...but no one who didn’t live through the Crash and the Aftermath has any right to criticize a man who knew the real value of simply being alive. There’s no one else like him you know. There are older people, even in Lancashire—maybe hundreds in the country, tens of thousands in the world—but they’ll all be
gone soon enough, and every one of them is unique. They’re all dragon people, in a way: fabulous creatures, born on one side of an Age of Ruin and dying on the other. When all his kind are gone there’ll be no one left who knows what it was really like to live in the old world, no matter how many assiduous collectors of pre-Crash junk there are, or how many expert historians.”

  Sara realized that Father Lemuel hadn’t come to see her just for her benefit, but for his too. He wanted to talk, not just to anyone, but to her. She remembered what he’d said about strange and difficult bridges—but among the many things she was now beginning to understand was a sense of the fact that all of her parents sometimes found it a great deal easier to talk to her than to talk to one another. Even Frank Warburton, who had only met her properly the day before, after seeing her once at a junk swap in Old Manchester and being afraid that his horrid face might have frightened her, had found it easier to talk to her on his last day of consciousness than it would have been to talk to Father Lemuel, or any other adult.

  What must the world have been like, she wondered, when children were so common that two parents might have five or six of them, and never want for anyone to talk to?

  “I’m glad I went to see him,” Sara said. “In a way, it makes it more painful to know that he’s dying—but that’s better than it being...irrelevant.”

  “Yes it is,” Father Lemuel said. “I’m glad you went to see him too. Because I didn’t, you see. In a way, that makes it more painful that he’s dying too—but it’s better by far than it being irrelevant. Imagine living in the old world, when death was commonplace!”

  Sara started slightly at that perverted echo of her own thought, but she knew it was just a coincidence. “Will I be allowed to go to the funeral?” she asked.

  “We all will,” Father Lemuel told her. “I don’t know who his executor is, but given the circumstances, I suspect that you’ll be offered a good seat, if you want it.”