The Dragon Man Page 19

  “I’d like that,” Sara said. “I’d like it even better if he regained consciousness and went back to work, though, if only for a little while.”

  “So would we all,” Father Lemuel agreed.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  As things turned out, it took ten days for the county hospital’s Ethics Committee to agree with representatives of the Neuroanalytical Unit that Frank Warburton’s body and brain were no longer able to work together in such a way as to maintain his personality, no matter how many neuronal reconnections the surgical team’s nanobots might contrive to restore and renew. He was “released” within the hour.

  Sara understood well enough what the word “released” signified when her desktop messaging system, obedient to its programming, broke into the middle of a history lesson to whisper the news in her ear. It meant that the machines maintaining the semblance of life within the old man’s faded flesh had been stood down to await more profitable duties.

  Sara had already learned from publicly accessible records that Frank Warburton was—had been—two hundred and eighty-two years, nine months, and fourteen days old. It wasn’t a record, even for the county, let alone the country, but there weren’t many people of that age who were hard at work when their consciousness was eclipsed for the last time. There had, it seemed, been no other who had clung to what was effectively the same profession since his twenty-first century teens, in spite of at least half a dozen transformative technological revolutions. That small element of uniqueness enabled the report to make the national news, carefully colored by the uniquely respectful kind of melodrama that was typical of modern obituaries.

  According to the text Sara read in the national broadcast, Frank Warburton had collapsed “while conscientiously analyzing a mistake that he had made as a result of his overadventurousness in trying to meet the requests of a client who was too young to have sufficient credit to have the job done properly.” Apparently, the item went on to explain, Frank Warburton had always been willing to innovate, especially on behalf of the young. This particular mistake, the newswriter noted, had thrown up some interesting information regarding previously-unnoticed possibilities inherent in sublimation technology, which might increase the utilitarian potential of “shaped sublimates” considerably. The funeral would be on the fourteenth of September

  Sara’s name was not mentioned in connection with the “interesting information”; nor was anyone else’s.

  “That’s so unfair,” Gennifer told her, when the day’s school was finally over and they were able to go on-camera for an intimate exchange of views. “You were the one who made the discovery, not him. They’re only making him out to be a hero because he’s dead. If he were still alive they’d have called him an irresponsible tamperer and taken away his license.”

  “Which would probably have killed him,” Sara said, not being at all certain that it hadn’t been exactly that prospect that had tipped him over the edge. “He deserves all the credit. He did the tweaking, and he figured out what it was that he’d done. Anyway, responsible people who only do what they’re supposed to do, like our faithful family tailor, never discover anything. It’s the people who don’t follow the instructions who make progress.”

  “Very big of you,” Gennifer said. “Personally, I’d have made a fuss. You might not be entitled to any royalties, but you could have made the national news.”

  “The quiet kind of celebrity that children already have,” Sara informed her, oozing mature sophistication, “is more substantial, in its way, than anything brokered by TV.” But Gennifer didn’t understand what she meant.

  “Are you going to the funeral?” Gennifer asked. “They say it’s going to be big. A man that age knows a lot of people—my Mother Leanne says that she and Father Jacob both met him, although Father Jacob claims to have forgotten all about it. I wish my parents would take me, but they won’t. You and I will still have to wait for Christmas for our first meeting in meatspace.”

  “Yes,” Sara said, when she was finally able to get a word in. “I am going. I’ll be in the Hall, in fact.”

  Gennifer was impressed. “How did your parents wangle that?”

  “They didn’t,” Sara said, proudly. “I might not have made the national news, but I was a witness to his last hours—that’s how the executor put it. When I say I’ll be in the Hall, that’s what I mean. Just me. Not even Father Lemuel, although he’s known the Dragon Man for more than a century, off and on, and he’s determined to be in the memorial garden in the flesh even though he’s practically a cocoon-addict nowadays.”

  Gennifer was now beyond being impressed; she was awestruck. “My God!” she said. “Imagine how many women wearing hummingbirds there’ll be at a do like that! Thousands!”

  “They won’t be allowed to fly in the Hall,” Sara reminded her. “There’s such a thing as decorum. In fact, they won’t be flying in the memorial garden either. It says so on the invitation, in so many words. All mobile accessories must remain fixed for one hour after the revelation of the memorial stone.”

  “Why?” Gennifer asked.

  “Decorum,” Sara repeated, with all the dignity she could muster. “It’s a funeral, not an eight-way marriage or a naming day.” Even as she said it, though, she remembered seeing funeral ceremonies on the TV in which the memorial gardens had been filled with flocks of colored birds, which couldn’t possibly have been natural. Perhaps, she thought, the Dragon Man had left special instructions.

  “Lucky you had that rose fitted, isn’t it?” Gennifer observed.

  “Is it?” Sara said. “He’s dead, Gen. I don’t call that lucky.”

  “He’d have died anyway. This way, you get a front seat at a really big funeral. You didn’t kill him, you know. It wasn’t your fault he was working on a Sunday evening, and even if he’d been cozily cocooned in his bedroom he’d still have pegged out on the Monday.”

  “It’s still not lucky,” Sara insisted. “It’s just not the right word. Father Gustave says that it’s been good for me to make the intimate acquaintance of death, but that’s not right either. It’s not luck, and it’s not good. It’s...well, I don’t know what it is, but there is such a thing as decorum.”

  “So you keep saying. Well, I envy you. Will Mike Rawlinson be there, do you think? It was his shadowbat, after all.”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him today. I’ll call him later if he doesn’t call me first.”

  “Will you, now? Maybe you’ll be going to stay with him for Christmas.”

  “He only lives just down the road,” Sara reminded her. “I can walk to his hometree as easily as he can walk to mine. This whole thing wouldn’t have happened otherwise. We don’t need to fix up formal visits.”

  “He’s two years older than you are,” Gennifer pointed out, cattily. “You’re not old enough to be his best friend.

  “In the great scheme of things, two years is nothing,” Sara told her. In a hundred years time, our ages will be closer than the ages of any two of my parents, or his...or yours, for that matter.”

  “Oh, be like that,” Gennifer said. “Anyway, I won’t say enjoy yourself at the funeral, given that you’ve come over so sensitive, but you still have to tell me the whole story, in more detail than you tell it to anyone else, okay? We’re sisters, remember—or as close as anyone ever gets to being sisters nowadays, or ever will again.”

  “Sisters,” Sara repeated, glad to find that the word sounded appropriate.

  Gennifer was right, Sara thought; now that all children were born in artificial wombs, from eggs and sperm dutifully deposited in the bank by parents who’s been far too polite to exercise their right of replacement while they were still alive, it was unlikely that earthbound humankind would ever again produce any biological sisters, although things were different in the Lagrange colonies. If the earthbound ever did produce any more biological sisters, it was unlikely in the extreme that the sisters in question would be alive at the same t
ime—but that only meant that the word “sister” had been liberated, as the word “junkie” had been, and was now free to acquire new meanings. Yes, she and Gennifer were sisters, in a brand new sense that made the fact all the more remarkable and all the more exciting. “I’ll tell you everything,” she added, when Gennifer made no further response. “Everything.”

  As soon as she had broken the link, she called Mike Rawlinson. “You heard the news?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I got a whisper during history. I wanted to come and talk to you, but I had things on—commitments I couldn’t break. My parents have been bending my ear ever since I logged off. I’ve only just only escaped. Same with you?”

  “No,” Sara said. “Either they’re being diplomatic and leaving it up to me to mention it first, or they’ve said everything that had to say already. The last ten days has been a long time. Are you going to the funeral?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll see you in the memorial gardens—but I’ll have my parents with me, so it’ll just be a matter of waving hello and goodbye.”

  “I’ll be in the Hall for the eulogies,” Sara told him, not in the least triumphantly.

  “That’s fair,” he said. “You were the last person to see him. If you’d stayed a little longer you’d probably have seen him collapse.”

  “He didn’t want that,” Sara told him. “I couldn’t have done anything. His IT was rigged to send out an immediate distress call—the ambulance wouldn’t have got to him any sooner.”

  “I know,” Mike assured her. “I only meant that it’s right that you should be in the Hall. I’ll still see you in the gardens afterwards. I wish I still had the shadowbats—the manufacturers offered me another flock, but I said no. It wouldn’t have seemed right.”

  “I’d quite like to have something to remember him by,” Sara said. “Nothing big—a little figure of some kind, on my arm or shoulder. Just a picture, not a flyer or one of Davy’s creepy spiders. A golden dragon, like the one in his window.”

  “It’s not there any more,” Mike told her. “The shop’s been cleared out. It’s up for sale. I don’t know what happened to all his stock, or his archives. My Father Benjamin says that he must have had a massive archive, but I’m not so sure he was the kind of man to keep all his old stuff in drawers and cupboards.”

  “I saw him at a junk swap once,” Sara said. “He collected old tattooing equipment.”

  “That’s different. Anyway, it’s all gone, whatever there was. His executor will probably sell it off. Do you know his executor? Someone called Janis Leggett, apparently.”

  “She lives on the south coast, in Hove,” Sara told him, having looked the woman up. “She’s his daughter.”

  “His biological daughter?”

  “He wasn’t that old. He was a natural born himself, but he was a parent like our parents. She’s like me—the product of an anonymously-donated egg from the early days of the great plague. I’ll be interested to meet her.”

  “Is she a sublimate technologist too?” Mike wanted to know.

  “No. She’s an oceanographer in the UN’s Climate Bureau. Must have followed in the footsteps of one of her other parents, unless she struck out on her own.”

  “I might do that,” Mike said. “Oceanography, that is, not strike out on my own. My Mother Gaea’s a marine ecologist.”

  “You have a mother called Gaea?” Sara asked. “I bet Father Stephen and Father Aubrey made up some nice jokes about that after the big joint meeting. I’m surprised they haven’t told them all to me.”

  “It’s not an uncommon name,” Mike said, a little stiffly. “Anyway, the jokers in my family had some fun with Lemuel. We’re lucky that kind of thing’s gone out of fashion. What do you want to do when you grow up?”

  “Lots of things,” Sara told him. “There’ll be time enough to try all sorts of work, on Earth and off it. Someday, I’ll go to the moon. By then, who knows what further horizons there’ll be?”

  “Which of your parents said that to you?”

  “All of them, at one time or another. Haven’t yours?”

  “They’re more a don’t-rush-into-things-and-don’t-try-to-run-before-you-can-walk sort of crowd. It’s a wonder they ever got around to applying for a license at all, let alone with one another. Did you ever hear the one about a camel being a horse designed by a parental house-meeting?”

  “Camels were extinct before parental house-meetings started,” Sara pointed out. “I believe the original reference was to committees in general.”

  “Well,” Mike said, theatrically, “they’d have been extinct a long quicker if my parents had been the committee in question, if they’d ever got off the drawing board in the first place. I bet Janis Leggett’s parents could have done a much better job—they had the Dragon Man. He wouldn’t have been content with a horse, though. He’d have given it wings, and a horn on its forehead too.”

  “Yes he would,” Sara agreed. “There’ll never be anyone like him again. Never. And no matter how long people like Father Lemuel may have known him, we’ll be the ones who remember him longest—you and I. We were part of his last adventure.”

  The older boy smiled at that, but not condescendingly. He smiled to show that he knew what she meant, and felt the same way. “See you at the funeral, Stinky Rose,” he said.

  “You too, Bat Freak,” she replied.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The indoor funeral ceremony was rather tedious, in Sara’s opinion. It might have been more interesting if the information about Frank Warburton contained in the various eulogies had been new to her, but by the time the big day came she’d been trawling the web for days and she probably knew more about the man than any mere human acquaintance could possibly remember. The eulogists had undoubtedly consulted the same sources, but propriety demanded that they pretend to be speaking from memory as well as from the heart, so the word-pictures they painted were as hazy as shadowbats in the dusk.

  Janis Leggett was, alas, no exception. More than a hundred years had passed since Frank Warburton had been one of her adoptive parents, but Sara had always been assured by her own Mothers and Fathers that although the collective household would not remain together for more than twenty years or so, they would remain her parents forever. Although Sara had never given the matter intensive thought, she had assumed that she would remain in contact with all her parents, and that she would probably draw closer to them as individuals once she no longer had to confront them as a barely-organized mob on a daily basis.

  The Dragon Man’s daughter, by contrast, freely confessed that she had not seen Father Frank in the flesh for seventy years, and only ever talked to him on the phone when he called her. She made what was obviously intended to be a humorous reference to his ineptitude in calculating time differences when he called her in the South Atlantic—supplemented by a joke about the time-zone difficulties the UN would face if it really did relocate to the south pole—but Sara could see nothing funny in the fact that Frank Warburton had had to try so hard to obtain the attention of his daughter that he had chosen to ignore his desktop AI whenever it told him that she was likely to be fast asleep, because she was somewhere so distant from him that she was living ten or eleven hours ahead of him.

  In spite of her determination to remain focused on the speakers, Sara found her attention wandering. She never went so far as to stop thinking about the man whose absence her presence was supposed to be honoring, but she did take leave to wonder how much of his work was on display in the solemn crowd.

  There were, as Gennifer had prophesied, an inordinate number of hummingbirds among the living jewelry on display. They were not merely perched on dozens of shoulders like fancy epaulettes but clustered around dozens of elaborate head-dresses and occasionally distributed about in meticulously-linked flocks around the billowing sleeves and pleats of the most ostentatious costumes Sara had ever seen in meatspace. None of these, Sara felt sure, were Frank Warburton’s work. In his youth, when “tattoos” really h
ad been tattoos, his work might have seemed garish to some—especially when he inscribed brightly-colored dragons in the real flesh of people’s upper arms, torsos and ankles—but by today’s standards a sublimate engineer was a subtle artist, whose works were exceptionally discreet.

  Sara remembered the tone of the Dragon Man’s voice as he had told her that sublimate accessories didn’t have to be shadows—that they could be as bright as angels or as subtle as phantoms. She had not thought about it much at the time, but she was convinced, now, that he must have been nursing plans for designs far more subtle than any that had yet been advertised. In the meantime, he had fitted Davy’s spiders and Mike’s bats, glad to help out with their adolescent pretences—but his ambitions, Sara knew, had far exceeded the scope that had yet been granted to him. He had been waiting patiently for the slow wave of fashion to move beyond gimmickry and frippery, and for the potential of the new technology to unwind into a spectrum of splendid opportunity. Alas, he had not had the time to wait.

  Unlike the females in the audience—all but a few of whose personal embellishments made Sara’s purple rose seem modest in the extreme—the males had set their smartsuits to black, mimicking the formal mourning-dress of the Lost World rather than more recently obsolete SAPsuits. Even if a few shadowy sublimates had been allowed to cling to such costumes—while brighter angels and diaphanous ghosts were hidden away, along with the more substantial produce of former fashion-eras—they were quite invisible.

  There was not a dragon to be seen anywhere in the room, and certainly nothing flamboyantly pictorial, in the vein of Washington crossing the Delaware. Not one of her parents had been able to interpret that particular joke for Sara, but the phrase was sufficiently exotic not to call up too many hits on a search engine when fed in as a unit; there was even a pre-Crash audio file available, whose survival of the centuries was even more remarkable than Frank Warburton’s. Sara suppressed the irreverent tune as it rose unbidden into her memory, and concentrated harder on the present speaker, who had been introduced as the president of some sort of trade union of sublimate engineers. So far as Sara could tell, he had never even met Frank Warburton, although he did seem to be speaking with genuine appreciation about his work—not just his astral tattoos but all his work, including the golden dragon in his window.