The Dragon Man Read online

  In addition to five junk swaps, Sara’s parents took her out into the world beyond the garden fence on five more occasions before her seventh birthday arrived, and even more regularly thereafter, but whenever destinations were discussed, the fire fountain was always dismissed as something already seen and done. She could have asked to go back to New Town Square, but she never did. The golden dragon was always available to her in virtual space, and she felt no urgent need to look at it even there.

  By the time her tenth birthday rolled around Sara had been back and forth from Blackburn nearly twenty times. She had been to hospital twice to be scanchecked, and twice more to add new colonies of nanobots to her Internal Technology. On other excursions, she went shopping for various “hometree improvements”, and visited the family’s tailor, Linda Chatrian—whose fitting-rooms were only forty metres away from the south-eastern corner of New Town Square—in order to ensure that the growth of her smartsuit kept pace with her body’s maturation.

  She had also been to half a dozen different playcenters in the town, although she had always felt slightly out of place there because there was never anyone else from her own birth-year. Sara preferred going south to playcenters in the ManLiv Corridor, where she was able to meet some of her classmates in the flesh, including Davy Bennett, Leilah Nazir and Margareta Madrovic. None of these real world acquaintances ever threatened to replace Gennifer Corcoran as her best friend, even though Gennifer lived way up north in Keswick, but it was good to see them in an environment where they walked and ran and stumbled in a refreshingly clumsy way, rather than floating through virtual space in response to the instructions of hidden cursors.

  Between the ages of six and fourteen Sara passed dozens of personal milestones marking out the phases of her youth, but when she looked back on them all the one that seemed to be the most important of all was the day not long after her tenth birthday when she climbed the hometree. It was important not merely because it was the first time she had defied her parents so blatantly, but because it was the first time she had ever been truly afraid. She could not have been nearly as proud of herself had it not been for the magical combination of those two factors.

  Looking back four years later, Sara understood that climbing the hometree could not have been very difficult. She had had to wait until she was unobserved long enough to get a good head start of Mother Quilla and Mother Verena, who were on garden watch that particular day, but once she had evaded their attention for two or three minutes she was well out of reach, clambering up the side of the house far too rapidly to be overtaken. The speed of her ascent was evidence not only of the abundance of hand- and foot-holds but of their firmness; she had never been in any real danger of slipping and falling—but it had not seemed that way at the time. At the time, she had felt that she was doing something difficult and dangerous, something fabulously daring. Had she not been so fearful, she could not have been so excited.

  It was not the first forbidden thing Sara had ever done, and perhaps not even the naughtiest, but it was the one that carried her to the greatest height.

  Mother Quilla spotted her while Sara was still clambering up the outer face of the second storey, but it was too late by then.

  “Sara! Come down at once!” was Mother Quilla’s entirely expectable reaction, but Sara simply ignored her. Mother Verena actually ran to the wall and tried to set off after her, but found out soon enough what Sara had already realized: that the nooks and crannies in the bark finish offered plenty of toeholds to someone of her size, but far fewer to adult feet. Mother Verena, who was not one of nature’s quitters, even attempted to modify her smartsuit to simulate bare feet instead of gardening boots, but that only meant that she howled with pain when she had to jump back down again, having attained a height no more than a couple of metres off the ground.

  “If you don’t come down this minute you’ll be under house arrest for the next six months!” Mother Quilla threatened—but Sara wasn’t to be intimidated. Within the house she had the Virtual Space of the entire Global Village at her disposal, not to mention hundreds of Fantasylands, but the chance to climb to the top of the hometree in the flesh wasn’t likely to come again any time soon, now that she had revealed the ambition. She kept going.

  As seen from ground level, the hometree her parents had bought in order to provide a home for Sara was not so very different from a town house. It was rectangular in section, and it had a perfectly ordinary front door. It had windows on every side, big ones on the ground floor and slightly smaller ones on the first and second floors—none of which were picture-windows when viewed from the outside, so that they all looked uniformly grey when they weren’t tuned to transparency. Given all that, the “bark finish” on the walls wasn’t going fool anyone into thinking that they were really looking at a tree, rather than a house with tree-like decor. The roots of the house’s biosystems were, of course, invisible.

  Even if one looked up at it from the ground—at least from Sara’s meager height—the top of the hometree didn’t look so very different from the decorated roofs of many stone-effect town houses, because its complexity wasn’t obvious at that range. It was evident that the crown had leaves, but they seemed to merge together into a kind of green fuzz whose shape was unclear, and the internal structure of the crown—the branches and their emergence from the attics above the third-storey ceilings—was hidden.

  Seen from within, on the other hand, the hometree’s crown was a realm of marvels.

  Once she was in the crown, the climbing became so absurdly easy that Sara felt sure that there was no longer any danger of her falling, at least until she tried to clamber down again. There were sturdy branches aplenty, offering abundant handholds and secure footholds. The crown was tall, more like a steeple than a poplar, let alone an oak, but Sara did not feel that she was unsafe even when the combination of her weight and the breeze made it stir and sway.

  She had expected to see birds in the branches of the tree, because she often heard their songs from the garden, but the birds themselves all flew away; what she actually saw was their nests—dozens of them, all but a few empty now, though one or two still contained fat chicks sounding shrill alarms. She had not expected so many creepy-crawlies, but every time she reached out for a new handhold things with lots of legs went scurrying away, and things with wings took to the air, some of them large enough to whirr or buzz—and still there were others left to squish beneath her fingers.

  By this time, Mother Quilla had summoned help, but Sara could no longer see how many of her parents had come out into the garden, and had to rely on the sounds of their voices to count the witnesses to her daring.

  She heard Father Gustave saying, “She’ll be quite safe if you don’t shout at her. She won’t fall unless you scare her into it,” and agreed with him wholeheartedly—but that didn’t stop Father Stephen lending his stentorian tones to the chorus of disapproval.

  “Come down at once, Sara!” he shouted, louder than anyone else—but even his long legs and far-reaching arms weren’t up to the task of finding cracks big enough to serve as handholds and footholds while he hauled himself up to attic level.

  She heard Mother Maryelle saying, “All kids do it,” in the weary way that Mother Maryelle always had when she was pretending that, because she had recently turned a hundred, she had to know more about the business of parenting than those members of the household who had not yet clocked up their first century. She didn’t have to hear the drowned-out protests of Father Aubrey and Mother Jolene to know that they were not in the least consoled by the universality of her mission. Nor was she—she would have preferred to believe that what she was doing was exceptional, if not actually unprecedented.

  After that, though, Sara stopped listening to the voices down below, in order to concentrate her attention outwards, at the vast panorama visible from within the high canopy.

  It was then that the real fear hit her, and hit her hard.

  Sara had never imagined that she was, or
could be, afraid of heights. After all, she had often tuned her picture window to views from mountain-tops. She had looked out from similar heights within her hood, both in and out of school. She had even used the hood to “fly” through fabulous skies, pretending that she was a bird or a dragon, or Father Gustave on a powerglider, although the experience hadn’t been very convincing. She had experienced vertigo, and had trained her Internal Technology to blank out its symptoms and restore her calm of mind.

  But this was different. This time, she knew that she was in real space rather than virtual space, and that the distance between her and the ground was a space through which she could actually fall.

  It was meatspace, and she was meat. If she did fall, she would fall like any other piece of meat. Although her smartsuit was armor of a sort, it couldn’t protect her from all the kinds of damage that an impact with the ground would inflict. Her Internal Technology would help her flesh to repair itself, but it wouldn’t take away all her pain because pain was a warning and had to be allowed to sound its alarm.

  If she fell, it would hurt.

  If she fell, she’d be hurt.

  Because she knew all this, Sara’s experience was quite different from the experience of looking through a picture window or soaring in virtual space. This vertigo swamped the calming efforts of her IT, and left her giddy with terror.

  It was all slightly absurd. She was surrounded by so many branches that it would have been far more difficult to fall than cling on. She knew that, too—but the terror possessed her nevertheless, while long seconds ticked by...and she actually began to believe, if only for a moment, that her parents were right, and that she really ought to do exactly what they said at all times, even if they couldn’t always agree among themselves as to what that might be.

  CHAPTER IV

  Mercifully, the effect was temporary. Whether it was her Internal Technology catching up with its duty, or merely her own consciousness adapting to the situation, the terror drained away. Sara became confident that she could not and would not fall, and that she was free to enjoy the view.

  Terror was swiftly replaced by triumph, as she realized what a victory she had won. She had conquered her fear. She had conquered the hometree. She had conquered the brief anxiety that her parents might, after all, be right about everything.

  The roofs of Blackburn were invisible from the open window of her bedroom, even if she stood on a chair, but from the crown of the hometree Sara could not only see the town sprawled across an improbably tiny section of the north-western horizon, but two other accumulations of dwellings nestling in the hills to the east. She felt slightly ashamed that she could not put a name to either of them, although she knew that the trees clustered between them were the New Forest of Rossendale—which, like the New Town Square, was only as New as the Aftermath of the Crash.

  She wished, belatedly, that she had taken the trouble to consult a map before embarking on her climb. Was the ManLiv corridor closer in the south than the sea was in the west? She could not see either of them, not even Preston, which lay between Blackburn and the Ribble Estuary. She could not guess how far behind the south-western horizon the city might be, or the ruins of Old Manchester in the south-east.

  She was surprised by the number of black patches littering the landscape, and by the manner in which they were aggregated around buildings which she took to be facfarms. Black was the color of SAP—the Solid Artificial Photosynthesis technology that “fixed” sunlight more efficiently than nature’s chlorophyll—but the illustrations posted in her virtual classroom always showed vast tracts laid out in the tropic regions that had once been scorched deserts, never little clusters in the grey-lit Lancashire hills. These were SAPorchards, not SAPfields. There were green fields too, though, some of them speckled with amber seed-heads and others stained yellow by oilseed rape. The green meadows provided ranges for ground-nesting birds and free-grazing sheep, while the cultivated fields produced animal feed.

  She counted no less than nine skymasts on the horizon, some of them lavishly embellished with dishes, but there were no windmills, and no pylons carrying overhead power-lines, such as she had seen in picture window views of the Yorkshire side of the Pennines and the highlands of Scotland. The hometree’s electricity was carried by underground cables—which was why it had taken Powerweb so long to locate the break that had left her parents reliant on its feeble inbuilt biogenerator for nearly a week in the depths of the previous winter, causing her to miss four whole days of school.

  There were fewer visible roads than Sara had expected, and for a moment or two she wondered whether this was because many of them were so deeply sunken as to be hidden even from this lofty viewpoint—but she realized eventually that, although the world seemed be mostly made of roads while you were traveling in a robocab, there was a lot more territory in between them than their claustrophobic banks allowed passengers to perceive. She was surprised how tiny the vehicles appeared to be—even the greatest of the lumbering trucks—and how exceedingly tiny the distant people seemed who could be seen walking in the vicinity of the facfarms. It was not until she had noticed them that she realized how vast the country was—and how vast the whole country must be, against whose backcloth on a map Blackburn and ManLiv seemed to lie almost cheek by jowl.

  But the vastest thing of all was the sky. Sara had not expected the sky to seem different, no matter how high she climbed, because it was, after all, an absence rather than a presence, whose emptiness could hardly be increased—but she realized now how little of the sky she had been able to see from the ground, where there were looming objects all around.

  From the crown of the hometree, the vastness of the sky was increased in proportion to the vastness of the horizon, and she saw for the first time how full of flyers it was—not birds, which were far too tiny to be perceptible much beyond the limits of the garden, but gliders and powergliders, jethoppers, and airships.

  Sara had already taken due note of the play of color on the roads, and the manner in which the insectile dots that were bright-clad bikers zoomed so easily past the drab trucks, but now she took note of the massed traffic of the air, where there was nothing drab at all. Even the gasbags of the stateliest airships shone luminously silver, while the individual human flyers were as brightly clad as hummingbirds, or tropical butterflies...or fanciful dragons.

  After a few moments of turning her head to scan the west from north to south, and then the east from north to south, she realized that there were not so many flyers as she had first thought. They were more thinly distributed than she had assumed, all aggregated within a few degrees of arc about the far horizon—but even so, she could not recall ever having had more than two or three simultaneously in view before, and now she had at least thirty.

  She knew that she was not on top of the world by any means, and that the distant Pennine peaks were far more loftily set than the crown of her hometree, but still she felt taller than she had ever felt before—taller than any mere adult. But she knew, too, that when she got back down to ground level she would be just as short as she had been before she started to climb, and that all eight of her absurdly tall parents would be coming down on her hard.

  That thought caused another quiver of panic, but it subsided very quickly. Now that she had known real fear, she was not about to be disturbed by something as silly as that. Even so, she took great care while she made her descent, making absolutely sure that she would not give her waiting patents any further cause for concern.

  That evening, there was a special house meeting to decide what had to be done about Sara climbing the house. It wasn’t the first time a special meeting had been called, nor was it the first parental meeting in which the whole discussion was devoted to arguments about how best to fit a punishment to a crime, but it was different nevertheless, because it was the first time Sara had ever gone into such a meeting in a defiant mood. It wasn’t just that she didn’t feel ashamed at having climbed nearly to the top of the hometree’s crown w
hen she’d been forbidden to do it, but that she felt too much delight in her achievement to worry about any reprisals that her parents were likely to dream up. She expected to be punished, but she was determined to bear her punishment stoically. She also expected to have to face up to a rare unanimity of disapproval and purpose on the part of her eight parents—but that wasn’t quite the way it worked out.

  “What’s all the fuss about?” Father Lemuel demanded, almost as soon as Mother Maryelle—whose turn it was to act as chairperson—had called the meeting to order.

  “We all know how testy you get when you’re dragged out of Fantasyland, Lem,” Father Gustave said, “but it really is important. What Sara did was dangerous. If she’d fallen, she could have been killed.”

  “That’s not really the point at issue,” Father Stephen put in. “It’s a matter of disobedience—a point of principle.”

  “No it’s not,” said Mother Quilla. “Obedience isn’t a principle. Sara shouldn’t do what we say simply because we say it. It’s a matter of trust. The principle is whether Sara trusts our judgment in regard to acceptable risk.”

  “That certainly isn’t a principle,” Father Gustave objected, scornfully. “Not that it matters a jot one way or the other. Principles don’t have anything to do with it. It’s purely a matter of making things clear, of explaining to Sara why she shouldn’t do things like that.”

  “Which is a matter of trust, just as Quill says,” Mother Jolene put in. She has to realize that we have good reasons for telling her what to do and what not to do, even if they aren’t....”

  Sara assumed that Mother Jolene was about to say “obvious”, but it didn’t really matter, because Father Stephen cut her off before she finished the sentence—and Sara had had plenty of opportunity to observe that as soon as one parent took it upon himself, or herself, to interrupt one of the others before a sentence was finished, the rules of polite conversation immediately fell apart. Everybody would then start talking at once—as, indeed, they did.