The Dragon Man Read online

  Two or three minutes elapsed before Mother Maryelle resorted to banging the table with the claw-hammer that had served as a temporary gavel ever since the real one had been mislaid three years earlier. Sara immediately began counting the blows. A five bang row was about average, a ten-bang row exceptional, and a twenty-bang row was likely to lead to talk of divorce. This one turned out to be a twelve-bang row.

  “I would have thought,” Mother Maryelle said, when she had finally restored silence, “that this was one issue on which we could present a united front. There’s no point in arguing about why we’re angry....”

  “We’re not angry,” Mother Verena said, getting the comment in an instant before Mother Maryelle started her next sentence, so that it didn’t quite qualify as a fully-fledged interruption.

  “We’re anxious,” said Mother Jolene.

  “Fearful,” said Father Aubrey.

  “Concerned,” was Father Stephen’s offering.

  A single bang of the claw-hammer was all it took to put a stop to that sort of trickle.

  “The point,” Mother Maryelle said, her voice consumed by the acid authority that came with the chairperson’s job, “is to decide what to do about our...can we call it a disturbance? Is there anyone who can’t agree that we’re disturbed by what happened?”

  For half a second, it actually seemed that the compromise might hold—but then Father Lemuel said: “I can’t.”

  This time, it didn’t need an interruption for everyone to start talking at once.

  Sara observed, not without a certain disturbance of her own, that the discussion had now escalated—or perhaps deteriorated—into a fourteen-bang row.

  “All right,” Mother Maryelle said, when she had won silence for a second time. From now on, it’s one at a time. If we can’t manage it without help, I’ll get the snowing globe.”

  The snowing globe was a pre-Crash antique which Father Stephen had given Mother Maryelle for her hundredth birthday—having acquired it, of course, at a junk swap in Old Manchester. Whenever her turn to be chairperson came around, Mother Maryelle controlled disputes that got out of hand by stating the three fundamental rules that the person holding the snowing globe was the only one who could speak, that the person holding the snowing globe had the sole authority to decide who to pass it on to when he or she had finished, and that anyone who ever broke the snowing globe would forfeit a month’s wages to the household pool.

  After ten seconds of silence, Mother Maryelle said. “Right. Lem, would you care to explain why you can’t agree that we’re all disturbed by Sara’s antics?”

  “Perfectly natural thing to do,” Father Lemuel said, dismissively. “Had to happen sooner or later. Glad she’s got the guts. Lot of fuss about nothing.”

  Mother Maryelle already had the claw-hammer raised, ready to bring it down if anyone spoke before she gave them leave. “Jo,” she said.

  “I really do think it’s a matter of trust,” Mother Jolene said. “Sara did something we told her not to do, and she carried on doing it while we were telling her to stop. She obviously has no faith in our judgment and our reasoning—and that’s serious.”

  Sara knew even before Mother Maryelle’s gaze had swept around the whole table that it was going to flick back to her.

  “I trusted myself,” she said, as firmly as she could. “I trusted myself not to fall—and once I was in the crown, even though I was a little bit scared, it would have been harder to fall than hang on. It was easy. I just wanted to do it—to have a look around. If you want to punish me, that’s okay.”

  “Gus,” said Mother Maryelle, quickly.

  “It was dangerous, Sara,” Father Gustave said, soberly. “It frightened all of us as well as you—except Lem, apparently. It made us anxious, not just about the possibility that you might fall and hurt herself, which thankfully didn’t happen, but about this whole project, this whole enterprise.”

  “That’s a bit strong!” Mother Jolene put in, before Mother Maryelle’s glare silenced her.

  “Is it?” Father Gustave went on. “I’m well over a hundred years old now, Jo, and this is the first time I’ve ever been a parent. We might all have another chance some day, if Internal Technology continues to improve, but the longer we live, the harder it will become to get licenses, so everyone here has to work on the assumption that this is our one and only chance to raise a child. Even if it weren’t, the prospect of failure would be too much to bear. We’ll only be living together for twenty or twenty-five years, but if we do the job right, we’ll be parents until we die, no matter how widely we scatter when Sara goes her own way. There’s a lot at stake here—so we’re entitled to be frightened. We’re entitled to be terrified by the possibility of failure, of disaster, even if Lem thinks that makes us over-protective. We don’t know how long Sara might live; if you trust the ads the IT people put out, she might live to be a thousand; if not—and it’s going take a long time before anyone can be sure—she might only have three or four hundred years...barring accidents. But I don’t think Sara understands, as yet, what kind of risks she’s running when she invites the possibility of accidents. I think we need to try harder to make it clear to her. That’s what we need to do—what we need to decide.”

  Ordinarily, Sara would have switched off half way through a speech as long as that, but the day’s excitement was making her unusually alert, thus helping to maintain her concentration. “Lem,” said Mother Maryelle, swiftly. “Have you got any objection to that?”

  “Of course I have,” Father Lemuel said. “We can’t let our fears shape Sara’s life—no, cancel that, it’s precisely because we can that we have to take care. We shouldn’t let our fears shape Sara’s life. Of course we’re scared of being shown up as lousy parents. Even I’d have to live far longer with the shame of having messed it up than I could bear. But it’s not her business to calm our fears—it’s our business to calm hers, which we won’t do by coming down on her hard if she ever steps out of line. She’s only a child, granted—but she’s not an idiot. She knows she took a risk when she climbed up to the roof. If she’d fallen, she’d have hurt herself. But she watches TV. She rides robocabs. She knows full well that there are people who take much greater risks for the thrill of it, day by day. She knows that there are people sitting at this table who’ve been bikers, flyers, skiers...I don’t suppose she has any real notion of what each of us did for a living before we applied for our license, or what those of us who are still working do, but if she did she’d know that at least half of us have taken measurable risks on an everyday basis in the past, and that at least two of us are still taking measurable risks even now. Okay, we’re a boring bunch, on the whole—not a single extreme sportsperson among us—but not one of us would ever have refused on our own behalf the kind of risk that Sara took today, in the grounds of her own home, while half a dozen of her parents watched. So I say that if this is a test of some kind, Sara’s passed it; we’re the ones who are in danger of failing. If we over-react, we fail. Why not just tell her that she scared us—which she must have realized by now—and ask her to be careful, please, to think hard before she scares us like that again?”

  Sara was tempted to applaud, but that would have been one impertinence too many. Mother Maryelle had the claw-hammer raised and ready, but this time she had to bring it down to stop three simultaneous protests. “This is obviously going to be harder than we thought,” she said, ominously. “Quilla.”

  Sara immediately guessed what would happen next. She understood that Mother Maryelle’s comment had been a hint, which Mother Quilla was expected to take up. Mother Quilla did, immediately proposing a motion that the meeting should be held “in camera”—which meant, in simple terms, that Sara should be sent to bed while her parents got on with the serious business of tearing into one another without her inhibiting presence.

  Father Stephen seconded the motion—but Father Lemuel was, for once, unstoppable. “No,” he said. “That’s the cowards’ way out. She’s old eno
ugh to hear us, now.”

  For two or three minutes, Sara was immensely pleased by that compliment, and by the fact that in the hectic discussion that followed the original motion was eventually forgotten, and never even put to the vote. After two or three hours, however, she realized that no privilege came without penalties, and that that the privilege of listening to her parents argue about what they should and shouldn’t say and do in front of her—especially while she was alert to every word—was a very dubious one indeed.

  Eventually, Sara decided that Father Lemuel hadn’t said the half of it when he’d observed that they were a boring bunch on the whole. Individually, there were only one or two who could have bored for England, but collectively....

  The meeting went on for a very long time, and got nowhere. By the time Sara did get to her room, free to collapse on her bed, she felt that she had been more thoroughly and more imaginatively punished for her reckless adventure than she could ever have imagined possible. But that too, she eventually realized, was a far-from-insignificant milestone in her increasingly complicated life.

  CHAPTER V

  Although no punishment had actually been agreed by the committee of her parents once Father Lemuel had sown the seeds of deep dissent, Sara still expected to be put under house arrest for at least a month after the hometree-climbing incident. She was somewhat surprised, therefore, to be invited to accompany Father Stephen and Mother Quilla on a junkie expedition to Old Manchester on the following Sunday. It wasn’t until she mentioned the fact to Gennifer during Friday’s school break that the reason became clear to her.

  “It’s not a treat,” Gennifer told her. “It’s what everybody’s parents always do. If the whole lot of them can’t stop arguing among themselves long enough to tell you off they delegate someone—or some two—to whisk you off somewhere quiet where the rest of them can’t get in the way, so that they can give you a good talking to.”

  “They could do that in my room,” Sara objected, even though what Gennifer had said had a suspicious ring of truth about it. “They often come in one at a time for little chats—except for Father Lemuel.”

  “It’s not the same,” Gennifer told her, shaking her head to emphasize the point. “Mine always do the most serious tellings off outside the house, on neutral ground. Davy said the same when I mentioned it to him, and Luke and Margareta confirmed it. I think it must be in the parents’ instruction pack.”

  “Oh,” Sara said. She considered the implications of this statement for a few moments before saying: “Well, at least I get a trip to Old Manchester out of it.”

  “I’ve never been there,” Gennifer admitted. “Is it nice?”

  “It’s not nice,” Sara said, smiling wryly at the thought. “But it is interesting. People come to the junk swaps from all over the country, and the ruins are...well, I’m not sure what they are, but they’re not like Blackburn, or anything else around here. Father Gustave says they’ve been allowed to rot for far too long, and it’s about time the reconstruction crews got busy, but Father Stephen says that the junkies need at least another fifty years to sort through the rubble if we’re to save the Legacy of the Lost World.”

  “You’re lucky to be near enough to go,” Gennifer said. “We live in a town, but we’re further away from civilization than you are.”

  “You can look at Old Manchester any time you want,” Sara pointed out. You can set your bedroom window to look out on it. You can probably watch me at the junk swap if you want—I’ll wave to a flying eye if I see one hovering. I wouldn’t call it civilization, though. It’s mostly just a mess. Anyway, Father Gustave says that civilization was what they had before the Crash—what caused the Crash. He says what we have now ought to have a new name.”

  Gennifer shrugged her shoulders, having no interest at all in Father Gustave’s opinion on such abstruse matters, but she didn’t have time to change the subject because break was over and their hoods had automatically tuned into the virtual classroom again—and not for anything as relaxing as a history lesson. Sara found elementary biochemistry extremely hard going, although she knew it had to be done. It was, after all, the stuff of life itself.

  Gennifer turned out to be right about Father Stephen and Mother Quilla having been delegated to have a serious word with Sara about the climbing incident, but Sara was glad to discover that they were in no hurry to get on with it. Indeed, when they all climbed into the robocab clutching their lunchboxes and bags of junk, Father Stephen and Mother Quilla seemed even more enthusiastic than Sara to stare out of the window and pretend to be interested in the scenery. It wasn’t until they were on the Old Roman Road that either of them took the opportunity to speak.

  “This road is two thousand years old,” Mother Quilla told her. “Well, not the road, but the route it follows. It’s a lot straighter than many that were built after it.”

  “I know,” Sara said. “I’ve been on it before.”

  “I only had six parents myself,” Mother Quilla went on, without the least hint of a mental gear-change. “Father Stephen had four. Father Lemuel had to make do with two, just like the days before the Crash.”

  “Not exactly like,” Father Stephen pointed out. “He wasn’t biologically related to them—and his mother certainly didn’t have to give birth to him.”

  “Details”, said Mother Quilla, dismissively. “The point is, there were only two of them. Not four, or six... and certainly not eight. Two’s a pair, eight’s a committee. Have you ever seen a picture of a camel, Sara?”

  “Yes,” said Sara.

  “Well, before they became extinct, people used to say that a camel was a horse designed by a committee. They didn’t say how many people there were on the committee, but if it wasn’t eight it might have been. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s difficult enough for two people to agree, or compromise, it’s more than twice as difficult for four, and more than twice as difficult as that for eight. There are people who think that eight people is too many to parent a child, and there’s a real possibility that the Population Bureau will change policy if things don’t seem to be going very well. Everyone’s on trial, you see—the whole system as well as individual households. But if the new Internal Technologies do work as well as the manufacturers say, and the human lifespan really will extend to a thousand years as from today or tomorrow...well, you can do arithmetic. If anyone is ever to have the chance again of parenting more than one child—and if they don’t, then how will they benefit from the practice?—they’re going to have to form even bigger households than ours. So....”

  “I only climbed the hometree,” Sara pointed out.

  “Yes, I know,” said Mother Quilla. “It’s not the climbing we’re worried about—not any more. It’s not being able to decide how to cope with it.”

  “I only wanted to see what I could see,” Sara said, defensively. “I promise I won’t do it again.”

  “It’s not that, Sara,” Father Stephen chipped in. “The point is, it won’t be the last time that you do something that worries us—and in a way, it would be a great pity if it were. If you only ever did what we told you, you wouldn’t be able to develop the independence you’ll need to organize your own life when you go your own way. We just want you to understand what happened the other night. We feel that we let you down, you see, by not being able to form a united front and give you clear guidance. It couldn’t be good for you to see us fall out like that.”

  “Oh,” said Sara, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “But it’s probably inevitable,” Mother Quilla said, taking up the thread again. “If eight people could agree about everything, we wouldn’t need democracy. If eight people had ever been able to agree about anything really important, Old Manchester would never have been built, let alone ruined.”

  “It wasn’t bombed,” Sara pointed out, figuring that she needed to say something to demonstrate that she was following the argument. “The people had to move out to be nearer the facfarms when the petrol
ran out. Not like London, or Jerusalem.”

  “It wasn’t quite that simple,” Father Stephen said, “but that doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s not unusual for eight people not to be able to agree. It’s unusual when they do. Not that anyone thinks you should have carried on climbing the hometree when we told you to stop—except perhaps Lem, who’d always rather be in a minority than a majority if he possibly can, and would probably like you to grow up the same way.”

  “Which will be your decision,” Mother Quilla put in. “Not now, but some day. What we’re trying to say is that what happened on Wednesday night is normal, not something for you to worry about.”

  “I wasn’t,” Sara said, truthfully.

  “Good,” said Father Stephen, sitting back in his seat to signify that the conversation was over, for the moment—which was perhaps as well, because the robocab had drawn to a halt on the edge of St Anne’s Square, where hundreds of junkies had set out their blankets full of petty treasures salvaged from anywhere and everywhere in the ruins of the pre-Crash world. From now on, Sara knew, Father Stephen would be in a world of his own: the world of the collector, the searcher for curious things whose value their present owners did not fully appreciate.

  “You will stay with me, won’t you?” Mother Quilla said, anxiously, as they got out of the cab. “You won’t go off on your own?”

  “No, I won’t,” Sara said, meekly, feeling that she owed Mother Quilla at least one promise, and maybe as much as a whole week of good behavior. In any case, the kind of crowd that was thronging around them now both was far too intimidating and far too vigilant for her to risk getting too far away from Mother Quilla’s side. She knew only too well that if the impression got around that she were lost, there would be a great many more than eight people fussing around her furiously, until she was safely un-lost again.