The Dragon Man Read online

  There are thousands of Fantasy worlds like this one, Sara thought, and there’ll be millions more—more than anyone could ever explore, even in a lifetime like mine.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Sara began to feel cold, and realized that her temporary IT was already preparing her for the end of her trip. In advance of being expelled, she would be slightly discomfited, so that she would not regret her return to her own reality and might even feel glad to be home and warm. The awareness that time was short made her concentrate harder, determined to make the most of the experience while it lasted. She stroked the dragon’s scales with her left hand, feeling their peculiar quality, like adamantine silk. She looked from side to side at the huge wings, marveling at the elegance of their curvature, the awesome precision of their form. She looked back at the extending tail, undulating ever so slightly like an eel in shallow water, then forward at the stretching neck, the arched hood, the strangely tinted head.

  She looked up into the blue vault of the imaginary heavens, leaning back to let the sun’s radiance warm her swirling hair as if it were a halo. Then she looked down again at the valleys sweeping by, nourished by streams whose sources were snow-packed crevices, weeping as the sun’s glow eased their excess without ever cutting through the tresses dangling from the icy summits. She looked at the clouds clustered about the highest peaks, hugging them tightly, stirred at their outer edges by breezes that were not nearly strong enough to dislodge their grip and send them tumbling across the sky.

  For the first time in her life, Sara was struck by the sensation that this particular virtual world was actually more real than the actual one. She was old enough to know that the sensation was subjective, arising as much from the particular way she was paying attention as the cleverness of Father Lemuel’s cocoon and the temporary IT, but did make her wonder why she never attended to her actual surroundings with as much intensity...and the answer, she realized, was that her actual surroundings were too familiar, that she had no choice but to take them for granted because that was the essence of her relationship with them. This was different; it had a dramatic quality that actuality could only produce in circumstances so extreme as to be terrifying. Only a virtual world could offer this special kind of vividness without anything but the most superficial, graceful and entertaining sense of threat. This was a purer kind of excitement than any available outside a cocoon.

  Was that, she wondered, why people like Father Lemuel found themselves spending more and more time in virtual worlds, less and less in the real one. And what kind of virtual worlds did Father Lemuel live in, anyhow? Did he also ride dragons, or did he have better things to do?

  It was, of course, impossible to ask. She was old enough now to know where the most significant taboos of adult life were set out, and to steer well clear of any violation.

  Then the dragon began to descend again. It was, she had to suppose, a long way from home—much further than she was. Perhaps it would pick up another rider before it set off on the journey—or perhaps, for now, it had earned a rest.

  “How was it?” Father Lemuel asked, when Sara emerged from the cocoon, stumbling as she readjusted to the drag of actual gravity.

  “It was great,” she said, trying hard to sound suitably enthusiastic, so that Father Lemuel would think that his money had been well-spent. Actually, she felt dazed and disconcerted, not yet ready to evaluate the experience accurately.

  Father Lemuel nodded, understandingly. “But not so very much different from watching them through a picture window?” he suggested. “Not quite as gripping as climbing the hometree.”

  Sara looked up at her oldest father with a slight frown, but she didn’t say anything. She wondered exactly how good he was at following the train of her thought.

  “It was different,” she assured him. “The new IT made it feel much more real.”

  “It’s new to you,” Father Lemuel observed, implying that it was far from new to him. “You’ll get used to it.” Obviously, her parents—one of them, at least—were not as innocent in the ways of “entertainment IT” as Sara had assumed.

  “If you get used to it...,” she began, before the suspicion that she might be asking a forbidden question made her pause.

  Father Lemuel didn’t seem to mind the personal nature of the implicit enquiry. “Why do I spend so much of my time in virtual worlds, if the experience is always inferior?” he finished for her. “Some people argue that it ought not to be reckoned inferior just because it’s different, but that isn’t really the point. All VW addicts point out there’s an awful lot you can do in the virtual world that you wouldn’t attempt to do in the real world because it would be too dangerous—but that isn’t really the point either. You already understand that the real purpose of synthesized experience is to open up opportunities that have no parallel in the real world. Dragonriding is only the first step. In a VW you can reduce yourself to the size of an insect or a bacterium, ride a spacecraft through the solar system and beyond, etcetera, etcetera...and you can visit hypothetical worlds very different from ours, where everything—including the laws of physics—has been altered, not according to anyone’s constructive imagination but by manipulating the generative code. Do you understand what I mean by the generative code?”

  “I think so,” Sara said. “At bottom, everything in a machine is just a matter of switches being on or off. What you see in a window or a cocoon is a translation of a long string of ones and noughts.”

  “That’s right. A lot of what you see on your desktop screen or through a window starts out as a picture, which is converted into generative code so that it can be reproduced—and the picture can then be made to move by means of an animating program. But you don’t have to start with the picture. You can use code to generate imagery that no one has ever seen or imagined before: whole virtual universes, which can then be explored at the sensory level. Do you see what I mean?”

  “And that’s what you do all day—explore imaginary universes?”

  “I used to, when I was working full-time. I wrote code to generate alien virtual environments from scratch, then checked them out, to see whether any of them were interesting. In those days, I was looking for commercial exploitability. It’s how I made my money. Nowadays, it’s more of a...well, I suppose Steve would call it a hobby, because that’s what I’d call his junk-collecting. I’d probably call it a vocation, because that sounds much more serious. Not that I turn down the opportunity to earn more credit if I find something I can sell. Dragons were never my sort of thing, though. Somebody else collected the royalties on your little trip.”

  “I like dragons,” Sara said, defensively.

  “So I’ve noticed,” Father Lemuel replied—although, so far as Sara knew, he had never actually come into her room to see the models on her shelves or look through her picture window. “It’s okay to like dragons. The reason I started telling you all that was to explain why you can only go so far with dragons—or any other conventional invention of the imagination. Your own senses—touch as well as sight—have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to deal with the world you walk around in. Even virtual worlds that mimic the actual world as closely as possible can only reproduce an appearance, and your brain is never completely fooled by it. My cocoon is state-of-the-art, but state-of-the-art will never quite catch up with the texture of actuality, even with the aid of clever IT. You’ll never get an adrenalin rush from climbing in a cocoon that’s the same as the one you got from climbing the hometree, because your brain and your body will always know the difference. There are some kinds of experience where it makes very little difference—including school, playing games and chatting to your friends—but whenever an experience is really important to you, or whenever you want an experience to be really important, you’ll be aware of that margin. That’s why so-called VW addicts never really lose touch with reality. Reality is the only place you can get the whole sensation of touch.”

  Sara thought about that for a few moments
before saying, “I really did enjoy it.”

  “I’m glad,” Father Lemuel assured her. “It was new, closer to real experience than you’ve ever been in a Fantasyworld before—but next time, you’ll be more conscious of the difference. And the time after that...well, I suppose I should let you find out on your own. It’s that old parental responsibility coming through again, always making free with the warnings and the sermons. You have to learn from experience to get the full benefit from your senses—all you’re born with is the potential. You’ll notice that more and more as you get older. Maybe we should have created more opportunities for you already, but parental committees always tend to take things slowly. Maybe it was different in the old days—but maybe not. Maybe two parents did just as much worrying as eight, but couldn’t share it out so easily.”

  “In the even older days long before the Crash,” Sara said, spotting an opportunity to show off her learning, “most people lived in extended families, not nuclear ones. Our way is a return to normality, if you look at it that way.”

  “So they say,” Father Lemuel agreed, although the tone of his voice proclaimed that he didn’t believe it. “People will go a long way in search of arguments that support what they’re doing. It takes a village to raise a child is a slogan that’s been worked to death. Whatever we are, Sara, we’re not a village that’s been somehow collapsed into a single set of rooms and strewn around a fake tree like so many squirrels’ nests, and we’re certainly not a company of grandfathers and maiden aunts who’ve been drafted in to baby-sit—although I can see how it might seem that way to you.”

  “There are birds’ nests in the branches,” Sara told him. “Lots of them. And things with lots of legs. It’s not just our hometree.”

  “No, it’s not,” Father Lemuel agreed. “And that’s one of the reasons for making some houses look like trees, rather than hiding all their organic systems away in hollow walls, the way they do in town houses. It wasn’t just our Crash—the birds and the bees nearly went the same way as the large mammals. Ecologically speaking, it pays to look after your insects—and your insect-eaters.”

  “Is that why you bought a hometree?” Sara asked.

  “Not really,” Father Lemuel admitted. “It was more to do with the kind of environment we wanted to provide for you—good for climbing, among other things, although I’m not sure that all of us had given our full consideration to that aspect of it. But as I said, people will go a long way in search of arguments that support what they’re doing, and I never like to let one go to waste.”

  “If I had my own credit account,” Sara dared to point out, although she knew that it might be taking a little too much advantage of Father Lemuel’s good mood, “I wouldn’t have to ask you to pay for educational trips to Fantasyworlds.”

  Father Lemuel laughed. “And the difference would be?” he asked, meaning that what she was really asking for was to be given the money now rather than later.

  “I wouldn’t have to ask so often,” she pointed out.

  “Well,” said Father Lemuel, “that’s one of the advantages of having eight parents. There’s always someone around to ask, and you don’t have to put too much pressure on any one of them. Except that it’s always me you’d have to come to if you wanted to use a state-of-the-art cocoon. Which is why I was rather hoping that today’s little trip would have been sufficiently disappointing to make you think that it might not be worth the trouble of coming back to me on a regular basis. You can put it to the house-meeting if you like, but I bet you can guess what we’ll say, after we’ve discussed it for an hour or two.”

  Sara nodded, glumly. “All in good time,” she said, glumly. “Maybe next year, or the year after that. I’m only ten, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to make changes.” She pronounced these sentences in a mocking way, to emphasize that she was not speaking on her own behalf.”

  “Just between the two of us,” Father Lemuel said, “you might consider the possibility of sticking out for a firm timetable. It’s a lot easier for people to make promises about tomorrow than to get immediate action, especially when there’s a committee involved. But once something’s on the record, the promise has to be kept. I know it’s not as good as instant gratification, but the time passes—if you’re clever you can lay down a whole trail of useful promises stretching way into the future. Of course, I’m only telling you this because it’s educational. It’ll get you into the habit of making plans, thinking constructively about your future, and all that sort of stuff.”

  Sara saw what Father Lemuel meant about people going a long way in search of arguments to support what they were doing, and knew that he would expect her to see it. When she grinned, he grinned back—and now they were both following one another’s trains of thought.

  “Thanks,” she said, as she went to the door so that Father Lemuel could get back to his vocation. “I’ll try it, and see how it goes.

  She was so anxious to try it out, in fact, that she became quite insistent at the following Thursday’s house-meeting, demanding that a date be set for the time when she could have a credit account of her own with sufficient funds in it to make serious purchases—not just trivia like new views from her picture window, but big things like major modifications to her smartsuit.

  It was at that point that she realized that Father Lemuel’s cunning scheme had its downside. By going so far in search of arguments to support what she wanted, she overstepped the mark. She conjured up anxieties that might never have crossed her parents’ minds if she’d taken a softer line, and she’d done so within a matter of days of climbing the hometree—which already had stirred up a fine mess of anxieties that her parents had hoped to postpone for at least a little longer.

  Once she had raised the possibility of her being able to order major modifications to her smartsuit without having to obtain specific parental permission that became a topic of discussion in its own right...as did several other, far more fanciful, suggestions that various Mothers and Fathers put forward as to how the kind of credit she was talking about might be spent. By the time the scarier items—mostly involving hallucinogenic drugs, entertainment IT, powergliders, or robocabs to venues so exotic she had never even heard of them—had been aired, her hopes of obtaining a promise to set up a substantial credit account on her next birthday had been utterly dashed. Indeed, her entire strategy was usurped by Father Gustave and Mother Maryelle, who contrived to rally a six-two majority behind the motion that Sara should not have a substantial credit account until her fourteenth birthday—which would given them a ready-made excuse to turn down any approach she might make in the meantime.

  Father Lemuel voted against that motion, as did Mother Verena—but Sara wasn’t entirely certain, as she watched her future plans being wrenched horribly out of shape, that Father Lemuel hadn’t known all along that persuading committees to establish firm timetables could as easily work against one’s interests as for them. He was, after all, a hundred and fifty years old—give or take a few—and the time he spent in virtual worlds hadn’t yet caused him to forget how the real one worked.

  CHAPTER IX

  Sara knew, even at the time, that the decision taken at the house-meeting after the hometree-climbing incident hadn’t been a total disaster. It did mean that she had to keep on making special applications for credit every time she wanted to buy something substantial, but she had established the principle that when she eventually did get her own credit account, there would be no conditions attached to it.

  In particular, because it was the example that had started the big argument, she had it on the record that she could pay for major modifications to her smartsuit.

  When she had first mentioned that possibility, rather carelessly, Sara had not had any specific modifications in mind. It had merely been an example of the kind of major purchase that she would eventually have to make, plucked out of the air with only the vaguest notion of what it might eventually imply. Even at the age of ten, though, she had been consciou
s of the fact that the time would one day come when that might be an important principle.

  Sara had long grown used to looking upon her smartsuit as a mere necessity, and it had never occurred to her to object to the simplicity of the appearance it presented. Babies were often displayed to the public eye in all the colors of the rainbow, but ever since she had started school, where her image was required to maintain an appropriate sobriety, she had taken it for granted that the only choice to be made regarding the configuration of her second skin was the color she would wear from the neck downwards. The vast majority of young children—not just in England but all over the world—wore plain costume, with the possible exception of a single decorative motif or an occasional venture into elementary patterns. Even at weekends, when children were taken out to be shown off to the neighbors, a few zebra-strips or abstract swirls were considered perfectly adequate as decorations. The faces of shy children might be ingeniously masked, but their bodies were rarely allowed much latitude for eccentricity.

  Sara had taken this for granted for so long that it came as something of a surprise when her lessons in elementary biotechnology finally caused her to realize, as she approached her fourteenth birthday, what ought to have been obvious for a long time: that young children’s smartsuits were plain because they were, in certain key respects, technologically primitive. They were simply not equipped with the sorts of decorative opportunities of which adults sometimes took advantage. As children became teenagers, however, their smartsuits matured with them, and became considerably more hospitable to unusual decoration.

  When she mentioned this realization to Gennifer during one of their on-camera chats, her friend inevitably pretended to have been aware of it for ages.