The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [1]
Seen through her bedroom window, Blackburn was an uninteresting place by comparison with others Sara had looked at, but the fact that she could actually go there made it a great deal more exciting than any virtual world—even the virtual worlds contained in Father Lemuel’s cocoon, which could be touched as well as seen and heard, unlike those she could look into wearing her own hood.
Sara didn’t like using the hood to go into virtual worlds, partly because they never seemed quite as real as they appeared to be when seen through her bedroom window, and partly because the hood was what she wore to go to school. Now that she was six she would have to be at school for five hours a day instead of two, for at least another thirteen years—which seemed, at present, an eternity.
Blackburn also seemed more exciting, as the robocab turned the corner into the main road, than ManLiv or Manhattan, Morecambe or Madras. All those were places to which she would one day be able to go, if she wanted to, but Blackburn was the one and only place she could go now. She was already looking forward to setting foot on the pure white flagstones of New Town Square—which was actually very old now, having been called “New” when the town was rebuilt at the beginning of the twenty-second century, after the Crash. She’d checked it out in her window before running downstairs to join her eager parents, so she knew that the fire fountain stood in the north-western corner of the square, where the Cloistered Facade almost met the Municipal Parade.
Sara didn’t want to miss a thing. She wanted to be able to tell her best friend Gennifer all about her excursion, although Gennifer was sure to be unimpressed. Gennifer lived way up north, in Keswick, so she not only had a town right on her doorstep, but a lake called Derwent Water within walking distance.
As the cab accelerated along the road Sara looked back to see if she could still see her hometree. The only visible part of it was the top of the green crown that entitled it to be called a hometree rather than a mere house, and even that soon passed out of sight, giving her a slight thrill of detachment.
The road was like a groove cut into the countryside—which, Sara realized, was why she couldn’t see the traffic on it when she opened her bedroom window to look out over the fields beyond the garden hedge. The grass-covered banks to either side were starred with colored flowers, but that seemed a poor substitute for a long view over the fields, taking in facfarms and SAPorchards, other people’s hometrees and distant skymasts.
There weren’t as many other vehicles on the road as Sara had expected, but they were various in type. She was surprised to observe that only one robocab in three wore the blue-and-silver livery of Blackburn. Her parents never used any other, so all the cabs that had ever come into the hometree’s drive had worn those colors, but there were plenty of cabs on the road displaying ManLiv’s red-and-sky-blue, and it didn’t take long to spot half a dozen other combinations. Some must be from Preston, but she had no idea where the rest might be based.
When Sara looked across at the southbound carriageway, she could see that the cabs there were dutifully flocking together as they coordinated their cruising speeds in the inside lane. The middle lane was the province of trucks, which came in many different shapes and sizes. There were occasional private cars too, but they were mostly uncustomized, as soberly clad as the trucks. The bikes in the outermost lane—the human drivers’ lane—were even more brightly-decorated than the cabs, because bikes were what people rode for pleasure rather than purpose. Their riders were more