The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [10]
“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