The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [12]
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