The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [14]
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.