The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [19]
At the time it seemed rather rude; Sara did not realize for several minutes that he had done it for her sake, because he had thought it the simplest and easiest way to set her mind at rest.
“Who was that?” she whispered, as the man with the terrible face hurried away, clutching a rucksack twice the size and weight of Father Stephen’s.
Mother Quilla followed the direction of her gaze easily enough.
“Nothing to worry about,” Mother Quilla said. “It’s only Frank Warburton. They call him the Dragon Man.”
The image of the shop window in the Cloistered Facade of New Town Square surged out of Sara’s memory with an uncanny brilliance, perfectly fresh, in spite of all the time that had elapsed since she had gone to see the fire fountain.
She had always assumed, without even knowing that she was making an assumption, that the Dragon Man had been called the Dragon Man because his shop had a dragon in the window. It had never occurred to her, and nothing anyone had ever said to her had carried the least suggestion of it, that the Dragon Man might be some kind of dragon himself.
“What’s wrong with him?” Sara demanded.
“He’s very old,” Mother Quilla said, in what seemed to Sara to be a remarkably off-hand manner. “He was quite old—by the standards of his time, that is—when the first Internal Technologies came on to the market, and the preservative measures he took then weren’t as effective as the ones that came later. He’s not the oldest person in the world, by any means, but...well, you don’t get many people his age turning up to junk swaps. Everybody in the north-west knows him. He’s been around all our lives. I suppose it is a bit of a shock when you see him for the first time, though. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Lem knows him from way back—Gustave too, I think. Well, know might be putting it a bit strongly. They were acquainted, maybe did some skintech business. He’s into sublimate technology now. An example to us all—in the sense that it’s good to know that you can still keep up with the times, even if you’re two hundred and fifty years old.”
“Two hundred and fifty?” Sara echoed, wondering why the number seemed so much larger than one hundred and fifty, which was Father Lemuel’s age, give or take a few years. A quick calculation assured her that even two hundred and fifty wasn’t old enough to remember the world before the Crash; it seemed just as remarkable, though, that Frank Warburton must have been born during the Crash, into a world in mid-collapse.
Frank Warburton, Sara realized, must not only have had to make do with two parents, or even one, but must actually have been born from his mother’s own womb. In terms of human evolution, he was practically a dinosaur.
Or, at least, a Dragon Man: something rare and strange.
“He used to be a tattoo artist,” Mother Quilla added, as if the thought had only just resurfaced in her mind. “He’s probably here hunting for obsolete equipment. Electric needles, that sort of thing.”
The way she pronounced the words told Sara that Mother Quilla hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of equipment Frank Warburton had used in the long-gone days when he was a tattooist, even though she must have looked into the window of his shop a dozen or a hundred times.
Most of the people at the junk swap, Sara knew, would be trading ancient communications technology: primitive computers and mobile phones, sound systems and TVs. The currency of junk swap culture wasn’t invisibly inscribed in smartcards and hologram-bubbles, but it consisted very largely of plastic wafers and discs—every obsolete means of data-storage that had ever been invented. Such wares were exchanged even by the minority of traders who had come to trade jewelry and toys, pottery and glassware, paintings and snowing globes, although none of them would ever have admitted that they were compromising the etiquette of barter by introducing any kind of “money”. According to Mother Quilla, though, the Dragon Man