The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [27]
As the flight extended, Sara tried to imagine what she might look like from a viewpoint even higher in the sky, from which the flying dragon might appear to be skimming the surface below, like a fiery cross moving across an infinite field of grey and green, flattened out by perspective. Was that, she wondered, what one of Frank Warburton’s tattooed dragons had looked like? Had they looked as if they were soaring over a body that was in fact a world?
No, she decided. The dragon in the shop window had been seen in profile, as if from an airship floating alongside it, as if the skin of the wearer were the sky and not the ground at all: an infinite absence rather than an immediate presence. Was that the impression his clients had been trying to achieve? Not magnification, but transformation?
She began to see other dragons now, some soaring around their domestic peaks, others perched on ledges close to nests where huge white eggs were resting. Were they near to hatching? There was no way to tell. Half a dozen smaller dragons fluttered upwards to fly alongside Sara’s mount in brief formation, but none carried a rider, and none turned its great green eye to stare at her. She was not invisible, but she was not of interest. She was an alien visitor, but her presence was not so disruptive that she needed to be noticed, let alone feared.
There are thousands of Fantasy worlds like this one, Sara thought, and there’ll be millions more—more than anyone could ever explore, even in a lifetime like mine.
CHAPTER VIII
Sara began to feel cold, and realized that her temporary IT was already preparing her for the end of her trip. In advance of being expelled, she would be slightly discomfited, so that she would not regret her return to her own reality and might even feel glad to be home and warm. The awareness that time was short made her concentrate harder, determined to make the most of the experience while it lasted. She stroked the dragon’s scales with her left hand, feeling their peculiar quality, like adamantine silk. She looked from side to side at the huge wings, marveling at the elegance of their curvature, the awesome precision of their form. She looked back at the extending tail, undulating ever so slightly like an eel in shallow water, then forward at the stretching neck, the arched hood, the strangely tinted head.
She looked up into the blue vault of the imaginary heavens, leaning back to let the sun’s radiance warm her swirling hair as if it were a halo. Then she looked down again at the valleys sweeping by, nourished by streams whose sources were snow-packed crevices, weeping as the sun’s glow eased their excess without ever cutting through the tresses dangling from the icy summits. She looked at the clouds clustered about the highest peaks, hugging them tightly, stirred at their outer edges by breezes that were not nearly strong enough to dislodge their grip and send them tumbling across the sky.
For the first time in her life, Sara was struck by the sensation that this particular virtual world was actually more real than the actual one. She was old enough to know that the sensation was subjective, arising as much from the particular way she was paying attention as the cleverness of Father Lemuel’s cocoon and the temporary IT, but did make her wonder why she never attended to her actual surroundings with as much intensity...and the answer, she realized, was that her actual surroundings were too familiar, that she had no choice but to take them for granted because that was the essence of her relationship with them. This was different; it had a dramatic quality that actuality could only produce in circumstances so extreme as to be terrifying. Only a virtual world could offer this special kind of vividness without anything but the most superficial, graceful and entertaining sense of threat. This was a purer kind of excitement than any available outside a cocoon.
Was that, she wondered, why people like Father Lemuel found themselves spending more and more time in virtual worlds,