The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [30]
“If I had my own credit account,” Sara dared to point out, although she knew that it might be taking a little too much advantage of Father Lemuel’s good mood, “I wouldn’t have to ask you to pay for educational trips to Fantasyworlds.”
Father Lemuel laughed. “And the difference would be?” he asked, meaning that what she was really asking for was to be given the money now rather than later.
“I wouldn’t have to ask so often,” she pointed out.
“Well,” said Father Lemuel, “that’s one of the advantages of having eight parents. There’s always someone around to ask, and you don’t have to put too much pressure on any one of them. Except that it’s always me you’d have to come to if you wanted to use a state-of-the-art cocoon. Which is why I was rather hoping that today’s little trip would have been sufficiently disappointing to make you think that it might not be worth the trouble of coming back to me on a regular basis. You can put it to the house-meeting if you like, but I bet you can guess what we’ll say, after we’ve discussed it for an hour or two.”
Sara nodded, glumly. “All in good time,” she said, glumly. “Maybe next year, or the year after that. I’m only ten, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to make changes.” She pronounced these sentences in a mocking way, to emphasize that she was not speaking on her own behalf.”
“Just between the two of us,” Father Lemuel said, “you might consider the possibility of sticking out for a firm timetable. It’s a lot easier for people to make promises about tomorrow than to get immediate action, especially when there’s a committee involved. But once something’s on the record, the promise has to be kept. I know it’s not as good as instant gratification, but the time passes—if you’re clever you can lay down a whole trail of useful promises stretching way into the future. Of course, I’m only telling you this because it’s educational. It’ll get you into the habit of making plans, thinking constructively about your future, and all that sort of stuff.”
Sara saw what Father Lemuel meant about people going a long way in search of arguments to support what they were doing, and knew that he would expect her to see it. When she grinned, he grinned back—and now they were both following one another’s trains of thought.
“Thanks,” she said, as she went to the door so that Father Lemuel could get back to his vocation. “I’ll try it, and see how it goes.
She was so anxious to try it out, in fact, that she became quite insistent at the following Thursday’s house-meeting, demanding that a date be set for the time when she could have a credit account of her own with sufficient funds in it to make serious purchases—not just trivia like new views from her picture window, but big things like major modifications to her smartsuit.
It was at that point that she realized that Father Lemuel’s cunning scheme had its downside. By going so far in search of arguments to support what she wanted, she overstepped the mark. She conjured up anxieties that might never have crossed her parents’ minds if she’d taken a softer line, and she’d done so within a matter of days of climbing the hometree—which already had stirred up a fine mess of anxieties that her parents had hoped to postpone for at least a little longer.
Once she had raised the possibility of her being able to order major modifications to her smartsuit without having to obtain specific parental permission that became a topic of discussion in its own right...as did several other, far more fanciful, suggestions that various Mothers and Fathers put forward as to how the kind of credit she was talking about might be spent. By the time the scarier items—mostly involving hallucinogenic drugs, entertainment IT, powergliders, or robocabs to venues so exotic she had never even heard of them—had been aired, her hopes of obtaining a promise to set up a substantial credit account on her next birthday had been utterly dashed. Indeed,