The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [31]
Father Lemuel voted against that motion, as did Mother Verena—but Sara wasn’t entirely certain, as she watched her future plans being wrenched horribly out of shape, that Father Lemuel hadn’t known all along that persuading committees to establish firm timetables could as easily work against one’s interests as for them. He was, after all, a hundred and fifty years old—give or take a few—and the time he spent in virtual worlds hadn’t yet caused him to forget how the real one worked.
CHAPTER IX
Sara knew, even at the time, that the decision taken at the house-meeting after the hometree-climbing incident hadn’t been a total disaster. It did mean that she had to keep on making special applications for credit every time she wanted to buy something substantial, but she had established the principle that when she eventually did get her own credit account, there would be no conditions attached to it.
In particular, because it was the example that had started the big argument, she had it on the record that she could pay for major modifications to her smartsuit.
When she had first mentioned that possibility, rather carelessly, Sara had not had any specific modifications in mind. It had merely been an example of the kind of major purchase that she would eventually have to make, plucked out of the air with only the vaguest notion of what it might eventually imply. Even at the age of ten, though, she had been conscious of the fact that the time would one day come when that might be an important principle.
Sara had long grown used to looking upon her smartsuit as a mere necessity, and it had never occurred to her to object to the simplicity of the appearance it presented. Babies were often displayed to the public eye in all the colors of the rainbow, but ever since she had started school, where her image was required to maintain an appropriate sobriety, she had taken it for granted that the only choice to be made regarding the configuration of her second skin was the color she would wear from the neck downwards. The vast majority of young children—not just in England but all over the world—wore plain costume, with the possible exception of a single decorative motif or an occasional venture into elementary patterns. Even at weekends, when children were taken out to be shown off to the neighbors, a few zebra-strips or abstract swirls were considered perfectly adequate as decorations. The faces of shy children might be ingeniously masked, but their bodies were rarely allowed much latitude for eccentricity.
Sara had taken this for granted for so long that it came as something of a surprise when her lessons in elementary biotechnology finally caused her to realize, as she approached her fourteenth birthday, what ought to have been obvious for a long time: that young children’s smartsuits were plain because they were, in certain key respects, technologically primitive. They were simply not equipped with the sorts of decorative opportunities of which adults sometimes took advantage. As children became teenagers, however, their smartsuits matured with them, and became considerably more hospitable to unusual decoration.
When she mentioned this realization to Gennifer during one of their on-camera chats, her friend inevitably pretended to have been aware of it for ages.
“It was different in the olden days,” Gennifer informed her, loftily. “When people wore dead clothes they had whole wardrobes full of all kinds of bizarre bits, which they put on in all kinds of weird combinations. All they—the clothes, that is—had to do was hang there, so of course they came in all kinds of different fabrics and colors, with all kinds of buttons and beads and things attached. The people put them on every morning and took them off at night,