The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [33]
Gennifer had her desktop camera zoomed in on her face, so Sara couldn’t see anything below her neck, but when Gennifer glanced down critically Sara knew that the other girl must be making calculations of her own.
“I’d like birds myself,” Gennifer said, “but they’d never let me wear birds there. They’d say it would be too provocative when they took off.”
“Flowers,” Sara said, firmly. “Better that than the kinds of feathers and furs that bikers wear. I think Father Aubrey has a couple of radical surskins hidden away, but he doesn’t think that sort of thing fits in with being a parent.”
“My Father Jacob’s the same,” Gennifer said. “And I bet Father Guy’s got a skeleton or two hidden in his cupboard. But that won’t make them any more sympathetic to any requests I make. Mother Jenna and Mother Luisa might take my side, because they’d be glad to think they’d inspired me, but I’d never get it through the house meeting. The moment I mentioned it, they’d all start pushing their own ideas. I’d probably end up in chain mail. Parents, eh?”
Sara contented herself with a sympathetic nod, but the conversation set off a train of thought in her own mind that was still running long all through the evening meal, when no less than five of her parents put in an appearance at the communal table to engage in hearty conversation about the latest ecological management statistics, the reclamation of Antarctica, the Gaean Lib anti-SAP demonstrations in the South Saharan Republic and the latest scheme cooked up by the Continental Engineers to speed up work on the sixth continent without re-raising the sea-level to the point at which New Shanghai and the Brahmaputran Confederacy disappeared beneath the waves again. Sara could never quite work out whether anyone except Father Gustave—who had done long service as a UN bureaucrat before taking time out for parenthood—was actually interested in such matters, or whether they thought that it was the sort of thing they ought to talk about at communal mealtimes for the benefit of her political education. Either way, she felt no particular compulsion to listen, even at the best of times, and now she had more pressing matters on her mind.
Until she’d complained about it to Gennifer, she hadn’t really given much thought to the matter of an imminent trip to the tailor, partly because her early experiences of smartsuit checkups had seemed to her to be on a par with visits to the hospital to have her ever-growing population of nanobot assistants monitored, enhanced and reprogrammed—not the sort of thing that one wanted to dwell upon. Now that she was growing up, though, she had to adopt a different attitude, and see such expeditions as matters of opportunity rather than mere obligation.
She studied the costumes of her fellow diners more carefully than she had ever bothered to do before. Father Gustave and Father Stephen were wearing plain black, the mass of their smartsuits carefully bulked up on the shoulders and at other strategic points. Father Aubrey was slightly more daring, opting for a dark blue base with several extra decorations, including a silk-effect cummerbund and purple leg-stripes. Mother Jolene wore a lighter shade of blue, but her attire was as plain and conservative, in its way, as Father Gustave’s. Only Mother Quilla seemed to be taking much trouble to individualize her appearance, although Sara didn’t think that green—even ocean green—was the right backcloth to show off her seashell decorations to good effect.
Suddenly, the accidental detail of the promise that she’d extracted nearly four years earlier, that she could use her credit account to pay for major smartsuit modifications, clicked into clearer focus. She really did have an opportunity that she must be careful not to waste. If she didn’t want her parents to decide whether—or how—her appearance ought to be adjusted to take account of her increasing maturity of form, then she ought to conceive a plan