The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [34]
Even birds, she suddenly thought, were not the limit of potential ambition. If she were to decide that she wanted dragons....
So far as Sara knew, no fashion designer had yet got around to engineering solid dragons that could enjoy the same symbiotic relationship with a person’s smartsuit as the synthetic bluebirds and hummingbirds that were all the rage in the more civilized parts of north-west England, but animal and mineral decorations were not the only ones available. The easiest—and perhaps the cheapest—way to augment the display capabilities of a relatively primitive smartsuit was to use sublimate technology: images made out of vaporous substances that had enough molecular memory to form cloudy shapes in two or three dimensions, bounded by “smokeskins”. When they lay flat on the surface of a smartsuit, they were “astral tattoos,” but those which could take flight could reform themselves as phantom bats or owls—or even spiders, if she had taken the correct inference from Gennifer’s comments on Davy Bennett’s new costume.
The astral tattoos that Sara had actually seen were mostly black, formulated as the silhouettes of bats, birds or swimming fish—but images of that sort were almost exclusively worn by males. There was no reason at all why astral tattoos shouldn’t be any color their wearer might desire, or any shape their wearer might desire. They might, for instance, be golden dragons—and Sara was certain that she knew where a man could be found who would be only too pleased to make that possibility an actuality: Frank Warburton, the Dragon Man.
For ten minutes or so, while she slowly savored her dessert—cassata siciliana, flavoured with three traditional fruits and three brand new products of ingenious genetic engineering—Sara solemnly considered the possibility of becoming host to a family of two-dimensional dragons, which would flow around her body, taking off from time to time to fly free like phantoms of eerie light, effortlessly upstaging any lumpen bluebirds or hummingbirds that happened to be around.
In the meantime, Father Gustave was earnestly explaining to Fathers Stephen and Aubrey and Mothers Quilla and Jolene why the as-yet-unbuilt supermetropolis of Amundsen City was the only appropriate home for the new United Nations Headquarters, with an enthusiasm that brought forth a mixture of laughter and astonishment.
“Surely, Gus,” Father Stephen said, “even you can’t actually want to live at the South Pole.”
“It won’t be cold inside,” Father Gustave said, the reddening of his face uninhibited by the transparent surskin overlaying his native flesh.
“No, of course not,” said Mother Jolene. “But think of the scenery! Even if they recreated penguins and polar bears from the gene banks....”
Sara was sure that Mother Jolene was joking, firstly because she had to know perfectly well that penguins and polar bears had lived a opposite ends of the Earth, and secondly because the Continental Engineers planned to reshape the glaciers in a massive crown-like rim around the reclaimed region where Amundsen City was supposed to be—but Father Gustave was blushing even more deeply as his frustration increased.
Whether the sight of that blush of annoyance that had anything to do with her own realization, Sara couldn’t tell, but it came to her all of a sudden that it wouldn’t do to be too original in her choice of sophisticated clothing. No matter what sort of promise was on the house record from four years before, she had to be careful not to overstep the mark, or the promise would simply be revoked. Politics, as Father Gustave was exceedingly fond of saying, was the art of the attainable.
Reluctantly, Sara set aside the idea of becoming a Dragon Girl, postponing further contemplation of that prospect until she was old enough to be a Dragon Lady. If she wanted to decorate her costume more elaborately now, she had to pick something that at least some of her parents