The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [37]
In the end, Father Aubrey had to reach for the claw-hammer again, in an ostentatiously purposeful manner, but the others were sufficiently alert to his intention to fall silent before he actually started banging. This gave Father Lemuel the opportunity to raise the big question.
“What kind of modifications did you have in mind, Sara?” he said, mildly.
“Well,” Sara said, after taking a deep breath, “I’ve thought about it very carefully, and I’ve studied the examples set by all four of my mothers—and my four fathers too—so that I could see what each of you has done to make your smartsuits reflect your personalities. I’ve studied my classmates on camera, and the people on TV, to make sure I’d taken everything into account. After mature consideration, I’ve decided that what I like best is the kind of thing Mother Verena has—except that instead of a lot of little flowers, I’d like to start with just one, and see how that suits me before letting things get too elaborate.”
All in all, she was satisfied with the speech. She particularly liked the reference to “mature consideration” and the final cautionary note about “letting things get too elaborate”. They expressed the kind of sentiment that was sue to go down well—and she’d tried to make sure that no one could criticize her too harshly without seeming to criticize Mother Verena too.
Fortunately for Sara, Father Gustave was still in a stick-in-the-mud mood. When he said “Well, I don’t approve of all this personal vegetation; it’s almost as bad as phantom bats and ghostly scorpions—it looks absurd,” he started a virtual stampede of disagreement, of which Mother Verena was merely a member.
Father Aubrey, having the chairperson’s advantage, won the race. “I’m a conservative dresser myself, Gus,” he said, unnecessarily, “but I never begrudged other people a little color. In our day, the technics weren’t up to much more than that, so we never had the chance to play the kind of games that progress has opened up. We shouldn’t be slaves to habit—it sets a bad example. We’re supposed to be figuring out how to live for hundreds of years without getting bogged down in utter tedium. We need to be receptive to new ideas, new opportunities.”
“That’s fair,” Father Stephen agreed, unexpectedly shifting his position. “There’s such a thing as progress, Gus.”
Father Gustave opened his mouth, probably to point out that Father Stephen was a man so deeply enmired in the past that his room was crammed from floor to ceiling with pre-Crash junk, but Mother Verena was keen to take up her own defense. “I’m not making any outrageous claims for my own taste, Gus,” she said, “but I think wearing flowers makes a powerful statement about our relationship with the natural world. Two hundred years on, there’s a danger that we might forget what our ancestors did to the world when they caused the worst ecocatastrophe since the Permian extinction. You must have some sympathy with that, or we wouldn’t be living in a hometree. We thought that was the most appropriate place to bring up our child, and we were right—isn’t it natural that a child brought up in a house whose organic systems are so flamboyantly manifest should want to accessorize that message in her own costume?”
That was a little too pretentious for Mother Quilla and Father Lemuel, whose simultaneous objections opened the floodgates. Everyone was suddenly trying to speak at once, and the claw-hammer had to restore order yet again. Patiently, the other seven took turns to respond to Mother Verena