The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [4]
The other boy, whose height marked him out as the oldest, was also clad in unusual finery, but his face was clear; it was only his suit that was tuned up to show off, displaying a slightly dizzying kaleidoscopic effect. She presumed that he didn’t wear it that way at home, although she couldn’t actually be sure. In school, of course, he would only present an image synthesized by his hood; the sober dress required of that image didn’t have to reflect what he was actually wearing.
Sara studied them all, and they studied her. In school, their virtual images would have been equipped with tags, and she would have been able to use her private cursor to click on the tags in order to discover their names, their ages, which classes they were in, where they lived and what their desktop numbers were. Their actual bodies had no such tags, and were therefore intrinsically mysterious.
In school, Sara rarely bothered to click on anyone’s tag, unless she had forgotten a name she ought to know, and when she did she never took much notice of the additional information. Because the information was always available, only a click away, it wasn’t necessary to commit it to memory. Now that there were no tags available, though, she couldn’t help feeling curious about who the other children were and where they had come from.
She knew that her frustration was temporary, and slightly silly. Tomorrow, when she saw these other children in school, she would know that she had met them in the flesh—except for the annoying girl who only had courage enough to venture into the real world if her face was hidden—and they would know that they had met her. They would all be able to click away to their hearts’ content, learning everything they wanted to know...but they probably wouldn’t feel the need.
* * * *
Remembering the moment fourteen years later, Sara was able to appreciate the paradoxes inherent in her wary observation of the other children more fully than she had at the time.
At six, Sara’s awareness of the fact that none of them were likely to become her close friends had been vague and inconsequential. At fourteen, though, she could see a certain irony in the fact that they had been—and were likely to remain—socially distant, even though they lived far closer to her hometree, in meatspace terms, than Gennifer Corcoran, who was the only one of her classmates with whom the six-year-old had regular conversations on camera, desktop-to-desktop.
At fourteen, Sara could see a certain unfortunate perversity in the fact that chance and the whim of the Population Bureau Licensing Authority had ordained that she was to be the only child born within fifty kilometres of her hometree in the year 2367—with the result that none of her classmates lived near enough to make a casual meeting in real space likely. And she knew, at fourteen, that no such meeting had yet occurred—nor would it, without a great deal of preparation and careful interparental negotiation.
* * * *
Thanks to the presence of the other children and their reaction to six-year-old Sara’s arrival in the square, the fire fountain went almost unheeded by its audience for a full three minutes. Those who had been brought to marvel at its display were too busy marveling at one another.
When Sara did try to focus on the fountain, she found it quite uninteresting by comparison. Some trick of perspective made it seem smaller now than it had when she had stared at it through her bedroom window, and the fact that the sparks did not seem substantial, or even warm, when they drifted far enough from