The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [41]
“Thorns,” Sara informed Father Aubrey, with all due dignity, “are optional.”
For a while, it almost seemed as if no one was going to ask about the as-yet-unmanifest perfume, but Mother Maryelle wasn’t going to let her ostentatious sniff go to waste. “I do hope it’s not going to be too strongly scented when it opens,” she said. “It might be your rose, but the hometree’s everyone’s personal space.”
“You’ll hardly notice it,” Sara promised. “It’s called colibri.”
Mother Maryelle—who knew no foreign languages—simply looked puzzled, but Father Gustave, always enthusiastic to occupy the intellectual high ground, tipped her off. “Colibri’s French for hummingbird,” he said. “Very nice, I’m sure.”
Mother Jolene was the only one who picked up the full implication of that revelation. “Does that mean that the flower will attract hummingbirds, when it’s mature enough to start producing nectar?” she asked.
Sara admitted that it would.
“There aren’t any hummingbirds in England,” said Father Stephen, frowning slightly because he already knew that he must be missing something.
“Oh yes there are,” said Mother Quilla. “More and more with every day that passes.”
“Those silly things that some women have started wearing on their shoulders and around their waists?” Father Gustave said. “But they’re not real hummingbirds—just fancy costume jewelry.”
“They might not be products of natural evolution,” Mother Quilla told him, “But they’re certainly real—a lot more solid than these astral tattoo things that all the young men are wearing, although some of them can apparently fly free too. Costume hummingbirds have real feathers, real wings and real beaks...and they have real appetites too. They drink nectar from flowers—and it seems that the flowers don’t have to grow in gardens. What possessed you, child? There aren’t any hummingbirds here. Or are you trying to drop heavy hints about our dress sense?”
“Of course not,” Sara assured her. “I just thought it would be nice, when I go into town, or down to Old Manchester for junk swaps. Any hummingbirds around, far from their gardens at home, will be grateful that I’m around...and if there aren’t any hummingbirds, the scent will just dissipate on the wind. It is discreet, just as Mother Maryelle wanted.”
Father Lemuel stifled a laugh.
“Well,” said Mother Jolene, with a sigh, “I suppose it’s a nice thought, in its way. The flower is sterile, I hope—the hummingbirds might be carrying pollen on their beaks from real roses.”
“Of course it is,” Sara assured her.
“As a matter of interest,” Father Stephen inquired, “do they make a nectar that attracts suicidal nightingales?”
Father Gustave was the only one who laughed out loud at that, and he didn’t take the trouble to explain why. He and Father Stephen had always had a penchant for keeping their private jokes under wraps.
Although four of her parents had voted against the rose, all eight of them seemed sympathetically interested in its progress during the following two weeks—but theirs weren’t the reactions in which Sara was most keenly interested. She did what Davy Bennett had done, adding an icon to her name-tag so that anyone in the school who cared to click on it could see a picture of her new costume—and she made sure that the rumor got around as quickly as possible, although that was hardly difficult.
As she had hoped, but had not dared to expect, the rose harvested a very satisfying crop of envious admiration. The only augmentation that offered any competition at all within her own age-group was Davy’s spider web, but his shadowspiders weren’t allowed to detach themselves from his person—not, at any rate, within the walls of his ManLiv town house.
In the mixed-age groups of the games sessions and hobby clubs the rose didn’t seem exceptional at all, because practically everyone in the years ahead of Sara had some sort of additional decoration by now, but it felt good to be a pioneer among her peers, even if everyone else caught up by Christmas. Indeed, Sara congratulated herself on having set a