The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [42]
“I’m having birds myself,” Gennifer reminded everyone, during morning break, although Sara knew that Gennifer had yet to negotiate this through her own house-meeting.
“I’m having snakes,” Luke Grey boasted. “Not shadowsnakes—solid ones.”
“With real poison?” Davy asked, oozing incredulity.
“As much real poison as your spiders,” was the inevitable retort, “and my snakes will be in color”—after which Luke and Davy drifted off to conduct an earnest discussion on whether or not spiders were supposed to be poisonous, or whether they were just as creepy without, and, if so, whether the same arguments were applicable to snakes.
Even Sara’s class teacher, Ms. Mapledean, was suitably impressed when Sara invited her to click on her new icon after class resumed. “What a pity we won’t get the benefit of the scent,” she said. “On the other hand, I suppose it might be inconvenient to have all the hummingbirds lurking behind the scenes in the year eleven classroom fighting amongst themselves to insert themselves behind the scenes this of one.”
Sara laughed dutifully at the weak joke.
“My snakes will eat hummingbirds,” Luke said, missing the point. “And they won’t need to smell them first—so the rest of you had better watch out for your accessories.”
“I think we ought to be able to duplicate our real suits in our school images,” Davy Bennett said.
“I don’t,” Leilah Nazir retorted. “I wouldn’t mind Sara’s rose, but there’s no way I’m going to sit in a classroom with your spiders.”
“You’d better be careful with that sort of talk,” Ms. Mapledean advised, “or the school governors will start talking about a real uniform again. It keeps coming up, you know. Allowing students to wear different colors was a hard-won compromise—if you start pressing for the right to display your animal, vegetable and mineral baubles, you might get the opposite result.”
“You can’t make us all wear identical smartsuits,” Leilah said, incredulously.
“They don’t have to, you idiot,” said Julian Sillings. “All they have to do is to make us reprogram our virtual images.”
“But it would be terrible if our images all looked exactly the same,” Gennifer complained. “We wouldn’t be ourselves any more. We’d be pretending to be all alike. That’s pre-Crash thinking.”
That’s silly too,” Julian observed. “Our faces wouldn’t have to be identical, would they, Ms. Mapledean?”
“Why do you say that it’s pre-Crash thinking?” Ms. Mapledean demanded, eager to set the discussion on a genuinely educational path.
As soon as normality was restored, Sara settled back into her customary half-attentive state of mind. She already knew why uniformity was one of many ideas that had been irredeemably tainted by the Crash, and knew that it had much more to do with armies than schools. Personally, she thought that all her teachers went on far too much about the sins of the pre-Crash world, given that everything was utterly different now and that no one had the slightest desire to make the same mistakes again.
When the lunch break rolled around and she could spend some time one-to-one with Gennifer, Sara voiced this opinion, and Gennifer readily agreed.
“It’s a pity about the nectar, though,” Gennifer said. “Living in the wilds, the way you do, you’re not going to attract many hummingbirds.”
“I don’t live in the wilds,” Sara said. “Blackburn’s a bigger town than Keswick—I just don’t happen to live in the middle of it.
Mercifully, Gennifer didn’t want to argue about that. “It was a good decision anyway,” she said, generously. “I can’t wait till the flower opens out—it’ll really suit you. And it will attract hummingbirds, every time you go out. The only thing half as sexy as wearing the very best living jewelry is wearing flowers that attract the very best living jewelry. You’re going to have more blossoms than one, I hope?”
“In time,” Sara told her.
“Of course,” Gennifer agreed, oozing pretended sophistication, “You’ll have to mind your diet now, though. You’re eating for two. Drinking, anyway—the roots will be tapping your veins,