The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [47]
The shadowbats flying about her room, on the other hand, were doing something that no shadow ever had, or could: moving through space with effortless ease, maintaining distinct three-dimensional forms in spite of the fact that they had no solidity.
Father Lemuel had once shown her the interior of a gas-giant world—not a real one, but a serious simulation put together by experimental xenobiologists—which was populated by thousands of different kinds of vaporous life-forms. Many of them had been far more spectacular than these invaders, which were mere mimics of solid creatures that still existed in spite of the Crash, no bigger than her adolescent hand—but the gas-giant’s inhabitants had been phantoms in a virtual world, where phantoms belonged. The shadowbats were in her own world, in her own bedroom, where phantoms had no possible right to be. That made them bizarre and disturbing.
Sara knew that there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of young men in Blackburn, Preston and ManLiv whose smartsuits had been adapted to support shadowbats. The augmentation was slightly less expensive, and far less troublesome, than the one she had undertaken. People who routinely wore black to go abroad in the world, like Father Stephen, could wear such augmentations unobtrusively even to their places of work. There was, in consequence, nothing very surprising about the fact that she should eventually see shadowbats in flight, nor about the shadowbats themselves. Even so, they seemed bizarre—and their presence in her bedroom, where they had no right to be, was disturbing.
Sara wondered, briefly, whether the bats might belong to Father Stephen, who could have been concealing them about his black-clad person for months, but she quickly rejected the idea as absurd. It did not even seem conceivable that they might belong to Father Gustave. In fact, the only one of her parents Sara could imagine as a potential shadowbat-wearer was the youngest of them all, Mother Jolene—but Mother Jolene was so adamant about her immunity to fashion trends that she surely would not contemplate such a step until everyone else had passed on to a new fad. Anyway, it was absurd to imagine that any of her parents could have been keeping a secret flock of shadowbats, so the shadowbats could not possibly belong in the hometree.
They must, therefore, have come from further afield—which meant that they must have flown a long way...unless there was someone lurking in the darkness just beyond the garden hedge.
That thought made Sara sit up on the bed, looking anxiously at the open window—but she stayed where she was, and watched the shadowbats.
There were six of them. They were as graceful in flight as only semi-substantial creatures could be. They spiraled and soared, dived and looped.
As soon as Sara sat up on the bed, the rose began to open out. It had obediently flattened itself out when she had smoothed it with her hand, so that its petals would not be crushed as she turned over on the bed, but it responded automatically to her change of attitude.
Immediately, the flock of shadowbats moved towards her—or rather, towards the flower. Now, when they dived, they descended one by one upon Sara’s not-quite-flattened rose, banking as they slid past its burgeoning surface, like swallows skimming the surface of a wind-rippled lake.
For a moment or two, Sara assumed that they were only playing, perhaps attracted by the unusual color of the flower. She quickly realized, though, that they really were taking turns, moving past the flower in strict rotation, as if they were sharing its effluence.
Unlike hummingbirds, the shadowbats could not hover; nor did they possess beaks which they could intrude into the centre of the flower so that they might drink directly from the nectar-glands at the base of the style. In any case, because they were vaporous themselves, they had no need for vulgar liquid nourishment...but Sara realized that this did not mean that they needed no nourishment at all, nor that they were unequipped to take it from the