The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [48]
It took Sara several minutes to become convinced of the fact, but in the end she could not resist the conclusion that the sublimate organisms really were taking in the volatilized scent of her rose’s nectar, absorbing the perfume into their cloudy bodies a few molecules at a time. They had neither mouths nor noses, so they were not drinking or breathing it, but they were certainly mopping it up—her own nose told her that much.
It was only a short step from that conviction to another, which was that the shadowbats’ aerial frolics were becoming more hectic by the moment. It seemed to Sara that they were not merely absorbing the intangible perfume of her purple rose, but also becoming intoxicated by it, as if it were a drug.
For a few moments Sara remained absolutely still in her sitting position, marveling at the unexpectedness of it all—but then a sense of violation began to build.
A rose perfumed by colibri nectar should not be attracting shadowbats. None of the scents in the catalogue shown to her by her family’s ultra-respectable tailor were designed to attract shadowbats, nor had she ever seen such an advertisement on TV, even on the more exotic shopping channels. The shadowbats that had invaded her room might not be guilty of theft, given that the scent exuded by her flower could not be reckoned to be hers once it was released into the air, but they certainly seemed to her to be guilty of some strange as-yet-unnamed perversion.
So far as Sara knew, shadowbats were designed to draw their nourishment parasitically from the bodies of their hosts. Unlike ornamental birds and bees, they were not intended to seek out “food” elsewhere. Their flight was not supposed to be purposeful. But Sara was old enough to know that “so far as she knew,” at the ripe old age of fourteen, was not very far. The world was still full of mysteries that her schooling, her parents and her TV-viewing had not yet contrived to illuminate. What she did not know about sublimate technology would easily fill a catalogue, if not a whole virtual world.
Her train of thought suddenly turned back on itself, returning to her supposition that shadowbats were nourished “from the bodies of their hosts”—or, more likely, host in the singular, if she were only concerned with the particular flock of night-visitors turning somersaults around her nightlight.
These were not just any shadowbats; they belonged to someone. In fact, they belonged to the kind of person who was likely to wear, at least some of the time, an elaborate network of quasi-Gothic astral tattoos. Someone like Davy Bennett, but probably older. One of the year elevens or twelves in webschool...or someone even older than that. Not necessarily male, but very probably. Someone who lived nearby, at least insofar as “near” could be defined by the flight of an insubstantial bat...or someone who was nearby now, wherever he might live....
This time, Sara did jump to the floor and move away from the bed, scattering the shadowbats as she did so. Not one of them touched her, nor even came close enough to her face to let her feel the faint wind of their passage. She went to her east-facing window and looked out into the sultry late-July night.
The stars were bright, only a few of them hidden by wisps of cirrus cloud. The moon was in its third quarter, a crisp white crescent. Away to her left, the muted streetlights of Blackburn—which were designed to minimize light pollution, but could not prevent some leakage of their emissions—imparted an eerie glow to the northern horizon. The familiar sky seemed almost neighborly in spite of being out of reach—but the ground was cloaked in black, and might have hidden a hundred silent watchers who could see her silhouette quite clearly, while remaining utterly invisible themselves. So far as she could tell, the whole surrounding countryside might have been swarming with people...or shadowspiders, shadowscorpions and shadowdragons.
Her parents had always assured her that the hometree was absolutely secure. Nothing could get past the perimeter undetected, they had