The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [49]
Even so, there were people who liked to wander about by night, especially in the season when the normally dreary north-west of England retained a calm echo of Greenhouse Crisis subtropicality. There might easily be someone out there beyond the property’s boundary... someone whose presence might be entirely innocent, quite devoid of any criminal intent, but which could still be reckoned disturbing.
Sara reached out into the night to pull the window shut—and as soon as she did so the shadowbats reacted. Vaporous entities had very little scope for awareness, let alone intelligence, but whatever organizing power controlled their bat-like shape was sensitive to the fact that the window was their only means of escape.
They flew past her in tight formation, and were gone. The night dissolved them, almost as though it were absorbing them into its own vast void. It was as if they were themselves no more than a perfume to be obliterated even as they were sensed.
For a few seconds, Sara remained frozen in mid-motion, unable to complete her intention. Then she was free again, and she drew the window closed, without undue violence. The intense darkness she looked into now was not the darkness outside but the darkness of another world, which the pane was programmed to display. It was not one of her favorite dragonworlds but a forestworld...a lush tropical jungle, of a kind where hummingbirds might live wild, if the natural species had not been exterminated by the collateral damage of the ecocatastrophic Crash. No stars were visible through her window now, because the rainforest canopy was too dense to let even one shine through...but Sara had never been sure whether that meant that the virtual world in question was bounded by the opaque canopy, or whether the stars were somehow “there” even if they could never be seen.
As her Internal Technology calmed any unnecessary fear that the strange visitation had excited, Sara began to feel very tired indeed. She moved back to her bed, and lay down upon it. She curled herself up slightly as she smoothed her rose with her hand, until its petals merged with the gentle contours of her flesh.
It was only a dream, she told herself, silently, although she knew perfectly well that it had not been a dream at all. It was all shadows and illusions, she added—but she was old enough to know that she lived in a world where shadows and illusions had to be taken seriously, because they were usually meaningful products of ingenious design.
CHAPTER XIV
In spite of the deep dent in her credit inflicted by the rose, Sara decided to take a robocab into town on the following Saturday morning in order to consult Linda Chatrian about the shadowbats. A few eyebrows were raised when she told the five parents lingering in the dining room that it was expected, but they conscientiously respected the rights they had recently conceded by asking no further questions when she told them that she was “only going into town”. After much thought, she had decided against telling any of her parents about the strange visitation. She was afraid that one of the four who had supported her initial request might decide to switch sides and begin a campaign to have the rose removed and put in storage until the mystery was sorted out.
The moment she had been waiting for arrived almost as soon as she stepped out of the cab. The street was crowded with strollers and shoppers, at least some of whom had come out to parade their finery. Two hummingbirds appeared as if by magic, and began to engage in an intricate competitive dance to determine which of them would have the privilege of taking the first sip from Sara’s rose.
Sara paused, knowing that she ought to be savoring the moment and storing it away as a precious memory, but she was suddenly overtaken by a flood of self-consciousness.