The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [53]
“Hello, Miss Lindley,” the Dragon Man said, speaking from the shadows in an unexpectedly warm voice. “That’s a nice rose—it really suits you. What can I do for you?” He took his feet off the desk but he remained seated, and shadowed.
Sara felt perversely annoyed with herself when the only thing that she could find to say in response to this greeting was: “How do you know my name?”
“Please sit down, Miss Lindley,” the Dragon Man said—and waited until she did so before continuing. “Children are a rare and precious commodity nowadays,” the astral tattooist said, softly. “Not just to their elective parents. Did you ever hear the saying that it takes a village to raise a child?”
“Everyone has,” Sara told him. She leaned forward, but the lamp was too cleverly-positioned; the Dragon Man’s face was as deeply shadowed from this angle as it had been when she was standing up.
“Well, it might have been true once,” the Dragon Man told her. “Nowadays, though, it can easily take a whole city. I think you’ll find that everybody in town knows your name, Miss Lindley—even people you’ve never spoken to, and wouldn’t recognize if you bumped into them on the street. It’s a quiet sort of celebrity, but it’s more substantial in its way than anything brokered by TV. You were the only one in your year, you see, this side of Kendal or ManLiv. Think of that! No...don’t. It seems quite normal to you, of course—but even people of your parents’ ages, let alone mine....” He left the sentence dangling.
Sara remembered the people who had been looking at her earlier that day. She remembered how she had fled from them once, and refused to flee a second time. Would it have made a difference, she wondered, if she’d realized that every one of them, save perhaps for the children, had known her name?
“You know Father Lemuel and Father Gustave,” she said, accusingly. “That’s how you know my name.”
The Dragon Man shook his head slightly, as if to deny that he’d been exaggerating, although the gesture was barely visible. “I haven’t seen Lem in twenty years,” he said. “Before you were born.” But he didn’t say it is as if were a denial of her accusation; he said it as if it were something he regretted slightly—as if he should have kept in closer contact with Father Lemuel, but hadn’t.
In any case, Sara thought, Father Lemuel’s surname wasn’t Lindley. She was named after her biological father, according to custom. How would eight parents ever have settled the question of which of them their child ought to be named after, if the custom had been otherwise?
“Everybody takes an interest in children, Miss Lindley,” the sublimate technologist said, mistaking her silence for confusion. “More than you’ll understand, until you’re a little older.” There was a peculiar wistfulness in the old man’s tone that made Sara feel uncomfortable.
“Ms. Chatrian says that you’re the man to talk to about shadowbats,” she said, deciding that it was time to get to the point.
“Very kind of her, I’m sure,” the old man said, equably. “Knowing Linda, though, I doubt that she’d be sending you to me if you wanted to order a few extra decorations in a different style. So what about shadowbats?”
“A flock of them came into my room the other night,” Sara told him. “They were attracted by the scent of my rose.”
The Dragon Man sniffed audibly. “Colibri?” he asked, after a slight pause.
Sara nodded, and the Dragon Man nodded too. “You left your window open expecting hummingbirds,” he deduced. “Your first hummingbirds, at a guess. I can see how a flock of shadowbats might have been a disappointment...and a puzzle.”
“You don’t seem very surprised,” Sara observed. “Ms. Chatrian agreed that the perfume might have attracted the bats—a glitch in the new technology, she said—but she didn’t believe me when I said that they seemed to be absorbing the scent from the air...and getting drunk on it.”
The