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By Root 672 0

Dragon Man shifted his position slightly, but he didn’t expose his face. He lifted his bony shoulders in what might have been a shrug. His shoulders, unlike Ms. Chatrian’s, had no talent at all for expressing contempt. “New technology always does more than it’s intended to,” he said, pensively. “Shaped sublimates are designed to soak up everything they need from their hosts, but the absorption process is necessarily crude; it’s not surprising that they sometimes soak up other things as well. Nobody notices, for the most part, but perfume is...well, more noticeable. You have to remember that they’re creatures like none that natural selection ever produced, and that they don’t know what they’re not supposed to do. They have built-in inhibitions about settling on anyone else’s surskin, but fluttering around is the name of their game. You weren’t afraid, I hope?”

“Of course not,” Sara said. “I knew they couldn’t hurt me, even if they touched me, or if I breathed one in—but I wondered if they might be in danger.”

The old man shifted in his seat again, as if Sara’s story were causing him some slight disturbance, but he clung stubbornly to his protective shadow. He must have set things up this way to protect his clients from the sight of him, Sara thought. But if he’s willing to do that, why won’t he use the cosmetic potential of his smartsuit?

“They seemed to be getting drunk, did they?” the Dragon Man murmured, as if he were trying to get the thought more securely into his head. “And you think they might have overdone it, poor things? I don’t think they’d readily take aboard anything that would do them harm...but new technology always has unexpected glitches, just as lovely Linda says. Who knows?” He paused for a few moments before adding: “It would be interesting, though, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?” Sara countered.

“Biochemically interesting, I mean. Colibri is a moderately complex cocktail, and the metabolic systems of sublimated quasi-life are straight off the drawing-board, so I doubt if they were ever formally introduced in the lab. It must be idiosyncratic to the flock, though—there are plenty of interaction opportunities in ManLiv, and even more down south. Linda doesn’t meddle much with her off-the-shelf products, so the scent must be standard, unless there’s been some weird interaction with your personal metabolism—but the shadowbats would be the prime suspects anyhow, given that they’re in the earliest stages of their evolution.” He stopped, and waited, as if to give Sara the opportunity to complain if the argument were beyond her comprehension.

She was having difficulty following the thread, but she didn’t want to admit it.” Do you meddle much with off-the-shelf products, Mr. Warburton?” she asked.

“You can call me Frank if I can call you Sara,” he said, amiably. “To answer the question, though—yes, I’m an inveterate tinkerer, just like your Father Lem. Old habits die hard, even when you’re in unfamiliar territory. I used to do beautiful work, you know, when I was younger. Birds, roses, hearts, mottoes...even dragons with gold and silver scales, like the one in the window, and angels with swans’ wings and breath like holy fire—but never Washington crossing the Delaware.” He waited a moment to see whether Sara would ask him what he meant by the last remark, but she didn’t want to seem ignorant and she knew that she could always ask one of her parents.

“I must be one of the last men alive who worked with needles, on bare skin,” the Dragon Man went on. “That’s why I keep them in the window, like whiskers dropped from the dragon’s snout. I’ve always kept pace, with the organics and the smartsuits, all the way from...well, not quite the beginning, but at least a time when a few of us were still willing and able to stand naked every time we took a bath or changed our poor dead clothes. I’ve always meddled, Sara. I carried the habit over when I qualified as a sublimate engineer, just as I’d carried it over into all the other retraining programs I had to go through in order to maintain the outer semblance of my career.