The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [55]
“Do you know who owns the shadowbats that came into my room?” Sara asked. It seemed more diplomatic than asking whether he had meddled with any shadowbats in such a way as to give them an appetite for hummingbird-food.
“I can find out,” he replied, confidently. “What do you want me to do about it if I do?”
Sara hesitated. She wasn’t sure. “Could you fix them?” she asked, curiously.
“Are you sure they’re broken?” he countered. “Perhaps they’ve acquired a whole new realm of experience, and discovered a brand new pleasure. Fixing them might be cruel, don’t you think?”
“They’re not hummingbirds,” Sara said. “I chose colibri because....” She trailed off, realizing that what she was saying was utterly irrelevant to the question he had posed. Her eyes had adjusted to the poor light now, and she could make out the vague lines of Frank Warburton’s features. She was suddenly convinced that was looking at her intently, with a very peculiar expression on his face. She immediately told herself that it must be a trick of the shadows, but she wouldn’t be convinced.
She had been told often enough that smartsuits were “emotionally intelligent”—which meant that they were designed to signal and signify, even better than unmasked faces, all the things that people needed to communicate face-to-face but couldn’t put into words. Their role was, however, essentially supportive. If the human being within was enigmatic, the extra layers of synthetic skin wouldn’t decipher the mystery. Frank Warburton suddenly seemed even more deeply enigmatic than the surrounding shadows forced him to be—more deeply enigmatic than Sara had ever imagined that any human being could seem.
“Do you know, Sara,” the old man said, apparently wanting to set her at her ease, “that you’re the first customer I’ve had this morning? On a Saturday! I have four appointments on the machine, but they’re all for this evening, after sunset. Why is that, do you think? Is it going to be bats all the way, now? Am I becoming a creature of the dusk myself? Sublimate entities don’t have to be shadows, you know. They can be bright, like creatures of pure radiance, or nearly invisible.”
“I know,” Sara said. “I thought about that. I thought about having a golden dragon fitted to my smartsuit—but my parents would never have let me do it.”
“Did you, indeed?” he said, as if he were genuinely impressed. “You’d have come to me, of course—what a fine time we might have had with that design. It’s not just dragons, though. We can make all manner of fays and phantoms. Imagine that! We could fill the world—the real world, that is, not one of its virtual parallels—with quasi-life that we can’t even see. For now, we have shadows, which only fade away in the twilight...but in time, there’ll be hosts of angels dancing around us in the broadest daylight, unseen and unsuspected. Or maybe we’ll want to reserve the word angel for the ones that glow like haloes. Fashion is a fickle thing, but I can’t help getting a little bit impatient with it...you can see what I mean, can’t you Sara? You really have thought about it.”
“I think I can see,” she said. “Yes, I really have thought about it. The spiders and the scorpions seem a little silly to me too—but the shadowbats are better, and the potential that’s still untapped...what you mean is that you meddle because you’re anxious to move on.”
“Old age breeds impatience,” Frank Warburton told her, as gravely if he were imparting a dark secret. “My kind of old age does, at any rate. You won’t find out about your kind for a very long time. I don’t frighten you, do I, Sara? I frighten children sometimes. I thought I might have frightened you, last time we met.”
“You remember that?” Sara said. It seemed astonishing.
“You were with Stephen and Quilla,” he reminded her, as if he felt obliged to provide proof. “I knew you were Lem’s girl. If Gus had been with you...or even Maryelle...but maybe not. Did