The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [57]
Either way, she realized, the further encouragement that she was now providing would only serve to reinforce their new habit. They would surely come back again and again, whether she condescended to let them in or not
She lay still on the bed, with the rose fully extended, carefully watching the aerobatic display of the living shadows and measuring its quality. Having made their way around the bedroom twenty or thirty times, following incredibly intricate trajectories—presumably mopping up the molecules that had permeated the atmosphere before their arrival—the six phantom bats eventually came into a more orderly formation. They straightened out their courses, taking turns to skim the surface of the flower. They came from three different angles, cutting graceful arcs through the space above the flower. The arcs intersected at a point above the central style, from whose base the perfume was released.
They were perfectly coordinated, as if they were operating as a practiced team rather than a mere haphazard flock. They never seemed to be in the least danger of colliding, even though their flight was becoming more excited, and their speed was increasing. The scent emitted by the rose was no longer perceptible in her own nostrils; it was vanishing from the air almost as soon as it evaporated.
Were the shadowbats really getting drunk, Sara wondered, or was that merely the best analogy she could draw? It wasn’t a helpful one, in any case. She had never been drunk herself, and had never seen any of her parents drunk—they were very careful about setting a bad example while they were at home. All she knew about drunkenness was based on TV shows she had seen—mostly comedies, at that. She had no idea what being drunk felt like. She imagined it as a combination of dizziness and pleasurable excitement, a matter of getting carried away.
Sara had only ever been “carried away” by sheer excitement, and she realized as she watched the aerial display that it was something she no longer experienced very frequently. Without being quite aware of it, she had “grown out of” the capacity to laugh until she cried when she was tickled or chased...and it was possible that what the phantoms were experiencing was nothing like that at all. Perhaps it was more like the greed that sometimes inspired her to eat sweet things too quickly...or the sense of triumphant achievement she had felt, all too briefly, the day she had climbed the hometree.
That too, she realized, was something she had not felt for quite a while, although she couldn’t believe that it was something people grew out of, the way they lost the knack of being tickled to hysteria.
Perhaps, Sara thought, the effect of the perfume on the shadowbats was more like the drugs she had been warned about in school—but she found it hard to believe that such frail phantoms were capable of hallucination, or being interested in any hallucinations they might chance to experience.
The idea of a shadowbat, or a flock of shadowbats, lying down in a cocoon so that they could visit a fantasy world or take some kind of training program was absurd enough to bring a smile to Sara’s face. But was it really so absurd? If the shadowbats’ sensory apparatus was so much simpler than her own, wouldn’t that make it easier for them to be fooled by simulatory input?
Perhaps, she dared to think, shadowbats didn’t need hoods or cocoons, or even picture windows, to look out into alternative worlds. Perhaps they only needed an appropriate scent...perhaps, when they breathed colibri, they were transformed in their own tiny minds into hummingbirds, or dragons, or things of which only bats or phantoms were capable of dreaming....