The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [58]
It was all unbelievable—but Sara felt strangely proud of herself for having been able to imagine it, and wondered if Father Lemuel would be proud of her too, if she told him about it. She had no plans to tell him yet, of course; the sensation of having a real secret, much more personal and profound than the secret of her experiment in dragonflight, was far too precious. In time, though, when Mr. Warburton had found a solution to the puzzle and a means of tackling the problem, it might be enjoyable to talk the whole thing over with Father Lemuel....
Sara suddenly realized that the flight of the shadows was become ever more rapid, and their turns ever more hectic—and that as they gave themselves up to sheer madness, their uncertain shapes were becoming even more uncertain, less obviously bat-like.
It was as if the sublimate creatures were attempting some strange metamorphosis that they were not yet able to contrive; as if they were no longer content to be shadowbats, but wanted to be shadow-caterpillars, or shadow-tadpoles, on their way to becoming shadow-butterflies or shadow-frogs.
The limits of absurdity seemed to stretch then, as Sara found it abruptly possible to believe what she had not been able to believe before, to accept as an evident fact what had seemed a ridiculous fancy only a few moments ago.
Now, she was almost ready to be convinced that the vaporous creatures really did nurture a primitive hope that drinking their fill of volatilized colibri might actually turn them into hummingbirds, endowing them with marvelous brightness and color instead of their fugitive mock-darkness. What was actually happening to them, though, was that they were beginning to break up under the strain—to dissipate like curls of smoke.
If they continued, Sara felt sure that their “skins” would disintegrate, and whatever internal organization they had would decay into chaos.
Sara became suddenly anxious. She did not want the shadowbats to come to any harm—and even if they succeeded in re-forming, in transforming themselves into something else, that was surely a far more dangerous business than merely “getting drunk”. Her desire to know and understand what was happening was still increasing, but so was her fear that something bad might be happening, and that it would be her fault.
Acting on an urgent impulse, Sara sat up on the bed and swung her legs over the side. Her abrupt movement sent the invaders scattering in every direction.
She leapt to the floor and ran to her cupboard. As soon as the door slid sideways she rummaged among the clutter that had accumulated on the cupboard’s narrow floor, until she found an ancient screw-topped jar in which her younger self—who seemed by now to have been a very different person—had stored her kaleidobubbles.
The gelatin spheres had become sticky with age. When she tried to pour them out they resisted, clinging together in a stubborn adhesive mass, but Sara poked her forefinger into the jar to break up the mass, and shook the inverted jar as hard as she could. She persisted until she had dislodged them all, pouring them out into the shower-nook.
When the jar was empty, except for a few smears of translucent color on the inner surface of the clear plastic, she started chasing the shadowbats with the empty jar.
The dark phantoms evaded her amateurish scooping without the slightest difficulty, even though they were still confused and over-excited. They no longer seemed to be disintegrating, now that the flow of nectar had been interrupted, but the perfume of the flower was still diffusing into the air, and Sara had to suppose that the process had only been slowed down.
Realizing that she was going about her task in the wrong way, Sara lay down on the bed again and stretched herself out in a supine position. She lay quite still, and waited for the shadowbats to begin moving more purposefully again.
Gradually, she eased the open neck of the jar closer and closer to the rim of the rose’s ring of petals. She only needed to adjust its position two or three times before the momentum of a giddy