The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [60]
Sara was speechless, but she knew that her expression must speak volumes.
“It’s not that they’re spying,” Mother Verena said, defensively.
“People talk, you see,” Father Gustave said, hastening to take up the burden of explanation, “and they need things to talk about. After the weather, politics and the march of technology, children are a favorite topic. Anybody’s children.”
“It’s perfectly understandable,” Mother Maryelle added. “Now that people are directly involved in parenting for such a tiny fraction of their adult lifespan, it’s only natural that they take a greater interest in children they’re only indirectly involved with.”
“‘Indirectly’ meaning any that they see, even on an occasional basis, or any whose existence they know anything at all about,” Father Stephen put in, presumably intending to be helpful—although the way that Father Gustave scowled suggested that he wasn’t at all grateful for the pedantic definition.
Sara remembered what the Dragon Man had said about it taking a whole city to raise a child nowadays. She realized, belatedly, that he hadn’t meant to imply that the child needed the city, but rather that the city needed the child. Ms. Mapledean and Father Lemuel had both taken the trouble to explain to her that the Population Bureau was reluctant to grant child-rearing licenses to more than eight co-parents, partly because larger groups were notoriously prone to premature disintegration and partly because of the supposed limitation of a child’s primary-bonding capacity. Until this moment, she had left the fact unconsidered, like the vast majority of the facts her teachers and parents rained ceaselessly down upon her, but now she found herself rudely confronted with one of the more obvious implications of the policy.
“You mean,” she said, as the prospect became clear to her for the first time, “that wherever I go, and whatever I do, people won’t be content just to watch me go by... they’ll report it all back to you.”
“It’s not a matter of reporting back,” Father Stephen said. “Not in a sneaky way....”
“It’s more a matter of wanting to ask questions...,” Mother Jolene put in, before she was interrupted in her turn.
“In any case, it’s not something to worry about,” Mother Quilla took over. “It’s discreet, and it won’t last forever. In three or four years time—sooner if you grow as fast as I did—you’ll be indistinguishable from an adult by sight alone. You’ll become far less visible, or at least far less noticeable. You’re entering a difficult phase just now. Perhaps we should have warned....”
“Perhaps we should at least have talked to you about it,” Mother Verena said, effortlessly taking up the relay baton despite Mother Quilla’s obvious reluctance to relinquish it, “but we thought it would make you more self-conscious if it were actually pointed out, so we....”
“None of which is relevant to the matter in hand,” Father Gustave broke in, testily. “Which is that you should be keeping us informed, so we wouldn’t have to rely on second hand information.”
“We gave you every chance to tell us,” Father Aubrey pointed out. “We didn’t say anything at all yesterday, thinking that you’d probably feel able to tell us everything today, when you’d had a chance to sleep on it....”
“But this is simply too much,” Father Stephen said. “You can’t go around setting traps for other people’s bodywear. It’s not even legal, let alone moral.”
Sara was still trying to work out who might have said what to whom, and when, but the change of subject forced her to abandon that train of thought and deflect her attention to the question of why, if her parents knew about the captured shadowbat, they hadn’t taken the trouble to interfere at the time. If, as Father Gustave said, the hometree’s Artificial Intelligence was programmed to take note of anything unusual, it was presumably also programmed only to wake them up in case of emergency. If this didn’t qualify