The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [63]
“I don’t think they can have known him that long ago,” Sara said, wishing that she’d done some research into the likely sequence of Mr. Warburton’s artistic technologies. “Before all this sublimate stuff, obviously—but there must have been lots of other things between that and using needles to drill ink into naked flesh. Smart cellulite, migratory chromocytes, lepidopteran alate scaling....”
“Bioluminescent auras,” Gennifer added, not wanting to be left out of the list-making, “metaspectral melanin, dermal ivory inlays....”
Sara knew that Gennifer’s suggestions must have been plucked almost at random from ads on the more exotic shopping channels—the ones she and Gennifer supposedly weren’t allowed to watch—because that was where she’d borrowed a couple of her examples from, but she daren’t challenge Gennifer to tell her what any of the terms meant for fear of instant retaliation.
“I don’t have time to gossip, Gen,” Sara said, imperiously. “I have important things to do.” It seemed like something she had been waiting all her life to say—or, at least, to say with real meaning.
CHAPTER XVIII
As usual, the traffic management system compelled the robocab to let Sara out at the corner of the square most distant from Mr. Warburton’s shop, so Sara had to walk diagonally across the open space towards the fire-fountain. No less than six groups of parents had brought infant offspring of various ages to look at the fountain—surely a record for a Sunday morning in Blackburn—and they formed a crowd so large and dense that the children had to be held aloft in order to watch the cascade of sparks. Even so, Sara didn’t feel nearly as conspicuous as she had the day before. With that sort of competition, she told herself, no one was likely to be staring at a teenager.
Frank Warburton was waiting for her. He was standing up behind his desk, so his face was no longer in shadow. Sara felt a slight shock, not so much because his face seemed so gaunt and twisted but because his whole body was so very thin and frail. Had he been as thin as that four years earlier, when she’d seen him in Old Manchester? She couldn’t be sure. She pulled herself together, determined not to let the least trace of horror or alarm show on her face as she met his eyes.
“Hello again, Miss Lindley,” the Dragon Man said, very mildly. He had apparently forgotten their agreement to call one another by their first names.
“I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Warburton,” she said, stiffly, “but I thought it would help you to figure out what had gone wrong if I brought you one of the shadowbats.”
The sublimate engineer took the jar from her and peered at the dormant shadowbat. “What’s the colored stuff on the walls?” he asked.
“My kaleidobubbles must have leaked,” Sara said, apologetically. “They were in there for a long time. It won’t have harmed the shadowbat, will it?”
The Dragon Man shrugged his bony shoulders. “If the perfume of your rose has weird effects, who knows what the decay products of old kaleidobubbles might do?” he said. “Can’t tell anything by looking. I’ll probably need to do a complete proteonomic analysis, although I might be able to narrow the possibilities down with a quick gel-spread. Do you want to watch?”
Sara was mildly surprised by the invitation, which she accepted with alacrity. She was in no hurry to go back home again.
“Better come through, then,” he said, leading the way into an inner room.
Sara wasn’t surprised to discover that the sublimate technologist’s workshop had as little in common with Linda Chatrian’s consulting-room as his reception area had with the tailor’s. Some of the labtop equipment was similar, although Frank Warburton had nothing like the vats where the tailor grew her embryonic smartsuits or the suspension-clambers where she fitted them. Whatever he meant by a “gel-spread”, he obviously didn’t do it in the kind of tank in which Sara had been laid out while the winding stem of her rose had integrated itself into her surskin.
Ms. Chatrian