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By Root 649 0

liked whiteskin walls and a lightly-perfumed but reassuringly sterile atmosphere; she also favored extra-large windowscreens and Morris chairs upholstered in royal blue and chocolate brown. In stark contrast, the Dragon Man’s walls and furniture were stone dead, and his wallscreens were more like portholes than casement windows. Unlike Ms. Chatrian, the Dragon Man obviously liked shelves. He had lots of shelves, many of them filled with jars charged with what looked like colored smoke but obviously wasn’t. The air was loaded with a rich cocktail of barely-perceptible odors—as was only to be expected, given the lack of smart walls—and there was more clutter piled up in each and every corner than Sara had ever had in her cupboard, giving the room a curiously rounded aspect. The labtops were clean, though, and the equipment to which the Dragon Man turned his attention seemed to be ready-primed and set to go.

Sara half-expected the shadowbat to make a bid for freedom as soon as the screw-top of the jar was removed, but it remained quiescent. It had to be prompted with the point of a long needle before it would condescend to slide on to a gelatinous sheet in the bottom of a rectangular tray. After waiting for a couple of minutes, Mr. Warburton coaxed it on to a rag of synthetic skin. Sara saw that it had left an imprint on the gel, like a ghostly shadow—or, given that it was a shadow of sorts itself, a ghost of a ghost.

“Sit down,” the Dragon Man said to Sara.

In the absence of Morris chairs, Sara had no alternative but to perch on a stool beside the rag. She looked down at the shadowbat, hoping that it would be all right. She wondered whether it was feeding, and whether it would be able to fly again once it had.

In the meantime, the Dragon Man laid a paper-thin sheet of something soft and white over the shadow on the gel in order to take yet another, even fainter, imprint. This one he carefully rolled up; then he set the scroll on the edge of another rectangular bath of gel. This bath was fitted with a cluster of external wires and numerous dials. Three eye-like red circles were lit up as he tripped a hidden switch.

Mr. Warburton watched the placid surface for two minutes, although nothing as happening to it that Sara could detect. Then he went back to the first imprint, whose supportive medium had now become so viscous as almost to have set hard. This time, the Dragon Man used a scalpel to cut out the imprint, and a broad spatula to lift it from the tray. He slid the near-solid lump into a beaker half-full of another viscous liquid, into which it seemed to dissolve entirely. Then he poured a measure of the solution into the maw of a pot-bellied machine which put Sara in mind of the inorganic parts of the hometree’s plumbing systems—the parts that were so ugly they were tastefully hidden away in the cellar. Nothing now remained in the gel-bath but a cartoonish cut-out, which was only slightly reminiscent of a bat with extended wings.

“Right,” said the Dragon Man, pulling another stool from under the bench so that he could sit down too. “The full proteonome analysis will take at least four hours, probably six, even though the poor little devil only has a few dozen pseudogenes. The chromo-trace should tell if there’s anything untoward going on, though, and ought to offer a few clues as to how and why....” He broke off as he seemed to realize, suddenly, that Sara didn’t understand what he was telling her. “Sorry,” he said. “Just a second.”

His fingers danced on a virtual keyboard projected on the desk in front of one of the wallscreens, which was displaying a series of diagrams far more complicated than anything Sara had yet studied in school. She did her best to look as if she were capable of taking an intelligent interest.

“Right,” the Dragon Man said. “It’s getting on with the job. There’s time to explain, if I’m up to it. Do you know what a proteonome is?”

Sara shook her head.

“What about a genome?”

“It’s a set of genes,” Sara said. “Chromosomes. DNA. A set of instructions for making a person—or an animal.”

“That