The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [66]
“That’s understandable,” the Dragon Man observed, obviously feeling that he ought to be supportive of Sara’s parents. “Do you mind if I send Lem a message to let him know I’ve invited you to wait for the preliminary results of my inquiry? I don’t want your parents to worry.”
“Not at all,” Sara replied, politely. She waited until he had dispatched the text message before saying: “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“About my horrid face?”
Sara blinked in surprise. “No!” she said. “No...it was just...well, as you’ve known Father Lemuel for such a long time, and as you knew my name before ever seeing me...I wanted to ask you whether you knew the man I was named after—Gerard Lindley, my biological father?”
It was the Dragon Man’s turn to look surprised. “Why would I?” he blurted out. “Sorry...I mean, no, I don’t think so. Do you have some reason to think that I might have known him?”
“Not really,” Sara confessed. “I suppose it’s because I don’t know very much about him myself, except that he lived in these parts during his later years, that I thought you might...although I suppose Father Lemuel might have mentioned it, if he thought...sorry. It’s just that most of the kids in my class know quite a bit about their biological parents, because at least some of their parents knew them when they were alive. I’ve asked my parents why they decided to look after the child of people they didn’t know, but all they said was that someone had to look after the children of parents that nobody knew, and they’d decided it was a good thing to do. There doesn’t seem to be any record of my biological mother at all, because she died during the Crash, and all I can find out about my biological father is his name, dates and some of his places of residence. He didn’t live very long, but he didn’t die till 2161. That’s long before Father Lemuel was born but...you were alive then, weren’t you?”
“Yes I was,” Mr. Warburton answered, softly. “So it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that I did meet your biological father, even though I can’t remember it. He could even have been a customer—all my records of that era are long-lost. Your parents are right, you know. A great many people deposited sperm and eggs during the Crash, not knowing whether they’d ever be used—or even whether there’d be anyone around to use them. If today’s parents all insisted on exercising the rights of people they knew personally, the genetic heritage of most of the Crash’s victims would be lost. You’ve probably been told in school that loss of genetic variety within a species is always a bad thing, but modern genetic engineering can cope with the practical problems—what’s really at stake is a point of principle.”
“The right to found a family,” Sara said, to demonstrate that she could easily keep up with this phase of the conversation.
“There was a time, during the Crash, when we thought everybody might have lost that right,” the old man told her, in a somber tone.
Sara knew that, of course, as a bare fact—she had been informed of it at least once by nearly every adult she had ever come into contact with—but this was the first time that any of her informants had ever been able to mean “we” in a more literal sense than “the human race”. Frank Warburton had actually lived through the latter years of the Crash.
Sara waited for him to go on.
CHAPTER XIX
“I was born a little too early to be a miracle child myself,” the Dragon Man said, with a faint sigh. “The plague of sterility was running riot, but children were still being born, and the panic hadn’t yet extinguished hope that cures could be found to make the infertile fertile again. The banks of sperm and eggs still seemed to most of us to be a precautionary measure—something we’d only have to fall back on if the worst came to the worst, and just to help out for a while even then.”
Sara nodded, to let him know that she understood what he was saying, and wanted him to continue.
“When I was your age—that would be 2112 or so, I guess—we had no idea that the historians