The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [7]
“You mean, “Sara said, carefully, “that he was a kind of painter.”
“No,” said Mother Maryelle. “He used a motorized needle, to drive the ink into the skin, so that it would be permanently integrated into it—in much the same way that the colors and textures of your smartsuit are built into it, but much more crudely.”
Sara knew that she had to get in quickly if she wanted to remind her parents about her other question before they started bickering again, so she said: “So the dragon isn’t a painting, then? It’s inside somebody’s skin?”
Strangely enough, that precipitated a moment’s silence before Father Gustave—who liked to think of himself as a natural diplomat, capable of handling the touchiest situations—said: “No, Sara. That dragon in the window is only a hundred and fifty years old or thereabouts. About the same age as Father Lemuel, I think. It’s inscribed on—or in—synthetic skin. It’s not from an actual person.”
“Oh,” said Sara, trying as hard as she could to present the appearance of the highly intelligent, sophisticated child that all eight of her parents so obviously wanted her to be. “I see.”
* * * *
On many an occasion, in the years that followed, Sara had thought that it must have been a great deal easier to be a child in the days before the Crash, when all parental conversations had been two-way, and even seven- or eight- or nine-year-olds must have stood a fair-to-middling chance of interrupting. Once five adults—let alone the eight who gathered at house-meetings—began talking at cross purposes, the task of restoring order required a much more powerful voice than that of the tiny creature whose care and education had brought them all together in the first place.
Two parents, fourteen-year-old Sara thought, couldn’t possibly have put as much pressure on a six-year-old child as eight, even if they had entertained such high expectations. In the days when children only had two parents, of course, genetic engineering hadn’t been sufficiently advanced to make certain that all children were highly intelligent—but the combined expectations of eight parents, Sara now understood, were massive enough to outweigh any advantage conferred by science.
At six—and, indeed, at every other age she had passed through on her arduous journey to the present—Sara had always felt that she had been lagging behind, not yet capable of being the child her parents wanted and expected her to be. When, exactly, had she begun to wonder whether it was her parents that might be asking too much rather than she who might be failing? Was it before or after she had first defied them in a flagrant and spectacular fashion by climbing the hometree? Or was it, perhaps, climbing the hometree that had brought the long-held suspicion to the surface? She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember.
What she did know, and could remember, was that when her six-year-old self had gone home on the day of her sixth birthday, after a short walk through the streets of Blackburn, during which a hundred other things had been pointed out to her by five eager index fingers, the one enduring image that her mind had retained was the golden dragon. That image had somehow succeeded in seeming more interesting, and more precious, than the momentary presence of the other children.
In retrospect, Sara could see that the brief glimpse of the dragon within the cloister had been the only aspect of the experience that had actually started something: a chain of ideas and actions that had run, unsteadily but unbroken, all the way to the day when she actually entered that mysterious shop, in order to confront the exotic creature whose lair it was.
CHAPTER III
Even at six, Sara had been old enough to look up “tattoos” with the aid of her desktop. She still had enough curiosity left when she returned home on that birthday to try.
Unfortunately, the torrent of information released by her enquiry had too much in it that was