The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [76]
She’d said far more than she’d initially intended, and she looked around guiltily when she finished, half-expecting to see Mother Quilla standing in the bedroom doorway looking daggers at her. There was no one there; until the hometree’s AI decided that there was sufficient reason to wake her parents up, she was safe from interruption...though not, she realized, from the eventual consequences of her actions. All this would be recorded, and it had to be “unusual” enough to be reported to her parents in the morning.
“You caught it in a jar?” the boy said, incredulously. “That’s impossible.”
“It was sick,” Sara said. “I thought it was for the best. I thought it would help the Drag—Mr. Warburton figure out what was wrong. And it did. We figured it out this afternoon. He said he’d call you when he’d finished the job. He should have called you. Didn’t he call you?”
“You had no right to catch it,” the boy said, although his manner was much more subdued now. “You should have let it come back. It was mine. I should have taken it back to the Dragon Man.”
Sara recalled the memory of the shadowbat sinking into the gel that Mr. Warburton had used to take a sample of its molecular make-up, and remembered the way he’d taken an image of the image, and rolled it up...but there was another, more troubling memory lurking behind that one much as the boy was lurking beyond the hedge: the memory of the Dragon Man’s lean frame sagging when he had momentarily let go of the edge of his desk. He had told her as she left the shop that he was going to lie down for a while before finishing the proteonome analysis and calling his client to pass on the bad news.
“He should have called you by now,” Sara said to the boy, anxiously. “He said that he would.”
“Well, he didn’t,” the shadowy figure beyond the garden fence replied. “And it wasn’t up to you. It was my shadowbat, and I should have been the one....”
“Shut up!” Sara said, so commandingly that he did. Was it possible, she wondered, that the old man had simply forgotten to call his client? Of course it was—just as it was possible that the proteonome analysis had taken longer than he’d expected. There could be any number of reasons why the Dragon Man hadn’t made the call yet. It wasn’t urgent. There were any number of reasons why he might have decided to leave it until tomorrow. It was nothing to worry about....
Sara glanced at the wristpad that lay on her bedside table. The luminous time-display was readable even at this distance. Seven hours and ten minutes had elapsed since she had stepped out of the Dragon Man’s shop. Perhaps he had yet to complete his analysis. Perhaps he had forgotten his promise to call the owner of the shadowbat...and perhaps not.
“Wait there!” she called to the masked figure. “Don’t move!” She realized immediately that he would probably take that as an indication that she was about to call her parents, and thus as a signal to run away as fast as he could, but she hadn’t time to worry about that. She turned away from the window, and went to her desktop.
The Dragon Man’s phone number was in the machine’s ready memory, so she only required a couple of keystrokes to make the call.
When Frank Warburton’s remarkable face appeared on the screen, looking considerably fuller and healthier than it had that morning, Sara sighed in relief—but then she realized that the image was a simulation, and that she was dealing with an answerphone AI. “I’m Sara Lindley,” she said. “I need to talk to Mr. Warburton in person. It’s urgent.”
“That’s not possible at the present time, miss,” the simulation replied, with the typical smoothness of the kind of Artificial Intelligence that was really just an Artificial Idiot.
Sara knew how literal Artificial Intelligences were, and the phrasing sent a chill into her heart. Surely the answerphone