The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [77]
“It must be possible,” Sara said, although she knew that her insistence was, in this instance, quite impotent. “This is top priority...emergency...red alert...whatever the keyword is. I have to speak to him now. I have to.”
“That’s not possible at the present time, miss,” the Dragon Man’s image repeated—and this time. Sara allowed herself take aboard the full significance of the statement.
“You mean he’s dead, don’t you?” she asked, flatly.
The image flickered slightly as a new subroutine kicked in. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be reached at present,” the sim said, although its pretence to be the person it represented seemed utterly hollow.
“Shit,” Sara murmured. She turned on her heel and ran back to the window.
The boy hadn’t run away. He was still there, waiting. His posture signaled annoyance and impatience, but he had done what he was told because he was curious to know what was going on.
“Hey, Bat Freak,” she called to him, a little louder than was strictly necessary. “How do I get an AI sim to tell me whether or not its master is dead?”
The boy’s mouth was already open, poised to utter a complaint, so he had no difficulty at all looking astonished, despite the fact that the rest of his face was obscured by his mask. Five seconds went by before he contrived to speak. “You think the Dragon Man’s dead?” he said, too amazed by the inference to object to the form of address she had used.
“How do I get his answerphone to tell me, one way or the other?” Sara demanded.
“You don’t,” the boy replied, mechanically. “You ask local news. Wow—do you know how old that guy was? People like him are rarer than little girls like you—and they aren’t making any more of his kind.”
Sara didn’t bother to react to the “little girl”. She had more important matters to attend to, and he was only retaliating to the unflattering form of address she had used. She cursed herself for having been so stupid as to have to ask, but she went back to the desk and called up local news.
There was nothing in the banners, so she typed Frank Warburton’s name with an open query. When she read the terse message that came up she didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. She went back to the window, because she felt she had to share the news with somebody, and there was only one person readily available who wanted and needed to know.
“He’s in the hospital,” she told the boy. “He never had a chance to call you. He’s comatose. Stable but unconscious.”
The boy didn’t reply for a few moments. Then he said: “They’ll switch him off. Bound to. He’s too old. They’ll give it a couple of days, then they’ll let him go.”
“No,” Sara said. “He was okay. This morning—this afternoon—he was okay. His brain’s fine. It’s just a matter....”
Sara trailed off as she heard her bedroom door open. She looked around. Mother Quilla appeared, then Mother Maryelle, but there was nobody else. Obviously, the call to local news had finally tripped the resident AI’s alarm, but not at a level of urgency that required the whole house to be woken up. There was obviously some kind of roster, whose existence she had never previously had cause to suspect, determining which of her parents were on call in case of little emergencies.
“What’s going on?” Mother Quilla demanded.
Sara suppressed the reflex that instructed her to say: “Nothing.” She was, after all, no longer a little girl. “It’s Frank Warburton, Mother Quilla,” she said. “He’s been taken to hospital. I was probably the last person who talked to him.”
“And you felt compelled to broadcast the news to the empty night, I suppose?” Mother Quilla said—but it was Mother Maryelle who was elbowing Sara out of the way in a conspicuously unmaternal manner so that she could peer out of the window. When Sara glanced back over her shoulder she saw that the boy had vanished from sight, presumably having ducked down behind the fence,