The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [8]
Dragons, on the other hand, were easy for the six-year-old mind to get a grip on, and considerably more fascinating than tattoos. The most immediate legacy of Sara’s first trip into town, therefore, was a interest in dragons which became intense for a matter of months and lingered within her for years afterwards.
In Father Stephen’s room, which housed the most prized items of his collection of pre-Crash junk, six-year-old Sara found two statuettes formed in the image of dragons. One was made of plastic, the other of glass. He gave her the plastic one immediately, when she expressed an interest, but he told her the other was too fragile. He obviously felt guilty about keeping it, though, because he gave her a bag full of old CDs and diskettes and volunteered to take her to the next junk swap in Old Manchester, so that she could go dragon-hunting on her own behalf.
Sara’s excitement at Father Stephen’s gift was only slightly muted when Father Lemuel asked to have a look at the contents of the bag. “I know that the word junk is supposed to have been stripped of all its pejorative connotations, Steve,” he said, talking over Sara’s head, “but this stuff really is junk. She won’t get anything much in exchange for this rubbish.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Father Stephen said. “I wouldn’t get much for it, because I’d be bartering on level terms—but Sara only has to smile sweetly, and every carpet-trader in St Anne’s Square will be only too willing to give her model dragons in exchange for any old rubbish she has to trade. Plastic ones, anyway.”
“That’s exploitation!” Mother Quilla objected.
“No it’s not,” Father Stephen retorted. “It would be exploitation if I were asking her to barter on my behalf for things I wanted—which certain parents in ManLiv are only too happy to do—but if she’s bartering on her own behalf she’s perfectly entitled to take advantage of her opportunities. I’m just furthering her education.”
After that, the argument became heated and quite impenetrable, but Sara found out soon enough that what Father Stephen had said was true. Children did have a tremendous advantage at junk swaps, where even the traders who had so little regard for etiquette that they would take credit seemed absolutely delighted that a child so young could take an interest in their collections. They were so enthusiastic to welcome her to the community of junkies—or “Preservers of the Heritage of the Lost World,” as they preferred to call themselves—that they would have let her give them anything at all in exchange for ordinary items to which they were not sentimentally attached. In effect, they were giving them to her, and gladly—but junkie etiquette demanded that some exchange of goods should take place, no matter how contrived. And how else could she learn to be a good junkie?
By taking advantage of her youth and Father Stephen’s seemingly-infinite supply of junk so rubbishy that he “couldn’t swap it for dust” Sara soon built up a collection of dragons modelled in several kinds of plastic. She also acquired a fine set of old paperback books with pictures of dragons on the covers, including a few that would have been quite valuable if the pages hadn’t been so badly acid-burned that they splintered into fragments if they were turned.
Although she hardly qualified as a “real junkie” Sara was infected by the glamour of the past to the extent that she prized the figurines and paperback covers more than the whole dragon-filled worlds that could be conjured up on the other side of her bedroom window, or visited by means of her hood. Throughout her seventh and eight years she tuned her window to dragonworlds more often than not, but there was a magic in fondling the pre-Crash fabrications that mere sightseeing could not