The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [81]
Sara realized that Father Lemuel hadn’t come to see her just for her benefit, but for his too. He wanted to talk, not just to anyone, but to her. She remembered what he’d said about strange and difficult bridges—but among the many things she was now beginning to understand was a sense of the fact that all of her parents sometimes found it a great deal easier to talk to her than to talk to one another. Even Frank Warburton, who had only met her properly the day before, after seeing her once at a junk swap in Old Manchester and being afraid that his horrid face might have frightened her, had found it easier to talk to her on his last day of consciousness than it would have been to talk to Father Lemuel, or any other adult.
What must the world have been like, she wondered, when children were so common that two parents might have five or six of them, and never want for anyone to talk to?
“I’m glad I went to see him,” Sara said. “In a way, it makes it more painful to know that he’s dying—but that’s better than it being...irrelevant.”
“Yes it is,” Father Lemuel said. “I’m glad you went to see him too. Because I didn’t, you see. In a way, that makes it more painful that he’s dying too—but it’s better by far than it being irrelevant. Imagine living in the old world, when death was commonplace!”
Sara started slightly at that perverted echo of her own thought, but she knew it was just a coincidence. “Will I be allowed to go to the funeral?” she asked.
“We all will,” Father Lemuel told her. “I don’t know who his executor is, but given the circumstances, I suspect that you’ll be offered a good seat, if you want it.”
“I’d like that,” Sara said. “I’d like it even better if he regained consciousness and went back to work, though, if only for a little while.”
“So would we all,” Father Lemuel agreed.
CHAPTER XXIII
As things turned out, it took ten days for the county hospital’s Ethics Committee to agree with representatives of the Neuroanalytical Unit that Frank Warburton’s body and brain were no longer able to work together in such a way as to maintain his personality, no matter how many neuronal reconnections the surgical team’s nanobots might contrive to restore and renew. He was “released” within the hour.
Sara understood well enough what the word “released” signified when her desktop messaging system, obedient to its programming, broke into the middle of a history lesson to whisper the news in her ear. It meant that the machines maintaining the semblance of life within the old man’s faded flesh had been stood down to await more profitable duties.
Sara had already learned from publicly accessible records that Frank Warburton was—had been—two hundred and eighty-two years, nine months, and fourteen days old. It wasn’t a record, even for the county, let alone the country, but there weren’t many people of that age who were hard at work when their consciousness was eclipsed for the last time. There had, it seemed, been no other who had clung to what was effectively the same profession since his twenty-first century teens, in spite of at least half a dozen transformative technological revolutions. That small element of uniqueness enabled the report to make the national news, carefully colored by the uniquely respectful kind of melodrama that was typical of modern obituaries.
According to the text Sara read in the national broadcast, Frank Warburton had collapsed “while conscientiously analyzing a mistake that he had made as a result of his overadventurousness in trying to meet the requests of a client who was too young to have sufficient credit to have the job done properly.” Apparently, the item went on to explain, Frank Warburton had always been willing to innovate, especially on behalf of the young. This particular mistake, the newswriter noted, had thrown up