The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [82]
Sara’s name was not mentioned in connection with the “interesting information”; nor was anyone else’s.
“That’s so unfair,” Gennifer told her, when the day’s school was finally over and they were able to go on-camera for an intimate exchange of views. “You were the one who made the discovery, not him. They’re only making him out to be a hero because he’s dead. If he were still alive they’d have called him an irresponsible tamperer and taken away his license.”
“Which would probably have killed him,” Sara said, not being at all certain that it hadn’t been exactly that prospect that had tipped him over the edge. “He deserves all the credit. He did the tweaking, and he figured out what it was that he’d done. Anyway, responsible people who only do what they’re supposed to do, like our faithful family tailor, never discover anything. It’s the people who don’t follow the instructions who make progress.”
“Very big of you,” Gennifer said. “Personally, I’d have made a fuss. You might not be entitled to any royalties, but you could have made the national news.”
“The quiet kind of celebrity that children already have,” Sara informed her, oozing mature sophistication, “is more substantial, in its way, than anything brokered by TV.” But Gennifer didn’t understand what she meant.
“Are you going to the funeral?” Gennifer asked. “They say it’s going to be big. A man that age knows a lot of people—my Mother Leanne says that she and Father Jacob both met him, although Father Jacob claims to have forgotten all about it. I wish my parents would take me, but they won’t. You and I will still have to wait for Christmas for our first meeting in meatspace.”
“Yes,” Sara said, when she was finally able to get a word in. “I am going. I’ll be in the Hall, in fact.”
Gennifer was impressed. “How did your parents wangle that?”
“They didn’t,” Sara said, proudly. “I might not have made the national news, but I was a witness to his last hours—that’s how the executor put it. When I say I’ll be in the Hall, that’s what I mean. Just me. Not even Father Lemuel, although he’s known the Dragon Man for more than a century, off and on, and he’s determined to be in the memorial garden in the flesh even though he’s practically a cocoon-addict nowadays.”
Gennifer was now beyond being impressed; she was awestruck. “My God!” she said. “Imagine how many women wearing hummingbirds there’ll be at a do like that! Thousands!”
“They won’t be allowed to fly in the Hall,” Sara reminded her. “There’s such a thing as decorum. In fact, they won’t be flying in the memorial garden either. It says so on the invitation, in so many words. All mobile accessories must remain fixed for one hour after the revelation of the memorial stone.”
“Why?” Gennifer asked.
“Decorum,” Sara repeated, with all the dignity she could muster. “It’s a funeral, not an eight-way marriage or a naming day.” Even as she said it, though, she remembered seeing funeral ceremonies on the TV in which the memorial gardens had been filled with flocks of colored birds, which couldn’t possibly have been natural. Perhaps, she thought, the Dragon Man had left special instructions.
“Lucky you had that rose fitted, isn’t it?” Gennifer observed.
“Is it?” Sara said. “He’s dead, Gen. I don’t call that lucky.”
“He’d have died anyway. This way, you get a front seat at a really big funeral. You didn’t kill him, you know. It wasn’t your fault he was working on a Sunday evening, and even if he’d been cozily cocooned in his bedroom he’d still have pegged out on the Monday.”
“It’s still not lucky,” Sara insisted. “It’s just not the right word. Father Gustave says that it’s been good for me to make the intimate acquaintance of death, but that’s not right either. It’s not luck, and it’s not good. It’s...well, I don’t know what it is, but there is such a thing as decorum.”
“So you