The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [83]
“I don’t know,” Sara said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him today. I’ll call him later if he doesn’t call me first.”
“Will you, now? Maybe you’ll be going to stay with him for Christmas.”
“He only lives just down the road,” Sara reminded her. “I can walk to his hometree as easily as he can walk to mine. This whole thing wouldn’t have happened otherwise. We don’t need to fix up formal visits.”
“He’s two years older than you are,” Gennifer pointed out, cattily. “You’re not old enough to be his best friend.
“In the great scheme of things, two years is nothing,” Sara told her. In a hundred years time, our ages will be closer than the ages of any two of my parents, or his...or yours, for that matter.”
“Oh, be like that,” Gennifer said. “Anyway, I won’t say enjoy yourself at the funeral, given that you’ve come over so sensitive, but you still have to tell me the whole story, in more detail than you tell it to anyone else, okay? We’re sisters, remember—or as close as anyone ever gets to being sisters nowadays, or ever will again.”
“Sisters,” Sara repeated, glad to find that the word sounded appropriate.
Gennifer was right, Sara thought; now that all children were born in artificial wombs, from eggs and sperm dutifully deposited in the bank by parents who’s been far too polite to exercise their right of replacement while they were still alive, it was unlikely that earthbound humankind would ever again produce any biological sisters, although things were different in the Lagrange colonies. If the earthbound ever did produce any more biological sisters, it was unlikely in the extreme that the sisters in question would be alive at the same time—but that only meant that the word “sister” had been liberated, as the word “junkie” had been, and was now free to acquire new meanings. Yes, she and Gennifer were sisters, in a brand new sense that made the fact all the more remarkable and all the more exciting. “I’ll tell you everything,” she added, when Gennifer made no further response. “Everything.”
As soon as she had broken the link, she called Mike Rawlinson. “You heard the news?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I got a whisper during history. I wanted to come and talk to you, but I had things on—commitments I couldn’t break. My parents have been bending my ear ever since I logged off. I’ve only just only escaped. Same with you?”
“No,” Sara said. “Either they’re being diplomatic and leaving it up to me to mention it first, or they’ve said everything that had to say already. The last ten days has been a long time. Are you going to the funeral?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll see you in the memorial gardens—but I’ll have my parents with me, so it’ll just be a matter of waving hello and goodbye.”
“I’ll be in the Hall for the eulogies,” Sara told him, not in the least triumphantly.
“That’s fair,” he said. “You were the last person to see him. If you’d stayed a little longer you’d probably have seen him collapse.”
“He didn’t want that,” Sara told him. “I couldn’t have done anything. His IT was rigged to send out an immediate distress call—the ambulance wouldn’t have got to him any sooner.”
“I know,” Mike assured her. “I only meant that it’s right that you should be in the Hall. I’ll still see you in the gardens afterwards. I wish I still had the shadowbats—the manufacturers offered me another flock, but I said no. It wouldn’t have seemed right.”
“I’d quite like to have something to remember him by,” Sara said. “Nothing big—a little figure of some kind, on my arm or shoulder. Just a picture, not a flyer or one of Davy’s creepy spiders. A golden dragon, like the one in his window.”
“It’s not there any more,” Mike told her. “The shop’s been cleared out. It’s up for sale. I don’t know what happened to all his stock, or his archives. My Father Benjamin says that he must have had a massive archive, but I’m not so sure he was the kind of man to keep all his old stuff in drawers and cupboards.”
“I saw him at a junk swap once,” Sara