The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [84]
“That’s different. Anyway, it’s all gone, whatever there was. His executor will probably sell it off. Do you know his executor? Someone called Janis Leggett, apparently.”
“She lives on the south coast, in Hove,” Sara told him, having looked the woman up. “She’s his daughter.”
“His biological daughter?”
“He wasn’t that old. He was a natural born himself, but he was a parent like our parents. She’s like me—the product of an anonymously-donated egg from the early days of the great plague. I’ll be interested to meet her.”
“Is she a sublimate technologist too?” Mike wanted to know.
“No. She’s an oceanographer in the UN’s Climate Bureau. Must have followed in the footsteps of one of her other parents, unless she struck out on her own.”
“I might do that,” Mike said. “Oceanography, that is, not strike out on my own. My Mother Gaea’s a marine ecologist.”
“You have a mother called Gaea?” Sara asked. “I bet Father Stephen and Father Aubrey made up some nice jokes about that after the big joint meeting. I’m surprised they haven’t told them all to me.”
“It’s not an uncommon name,” Mike said, a little stiffly. “Anyway, the jokers in my family had some fun with Lemuel. We’re lucky that kind of thing’s gone out of fashion. What do you want to do when you grow up?”
“Lots of things,” Sara told him. “There’ll be time enough to try all sorts of work, on Earth and off it. Someday, I’ll go to the moon. By then, who knows what further horizons there’ll be?”
“Which of your parents said that to you?”
“All of them, at one time or another. Haven’t yours?”
“They’re more a don’t-rush-into-things-and-don’t-try-to-run-before-you-can-walk sort of crowd. It’s a wonder they ever got around to applying for a license at all, let alone with one another. Did you ever hear the one about a camel being a horse designed by a parental house-meeting?”
“Camels were extinct before parental house-meetings started,” Sara pointed out. “I believe the original reference was to committees in general.”
“Well,” Mike said, theatrically, “they’d have been extinct a long quicker if my parents had been the committee in question, if they’d ever got off the drawing board in the first place. I bet Janis Leggett’s parents could have done a much better job—they had the Dragon Man. He wouldn’t have been content with a horse, though. He’d have given it wings, and a horn on its forehead too.”
“Yes he would,” Sara agreed. “There’ll never be anyone like him again. Never. And no matter how long people like Father Lemuel may have known him, we’ll be the ones who remember him longest—you and I. We were part of his last adventure.”
The older boy smiled at that, but not condescendingly. He smiled to show that he knew what she meant, and felt the same way. “See you at the funeral, Stinky Rose,” he said.
“You too, Bat Freak,” she replied.
CHAPTER XXIV
The indoor funeral ceremony was rather tedious, in Sara’s opinion. It might have been more interesting if the information about Frank Warburton contained in the various eulogies had been new to her, but by the time the big day came she’d been trawling the web for days and she probably knew more about the man than any mere human acquaintance could possibly remember. The eulogists had undoubtedly consulted the same sources, but propriety demanded that they pretend to be speaking from memory as well as from the heart, so the word-pictures they painted were as hazy as shadowbats in the dusk.
Janis Leggett was, alas, no exception. More than a hundred years had passed since Frank Warburton had been one of her adoptive parents, but Sara had always been assured by her own Mothers and Fathers that although the collective household would not remain together for more than twenty years or so, they would remain her parents forever. Although Sara had never given the matter intensive thought, she had assumed that she would remain in contact with all her parents, and that she would probably draw closer to them as individuals once she no longer had to confront them as a barely-organized mob on