The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [85]
The Dragon Man’s daughter, by contrast, freely confessed that she had not seen Father Frank in the flesh for seventy years, and only ever talked to him on the phone when he called her. She made what was obviously intended to be a humorous reference to his ineptitude in calculating time differences when he called her in the South Atlantic—supplemented by a joke about the time-zone difficulties the UN would face if it really did relocate to the south pole—but Sara could see nothing funny in the fact that Frank Warburton had had to try so hard to obtain the attention of his daughter that he had chosen to ignore his desktop AI whenever it told him that she was likely to be fast asleep, because she was somewhere so distant from him that she was living ten or eleven hours ahead of him.
In spite of her determination to remain focused on the speakers, Sara found her attention wandering. She never went so far as to stop thinking about the man whose absence her presence was supposed to be honoring, but she did take leave to wonder how much of his work was on display in the solemn crowd.
There were, as Gennifer had prophesied, an inordinate number of hummingbirds among the living jewelry on display. They were not merely perched on dozens of shoulders like fancy epaulettes but clustered around dozens of elaborate head-dresses and occasionally distributed about in meticulously-linked flocks around the billowing sleeves and pleats of the most ostentatious costumes Sara had ever seen in meatspace. None of these, Sara felt sure, were Frank Warburton’s work. In his youth, when “tattoos” really had been tattoos, his work might have seemed garish to some—especially when he inscribed brightly-colored dragons in the real flesh of people’s upper arms, torsos and ankles—but by today’s standards a sublimate engineer was a subtle artist, whose works were exceptionally discreet.
Sara remembered the tone of the Dragon Man’s voice as he had told her that sublimate accessories didn’t have to be shadows—that they could be as bright as angels or as subtle as phantoms. She had not thought about it much at the time, but she was convinced, now, that he must have been nursing plans for designs far more subtle than any that had yet been advertised. In the meantime, he had fitted Davy’s spiders and Mike’s bats, glad to help out with their adolescent pretences—but his ambitions, Sara knew, had far exceeded the scope that had yet been granted to him. He had been waiting patiently for the slow wave of fashion to move beyond gimmickry and frippery, and for the potential of the new technology to unwind into a spectrum of splendid opportunity. Alas, he had not had the time to wait.
Unlike the females in the audience—all but a few of whose personal embellishments made Sara’s purple rose seem modest in the extreme—the males had set their smartsuits to black, mimicking the formal mourning-dress of the Lost World rather than more recently obsolete SAPsuits. Even if a few shadowy sublimates had been allowed to cling to such costumes—while brighter angels and diaphanous ghosts were hidden away, along with the more substantial produce of former fashion-eras—they were quite invisible.
There was not a dragon to be seen anywhere in the room, and certainly nothing flamboyantly pictorial, in the vein of Washington crossing the Delaware. Not one of her parents had been able to interpret that particular joke for Sara, but the phrase was sufficiently exotic not to call up too many hits on a search engine when fed in as a unit; there was even a pre-Crash audio file available, whose survival of the centuries was even more remarkable than Frank Warburton’s. Sara suppressed the irreverent tune as it rose unbidden into her memory, and concentrated harder on the present speaker, who had been introduced as the president of some sort of trade union of sublimate engineers. So far as Sara could tell, he had never even met Frank Warburton, although he did seem to be speaking with genuine appreciation about his work—not just his astral tattoos but all his work, including