The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [88]
“They are all men, though,” Mother Maryelle put in, as if she’d only just noticed.
“Not all,” said Mother Quilla, ever avid to match Father Stephen in pedantry. “Just because they’re almost all wearing black, it doesn’t mean that....”
Mother Quilla stopped in mid-sentence, partly because of the shock and partly because her pedantic judgment had just been overtaken by events.
Sara blinked in surprise, and drew in her breath sharply.
The people gathered in orderly ranks at the top of the hill were no longer wearing black—not all of them, at any rate. They had activated metamorphic transformations preprogrammed into their smartsuits, and they were undergoing a spectacular collective transformation.
It would have been even more spectacular, Sara judged, if they had coordinated their timing a little better, but they were too many for that, and there still seemed to be a certain residual confusion about exactly who was supposed to be positioned exactly where.
Father Lemuel’s estimate proved, in the end, to be conservative. Even though it had now become obvious that something was afoot, the minutes dragged on and on as the people making ready continued to make ready, presumably chiding one another for inept timing as rudely as they had earlier demanded more space.
Some little time before the display progressed to its next phase, Sara had worked out what was going to happen—but that only made waiting for it all the more testing. She understood now why the invitations had specified that all detachable decorations were to remain attached for an hour after the revelation of the memorial stone.
At the moment when the stone was finally revealed, Frank Warburton’s work took to the air.
CHAPTER XXV
Because a little of Mother Quilla’s and Father Stephen’s pedantry had rubbed off on her, Sara knew that it couldn’t really be all of Frank Warburton’s work that was taking to the air, because sublimate accessories had only been a part of his most recent endeavors. She knew, too, that most of the accessories he’d actually fitted to his customers’ smartsuits had been things of no great distinction—which meant that only the tiniest fraction of this display could actually have consisted of creatures he’d made and supplied. But this was neither a duplication of nor a tribute to his mundane accomplishments.
It was a mirror of his dreams.
Sara knew that by far the greater part of what survived of the Dragon Man’s everyday labours was bound into the real and artificial flesh of his customers, many of whom were long dead, and other miscellaneous living canvases, many of which were long discarded. Most of his accomplishments were lost in the infinite obscurity of the past. What remained was doubtless spectacular, but this was far more than a remainder.
There were shadowbats by the thousand. Most of them were tiny, but some of were them so large that they could have folded themselves around a living person—even an athlete—like a cloak. Some of them were huger still, unwearable by anyone but a giant, designed as if for human beings who were yet to be, but in reality not for human beings at all. These were shadowbats whose only reason for existence was to be shadowbats, not accessories to other beings’ lives and costumes.
There were shadowbirds and shadowbees, and shadow beings that were no mere mimics, but potential inhabitants of whole shadow worlds—not virtual worlds contained within the illusory glass of picture windows, but worlds in real space, like the islands where genetic engineers were trying to recreate all the species lost to extinction during the Crash, or the planets of alien suns which no interstellar probe had yet contrived to reach.
There were creatures made of fire—fiery flies and fiery birds and fiery serpents—which reminded Sara of something Ms. Mapledean had one told her class about life being a process of slow combustion, in which the body burned the food it took in as fuel, not merely to provide the energy of movement but the energy of thought and the energy of imagination.
There were