The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [9]
In addition to five junk swaps, Sara’s parents took her out into the world beyond the garden fence on five more occasions before her seventh birthday arrived, and even more regularly thereafter, but whenever destinations were discussed, the fire fountain was always dismissed as something already seen and done. She could have asked to go back to New Town Square, but she never did. The golden dragon was always available to her in virtual space, and she felt no urgent need to look at it even there.
By the time her tenth birthday rolled around Sara had been back and forth from Blackburn nearly twenty times. She had been to hospital twice to be scanchecked, and twice more to add new colonies of nanobots to her Internal Technology. On other excursions, she went shopping for various “hometree improvements”, and visited the family’s tailor, Linda Chatrian—whose fitting-rooms were only forty metres away from the south-eastern corner of New Town Square—in order to ensure that the growth of her smartsuit kept pace with her body’s maturation.
She had also been to half a dozen different playcenters in the town, although she had always felt slightly out of place there because there was never anyone else from her own birth-year. Sara preferred going south to playcenters in the ManLiv Corridor, where she was able to meet some of her classmates in the flesh, including Davy Bennett, Leilah Nazir and Margareta Madrovic. None of these real world acquaintances ever threatened to replace Gennifer Corcoran as her best friend, even though Gennifer lived way up north in Keswick, but it was good to see them in an environment where they walked and ran and stumbled in a refreshingly clumsy way, rather than floating through virtual space in response to the instructions of hidden cursors.
Between the ages of six and fourteen Sara passed dozens of personal milestones marking out the phases of her youth, but when she looked back on them all the one that seemed to be the most important of all was the day not long after her tenth birthday when she climbed the hometree. It was important not merely because it was the first time she had defied her parents so blatantly, but because it was the first time she had ever been truly afraid. She could not have been nearly as proud of herself had it not been for the magical combination of those two factors.
Looking back four years later, Sara understood that climbing the hometree could not have been very difficult. She had had to wait until she was unobserved long enough to get a good head start of Mother Quilla and Mother Verena, who were on garden watch that particular day, but once she had evaded their attention for two or three minutes she was well out of reach, clambering up the side of the house far too rapidly to be overtaken. The speed of her ascent was evidence not only of the abundance of hand- and foot-holds but of their firmness; she had never been in any real danger of slipping and falling—but it had not seemed that way at the time. At the time, she had felt that she was doing something difficult and dangerous, something fabulously daring. Had she not been so fearful, she could not have been so excited.
It was not the first forbidden thing Sara had ever done, and perhaps not even the naughtiest, but it was the one that carried her to the greatest height.
Mother Quilla spotted her while Sara was still clambering up the outer face of the second storey, but it was too late by then.
“Sara! Come down at once!” was Mother Quilla’s entirely expectable reaction, but Sara simply ignored her. Mother Verena actually ran to the wall and tried to set off after her, but found out soon enough what Sara had already realized: that the nooks and crannies in the bark finish offered plenty of toeholds to someone of her size, but far fewer to adult feet. Mother Verena, who was not one of nature’s quitters, even attempted to modify her smartsuit to simulate bare feet instead of gardening boots, but that only meant that she howled with pain when she had to jump back down again, having attained a height no more