The Dragon Man (26 page)

There was a sense, Sara knew, in which they were advertising themselves and their profession. There was a sense in which this was all publicity, calculated to generate commercial gain. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a fitting celebration of Frank Warburton’s life and career. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t an appropriate tribute to Frank Warburton’s long survival and still-unfulfilled ambitions.

There were dragons, too.

Most of all—because they were so large, so imperious and so magnificent, and because Frank Warburton had, after all, been a Dragon Man among Dragon Men—there were dragons.

Some were red and some were gold. Some were royal blue and some were imperial purple. Some were every color under the sun, not to mention quite a few that defied the sun to illuminate their mystery.

Oh yes, there were dragons a-plenty.

The most remarkable thing of all, however, was not the presence of the dragons, nor their number. It was the quality of their flight.

Sara had thought it remarkable that six shadowbats could form a flock, coordinating their own movements—even when intoxicated, or poisoned—with the movements of their fellows, so that as they ducked and dived and soared and swooped and swerved, looped the loop and curled and whirled themselves into shapes as improbable as their formations, they remained a kind of unit. People, as she had just witnessed, could not organize themselves as economically and as gracefully as that even while they were shuffling about at less than walking pace. Here, though, was a flock whose members must have numbered in the tens of thousands, and whose species must have numbered at least a thousand...and yet they were flocking
together
, maintaining a collective identity as a cloud of clouds: a supercloud as disciplined in its flight and its momentary metamorphoses as a crystal, despite the fact that it was as energetic as a flame.

There was nothing untidy about the astounding legion, however hectic its movement was. It was more orderly than any flicker-winged flock of solid birds. It was more graceful than any multifinned school of silver fish. It was more shapely than the fire fountain in Blackburn’s New Town Square.

At first, the dragons flew above the rest of the vaporous host, organizing themselves into a peculiar hierarchy, at whose summit was a single creature larger and more glorious than all the rest—which Sara recognized immediately as an embodiment of the design which had hung in Frank Warburton’s shop window for far longer than she had been alive.

It was not long, however, before the flock of dragons merged with the greater flock, to form a company even greater and far more various than their own.

The light and the darkness that danced around one another in a ceaseless ballet as the creatures of brightness mingled with creatures of shadow seemed perfectly natural. The ensemble was dignified in spite of the rapidity with which its components moved, decorous in spite of their delicacy.

Sara remembered how the shadowbats, disturbed by the nectar of her rose, had become even vaguer than artifice had intended, as if they had been attempting to change into something other than bats. None of the individuals in the cloud that soared and streamed above Frank Warburton’s monument was drunk, and none was attempting to become something other than it was, but the whole formation seemed to her to be far more than the sum of its parts, in versatility as well as substance. It was only what it was, and yet it held the promise of mysterious changes, the hope of unpredictable progress and metamorphosis.

She knew that it was only vapor. The entire host had no more mass than a storm-cloud—but the vapor was almost alive, and no matter how stupid its individual elements might be, the whole had a kind of intelligence. That intelligence was manifest in the way the cloud played so cleverly and so exuberantly with light and color, and Sara had no doubt at all that it was the Dragon Man’s intelligence: the intelligence that had made Frank Warburton a Dragon Man.

It was beautiful, and it was unprecedented. There had never been a display like it in the history of humankind. Given the furious pace at which technology continued to advance, there would probably never be another with quite the same balance of naivety and sophistication. So, at least, Sara was eager to believe. And why should she not be eager to believe it, given that she had known the Dragon Man more intimately, on the last day of his life, than anyone else?

Sara remembered what the Dragon Man had said about her being more aware of the ceaselessness of change than most of his clients, and what he had said about knowing how much he himself had changed, and the extent to which he had lost the sense of being his true self. She wanted to believe that if he had been here, he would have been able to recognize his true self in that marvelous flight of angels, bats and dragons, and know that it had not been lost even though he could no longer embody it.

She took particular care to remember the words that Frank Warburton had regretted having spoken—the words that had revealed more of himself than seemed polite at the time. He had confirmed Father Lemuel’s judgment that synthetic organs did not have the same capacity for feeling that real ones did, because biotechnology had not yet progressed to the point at which its practitioners could duplicate the emotional orchestra of hormonal rushes and neural harmonies accurately enough to make the music of real life come out in tune. She wanted to believe that the vast cloud of clouds pirouetting above her head was dancing to the tune of real life, which was coming out absolutely and gloriously right.

It was more illusion than reality, and she knew it, but Sara could see the Dragon Man himself within the cloud, no longer half-dead and half-alive, but complete in life and death alike.

She did not feel in the least ashamed of herself because she could find nothing to say, after three full minutes of the miraculous display, except: “He’s here, after all. He is.”

She did not feel the need, given that it was so obvious, to add the judgment that the funeral had been anything but pointless.

Nor did she trouble to add the observation that, even though lucky and good would have been entirely the wrong words to use, she was uniquely privileged to be where she was, and who she was, at this particular moment in time.

Afterwards, although it did not seem that an hour had passed, the hummingbirds came. There were thousands of roses on display, hundreds of which must have been designed to generate colibri nectar, but more hummingbirds came to visit Sara’s rose than any of the others.

She understood the reason why, and did not want to dispute its adequacy.

She was young.

People wanted to look at her, and welcomed an excuse to do so a little less discreetly than they usually did.

It was a temporary thing, she knew. In a year or two, it would pass. But in the meantime....

She enjoyed every minute, all the more so for knowing that she would be able to renew the sensations, and savor them anew, when she reported to Gennifer everything that she had sensed and felt, within and without.

Mingled with the hummingbirds, always outnumbered but never quite invisible, was a little flock of shadowbats. They moved with more stately precision than the similar flock that had been lured into her bedroom, presumably because they had been given an extra tweak to protect them from the unfortunate side-effects of the tweak that Frank Warburton had improvised. There was, in any case, far too much competition for her nectar to allow them any opportunity for intoxication.

Sara counted the shadowbats twice, having expected that there would be six and being mostly surprised to discover that there were only five. Then she worked out why Mike, when he changed his mind, had not asked the manufacturers to replace the whole set. He had planned a small funeral ceremony of his own for the six lost creatures, deliberately refraining from duplicating the one that she had captured and taken to the Dragon Man’s shops.

Compared with the death of a man, the loss of six shadowbats was a very tiny matter—but one that still deserved commemoration. When she caught Mike Rawlinson’s eye for one more brief moment, before their respective committees of parents hustled them away, Sara knew that, in spite of their extreme youth, she and he both understood very well what the absence of that sixth shadowbat meant.

It meant that no loss of life was too trivial to be mourned, even—perhaps especially—in a world where humans could legitimately nurse the hope that they, or at least their children, might be capable of living forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science fiction and fantasy novels, including:
The Empire of Fear
,
The Werewolves of London
,
Year Zero
,
The Curse of the Coral Bride
,
and
The Stones of Camelot
. Collections of his short stories include:
Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution
,
Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution
, and
Sheena and Other Gothic Tales
. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including
Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950
,
Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence
, and
Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia
. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical entries to reference books, including both editions of
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
and several editions of the library guide,
Anatomy of Wonder
. He has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including several by the feuilletonist Paul Féval. Many of his books are being published by the Borgo Press Imprint of Wildside Press.