The Dragon Man. Brian Stableford
the first time how full of flyers it was—not birds, which were far too tiny to be perceptible much beyond the limits of the garden, but gliders and powergliders, jethoppers, and airships.
Sara had already taken due note of the play of color on the roads, and the manner in which the insectile dots that were bright-clad bikers zoomed so easily past the drab trucks, but now she took note of the massed traffic of the air, where there was nothing drab at all. Even the gasbags of the stateliest airships shone luminously silver, while the individual human flyers were as brightly clad as hummingbirds, or tropical butterflies…or fanciful dragons.
After a few moments of turning her head to scan the west from north to south, and then the east from north to south, she realized that there were not so many flyers as she had first thought. They were more thinly distributed than she had assumed, all aggregated within a few degrees of arc about the far horizon—but even so, she could not recall ever having had more than two or three simultaneously in view before, and now she had at least thirty.
She knew that she was not on top of the world by any means, and that the distant Pennine peaks were far more loftily set than the crown of her hometree, but still she felt taller than she had ever felt before—taller than any mere adult. But she knew, too, that when she got back down to ground level she would be just as short as she had been before she started to climb, and that all eight of her absurdly tall parents would be coming down on her hard.
That thought caused another quiver of panic, but it subsided very quickly. Now that she had known real fear, she was not about to be disturbed by something as silly as that. Even so, she took great care while she made her descent, making absolutely sure that she would not give her waiting patents any further cause for concern.
That evening, there was a special house meeting to decide what had to be done about Sara climbing the house. It wasn’t the first time a special meeting had been called, nor was it the first parental meeting in which the whole discussion was devoted to arguments about how best to fit a punishment to a crime, but it was different nevertheless, because it was the first time Sara had ever gone into such a meeting in a defiant mood. It wasn’t just that she didn’t feel ashamed at having climbed nearly to the top of the hometree’s crown when she’d been forbidden to do it, but that she felt too much delight in her achievement to worry about any reprisals that her parents were likely to dream up. She expected to be punished, but she was determined to bear her punishment stoically. She also expected to have to face up to a rare unanimity of disapproval and purpose on the part of her eight parents—but that wasn’t quite the way it worked out.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Father Lemuel demanded, almost as soon as Mother Maryelle—whose turn it was to act as chairperson—had called the meeting to order.
“We all know how testy you get when you’re dragged out of Fantasyland, Lem,” Father Gustave said, “but it really is important. What Sara did was dangerous. If she’d fallen, she could have been killed.”
“That’s not really the point at issue,” Father Stephen put in. “It’s a matter of disobedience—a point of principle.”
“No it’s not,” said Mother Quilla. “Obedience isn’t a principle. Sara shouldn’t do what we say simply because we say it. It’s a matter of trust. The principle is whether Sara trusts our judgment in regard to acceptable risk.”
“That certainly isn’t a principle,” Father Gustave objected, scornfully. “Not that it matters a jot one way or the other. Principles don’t have anything to do with it. It’s purely a matter of making things clear, of explaining to Sara why she shouldn’t do things like that.”
“Which is a matter of trust, just as Quill says,” Mother Jolene put in. She has to realize that we have good reasons for telling her what to do and what not to do, even if they aren’t.…”
Sara assumed that Mother Jolene was about to say “obvious”, but it didn’t really matter, because Father Stephen cut her off before she finished the sentence—and Sara had had plenty of opportunity to observe that as soon as one parent took it upon himself, or herself, to interrupt one of the others before a sentence was finished, the rules of polite conversation immediately fell apart. Everybody would then start talking at once—as, indeed, they did.
Two or three minutes elapsed before Mother Maryelle resorted to banging the table with the claw-hammer that had served as a temporary gavel ever since the real one had been mislaid three years earlier. Sara immediately began counting the blows. A five bang row was about average, a ten-bang row exceptional, and a twenty-bang row was likely to lead to talk of divorce. This one turned out to be a twelve-bang row.
“I would have thought,” Mother Maryelle said, when she had finally restored silence, “that this was one issue on which we could present a united front. There’s no point in arguing about why we’re angry.…”
“We’re not angry,” Mother Verena said, getting the comment in an instant before Mother Maryelle started her next sentence, so that it didn’t quite qualify as a fully-fledged interruption.
“We’re anxious,” said Mother Jolene.
“Fearful,” said Father Aubrey.
“Concerned,” was Father Stephen’s offering.
A single bang of the claw-hammer was all it took to put a stop to that sort of trickle.
“The point,” Mother Maryelle said, her voice consumed by the acid authority that came with the chairperson’s job, “is to decide what to do about our…can we call it a disturbance? Is there anyone who can’t agree that we’re disturbed by what happened?”
For half a second, it actually seemed that the compromise might hold—but then Father Lemuel said: “I can’t.”
This time, it didn’t need an interruption for everyone to start talking at once.
Sara observed, not without a certain disturbance of her own, that the discussion had now escalated—or perhaps deteriorated—into a fourteen-bang row.
“All right,” Mother Maryelle said, when she had won silence for a second time. “From now on, it’s one at a time. If we can’t manage it without help, I’ll get the snowing globe.”
The snowing globe was a pre-Crash antique which Father Stephen had given Mother Maryelle for her hundredth birthday—having acquired it, of course, at a junk swap in Old Manchester. Whenever her turn to be chairperson came around, Mother Maryelle controlled disputes that got out of hand by stating the three fundamental rules that the person holding the snowing globe was the only one who could speak, that the person holding the snowing globe had the sole authority to decide who to pass it on to when he or she had finished, and that anyone who ever broke the snowing globe would forfeit a month’s wages to the household pool.
After ten seconds of silence, Mother Maryelle said. “Right. Lem, would you care to explain why you can’t agree that we’re all disturbed by Sara’s antics?”
“Perfectly natural thing to do,” Father Lemuel said, dismissively. “Had to happen sooner or later. Glad she’s got the guts. Lot of fuss about nothing.”
Mother Maryelle already had the claw-hammer raised, ready to bring it down if anyone spoke before she gave them leave. “Jo,” she said.
“I really do think it’s a matter of trust,” Mother Jolene said. “Sara did something we told her not to do, and she carried on doing it while we were telling her to stop. She obviously has no faith in our judgment and our reasoning—and that’s serious.”
Sara knew even before Mother Maryelle’s gaze had swept around the whole table that it was going to flick back to her.
“I trusted myself,” she said, as firmly as she could. “I trusted myself not to fall—and once I was in the crown, even though I was a little bit scared, it would have been harder to fall than hang on. It was easy. I just wanted to do it—to have a look around. If you want to punish me, that’s okay.”
“Gus,” said Mother Maryelle,