The Dragon Man. Brian Stableford
While Sara stared at him, he did not see her at first. He was looking in another direction. Then, as he began to turn his head to scan the crowd, he caught sight of her. He looked straight at her, and met her eyes. His expression changed, although it was not until some time afterwards that Sara, replaying the scene in her memory realized why. He had seen the horror on her face.
Oddly enough, Sara had not actually been conscious of feeling horror—she had interpreted her own reaction as surprise—but her face had shown it anyway. The man had been concerned, anxious to reassure her—but no sooner had he raised his arm slightly, and taken half a step in her direction, than he changed his mind. Abruptly, he turned away, thus hiding his face, and marched off into the crowded marketplace.
At the time it seemed rather rude; Sara did not realize for several minutes that he had done it for her sake, because he had thought it the simplest and easiest way to set her mind at rest.
“Who was that?” she whispered, as the man with the terrible face hurried away, clutching a rucksack twice the size and weight of Father Stephen’s.
Mother Quilla followed the direction of her gaze easily enough.
“Nothing to worry about,” Mother Quilla said. “It’s only Frank Warburton. They call him the Dragon Man.”
The image of the shop window in the Cloistered Facade of New Town Square surged out of Sara’s memory with an uncanny brilliance, perfectly fresh, in spite of all the time that had elapsed since she had gone to see the fire fountain.
She had always assumed, without even knowing that she was making an assumption, that the Dragon Man had been called the Dragon Man because his shop had a dragon in the window. It had never occurred to her, and nothing anyone had ever said to her had carried the least suggestion of it, that the Dragon Man might be some kind of dragon himself.
“What’s wrong with him?” Sara demanded.
“He’s very old,” Mother Quilla said, in what seemed to Sara to be a remarkably off-hand manner. “He was quite old—by the standards of his time, that is—when the first Internal Technologies came on to the market, and the preservative measures he took then weren’t as effective as the ones that came later. He’s not the oldest person in the world, by any means, but…well, you don’t get many people his age turning up to junk swaps. Everybody in the north-west knows him. He’s been around all our lives. I suppose it is a bit of a shock when you see him for the first time, though. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Lem knows him from way back—Gustave too, I think. Well, know might be putting it a bit strongly. They were acquainted, maybe did some skintech business. He’s into sublimate technology now. An example to us all—in the sense that it’s good to know that you can still keep up with the times, even if you’re two hundred and fifty years old.”
“Two hundred and fifty?” Sara echoed, wondering why the number seemed so much larger than one hundred and fifty, which was Father Lemuel’s age, give or take a few years. A quick calculation assured her that even two hundred and fifty wasn’t old enough to remember the world before the Crash; it seemed just as remarkable, though, that Frank Warburton must have been born during the Crash, into a world in mid-collapse.
Frank Warburton, Sara realized, must not only have had to make do with two parents, or even one, but must actually have been born from his mother’s own womb. In terms of human evolution, he was practically a dinosaur.
Or, at least, a Dragon Man: something rare and strange.
“He used to be a tattoo artist,” Mother Quilla added, as if the thought had only just resurfaced in her mind. “He’s probably here hunting for obsolete equipment. Electric needles, that sort of thing.”
The way she pronounced the words told Sara that Mother Quilla hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of equipment Frank Warburton had used in the long-gone days when he was a tattooist, even though she must have looked into the window of his shop a dozen or a hundred times.
Most of the people at the junk swap, Sara knew, would be trading ancient communications technology: primitive computers and mobile phones, sound systems and TVs. The currency of junk swap culture wasn’t invisibly inscribed in smartcards and hologram-bubbles, but it consisted very largely of plastic wafers and discs—every obsolete means of data-storage that had ever been invented. Such wares were exchanged even by the minority of traders who had come to trade jewelry and toys, pottery and glassware, paintings and snowing globes, although none of them would ever have admitted that they were compromising the etiquette of barter by introducing any kind of “money”. According to Mother Quilla, though, the Dragon Man was different. Even here, he was an anachronism, an outsider, an exotic specimen. He might not be the only collector of tattooing technology in England, or even in Lancashire, but could there possibly be another who had ever used that technology in his work…or in his art? Could there possibly be another who was so fully entitled to style himself a Preserver of the Legacy of the Lost World?
“Come on,” said Mother Quilla, taking Sara’s hand and drawing her gently away from the spot to which she had become rooted. “He’s not that unusual. You must have seen people as old as him in virtual space.”
It wasn’t until Mother Quilla said it that Sara realized that she had not. She had certainly seen people from the old world—even the world before the Crash—but she had never seen them as she had just seen Frank Warburton, still carrying the damage inflicted on his flesh before the biotechnologists found ways to repair all wounds and set aside all signs of aging.
In virtual space, it was said, you could see everything. All the world was there, and all the world’s accessible history, and imaginary worlds by the thousand as well…but that didn’t mean that if you took the obvious paths through the Global Village you would be certain to see everything it contained. Some things went unheeded, even when they weren’t hidden. That seemed, for a moment or two, to be an important revelation—but then Sara and Mother Quilla lost themselves in the crowd, and in the strange simmering excitement of the possibility of making discoveries.
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