Читать книгу The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER IV

Mercifully, the effect was temporary. Whether it was her Internal Technology catching up with its duty, or merely her own consciousness adapting to the situation, the terror drained away. Sara became confident that she could not and would not fall, and that she was free to enjoy the view.

Terror was swiftly replaced by triumph, as she realized what a victory she had won. She had conquered her fear. She had conquered the hometree. She had conquered the brief anxiety that her parents might, after all, be right about everything.

The roofs of Blackburn were invisible from the open window of her bedroom, even if she stood on a chair, but from the crown of the hometree Sara could not only see the town sprawled across an improbably tiny section of the north-western horizon, but two other accumulations of dwellings nestling in the hills to the east. She felt slightly ashamed that she could not put a name to either of them, although she knew that the trees clustered between them were the New Forest of Rossendale—which, like the New Town Square, was only as New as the Aftermath of the Crash.

She wished, belatedly, that she had taken the trouble to consult a map before embarking on her climb. Was the ManLiv corridor closer in the south than the sea was in the west? She could not see either of them, not even Preston, which lay between Blackburn and the Ribble Estuary. She could not guess how far behind the south-western horizon the city might be, or the ruins of Old Manchester in the south-east.

She was surprised by the number of black patches littering the landscape, and by the manner in which they were aggregated around buildings which she took to be facfarms. Black was the color of SAP—the Solid Artificial Photosynthesis technology that “fixed” sunlight more efficiently than nature’s chlorophyll—but the illustrations posted in her virtual classroom always showed vast tracts laid out in the tropic regions that had once been scorched deserts, never little clusters in the grey-lit Lancashire hills. These were SAPorchards, not SAPfields. There were green fields too, though, some of them speckled with amber seed-heads and others stained yellow by oilseed rape. The green meadows provided ranges for ground-nesting birds and free-grazing sheep, while the cultivated fields produced animal feed.

She counted no less than nine skymasts on the horizon, some of them lavishly embellished with dishes, but there were no windmills, and no pylons carrying overhead power-lines, such as she had seen in picture window views of the Yorkshire side of the Pennines and the highlands of Scotland. The hometree’s electricity was carried by underground cables—which was why it had taken Powerweb so long to locate the break that had left her parents reliant on its feeble inbuilt biogenerator for nearly a week in the depths of the previous winter, causing her to miss four whole days of school.

There were fewer visible roads than Sara had expected, and for a moment or two she wondered whether this was because many of them were so deeply sunken as to be hidden even from this lofty viewpoint—but she realized eventually that, although the world seemed be mostly made of roads while you were traveling in a robocab, there was a lot more territory in between them than their claustrophobic banks allowed passengers to perceive. She was surprised how tiny the vehicles appeared to be—even the greatest of the lumbering trucks—and how exceedingly tiny the distant people seemed who could be seen walking in the vicinity of the facfarms. It was not until she had noticed them that she realized how vast the country was—and how vast the whole country must be, against whose backcloth on a map Blackburn and ManLiv seemed to lie almost cheek by jowl.

But the vastest thing of all was the sky. Sara had not expected the sky to seem different, no matter how high she climbed, because it was, after all, an absence rather than a presence, whose emptiness could hardly be increased—but she realized now how little of the sky she had been able to see from the ground, where there were looming objects all around.

From the crown of the hometree, the vastness of the sky was increased in proportion to the vastness of the horizon, and she saw for 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, quickly.

“It was dangerous, Sara,” Father Gustave said, soberly. “It frightened all of us as well as you—except Lem, apparently. It made us anxious, not just about the possibility that you might fall and hurt herself, which thankfully didn’t happen, but about this whole project, this whole enterprise.”

“That’s a bit strong!” Mother Jolene put in, before Mother Maryelle’s glare silenced her.

“Is it?” Father Gustave went on. “I’m well over a hundred years old now, Jo, and this is the first time I’ve ever been a parent. We might all have another chance some day, if Internal Technology continues to improve, but the longer we live, the harder it will become to get licenses, so everyone here has to work on the assumption that this is our one and only chance to raise a child. Even if it weren’t, the prospect of failure would be too much to bear. We’ll only be living together for twenty or twenty-five years, but if we do the job right, we’ll be parents until we die, no matter how widely we scatter when Sara goes her own way. There’s a lot at stake here—so we’re entitled to be frightened. We’re entitled to be terrified by the possibility of failure, of disaster, even if Lem thinks that makes us over-protective. We don’t know how long Sara might live; if you trust the ads the IT people put out, she might live to be a thousand; if not—and it’s going take a long time before anyone can be sure—she might only have three or four hundred years…barring accidents. But I don’t think Sara understands, as yet, what kind of risks she’s running when she invites the possibility of accidents. I think we need to try harder to make it clear to her. That’s what we need to do—what we need to decide.”

Ordinarily, Sara would have switched off half way through a speech as long as that, but the day’s excitement was making her unusually alert, thus helping to maintain her concentration. “Lem,” said Mother Maryelle, swiftly. “Have you got any objection to that?”

“Of course I have,” Father Lemuel said. “We can’t let our fears shape Sara’s life—no, cancel that, it’s precisely because we can that we have to take care. We shouldn’t let our fears shape Sara’s life. Of course we’re scared of being shown up as lousy parents. Even I’d have to live far longer with the shame of having messed it up than I could bear. But it’s not her business to calm our fears—it’s our business to calm hers, which we won’t do by coming down on her hard if she ever steps out of line. She’s only a child, granted—but she’s not an idiot. She knows she took a risk when she climbed up to the roof. If she’d fallen, she’d have hurt herself. But she watches TV. She rides robocabs. She knows full well that there are people who take much greater risks for the thrill of it, day by day. She knows that there are people sitting at this table who’ve been bikers, flyers, skiers…I don’t suppose she has any real notion of what each of us did for a living before we applied for our license, or what those of us who are still working do, but if she did she’d know that at least half of us have taken measurable risks on an everyday basis in the past, and that at least two of us are still taking measurable risks even now. Okay, we’re a boring bunch, on the whole—not a single extreme sportsperson among us—but not one of us would ever have refused on our own behalf the kind of risk that Sara took today, in the grounds of her own home, while half a dozen of her parents watched. So I say that if this is a test of some kind, Sara’s passed it; we’re the ones who are in danger of failing. If we over-react, we fail. Why not just tell her that she scared us—which she must have realized by now—and ask her to be careful, please, to think hard before she scares us like that again?”

Sara was tempted to applaud, but that would have been one impertinence too many. Mother Maryelle had the claw-hammer raised and ready, but this time she had to bring it down to stop three simultaneous protests. “This is obviously going to be harder than we thought,” she said, ominously. “Quilla.”

Sara immediately guessed what would happen next. She understood that Mother Maryelle’s comment had been a hint, which Mother Quilla was expected to take up. Mother Quilla did, immediately proposing a motion that the meeting should be held “in camera”—which meant, in simple terms, that Sara should be sent to bed while her parents got on with the serious business of tearing into one another without her inhibiting presence.

Father Stephen seconded the motion—but Father Lemuel was, for once, unstoppable. “No,” he said. “That’s the cowards’ way out. She’s old enough to hear us, now.”

For two or three minutes, Sara was immensely pleased by that compliment, and by the fact that in the hectic discussion that followed the original motion was eventually forgotten, and never even put to the vote. After two or three hours, however, she realized that no privilege came without penalties, and that that the privilege of listening to her parents argue about what they should and shouldn’t say and do in front of her—especially while she was alert to every word—was a very dubious one indeed.

Eventually, Sara decided that Father Lemuel hadn’t said the half of it when he’d observed that they were a boring bunch on the whole. Individually, there were only one or two who could have bored for England, but collectively.…

The meeting went on for a very long time, and got nowhere. By the time Sara did get to her room, free to collapse on her bed, she felt that she had been more thoroughly and more imaginatively punished for her reckless adventure than she could ever have imagined possible. But that too, she eventually realized, was a far-from-insignificant milestone in her increasingly complicated life.