put extra surskins on over their smartsuits,” Father Aubrey told her, when he noticed that Sara’s flickering gaze had begun following the speeding machines on their own northbound carriageway as they zoomed past the cabs and trucks.
“I know,” Sara told him. “Ms. Mapledean told us.” Ms. Mapledean was her class-teacher.
Father Aubrey frowned slightly, but he went on stubbornly, as if he were determined to find something to tell her that she didn’t already know. “Their smartsuits could protect them from the wind perfectly well,” he said, “but putting on the extra layer is like putting on a new personality. Bikers love to deck themselves out like birds in fancy plumage—much fancier than those silly things fashionable women in ManLiv have taken to wearing.”
“Actually, they’re more like wasps displaying warning coloration,” Father Stephen put in, while Mother Jolene rolled her eyes in protest against Father Aubrey’s insult to “fashionable women”.
“They’re not like wasps at all,” Father Aubrey retorted. “You shouldn’t say things that might confuse Sara. It’s all about enjoyment—the speed trip.”
“There’s no need to sound so wistful, Aubie,” Mother Quilla said. “If it’s what you fancy.…”
“I’m a parent now,” Father Aubrey said. “There’ll be time enough to get back into the fast lane when Sara’s grown up.”
“Bikers are slugs with delusions of grandeur,” Father Gustave observed. “If you want to savor speed, you have to get a powerglider. That really does justify dressing up like a bird and pretending to be a hawk among the sparrows.”
“Airspeed isn’t really speed at all, Gus,” Father Aubrey said, hotly. “If you haven’t got the ground beneath your wheels, you don’t get the sensation of traveling at all.”
Sara had tried flying like a bird in virtual space, not just in her hood but in Father Lemuel’s cocoon, which was equipped to provide a much better simulation of reality. On that particular occasion the simulation had worked a little too well; she’d felt giddy and more than a little sick. If her Internal Technology hadn’t calmed her down she might actually have been sick—which would have annoyed Father Lemuel dreadfully. Father Lemuel wasn’t any more prone to annoyance than her other parents, but he was exceedingly fond of his cocoon and the wealth of virtual experience it provided.
The roadside scenery began to improve as the robocab came into the outskirts of the town, where there were walls and hedges with gardens and houses lurking behind. Sara caught fleeting glimpses of glittering walls that were quite unlike the bark-like exterior of her own hometree; hereabouts there were houses that did not try to hide their artificiality behind a vegetal mask, but seemed proud to be carved out of polished stone and roofed in stern jet black.
As the cab moved into denser but less varied traffic, slowing down as it neared the town centre, buildings clustered about the very edge of the road, looming up into the sky. There was an abundance of picture windows close to ground-level, many of them offering displays of goods and services for sale, although most were blank because they could only offer images of virtual worlds to people on the inside. A few offered views of barren deserts and ice-fields, teeming cities or lush forests to any and all passers-by, as if taking care to remind them that Blackburn, like everywhere else on the planet, was part of a Global Village, a Commonwealth of Souls.
Sara would have preferred to leave the cab some distance from the New Town Square and walk along one or two of those fascinating streets, but her parents always seem to be worried about “overtiring” her. They still seemed to think that she’d only just learned to walk. She had complained about it once to Mother Quilla, who had apologized and explained that it was because parents had no real idea of the rate at which children changed—but it hadn’t stopped her. Fortunately the traffic-management system forced the robocab to set them down in the south-eastern corner of the square, so they had a lot of shop-fronts to walk past as they made their way around, many of which were discreetly set back in the slightly mysterious alcoves of the Cloistered Facade.
“Thanks,” said Father Gustave, as they all got out. He was speaking to Father Aubrey, who’s offered him a supportive hand.
“We aim to please, sir,” the cab’s Artificial Intelligence replied, automatically. “We hope to have the pleasure of your patronage again.”
By the time they got half way along the cloister, Sara had stopped peering into the picture-windows on her right because her eyes had fixed themselves on the prospect ahead—not so much on the fire fountain itself, oddly enough, but on the crowd gathered around it.
The fact that there were twenty-five or thirty adults standing around the fire fountain was uninteresting, so Sara was hardly aware of it. The fact that they had brought their own children was a different matter.
Sara had met hundreds of other children in dozens of different virtual spaces, in addition to the fifteen classmates of her own age who were her regular companions in school. She often played with other children, in the many and various ways that children could play together while they were wearing hoods in their separate rooms. She was perfectly used to being with other children—but the only one she had ever met “in the flesh” was an older boy named Mike whom she had encountered on two occasions, quite by chance, when her parents had taken her for a walk in the countryside surrounding her hometree.
Because Mike and Sara had each been accompanied, on both occasions, by at least four adults, and because they were so obviously not the same age, their meetings had been guarded and wary, and certainly had not involved any actual physical contact. Although Mike attended Sara’s school he was two years ahead of her, and had not so far deigned to recognize her during assemblies, break times or club sessions. Sara didn’t even know his second name. Now, though, she found herself close—actually close—to no less than five other children of assorted ages. They ranged from a babe in arms to a boy twice as tall as Sara, who might have been nine or ten.
It was these other children, rather than the fountain, that drew Sara’s eyes. As she approached them, in company with her parental escort, all of them—even the big boy—turned their eyes towards her, with similar curiosity.
* * * *
When she recalled this experience at the age of fourteen, after the Dragon Man’s funeral, Sara wondered why she hadn’t noticed at the time that it wasn’t only the children who were looking at her avidly, consumed with curiosity. The simple answer was that her own attention had been too narrowly focused—but there was a little more to it than that.
Six-year-old Sara was accustomed to being the centre of her own parents’ attention, so it didn’t seem to her that being looked at by adults was anything out of the ordinary. She had been too young, at that time, to realize that there was anything to be noticed, or pondered upon, in the fact that other adults were looking at her too. Children were a different matter. The fact that she could meet their eyes in real space—“meatspace”, as Father Lemuel insisted on calling it—had seemed extraordinarily significant.
And so it had been, fourteen-year-old Sara thought. It had been as significant, in its own way, as the shop whose window of which her six-year-old self had not yet caught sight.
CHAPTER II
Sara knew that the other children who had been brought to see the fire fountain that day must all attend the same school she did. Blackburn was not the kind of town that attracted tourists from outside the county. She was surprised, therefore, that she could only put a name to one of them: a girl wearing a pale blue smartsuit
