The boy in dark green standing next to Samantha—close enough to touch her, although his hands were at his sides—also seemed to be about eight, but Sara couldn’t remember seeing him in school.
It wasn’t surprising that Sara couldn’t identify the other girl in the crowd, or guess her age, because the part of her smartsuit covering her face wasn’t conventionally invisible; it had been temporarily reset to make a cat-like mask, complete with fake whiskers. The second girl was shorter than Samantha Curtyn, and might therefore have been intermediate between her age and Sara’s, but there was no way to be sure. Sara felt slightly resentful of the fact that the other girl could almost certainly recognize her, and put a name to her too, without granting a similar privilege to others.
The other boy, whose height marked him out as the oldest, was also clad in unusual finery, but his face was clear; it was only his suit that was tuned up to show off, displaying a slightly dizzying kaleidoscopic effect. She presumed that he didn’t wear it that way at home, although she couldn’t actually be sure. In school, of course, he would only present an image synthesized by his hood; the sober dress required of that image didn’t have to reflect what he was actually wearing.
Sara studied them all, and they studied her. In school, their virtual images would have been equipped with tags, and she would have been able to use her private cursor to click on the tags in order to discover their names, their ages, which classes they were in, where they lived and what their desktop numbers were. Their actual bodies had no such tags, and were therefore intrinsically mysterious.
In school, Sara rarely bothered to click on anyone’s tag, unless she had forgotten a name she ought to know, and when she did she never took much notice of the additional information. Because the information was always available, only a click away, it wasn’t necessary to commit it to memory. Now that there were no tags available, though, she couldn’t help feeling curious about who the other children were and where they had come from.
She knew that her frustration was temporary, and slightly silly. Tomorrow, when she saw these other children in school, she would know that she had met them in the flesh—except for the annoying girl who only had courage enough to venture into the real world if her face was hidden—and they would know that they had met her. They would all be able to click away to their hearts’ content, learning everything they wanted to know…but they probably wouldn’t feel the need.
* * * *
Remembering the moment fourteen years later, Sara was able to appreciate the paradoxes inherent in her wary observation of the other children more fully than she had at the time.
At six, Sara’s awareness of the fact that none of them were likely to become her close friends had been vague and inconsequential. At eight, though, she could see a certain irony in the fact that they had been—and were likely to remain—socially distant, even though they lived far closer to her hometree, in meatspace terms, than Gennifer Corcoran, who was the only one of her classmates with whom the six-year-old had regular conversations on camera, desktop-to-desktop.
At fourteen, Sara could see a certain unfortunate perversity in the fact that chance and the whim of the Population Bureau Licensing Authority had ordained that she was to be the only child born within fifty kilometres of her hometree in the year 2367—with the result that none of her classmates lived near enough to make a casual meeting in real space likely. And she knew, at fourteen, that no such meeting had yet occurred—nor would it, without a great deal of preparation and careful interparental negotiation.
* * * *
Thanks to the presence of the other children and their reaction to six-year-old Sara’s arrival in the square, the fire fountain went almost unheeded by its audience for a full three minutes. Those who had been brought to marvel at its display were too busy marveling at one another.
When Sara did try to focus on the fountain, she found it quite uninteresting by comparison. Some trick of perspective made it seem smaller now than it had when she had stared at it through her bedroom window, and the fact that the sparks did not seem substantial, or even warm, when they drifted far enough from their source to land on her head and shoulders was strangely disappointing. They should have seemed more real, given that she was actually there, but they didn’t.
Even when you were standing right next to it, Sara realized, the fire fountain was just a special effect.
For that reason, the fact that the fountain was doing what it did in real space rather than virtual space didn’t seem half as significant as the fact that the other children were actually present, rather than being images carved in light. The sparks jetting forth from the fountain to follow dozens of strange trajectories weren’t real sparks at all. They were only bits of light. They weren’t hot; when they landed on someone, they simply winked out of existence, leaving no trace behind of their brief existence. The children, on the other hand, were people. They were solid, intelligent flesh.
That was why it only required two minutes more for Sara’s attention to wander again.
It was then that she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of the Dragon Man’s shop window.
* * * *
Looking back, eight years later, Sara wondered why her six-year-old self had been so abruptly captivated by that glimpse, when she couldn’t have been certain of what it was that she was looking at. She remembered that she had stared for thirty seconds or so at the golden dragon that formed the centerpiece of the display before it had dawned on her that the window, like the window of the robocab, really was a window and not a screen pretending to be a window.
Had that really seemed significant, at the time?
No, not significant. Just odd—but odd enough to command a long, hard look.
* * * *
Sara realized, belatedly, that she wasn’t looking through the eye of a camera at a rather poor three-dimensional visualization of a dragon in flight. She was looking through a plate of clear plastic at a rather fine two-dimensional picture of a dragon in flight: a dragon whose scales were golden on top and silver beneath, with a head like.…
She couldn’t find anything with which to compare that head among the ranks of living mammals, birds, and reptiles, nor among the much more extensive ranks of the extinct mammals, birds, and reptiles she had seen in virtual reproduction. There was something dog-like about the jaw and brow, something pig-like about the ears, something lizard-like about the teeth and something hawk-like about the eyes, but the head was no haphazard compound. It had its own integrity and its own identity, in spite of being fabulous.
Was it a painting? she wondered. Was it inscribed on paper, or polished stone? She wasn’t sure.
Sated by the glory of the dragon, Sara refocused her gaze to take account of the rest of the window-display—which, because the window was only transparent plastic, had to be composed of actual objects.
There were instruments of several different shapes and sizes, many with cables dangling or inartistically coiled, whose purpose she could not begin to grasp, although she could see easily enough that what Father Stephen would have called “the business end” of each device was something like a tiny drill…or a needle.
* * * *
Looking back from the age of fourteen, Sara could not remember how much of what her six-year-old self had seen had been immediately or eventually understandable. Because she understood it so well now, she could not tell how much she had added to the preserved memory as a result of subsequent
