* *
Sara tugged Mother Quilla’s arm, and said: “What’s that, Mother Quilla?”
Mother Quilla turned—and Sara noticed that her other four parents immediately turned too, obedient to her curiosity.
“It’s supposed to be a dragon,” Mother Quilla said.
“I know that,” Sara said. “But what sort of shop is it? Why does it have a painting in the window instead of a virtual display?”
“That’s the Dragon Man’s shop,” said Mother Maryelle. “It’s been here much longer than I can remember—maybe since the square was new. It’s an antique in its own right.”
“Yes,” Sara said, “but what sort of shop is it?”
“He’s just a tailor, really, much like any other tailor,” said Mother Jolene.
“No, he’s not,” said Father Aubrey. “He doesn’t do regulation smartsuits, the way Linda Chatrian does. It’s all fancy work. Sublimate technology, isn’t that what they call it? Moving pictures. Spiders—that sort of thing.”
“Biker gear,” Father Gustave put in.
“Flyer gear too,” Father Aubrey was quick to retort. “But that’s not what Sara means. The Dragon Man’s very old, Sara. He was a decorator of sorts long before there were smartsuits to decorate—but in those days tailors were people who dealt in dead clothes. The Dragon Man never sold clothes. He worked on skin, so he wouldn’t have been thought of as a tailor at all. He was a tattooist, before the art became redundant. As Maryelle says, that display’s probably been there for two hundred years—his own private monument. He’s still open for business, though. No second pre-childhood for him.”
“Don’t be silly, Aubie,” Mother Maryelle said. “She’s only six. How’s she supposed to follow all that?”
Even though she hadn’t understood everything that Father Aubrey had said, Sara felt free to be offended by Mother Maryelle’s assumption that she wouldn’t be able to follow it. She knew, for instance, that Father Aubrey’s reference to “a second pre-childhood” was an insult aimed at Father Lemuel’s habit of spending at least twenty-three hours a day in his cocoon, living his whole life—except for house-meetings and the occasional meal, which didn’t really qualify as “life”—in Virtual Space. What she didn’t know was what a “tattooist” was, or why one might be likened to a modern tailor even though he hadn’t been one. Alas, she wasn’t able to ask, because the adult conversation had already flowed on, as it so often did, acquiring the kind of mad momentum that made certain parental conversations impossible to interrupt.
“Lem used to know him, didn’t he?” said Mother Quilla.
“Who?” asked Mother Jolene.
“Frank Warburton,” said Mother Quilla.
“Who’s Frank Warburton?” asked Father Aubrey.
“The Dragon Man,” said Mother Maryelle.
“Everybody knows the Dragon Man,” said Mother Jolene.
“I know Frank Warburton,” said Father Gustave, at the same time as Mother Quilla was saying, “I mean, knew him personally,” and Mother Maryelle was saying, “Nobody really knows the Dragon Man—how can they?” After which, all five of them were trying to speak at once, aiming their remarks in every possible direction but Sara’s. She had to wait for her chance to break in on them.
When the chance finally came, Sara said: “What do you mean by work on skin? A smartsuit is a sort of skin, isn’t it? A surskin.”
“The Dragon Man’s very old,” Father Aubrey repeated, as if he thought that Sara hadn’t been listening the first time. “When he started work, people still wore dead clothes…well, clothes that you had to put on in the morning and take off at night, and change in between if you wanted to look different. Some of them were pretty smart, maybe smart enough to be thought of as alive.…”
“You’re confusing her again,” Mother Quilla broke in, accusingly. “It’s not so very different nowadays, Sara. We still wear clothing; it’s just that over the years…the centuries…our clothing has come to resemble a new outer layer—which is why smartsuits are sometimes called surskins. Yours is so versatile that it grows along with you, and you probably won’t have to change it more than two or three times in your lifetime, unless there’s a big leap forward in the technology, although you’ll start adding new accessories to it once you’re in your teens, and keep on adding more and more as you get older.…”
“Especially if you’re fashion-conscious,” Father Stephen put in, making it sound like an insult.
“Which you probably will be,” Mother Jolene said, giving Father Stephen another dark look, “if you take after me, or Verena, instead of.…”
“To answer Sara’s question,” Mother Maryelle broke in, in her most commanding voice, “what Mr. Warburton used to do, a very long time ago, was make pictures in people’s skin. Their natural skin, that is.”
“You mean, “Sara said, carefully, “that he was a kind of painter.”
“No,” said Mother Maryelle. “He used a motorized needle, to drive the ink into the skin, so that it would be permanently integrated into it—in much the same way that the colors and textures of your smartsuit are built into it, but much more crudely.”
Sara knew that she had to get in quickly if she wanted to remind her parents about her other question before they started bickering again, so she said: “So the dragon isn’t a painting, then? It’s inside somebody’s skin?”
Strangely enough, that precipitated a moment’s silence before Father Gustave—who liked to think of himself as a natural diplomat, capable of handling the touchiest situations—said: “No, Sara. That dragon in the window is only a hundred and fifty years old or thereabouts. About the same age as Father Lemuel, I think. It’s inscribed on—or in—synthetic skin. It’s not from an actual person.”
“Oh,” said Sara, trying as hard as she could to present the appearance of the highly intelligent, sophisticated child that all eight of her parents so obviously wanted her to be. “I see.”
* * * *
On many an occasion, in the years that followed, Sara had thought that it must have been a great deal easier to be a child in the days before the Crash, when all parental conversations had been two-way, and even seven- or eight- or nine-year-olds must have stood a fair-to-middling chance of interrupting. Once five adults—let alone the eight who gathered at house-meetings—began talking at cross purposes, the task of restoring order required a much more powerful voice than that of the tiny creature whose care and education had brought them all together in the first place.
Two parents, fourteen-year-old Sara thought, couldn’t possibly have put as much pressure on a six-year-old child as eight, even if they had entertained such high expectations. In the days when children only had two parents, of course, genetic engineering hadn’t been sufficiently advanced to make certain that all children were highly intelligent—but the combined expectations of eight parents, Sara now understood, were massive enough to outweigh any advantage conferred by science.
At six—and, indeed, at every other age she had passed through on
