The Dragon Man Part 9

As usual, the traffic management system compelled the robocab to let Sara out at the corner of the square most distant from Mr. Warburton's shop, so Sara had to walk diagonally across the open s.p.a.ce towards the fire-fountain. No less than six groups of parents had brought infant offspring of various ages to look at the fountain-surely a record for a Sunday morning in Blackburn-and they formed a crowd so large and dense that the children had to be held aloft in order to watch the cascade of sparks. Even so, Sara didn't feel nearly as conspicuous as she had the day before. With that sort of compet.i.tion, she told herself, no one was likely to be staring at a teenager.

Frank Warburton was waiting for her. He was standing up behind his desk, so his face was no longer in shadow. Sara felt a slight shock, not so much because his face seemed so gaunt and twisted but because his whole body was so very thin and frail. Had he been as thin as that four years earlier, when she'd seen him in Old Manchester? She couldn't be sure. She pulled herself together, determined not to let the least trace of horror or alarm show on her face as she met his eyes.

"h.e.l.lo again, Miss Lindley," the Dragon Man said, very mildly. He had apparently forgotten their agreement to call one another by their first names.

"I'm sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Warburton," she said, stiffly, "but I thought it would help you to figure out what had gone wrong if I brought you one of the shadowbats."

The sublimate engineer took the jar from her and peered at the dormant shadowbat. "What's the colored stuff on the walls?" he asked.

"My kaleidobubbles must have leaked," Sara said, apologetically. "They were in there for a long time. It won't have harmed the shadowbat, will it?"

The Dragon Man shrugged his bony shoulders. "If the perfume of your rose has weird effects, who knows what the decay products of old kaleidobubbles might do?" he said. "Can't tell anything by looking. I'll probably need to do a complete proteonomic a.n.a.lysis, although I might be able to narrow the possibilities down with a quick gel-spread. Do you want to watch?"

Sara was mildly surprised by the invitation, which she accepted with alacrity. She was in no hurry to go back home again.

"Better come through, then," he said, leading the way into an inner room.

Sara wasn't surprised to discover that the sublimate technologist's workshop had as little in common with Linda Chatrian's consulting-room as his reception area had with the tailor's. Some of the labtop equipment was similar, although Frank Warburton had nothing like the vats where the tailor grew her embryonic smartsuits or the suspension-clambers where she fitted them. Whatever he meant by a "gel-spread", he obviously didn't do it in the kind of tank in which Sara had been laid out while the winding stem of her rose had integrated itself into her surskin.

Ms. Chatrian liked whiteskin walls and a lightly-perfumed but rea.s.suringly sterile atmosphere; she also favored extra-large windowscreens and Morris chairs upholstered in royal blue and chocolate brown. In stark contrast, the Dragon Man's walls and furniture were stone dead, and his wallscreens were more like portholes than cas.e.m.e.nt windows. Unlike Ms. Chatrian, the Dragon Man obviously liked shelves. He had lots of shelves, many of them filled with jars charged with what looked like colored smoke but obviously wasn't. The air was loaded with a rich c.o.c.ktail of barely-perceptible odors-as was only to be expected, given the lack of smart walls-and there was more clutter piled up in each and every corner than Sara had ever had in her cupboard, giving the room a curiously rounded aspect. The labtops were clean, though, and the equipment to which the Dragon Man turned his attention seemed to be ready-primed and set to go.

Sara half-expected the shadowbat to make a bid for freedom as soon as the screw-top of the jar was removed, but it remained quiescent. It had to be prompted with the point of a long needle before it would condescend to slide on to a gelatinous sheet in the bottom of a rectangular tray. After waiting for a couple of minutes, Mr. Warburton coaxed it on to a rag of synthetic skin. Sara saw that it had left an imprint on the gel, like a ghostly shadow-or, given that it was a shadow of sorts itself, a ghost of a ghost.

"Sit down," the Dragon Man said to Sara.

In the absence of Morris chairs, Sara had no alternative but to perch on a stool beside the rag. She looked down at the shadowbat, hoping that it would be all right. She wondered whether it was feeding, and whether it would be able to fly again once it had.

In the meantime, the Dragon Man laid a paper-thin sheet of something soft and white over the shadow on the gel in order to take yet another, even fainter, imprint. This one he carefully rolled up; then he set the scroll on the edge of another rectangular bath of gel. This bath was fitted with a cl.u.s.ter of external wires and numerous dials. Three eye-like red circles were lit up as he tripped a hidden switch.

Mr. Warburton watched the placid surface for two minutes, although nothing as happening to it that Sara could detect. Then he went back to the first imprint, whose supportive medium had now become so viscous as almost to have set hard. This time, the Dragon Man used a scalpel to cut out the imprint, and a broad spatula to lift it from the tray. He slid the near-solid lump into a beaker half-full of another viscous liquid, into which it seemed to dissolve entirely. Then he poured a measure of the solution into the maw of a pot-bellied machine which put Sara in mind of the inorganic parts of the hometree's plumbing systems-the parts that were so ugly they were tastefully hidden away in the cellar. Nothing now remained in the gel-bath but a cartoonish cut-out, which was only slightly reminiscent of a bat with extended wings.

"Right," said the Dragon Man, pulling another stool from under the bench so that he could sit down too. "The full proteonome a.n.a.lysis will take at least four hours, probably six, even though the poor little devil only has a few dozen pseudogenes. The chromo-trace should tell if there's anything untoward going on, though, and ought to offer a few clues as to how and why...." He broke off as he seemed to realize, suddenly, that Sara didn't understand what he was telling her. "Sorry," he said. "Just a second."

His fingers danced on a virtual keyboard projected on the desk in front of one of the wallscreens, which was displaying a series of diagrams far more complicated than anything Sara had yet studied in school. She did her best to look as if she were capable of taking an intelligent interest.

"Right," the Dragon Man said. "It's getting on with the job. There's time to explain, if I'm up to it. Do you know what a proteonome is?"

Sara shook her head.

"What about a genome?"

"It's a set of genes," Sara said. "Chromosomes. DNA. A set of instructions for making a person-or an animal."

"That's right. Every genome has an equivalent proteonome-the full set of proteins that its genes can produce. Some genes work in collaboration, you see, to produce whole populations of related proteins. Different sets of genes are active in different kinds of cells, producing different sets of proteins, so that tissues and organs can do different jobs within the body. When I was born, human bodies had to get by with the genes and proteins that nature provided, but you and I are both equipped with several extra sets. Your smartsuit has the most obvious one, but various bits of your internal technology have minigenomes of their own. It's not as marvelous as it might seem-pre-Crash humans had resident bacteria, and every cell had mitochondria with genes of their own, as well as the genes in the chromosomes. We've just taken the process a little further. Are you with me so far?"

Sara didn't feel that a mere nod was sufficient, so she tried to antic.i.p.ate the next step in the argument. "And the shadowbat's just an extra bit of smartsuit, or an extra piece of IT," she said. "Another genome, another pre-pro...."

"Proteonome," the Dragon Man finished for her, as her tongue faltered over the unfamiliar word. "That's right-except that DNA isn't equipped to produce vaporous ent.i.ties, so what the shadowbat has instead makes up what we call pseudogenes...although they still produce proteins, so we can still talk about its proteonome without having to modify the term, even though many of the proteins have never been generated before by natural or artificial genomes. Sorry, that's probably unnecessarily complicated. To cut a long story short, although sublimate organisms-astral tattoos, in the advertising jargon-have gone through all the standard tests to make sure that they're safe to wear, that doesn't mean that every possible interaction between shadowbat proteins and the proteins produced by natural and artificial genomes has been investigated. There's still scope for surprises, especially when one new technology comes into contact with another."

"Just because it's safe for us to wear shadowbats," Sara said, looking down at the dark patch on the rag of synthetic skin, "it doesn't mean that it's safe for the shadowbats to be worn."

"That's true," the Dragon Man conceded. "Sublimate organisms-sublimate just means that they can pa.s.s from the solid to the vaporous state without going through a liquid phase, by the way-are rather delicate. It may not have been very wise for the owner of the flock you encountered to let them stray. Having said that, though, there hasn't been any previous report of shadowbats reacting oddly to colibri nectar. I checked that very carefully. Which probably means that someone-probably me-has altered these particular shadowbats in such a way as to open up the possibility."

"Why would you-or someone else-have done that?" Sara asked, warily.

"I'm not the only inveterate tinkerer in the world," Frank Warburton said, defensively. "Everyone does it. Everyone with an atom of curiosity. Anyhow, although the full a.n.a.lysis will take a few hours, tickling the secondary trace with a little electricity in this bath here will separate the organic compounds into a line-spectrum, like the ones police scientists and the newsvids call genetic fingerprints. Comparing that to the print the bat is supposed to produce should tell us in a matter of twenty or thirty minutes whether there is an anomaly, and might offer a clue as to its nature. Until then we might as well make polite conversation. Your parents know about the shadowbat, I suppose?"

"Oh yes," said Sara. "They also know about every move I made yesterday."

"Ah," the Dragon Man murmured. "The old jungle telegraph. It never fails to deliver the news. Are they annoyed with me too?"

"I don't think so," Sara rea.s.sured him. "Father Lemuel sent you his best wishes, and he wouldn't have done that if he'd been annoyed. In fact, he wouldn't have persuaded the others to let me bring the shadowbat in if he'd been seriously annoyed with either of us. I think it was more a matter of them thinking that they had to make a point."

"That's understandable," the Dragon Man observed, obviously feeling that he ought to be supportive of Sara's parents. "Do you mind if I send Lem a message to let him know I've invited you to wait for the preliminary results of my inquiry? I don't want your parents to worry."

"Not at all," Sara replied, politely. She waited until he had dispatched the text message before saying: "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"About my horrid face?"

Sara blinked in surprise. "No!" she said. "No...it was just...well, as you've known Father Lemuel for such a long time, and as you knew my name before ever seeing me...I wanted to ask you whether you knew the man I was named after-Gerard Lindley, my biological father?"

It was the Dragon Man's turn to look surprised. "Why would I?" he blurted out. "Sorry...I mean, no, I don't think so. Do you have some reason to think that I might have known him?"

"Not really," Sara confessed. "I suppose it's because I don't know very much about him myself, except that he lived in these parts during his later years, that I thought you might...although I suppose Father Lemuel might have mentioned it, if he thought...sorry. It's just that most of the kids in my cla.s.s know quite a bit about their biological parents, because at least some of their parents knew them when they were alive. I've asked my parents why they decided to look after the child of people they didn't know, but all they said was that someone had to look after the children of parents that n.o.body knew, and they'd decided it was a good thing to do. There doesn't seem to be any record of my biological mother at all, because she died during the Crash, and all I can find out about my biological father is his name, dates and some of his places of residence. He didn't live very long, but he didn't die till 2161. That's long before Father Lemuel was born but...you were alive then, weren't you?"

"Yes I was," Mr. Warburton answered, softly. "So it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that I did meet your biological father, even though I can't remember it. He could even have been a customer-all my records of that era are long-lost. Your parents are right, you know. A great many people deposited sperm and eggs during the Crash, not knowing whether they'd ever be used-or even whether there'd be anyone around to use them. If today's parents all insisted on exercising the rights of people they knew personally, the genetic heritage of most of the Crash's victims would be lost. You've probably been told in school that loss of genetic variety within a species is always a bad thing, but modern genetic engineering can cope with the practical problems-what's really at stake is a point of principle."

"The right to found a family," Sara said, to demonstrate that she could easily keep up with this phase of the conversation.

"There was a time, during the Crash, when we thought everybody might have lost that right," the old man told her, in a somber tone.

Sara knew that, of course, as a bare fact-she had been informed of it at least once by nearly every adult she had ever come into contact with-but this was the first time that any of her informants had ever been able to mean "we" in a more literal sense than "the human race". Frank Warburton had actually lived through the latter years of the Crash.

Sara waited for him to go on.

CHAPTER XIX.

"I was born a little too early to be a miracle child myself," the Dragon Man said, with a faint sigh. "The plague of sterility was running riot, but children were still being born, and the panic hadn't yet extinguished hope that cures could be found to make the infertile fertile again. The banks of sperm and eggs still seemed to most of us to be a precautionary measure-something we'd only have to fall back on if the worst came to the worst, and just to help out for a while even then."

Sara nodded, to let him know that she understood what he was saying, and wanted him to continue.

"When I was your age-that would be 2112 or so, I guess-we had no idea that the historians of the future would decide that the Crash was already completed and that we were already into the Aftermath. We didn't know that there were too many different viruses, or that too many of them had already wormed their way permanently into the genome. We didn't understand that the old world had already ended. Imagine that! The world as we knew it was finished, and we didn't even know. Our own parents...our own biological parents...were still trying to save it. Except, I suppose, for those who were still trying to destroy it. Do they tell you in school that the plagues came out of biological warfare labs, or have they drawn a polite curtain over that sort of thing?"

"I think they tell us the truth," Sara said, slightly shocked by the idea that they might not. "Ms. Mapledean says there's no way to be sure of the origin of any particular virus, because they were mutating so quickly and no one ever admitted to anything, but that it was definitely a war of sorts."

"Of sorts," the Dragon Man echoed. "That's right. Sorts that people had never been able to fight before. At least you had to meet your enemy face to face when people used to fight with clubs and swords-you even had to know who he was. In a plague war, everyone who hasn't had the right injections becomes an enemy by default...and n.o.body had all all the right injections, no matter who he was or how deep his bunker might be. Anyway, no one had actually accepted the fact, as yet, that the world would have to be comprehensively reinvented and totally redesigned. No one had yet grasped the fact that no human female would be able to bear a child of her own for...I don't know how long. I suppose we could put the clock back, now, if we ever wanted to. We have the technology now-but we didn't have it during the Aftermath. the right injections, no matter who he was or how deep his bunker might be. Anyway, no one had actually accepted the fact, as yet, that the world would have to be comprehensively reinvented and totally redesigned. No one had yet grasped the fact that no human female would be able to bear a child of her own for...I don't know how long. I suppose we could put the clock back, now, if we ever wanted to. We have the technology now-but we didn't have it during the Aftermath.

"I don't remember there being a day, or a year, when we all recognized that things had changed forever. It crept up on us. Artificial wombs were designed, perfected, used...but there wasn't a point in time when everybody accepted that they weren't just a stopgap, or an emergency measure. We kept on antic.i.p.ating a future that never came, until the realization dawned that we'd been living in a new world for decades, and that it was now the the world, a way of life we were stuck with. It was evolution, not revolution, too gradual to be clearly perceived. world, a way of life we were stuck with. It was evolution, not revolution, too gradual to be clearly perceived.

"The natural miracle children became rarer and rarer, and the technological miracle children gradually became commonplace. I suppose they teach you in school that it all worked out for the best, that it was necessary as well as lucky-and so it was-but it didn't seem like that when we were living through it. We lived it as tragedy, and those of us who are left still remember it that way."

"But it was was necessary," Sara murmured, when the old man looked for a response. necessary," Sara murmured, when the old man looked for a response.

"Yes, it was," he agreed. "In a world where everyone might live to be three hundred, or three thousand, it's necessary as well as polite that we should all postpone the exercise of our right to have children-our right of replacement-until we're dead. It's the only way we can live on the Earth without bringing about another ecocatastrophe even worse than the Crash. It's the way it has to be."

"And it was was lucky," Sara added, echoing what Ms. Mapledean had said about the matter. "The ecocatastrophe would have been even worse if it hadn't been for the plague of sterility." lucky," Sara added, echoing what Ms. Mapledean had said about the matter. "The ecocatastrophe would have been even worse if it hadn't been for the plague of sterility."

"Maybe," conceded the Dragon Man. "Some said, even then, that we'd have been a lot luckier if the plague had hit a hundred years earlier, in the 1980s instead of the 2080s. If it had, we might have prevented a lot more extinctions. On the other hand, it would have been a lot harder to develop the technologies we needed to save the situation before we we became extinct. There was no ideal time for any of it to happen. I guess we were lucky to come through it at all." became extinct. There was no ideal time for any of it to happen. I guess we were lucky to come through it at all."

"Not just lucky," Sara said, seeking further confirmation of the story she'd been told so many times. "Clever and brave."

"Clever and brave," the Dragon Man repeated. "Which, loosely translated, means that when people finally had no choice but to do what was necessary, they did it. Some of them. Enough of them, at any rate. Yes, it needed ingenuity-and yes, it needed heroism. You should feel glad-proud, even-of the fact that the sperm and egg your parents chose to combine as you came out of the old banks, from people whose life histories have been lost. The very fact of their being lost proves that they lived and died in desperate times, heroically...and whether I ever met them or not, I can certainly a.s.sure you that if they had known that you would one day be their child, they'd be very, very glad, and very, very proud indeed."

Sara watched the Dragon Man's face very carefully. It had grown familiar by now. In spite of the seeming thinness and hardness of the natural flesh sandwiched between the smartsuit and the skull, the face no longer seemed in the slightest degree unhuman.

There was nothing really new in what the Dragon Man was telling her; she had heard it all from her parents as well as her teachers-but this time, it was coming from the source, from someone who had actually lived through it. Whether Frank Warburton had ever met her biological parents or not, he was of their world; when he spoke for them, he spoke with proper authority.

"Thanks," she said.

"You're welcome," he replied. "About the face...."

"That's not important," she a.s.sured him.

"Yes it is," He told her. "It's ugly, and it doesn't need to be. I could use my smartsuit to form a mask indistinguishable from a normal face: a handsome face. Nowadays, somatic engineering gives everyone the opportunity to have a handsome face...and everybody takes the opportunity, except me. There are people older than me, you know, even in Lancashire-but they hide their wrinkles and patches. I don't, even though I know it scares people. I owe you an explanation, if not for scaring you that time in Old Manchester, for pretending just now that there's nothing unusual about me at all."

Sara shook her head. "I'm an apprentice junkie," she said. "Maybe I'll never be a real one, like Father Stephen, but I know what they're doing. They're Preservers of the Heritage of the Lost World. That's what you're doing-showing the world something lost. I understand."

The Dragon Man stared at her, seeming even more uncomfortable than he had before. "It's not just age," he murmured. "I had a bad accident once...two of them, in fact. The synthetic flesh they used in those days...but you're right. This isn't necessary. You do understand. I'm sorry. Sometimes, I forget just how far the world's evolved while I've been watching it go by...well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to ramble on at you. That shadowbat did me a huge favor-which will add a welcome hint of dramatic irony if it turns out to be one of mine. Let's see, shall we?"

He got up from his own stool and leaned over the bath in which he'd put the rolled-up fabric bearing the secondary trace. He peered at the faint, blurred lines that had appeared in the gel. Then he moved to a desktop whose screen was displaying an image of the surface, and began playing with the keypad. He was only typing with the fingers of his right hand, because his left was gripping the edge of the desk, supporting him in his standing position. He had been moving freely enough when he took the imprints of the shadowbats and set up his equipment, but his body seemed to have stiffened upon while he was perched on the stool. Eventually, he straightened up again.

"Well," he said, after yielding a slight sigh. "I always figured that it would be my fault. No surprise there. See this?"

Sara could indeed see the part of the screen at his finger was pointing, but what it was pointing at she had no idea. She nodded her head anyway.

"It was only a little tweak," he said. "Strictly speaking, the client should have reduced the apparatus he'd already fitted to his suit before adding sublimates to the mix, but you know what teenagers are like-teenagers a few years older than you, that is. They've always wanted more gadgets than synthetic flesh will readily bear. You're sensible enough to take things easy for now, of course. One nice, tasteful rose...but the temptations will come. Boys have to try even harder now than they did in my day. More masks, more hardware, more gimmicks and party tricks. Compet.i.tion takes different forms, you see."

"I'm sorry," Sara said, plucking up her courage at last, "but I don't have the least idea what you're pointing at."

Mr. Warburton half-turned to look over his shoulder, his expression slightly rueful. "Sorry," he said. "I've been reading proteonomic spectra so long that it's almost like looking at a picture. This trace here"-he tapped the screen with his fingernail-"is probably the fly in the ointment...except that in this case, it's more a case of the ointment in the flyer. I'll have to wait for the proteonome register to put the whole story together, and I probably won't have the tees crossed and the eyes dotted for another four or five hours, but there's enough of a clue here to help me figure out the vague outlines of what must have happened.

"The problem with sublimate organisms, you see-one of the problems, that is-is that they're a trifle oversensitive. They're built to feed on a very limited range of substances secreted by a standard smartsuit. The downside of their ultra-simple diet is that there are a lot of compounds that disagree with them."

"Poisons, you mean?" Sara said, helpfully "In a way. Let's say that shadowbats have something like an allergy problem. They can lose their shape, or their ability to fly, if they come into intimate contact with the wrong things...which, unfortunately, include some other kinds of suit-fitment. Not roses, or anything that Linda Chatrian deals in, but...do you ever look at the ads on the shopping channels your parents have told you not to watch?"

"Migratory chromocytes," Sara said. "Lepidopteran alate scaling...metaspectral melanin...dermal ivory inlays... those sorts of thing?"

"Those sorts of things," the Dragon Man confirmed, with a wry grin. "Well, I knew that there was a strong possibility of quasi-allergic reactions to one or two of the client's other suit-based systems, so I tweaked a couple of the pseudogenes to strengthen the sublimate's permeability barrier-what wearers would call its smokeskin. I did wonder why the manufacturers hadn't done that themselves, and now I know. The molecular networks that serve to keep bad chemicals out can also operate as traps. When I strengthened the shadowbat's smokeskin so that it would keep more dangerous substances out, I accidentally made it into a sponge for some not-quite-so-dangerous ones...one of which must be a key component of the artificial nectar designed for cosmetic hummingbirds to drink. Do you understand what I mean?"

"I think so," Sara said. "You can never do just one thing-that's the first rule of genetic engineering."

"Exactly. Every planned effect has unplanned side-effects. The nectar wouldn't normally do any harm, but once the shadowbats began soaking it up and concentrating it...well, while we're quoting slogans, you've probably heard the one that says that the poison is the dose. The shadowbats couldn't get rid of the stuff, and it began to disrupt their metabolism. To say that they were getting drunk is probably putting it mildly. Blowing their tiny minds might give a slightly more accurate impression."

"Can you cure it?" Sara asked, looking down at the stricken shadowbat clinging to its shard of flesh.

"I doubt it," the Dragon Man confessed. "The rest of the flock probably didn't make it back to base-which means, I suppose, that you did the right thing to grab one while you could, so I apologize for telling you that you shouldn't have. Their owner probably wouldn't have understood what you meant about one of six even if he had looked at the public noticeboard. I'll contact him this evening, when I can give him a more detailed explanation of what went wrong."

"Will you get into trouble?" Sara asked.

"Perhaps. If the manufacturer wanted to take the matter to court, I suppose my tweaking license could be revoked. I'll have to hope that they take the view that the inherent interest of the finding compensates for the manner in which it was made."

"So I did discover something," Sara said. "It really might be news."

"It's not the kind of news that makes TV, or even the local notice boards, but yes-it's something new, something unexpected, something that might even open up a profitable line of scientific and technological inquiry. If I get any credit, I'll made sure you get credit too, but long experience suggests that the manufacturers will keep all the credit that's going for themselves, as the price of letting me keep my tweaking license...which is hardly fair to you, but nothing either of us can do anything about."

"That's okay," Sara said. "I don't mind, really. I don't want you to lose your license."

The Dragon Man smiled. "Nor do I," he confessed. "Not that I'm likely to need it much longer, of course-but I'm rather attached to it. I've had it well over a hundred years, you know, although I've had to update it three times and only had it modified for sublimates three years ago. I was in business for well over a hundred years before I got it, but I could hardly go back to the kinds of work I was doing in those days. There's no demand for tricks as old as that nowadays."

"They might come back into fashion," Sara suggested, although she was thinking of dragons rather than needles.

"I don't think so," the Dragon Man said, "but I'm not worried. I think I lost my ability to worry a while ago, including my ability to worry about whether the loss of my ability to worry is something I ought to be worried about...and my ability to care much one way or the other seems to have gone with it. I'm still trying to figure out whether it's so hard to give a d.a.m.n about anything because my emotional spectrum has gone to h.e.l.l or because there really isn't much worth giving a d.a.m.n about when you get to my age. Comes to the same thing in the end, I guess."

"Father Lemuel says that it gets harder to feel things as you get older," Sara told him. "He says it's because Internal Technology isn't as messy as the natural systems it has to subst.i.tute for. He says we're all turning into robots, although we're doing it so slowly that we don't really notice it."

"Evolution, not revolution," the Dragon Man quoted. "Well, he's only half right. I notice it more and more, nowadays. It gets harder to feel things, and harder to bring back the feelings that go with your memories, but that doesn't prevent you being all too well aware that you aren't the man you used to be. Tell Lem he's too young yet to know what old age really feels like...and with luck, he never will. He's had IT all his life, but I was already old before I got anything more than a few squirts of friendly bacteria. I missed out on being a miracle child, but I'm certainly a miracle now. You have no idea how smart this suit is, or how much help it has from all the deep cyborgery I've taken aboard...but nothing lasts forever, Sara, especially when it's done as much ageing as I have. With luck, you might really be emortal, but I was born too soon. If I thought I had a serious chance to be Achilles' ship I'd be happy to be the guinea-pig, but Achilles' ship didn't have a brain."

"What's Achilles ship?" Sara asked. She had taken note of the fact that the Dragon Man had begun using her first name, but she didn't yet feel able to address him as "Frank".

"An old conundrum," he told her. "Achilles' ship kept going in for repairs. The hull was patched up time and time again, the mast replaced, and then the keel...until there came a time when there wasn't a single one of the original timbers left. Compared to the original, it was a completely new ship-but there was never an identifiable point in time when it had ceased to be the old one. As I said, it's a matter of evolution, not revolution. I've had quite a few replacements myself, and if I thought I could go on living by replacing every bit of natural flesh I had with some ultra-modern synthetic, evolving into a robot, I'd certainly go for it...but my brain can't take that kind of rebuilding, and my body has reached the limits of its tolerance. And if I could go on and on...well, would I still be me, even if I couldn't put my finger on the precise moment that I'd stopped being me?"

Sara frowned in concentration, trying to work out the implications of what the old man was saying. This was the first time she had ever been called upon to ask herself in all seriousness, what might become of her in hundreds of years time.

"But you wouldn't know you'd changed," she said, hesitantly. "You'd still be you, even if it wasn't quite the same you as before. We all change, all the time-but we're always the same person."

The Dragon Man shook his head, although his expression was thoughtful. "I know I've changed," he said, quietly. "I know how much I've changed...and to tell you the truth, Sara, I haven't been quite myself for a while, now. I still remember me...but I sometimes wonder whether there's anything actually left of me but memories."