Free The Dragon Man by Brian Stableford

it.”
    “Thank you,” Sara said, warmly. She leapt off the swing and gave him a hug.
    “But next time you take it into your head to do something silly,” he said. “I think you owe me a few moments’ thought and a no , don’t you?”
    “I’ll try to remember,” she promised, that being all she could actually promise with any real hope of keeping her word.
    Apparently, it was enough.

CHAPTER VII
    Father Lemuel filled the syringe very carefully, then pointed the needle upwards and squeezed the plunger to expel a small air-bubble. “This might hurt, you know,” he said.
    “No it won’t,” Sara assured him. “Just make sure you hit the right spot.” She had already primed her smartsuit so that it had marked the most convenient entry-point to a vein and secreted a modest amount of local anesthetic.”
    Father Lemuel seemed more nervous than she was, but he got the job done. Then he gave a slight sigh. “You, er, might want to keep this just between the two of us,” he said.
    “I won’t tell anyone,” she promised—perhaps a little too readily.
    “It’s not that it needs to be kept secret,” he assured her. “I could have told the others—it’s just that they’d have wanted to call a special house meeting to discuss it, for hours on end, and I’d have had to listen to Gus and Maryelle banging on yet again about parental responsibility. Not that I have anything against parental responsibility. It’s just the thought of wasting all that time going over the same old ground. I’m too old for all that.”
    So am I , Sara wanted to say—but she daren’t voice the thought, even to Father Lemuel.
    “Anyway,” Father Lemuel went on, “what kind of an example would we be setting if we were responsible all the time? You need to know that there’s such a thing as parental irresponsibility, even in the best-regulated of households. Are you all right?”
    Sara felt slightly faint, but she knew that there was no need. The thought of all those nanobots sweeping through her bloodstream was a little disturbing, but she knew that she mustn’t let her imagination get the better of her intelligence—not until she was safely enclosed in Father Lemuel’s cocoon, when she would have to do her utmost to make sure that it did exactly that.
    “Fine,” she said, holding herself rigid.
    Father Lemuel nodded. His cocoon was built into a corner of his sparsely-decorated room, so discreetly that an uninformed observer might have assumed that it was nothing more than a blister. A hometree’s walls were prone to the occasional disease that generated swellings, and such swellings nearly always afflicted corners, rounding them out as if to suggest that nature hated right-angles. Nature’s swellings couldn’t be slit down the middle the way Father Lemuel’s cocoon could, however, and their interiors weren’t equipped with artificial nerve-nets with nearly as many connections as a human brain.
    Stepping through the slit into the soft interior always made Sara feel claustrophobic for a moment or two, but the sensation was preferable to climbing into a gel-tank, which she had to do every time her smartsuit needed modification. Once the slit had sealed itself again there was a moment when the world seemed to turn upside-down, as the pull of actual gravity was cushioned and replaced by the apparent gravity of a virtual world. Once the moment of transition was over, however, she was fully committed to the Fantasyworld, and it only took a minute or so for her to enter into the illusion wholeheartedly.
    The dragon she had come to ride was at least sixty metres from head to tail, but that was partly because it had such a long tail and a long neck. Its body wasn’t that much bigger than a robocab, if you didn’t count the enormous wings and the huge clawed feet.
    Sara had been half-expecting four legs as well as the wings, and a body more like a lion’s than a chicken’s, but this was a world she had never looked into