Free The Dragon Man by Brian Stableford Page A

through her bedroom window. She was delighted to see that the colors were exactly right; the dragon’s scales were gold and silver—mostly gold on the back, but all pure silver on the belly—except for the hood behind its snaky head, which was intricately patterned in red and orange.
    Sara had elected to ride the dragon rather than be the dragon, so she found herself perched—precariously, it seemed—on a little saddle at the base of the neck. She had stirrups for her feet, and improbably long reins to hold on to, but it wasn’t easy to believe that any signal she sent to the creature’s distant head would actually elicit a response.
    It was even harder to believe it once the long neck and coiled around so that the dragon could look back at her with its huge snaky green eyes, flickering its tongue as if it thought she might make a tasty meal, small enough to take at a single gulp.
    The dragon didn’t say anything. She could have chosen a Fantasyworld in which dragons could and did talk, but that seemed like cheating. She wanted to fly with dragons that were just dragons, not pseudopeople in fancy costumes. The kind of dragon on which she was mounted was no more real than the other kind, of course, but it seemed somehow to be a little less contrived, a little less fake.
    The dragon must have looked around to check that she was aboard and properly posed, because it only favored her with a single lofty glance of disdain before it turned back again to look down the precipitous slope of the mountain on whose pinnacle it was perched, and then up at the clear blue sky. Without further delay, it launched itself into the air.
    Sara couldn’t help breathing in sharply. This was where the temporary IT was supposed to kick in, to work from inside her body to empower the illusion. For a moment, her mind clung hard to the knowledge that this was only a manufactured dream, and that she was still in the hometree, in Father Lemuel’s room—but then it relaxed. She wasn’t taken over in any kind of scary way; she just relaxed into the experience. She allowed her disbelief to be suspended; she gave her consent to the fantasy.
    And it did feel as if she were actually moving, with the airstream flowing past her increasing to a gale as the dragon picked up speed. When she looked down, it really did seem that the ground was far below, and that she really might fall if she leaned too far to one side or the other.
    She knew that if she tried to do anything the Environmental Rules wouldn’t permit, she really would “fall” out of the saddle. She wouldn’t be hurt when she hit the “ground,” and her own IT wouldn’t allow the IT that Father Lemuel had injected to scare her to death on the way down, but she had asked for a more realistic adventure and that was what she was going to get. The thrill of fear that lanced through her was as sharp as the thrill of fear she’d felt when she realized that she really might fall out of the hometree’s crown and hurt herself when she hit the ground. Compared with floating around the insipid and intangible corridors of her virtual school, flying through the thick, cool atmosphere of the Fantasyworld was vivid, penetrating and wildly exhilarating.
    This, Sara thought, must be what Father Aubrey meant when he talked about “the speed trip.”
    The dragon didn’t beat its wings; it merely spread them out, arching and tilting them to catch an updraft that surged up the side of the mountain. It settled into a glide almost immediately, and then began to turn in a lazy circle around the pinnacle, soaring higher on the ascending column of air.
    Sara felt the rush of the wind in her hair and on her face, crisp and electric, but she felt quite stable in the saddle—if not quite safe , at least not unduly uncomfortable. She wasn’t in any hurry to look down again, though. She looked up, into the bright blue sky, squinting against the sunlight, and she looked out at the jagged horizon, where range