Free The Dragon Man by Brian Stableford Page B

after range of snow-capped mountains extended as if forever.
    She had read the program’s supplementary literature carefully, even though she didn’t quite understand everything that it contained. She wanted to savor the imaginary world to the full, so she had ploughed on determinedly, even through the technical jargon. If this world had been an actual planet rather than an image in the mind’s eye of a machine, it would have been twice the size of Earth, with only a fifth of its surface covered by water—a multitude of lakes rather than a patchwork of oceans—and almost all the remainder crumpled like a rucked-up rug. Many of the peaks would have been worn down by erosion, their rough slopes gentled as if by millions of years of rainstorms and floods of melting snow. The program that was generating the world had grinding tectonic plates built into its binary bedrock, and new peaks would be thrusting up as the older ones were worn down.
    Sara knew that the “world” had only existed for a hundred years or so, and that its actual evolution had been incredibly rapid—but within its world-soul it had an implicit existence that stretched billions of years into the past, and an assumption of evolution with all the patience necessary to bring dragons out of reptiles that had once been fish, which had once been wormlike invertebrates...and so on, all the way back to bacterial slime.
    The world felt old. Sara was not quite sure whether that sensation was somehow being communicated to her by the nanobots, or whether it was something her own imagination was inventing—but either way, she was glad of it.
    The dragon, on the other hand, did not seem old at all. For all its vast size and easy competence in the air, there was something youthful about it—or perhaps, Sara thought, she was only projecting her own youth upon it. And why not? She was here to enjoy herself, to be master of her own experience.
    She drew slightly on the reins, trying to suggest to the dragon that they had circled the peak for long enough, and that it was time to undertake a more ambitious directional flight.
    The dragon responded to her touch. It turned its back on the high-set sun, and straightened out its course, heading for a group of peaks so tall that they wore collars of cloud.
    Now, Sara looked down into the valleys over which they passed, at forests and meadowlands, winding rivers and waterfalls, placid lakes. There was no sign of human habitation but there were other animals: great herds of shaggy herbivores making their way along their grazing trails.
    If Sara had chosen to be a dragon she could have hunted as one, trying to pick off an infant herbivore, but dragons of this sort did not hunt with riders on their back. Sara wasn’t sorry about that, nor did she resolve to return one day in a fashion that would let her use her simulated talons and fangs to kill, and her simulated mouth to swallow her prey. She only wanted to fly. She was not here to pretend that dragons really lived, but only that they flew. What the dragon symbolized was more important to her than its seeming scaliness and fleshiness, even though she had only the vaguest notion of what it did symbolize, for her or for anyone.
    Oddly enough, although the dragon seemed to be flying half a kilometer above the ground—more as it passed over the deep-set valleys—she did not have as acute a sense of height as she had had when she had finally paused in the hometree’s steeple-like crown. At first she thought that was because the new Internal Technology wasn’t living up to its promises, but there was another factor involved.
    In the hometree’s crown she had felt as if she were still connected to the ground. The potential fall had been measurable against a solid vertical scale. Here, there was nothing between her and the ground but empty space, which had no sensible scale. The perceptible objects on the ground seemed very small, and she knew that their seeming smallness was a