The Dragon Man by Brian Stableford

product of distance, but her kind of eyes could not make that distance meaningful—except when they flew close to a vertical slope, whose precipitousness would become abruptly obvious as her mind somehow changed gear. That never lasted for long, though; the dragon flew on and on, leaving all such tilted walls behind.
    The special Internal Technology continued its efforts, but now that she had become accustomed to its effects she became increasingly aware of the differences between the sensations of “touch” it synthesized and the real thing. The texture of the Fantasyworld wasn’t quite right. The saddle and harness she was holding, and the scaly skin she could reach out and stroke, certainly seemed to be there , but they lacked the subtleties of real-world solidity. The air caressing her face as she moved through it was more convincing, but Sara couldn’t shake off the suspicion that it wouldn’t have convinced Father Aubrey, or anyone else who knew what a real speed trip was like.
    Even so, it was new. It was wonderful. It was worth the effort.
    As the flight extended, Sara tried to imagine what she might look like from a viewpoint even higher in the sky, from which the flying dragon might appear to be skimming the surface below, like a fiery cross moving across an infinite field of grey and green, flattened out by perspective. Was that, she wondered, what one of Frank Warburton’s tattooed dragons had looked like? Had they looked as if they were soaring over a body that was in fact a world?
    No, she decided. The dragon in the shop window had been seen in profile, as if from an airship floating alongside it, as if the skin of the wearer were the sky and not the ground at all: an infinite absence rather than an immediate presence. Was that the impression his clients had been trying to achieve? Not magnification, but transformation?
    She began to see other dragons now, some soaring around their domestic peaks, others perched on ledges close to nests where huge white eggs were resting. Were they near to hatching? There was no way to tell. Half a dozen smaller dragons fluttered upwards to fly alongside Sara’s mount in brief formation, but none carried a rider, and none turned its great green eye to stare at her. She was not invisible, but she was not of interest. She was an alien visitor, but her presence was not so disruptive that she needed to be noticed, let alone feared.
    There are thousands of Fantasy worlds like this one, Sara thought, and there’ll be millions more—more than anyone could ever explore, even in a lifetime like mine.

CHAPTER VIII
    Sara began to feel cold, and realized that her temporary IT was already preparing her for the end of her trip. In advance of being expelled, she would be slightly discomfited, so that she would not regret her return to her own reality and might even feel glad to be home and warm. The awareness that time was short made her concentrate harder, determined to make the most of the experience while it lasted. She stroked the dragon’s scales with her left hand, feeling their peculiar quality, like adamantine silk. She looked from side to side at the huge wings, marveling at the elegance of their curvature, the awesome precision of their form. She looked back at the extending tail, undulating ever so slightly like an eel in shallow water, then forward at the stretching neck, the arched hood, the strangely tinted head.
    She looked up into the blue vault of the imaginary heavens, leaning back to let the sun’s radiance warm her swirling hair as if it were a halo. Then she looked down again at the valleys sweeping by, nourished by streams whose sources were snow-packed crevices, weeping as the sun’s glow eased their excess without ever cutting through the tresses dangling from the icy summits. She looked at the clouds clustered about the highest peaks, hugging them tightly, stirred at their outer edges by breezes that were not nearly strong enough to dislodge their grip and