The Human Blend

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Technically, yeah. Miavana’s municipal boundaries run a third of the way to the Gulf. But the main populated part of the metropolitan area is just a strip along what used to be the coast, from where the submerged highway used to go out to the Keys all the way back up to Jacksonville.”

  She frowned. In her course of studies geography had always taken an academic backseat to more career-relevant subjects like biology and the other life sciences. “What are ‘the Keys’?”

  Whispr nodded to his left. “String of islands that used to curve out into the Gulf from the southern end of the state. Been underwater a long time now, I guess. Real popular with the sea Melds who live there. Supposed to be good diving for Naturals and the rest of us, too.”

  “You dive?” She eyed him in surprise.

  “What, are you kidding me?” He shuddered slightly. “Swimming I like, but if I have to stick my head underwater for any length of time I get claustrophobic. The way I feel about it, if Nature wanted us to swim like fish she would have given us all gill melds.”

  By now they were encountering as many reed- and grass-choked channels as those that had been cleared for travel. Whispr slowed down to keep from clogging the boat’s jet intake.

  “You can tell we’re getting into the low-rent district.” He indicated one old channel that hadn’t been cleared in years. “Bad road maintenance.”

  Ever since Whispr had opened the watercraft’s canopy and reduced their speed in order to save battery power she had begun to succumb to the morning’s rapidly increasing temperature.

  “When do we get to—wherever it is we’re going?”

  Bringing the craft around to port he nodded toward a tight cluster of stilt-mounted structures. They seemed to materialize out of the cloying humidity like a mirage in the desert. A notably cheap and badly constructed mirage.

  “We’re here.” A touch on the accelerator began to reduce their speed.

  She studied the approaching heat-sink of a minor municipality. At least on initial view, “here” looked decidedly unpromising.

  13

  The town of Macamock Hammock (Macmock to the locals) consisted of a few hundred homes and associated commercial structures built just above the dark water and linked together by a web of scoot trails and walkways whose deteriorating condition would have sent a nonbribed transit inspector into a spasm of despair. To someone like Ingrid Seastrom who hailed from a modern metropolis like Greater Savannah it was astonishing in an age of water-resistant polymers, ceramics, and carbon-fiber construction to encounter a boogeyman from the past that had been largely banished elsewhere.

  Rust.

  She had to double-check with her companion to convince herself she was not seeing things. But rust it was; not dark red paint or some aging polymer binder. A number of the community’s oldest standing structures actually were fashioned of ferrous derivatives. Some had collapsed to form scattered small pockets of sharp-edged red reef within the boundaries of the town itself. When they drew nearer she saw windows that were empty of glass or equivalent solid transparencies.

  As Whispr guided their boat into an empty berth at a public dock she found herself growing increasingly doubtful of their prospects. Macmock hardly looked like a hotbed of cutting-edge technology, medical or otherwise.

  “You really think we have a chance to find out anything useful here?”

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have brought us.” Extending a slender but strong arm he helped her out of the watercraft and up onto the dock. Having acknowledged and recorded the rental’s ident, the dock’s automated steward was demanding advance payment for berthing privileges. Ingrid paid, using the new card she had picked up in order to maintain anonymity during the journey. Providing additional security an appropriately complex tailing algorithm would disperse the details of the transaction once it had been processed, thereby preventing anyone from tracing it back to the source. Shouldering their packs, they headed into town.

  As they walked, they passed a number of working fishermen making preparations to take their special shallow-draft boats out into the vast Florida waterways. Several trappers were layering legally taken caiman and croc skins onto a preservation pallet. A small refrigerated cargo craft was loading cases of frozen, locally butchered capybara cutlets.

  Passing swiftly overhead, a singular shadow caused her to glance upward. It had been cast by a patrolling raptor the size of a small pilotless drone aircraft. Noting the direction of her stare, Whispr shielded his eyes with a hand as he squinted at the sky.

  “Harpy eagle. I’ve heard they do well in Florida since finding their way up here a couple of decades ago. Lots to eat. Must be hell on the local poodle fanciers.”

  Every day she spent away from Savannah and in Whispr’s company was another day Ingrid realized how divorced her life had become from the comfortable world she had made for herself. “Are they dangerous?”

  “To humans?” Whispr turned thoughtful. “Not that I’ve heard. Though if I had a kid younger than three I wouldn’t let it go crawling around outside with one of those killer canaries circling overhead. Just to be on the safe side.”

  They turned down a main pedestrian walkway. It was flanked on either side by scoot paths. Since stepping off their rented watercraft she had seen nothing bigger than a two-person scoot. South of the Tampa-Orlando seawall there were no surface vehicles because there was virtually no surface left. For a long time now everything in South Florida from people to cargo had moved by water. It was a region where outside the artificial comfort zone provided by climate conditioning, everything moved slowly, in time to the rhythms of warm water and warmer air. What in a cooler clime would have been described as sluggish in the saturated tropics was regarded as only sensible.

  Their present surroundings were all very colorful and atmospheric, she thought to herself. What they were not, was encouraging. She wiped sweat from her forehead.

  “I’ll say it again, Whispr: this place doesn’t exactly strike me as being on the cutting edge of medtech development. Whatever metals they favor here, I don’t see MSMH being among them.”

  He did not sound discouraged. “And as with any folk, Natural or Meld, who eke out a living on the knife edge of what’s barely legal, I’m sure there are more than a few townsfolk who’d be pleased to hear you say that. Sometimes, doc, anonymity is the best fertilizer.”

  Making their way along the walkway’s edge, she stumbled over something firm and rubbery. A glance downward revealed a small brown corpse upon which a colorful assortment of tropical flies were enthusiastically banqueting. Where another visitor might have made a face or gone queasy she did not. As a physician she was comfortable with a vast variety of blood and guts. But neither did the sight inspire a gleeful chuckle.

  Whispr spared the small swollen corpse a look. “Nutria. Local vermin.” He inhaled deeply of the saturated air, his chest hardly seeming to expand as he did so, and grinned. “Kind of like me.”

  She shook her head. “Not you. You’re not local vermin. You’re just visiting.”

  “Hey,” he quipped back, “how many vermin can boast that they’re traveling with their own doctor?”

  “I’m not your doctor,” she reminded him firmly. “I’m your partner.”

  He nodded in the direction they were walking. “Heads up then, partner. That’s where we’ll be staying.”

  A two-story structure loomed directly ahead of them. In design it was severe, in execution contemporary. As with every other structure they had passed, an amorphous solar veneer coated all but the north-facing wall and the photosensitive windows. At the sight she heaved an inward sigh of relief. If hardly luxurious, the place at least looked modern and clean. The dozen or so watercraft parked at the nearby dock attested to the boatel’s popularity. She wanted to ask if it was the best place in town but caught herself as soon as she realized it might be the only place.

  The decorative sculpture out front piqued Whispr’s curiosity and for a change she was the one able t
o provide explanation.

  “It’s an old boat,” she told him as they headed for the lobby.

  “I can see that,” he responded, “but what’s that thing hanging off the back end?”

  “I think it’s called an outboard engine. You know—one of those motive devices that was powered by a petroleum distillate? Back when petroleum was common enough to use as a fuel?”

  He was clearly fascinated by the rusty relic of a bygone era. She would have gone into more detail except that as they entered the lobby she was nearly overcome by a blast of air-conditioning.

  The boatel’s modern exterior did not extend to check-in. Instead of the usual automated console, there was a human receptionist. The middle-aged man boasted a couple of cheap webbing melds between his fingers. Also between his toes, the latter being visible above the double-wide sandals he wore. Whispr leaned toward him and smiled.

  “One room with—”

  Stepping forward, Ingrid cut him off abruptly. “Two rooms.” She also smiled at the clerk. “We do so treasure our individual privacy.”

  Judging from his stolid reaction to their byplay, as long as their method of payment proved acceptable the receptionist could not have cared if they had voiced their intent to room together in concert with a pair of full Piscean Melds, a magician, and a couple of the howler monkeys descended from escaped zoo animals whose eerie calls crisscrossed the Everglades every sunrise and sunset.

  “What now?” she asked Whispr as they walked toward their lower-floor rooms. If he was upset by her curt dismissal of his desire to stay in a single room, he gave no sign.

  “Tonight I’ll take a walk around town and put out the word that we’re here looking to buy some special, expensive rainforest hallucinogens. The naturally harvested illegal variety—not those that are government approved and available in the familiar mass-produced packs from your local NDA drugstore. That should be enough to stimulate feelers from one or more of the local entrepreneurs that I’m told do business in this area.” He eyed her somberly.

  “I’m pretty careful when I do my shopping, doc, but you should know that there’s a chance of running into a slumming undercover poc. It’s always a risk. But if I should get picked up, you’ll be in the clear, and no matter what happens afterward there’ll be no clean connection between you and me or between me and the thread. I’ll just be hauled off and charged with drone-drugging.”

  “How very reassuring,” she commented dryly. “Assuming that doesn’t happen, then what?”

  He was warming to the plan. “Once I’ve made a local contact we can rely on, we can set aside bogus drug requests and work through him or her to try and find out more about the thread and what might be on it. If everything I’ve heard is still valid, this floating shingle of a town is a gateway for all kinds of sensitive information and products to enter and leave the country without going through the usual official channels. It’s a covert conduit and distribution point.” He looked around, forever conscious of their immediate surroundings and anyone who might have wandered within hearing range.

  “In the meantime, as far as anybody is concerned we’re just tourists.”

  “Okay.” Waving her key over the receiver on the front of the door she was rewarded by a soft click as it opened. “While you’re scoping out the town and dropping your inquiries I’ll be touristing my in-room facilities. Get back to me when you’ve learned something or you’re ready to eat.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “You desire my company for lunch?”

  “Don’t let it go to your head—or anyplace else,” she warned him. “I just hate eating alone. I have to do too much of it.”

  As he turned to retrace the path to the lobby he left a thin smile in his wake. “Nice to know that at least I rank one step above ‘alone.’ ”

  IF ONLY HE COULD THINK of a way to prolong this trip for as long as possible, Whispr mused as he followed an elevated walkway deeper into the older part of Macmock. Traveling around the country with a woman who was both more intelligent and more attractive than himself, having her pay for everything, was about as pleasant a set of circumstances in which he had found himself in quite some time. Eventually, of course, she would figure out that he was stringing her along. At that point she’d probably throw a little lady-doctor hissy fit and ditch him. That likely blowup would rouse no tears from him. He had spent most of his life being abandoned; first by family, lately by friends.

  Until the inevitable confrontation he would enjoy the sights, the weather, the opportunities, the comfortable paid-for lodgings, and the good food. There was only one problem with the otherwise entirely agreeable scenario. It nagged at him like a cactus thorn that had broken off beneath his skin and begun to fester.

  She trusted him.

  No question about it. Oh, maybe she didn’t trust him enough to share a room with him, but she was essentially trusting him with her life. After all, there was nothing to prevent him from turning her over to those who would hold her for ransom, or to the government or private individuals who so ferociously sought recovery of the thread. So what if he didn’t learn what was on the thread or the details of its (according to her) unusual manufacture? He could pocket whatever reward or payment was offered for its recovery and vanish back into the familiar underworld of Greater Savannah. He could take any of those options. Except for one thing.

  She trusted him.

  Why this should nag at him like an allergic reaction to optistash he did not know. They were not old friends. She was not even a friend of an old friend—just someone whose professional services had been recommended to him. He owed Dr. Ingrid Seastrom nothing. As she had informed him, the minor extraction she had performed for him had been carried out pro bono. Okay—deactivating the traktacs, that had been a windfall bonus. Sure, he had promised to pay her for the work, but if he didn’t and just walked away from her, what was she going to do? Call the cops and explain that he owed her for illegally deactivating their tracking devices?

  Trust, trust, trust—why did it plague him so? It wasn’t as if his conscience was any bigger than any of the rest of him. No doubt what he needed to make sense of it all was a morality meld. Except, to the best of his knowledge there was no such thing. Which meant that he was stuck with his own inescapable ethical recriminations.

  Maybe it was the fact that no one of Ingrid Seastrom’s social standing had ever trusted him before.

  You’re an idiot, he told himself. Why not just admit that you’re in love with her, or at least in lust? You know that isn’t going anywhere, and you know she’ll continue to reject you, yet you keep hoping. You keep fooling yourself. On the other hand, wasn’t that what love was all about? Self-deception, blinding oneself to one’s own fallacies and follies? You know that love is nothing but foolishness and self-delusion held in stasis.

  Which, he reminded himself, was still better than any state of existence he had inhabited during the past ten years or so.

  “You look like someone who could use a zoe, broth-brother.”

  The Meld who had spoken was leaning against the faltering walkway railing. What made his presence distinctive and immediately identified him as a local was the fact that he was standing not on the walkway but on the other side. The exceptional leg meld he had undergone had produced stiltlike lower limbs two meters long that terminated in widely splayed feet suitable for providing support on sand and mud as well as solid ground. Standing in the water below the walkway he was still eye level with Whispr. A convenient stance for challenging less attenuated strollers.

  Slowing without immediately responding, Whispr took a moment to check out their immediate environs. A local multimeld couple was strolling arm in arm in arm. Off to his right and away from the pedestrian walkways a Natural whose skin had been burnt sienna supervised a quartet of automatics that were off-loading catfish into a chilled, self-powered transport hopper. Several of the catfish were giants—more descendants of Amazonian immigrants carried northward by changing currents and patter
ns of ocean life. In the distance music drifted from a local café, a rejuvenating rejiggered bubbling bouillabaisse of southern Americana, salsa, and electronics that Whispr identified as the latest technopone.

  But of overt undercover agents out trolling for prey he could detect no evidence.

  “Not zoe,” he told the man who had undergone the swamp strider meld. “Brain stuff more expensive, less stable. Mind trope—not trip, not tripe. Food for haute thought. Barf me a river, giver.”

  The strider’s expression narrowed. “It would help if you named a tributary. Tickle me one.”

  Resting his arms on the shaky railing, Whispr evinced a false interest in the murky water below. “Might have a something that’s worth something cubed. Need an appraisal.”

  Tottering slightly atop his impossible legs, the swamp strider regarded the supplicant suspiciously. “Plenty of dealers in Miavana. Easy access from there to the rest of Namerica and all points south and east. Why come here to the hot zone?”

  “Plenty of watchers dealing watch on the dealers in Miavana, too.” Whispr offered a conspiratorial smile. “I prefer the words of the choir invisible.”

  “Yopers, you do look like the type who don’t want to be seen. Turn sideways and a dance step makes you so. Brisk wind blow you away; all crow and no scare.”

  From the other side of the walkway railing, Whispr met his gaze evenly. “Less wind in the waterlands. And I’m still here.”

  The strider sighed and shuddered impertinently. “You selling and not buying. Why should I drop on you anything heavier than loose vowels?”

  Whispr deliberately wiped long, bony fingers across a shirt pocket. “Maybe I could use a zoe.”

  Now the strider returned the visitor’s smile. “That better. Business always better two ways from yesterday. Tell me what you trying to price. Weevil wax? Gotagod extract?”

  “Hard goods.” Whispr kept his voice down.