The Human Blend

by Alan Dean Foster

Ginnyy nodded sagely. “So would I, after having skimmed the information I just called forth. Except that I’m not going to go into it any further. Because I did manage to find at least three similarities in every recorded instance.” She paused for effect. “Every one of those now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t little gizmos, irrespective of locality, health, gender, ethnicity, or anything else, was removed from a Meld. Not one of them was extracted from a Natural. And all of them were young. The oldest for whom I could find a report was nineteen. The youngest was twelve.”

  Whispr’s voice was pitched lower than usual. “You said you found three similarities. What was the other one?”

  Tomuk Ginnyy’s lips tightened. “Every single young person who’d had one of these mysterious disappearing objects removed from their bodies had previously undergone a botched Meld that later had to be fixed. Without exception.”

  Listening to the Inuit, absorbing her words, Ingrid was immediately put in mind of Cara Jane Gibson and her slipshod, bungled cosmetic meld.

  “So what we’ve got is a clear connection between the nanodevices, bad meld work, and young adults.”

  Ginnyy nodded. “Unless additional research turns up something contrarian, like non-Melds who show the implant or older adults who still retain it.”

  “But what’s it do?” a mystified Whispr wondered aloud. “What are they for, these tiny machines that disappear if anyone tries to study them?”

  “I certainly don’t know.” The Inuit switched her attention to him. “I don’t think I want to know. To me a combination of bad melds, unauthorized cerebral implants, and elaborate secrecy screams stay away, don’t touch, keep off the lawn. You two want to pursue this further”—she gestured in the direction of the shirt pocket where Ingrid had deposited the thread-holding capsule—“you need to talk to someone else. I’m just a small-time scanner and I can already smell that this is beyond me. Any additional follow-up calls for someone with more skill and more guts than I have.” She turned back to her console. “You need to talk to Yabby Wizwang.”

  The visitors exchanged a glance. It was an ident neither of them recognized. Had they encountered the name previously they were unlikely to have forgotten it. Any instinctive reaction Whispr might have had he deftly repressed. New to the underworld to which he had introduced her, a less tactful Ingrid could not keep herself from grinning.

  “You’re kidding,” she heard herself saying.

  Tomuk Ginnyy did not smile back. “If you want, I’ll set it up. Yabby’s work doesn’t come cheap, but he’s the best. Compared to him, I’m just your local small-town directory service. Yabby, he’s true global. But before I initiate contact for you, I’ve got three requirements.”

  Anticipating what one of the three might be, Ingrid was already reaching for her wallet. “Name them.”

  “One, you pay me what you owe for my work today. Two”—she shifted her attention to Whispr—“if you find out what the hell all this is about, what’s behind it, and what’s going on, you share the information with me. But discreetly. I’ll set up a secure two-way contact for us. I’m intrigued, but I’m an old lady and I don’t want any trouble.”

  “And three?” Ingrid pressed their host.

  Some of the boisterous self-confidence seeped out of Tomuk Ginnyy. “You run a checkup on me, Mizdoc.” For a second time she held up one of her oversized feet. “I’ve got my own substandard slipshod meld. Maybe I’m no kid anymore, but I was once. For all I know I’m walking around right now with one of these teeny little cryptics in my own skull.”

  “Based on the information you pulled together and just showed to us,” Ingrid reminded her gently, “you really are a bit too old to fit the indicated demographic.”

  “I don’t give a narwhal’s bunghole—I want you to check me out.”

  Repressing a smile Ingrid proceeded to do so, as thoroughly and effectively as she could without the appropriate medical gear. If Whispr could not assist directly, he did at least make a show of concern. And while he was showing concern, he also managed to swipe the activated, blank zoe strip he had purchased from the swamp strider across the back of the doctor’s bare right leg just beneath the hem of her shorts. Scarcely sensing the fleeting, featherlight touch, Ingrid Seastrom put the ephemeral contact down to a passing bug and ignored it as she continued her examination of their host.

  14

  The houseboat didn’t look like much. The confusion of tropical flowers and emerald-green bushes crowding the top of the single-story, flat-bottomed craft might hide sensitive antennae, or they might be nothing more than decoration. The ropes and vines falling down its sides and trailing in the tepid water might comprise part of a larger disguised pickup and broadcast array, or they might be used only to tie the boat up at isolated moorings or wharfs. Nothing about the sizable but sluggish-looking craft suggested that it was home and place of business of the individual whom Tomuk Ginnyy insisted was better qualified than anyone else in the waterlands, legit or illicit, to probe the mystery of vanishing cerebral implants from young adults. Or to try to penetrate the secrets of an incomprehensible storage thread whose composition verged on alchemy.

  More than anything else, Ingrid thought as Whispr steered their rented watercraft toward the unanchored, unlovely boat’s starboard side, the exterior of their slowly drifting destination hinted at an owner/occupant who was slovenly and unkempt in his personal if not his professional habits. Its appearance certainly jibed with the doubtlessly made-up surname Wizwang.

  Still, Ingrid reminded herself, it was unlikely Ginnyy had taken her money only to set up an appointment with an itinerant trapper or fisherman. There being no time to confirm from other sources the purported skills of the prober they were about to meet, they would have to render any such judgment themselves. She and Whispr could only hope the residents of the waterlands were not having a little fun at the visitors’ expense. She was tired, hot, sweaty, and still unable to get the last images of the badly beaten Rudolf Sverdlosk out of her mind.

  As their boat’s bow clamp-locked on to that of the larger craft a high-pitched voice piped up from somewhere unseen. “Are you the two travelers Tomuk Ginnyy said she was sending to me? Because if you’re not, leave now before I release the bees.”

  Bees? a bemused Ingrid thought. Had their morning appointment in the middle of the swampy waterlands been made with a distinguished dissident prober or an amateur apiarist? Following Whispr out of their boat, she found herself standing on narrow decking bedecked with moss, mushrooms, and other fungi. She wondered if all the dense sprouting was intended as decoration or camouflage.

  Maybe both, she told herself as she followed her lean companion into a nearby opening in the windowless side of the boat. Seen from a distance, whether at the surface or from a satellite, the vegetation-covered craft would more than anything else look like an island of floating vegetation.

  A welcome blast of cool air greeted them as they stepped through the climate curtain. The temperature on the other side was perfect; nothing like Tomuk Ginnyy’s arctic ambiance. Ingrid relaxed a little. Their host might be cautious, eccentric, and a celebrated hermit, but he was also human.

  Eccentric, she soon learned, did not begin to describe Yabby Wizwang.

  The shirt and shorts-clad boy who greeted them looked to be about ten. Curly of hair, amber of eye, slender of form, his suntanned skin smooth and unblemished, he rose and came toward them from where he had been sitting in a wooden chair whose butt-bowl had been scooped out of a single cypress stump. Ingrid smiled at the unexpected presence. Though never having practiced as a pediatrician, she had occasionally dealt with children and their inevitable afflictions. Putting her hands on her knees, she bent over to smile at him.

  “Hello. We’ve come to see—I’m guessing maybe it’s your father?”

  “My father’s been dead for sixty years, but if you don’t mind the sight and smell of advanced decomposition I expect I could arrange for you to make his acquaintance.” Though eye level with
her chest, the boy was staring at her lower body. “Tomuk said you were a physician. For a Natural, you’ve got nice legs.”

  “Excuse me?” she stammered in confusion.

  “In due time and as necessary.” The boy turned and beckoned. “Come with me and we’ll get started. I usually allow up to five minutes for dim-witted gaping, but there are a number of things I want to get done today besides accommodating you, so you’ll just have to get in your quota of obtuse oculations while we work.”

  Whispr could only stare speechlessly. Yabby Wizwang was the most perfect Meld he had ever seen.

  When he pointed that out to his companion, Ingrid at first refused to believe it.

  “How can you tell?” she whispered as she waited for him to catch up to her. “He looks exactly like a Natural child.”

  “That’s the beauty of it.” As a lifelong Meld himself Whispr did not try to hide his admiration for the culmination of innumerable surgical intercessions that their host represented. “Maniping someone to look like a Meld is nothing. Doing a Meld that perfectly mimics a Natural requires not just money but real skill.” He nodded at the childish figure that was leading them deeper into the bowels of the foliage-draped craft. “Whatever surgeon or group of biosurges did this were artists as much as doctors.”

  Ingrid was still reluctant to countenance her companion’s conclusions. “I have to ask,” she blurted in the direction of their host, regardless of how the query might be taken, “but how old are you?”

  The boy looked back over his shoulder. “Seventy-four next month, Legs. And just so you should know, there’s one part of me that hasn’t been maniped. You’ve got at least an hour to guess which it is.”

  Definitely not ten years old, she swore then and there. But why invest what must have been an enormous amount of time, money, and suffering—for this? To look like a child permanently? In the course of her studies and her career she had encountered hundreds of Melds, but never one like this. There was no suggestion, at least not yet, that their host fancied himself Peter Pan or some other notable child character from literature or the arts. Why then go through everything that must have been required in order to achieve this particular, peculiar, intentionally stunting Meld? She had to ask that, too, and also about the origin of his outré moniker.

  They descended a stairway that soon opened into a room below the waterline. It was so packed with electronics there was barely enough room for its idiosyncratic owner and a couple of visitors. Wizwang settled himself into an ambient chair whose internally cooled padding folded affectionately around his limbs. There being no other furniture in the room his guests could choose between sitting on the floor or remaining standing. Whispr opted for the latter. Conscious of their host’s unsettlingly childlike eyes wandering over her from hair to toe, Ingrid elected to remain upright.

  “My name? It’s a joke, of course.” In keeping with his incredibly elaborate meld his voice was preadolescent high-pitched, but there was nothing childlike about his diction. Nor the gaze that he used to pin her in place.

  “I wanted something appropriately absurd and incongruous to fit my chosen Meld, which self-evidently is also a joke. How more amusing to live life than to make your own physicality into a permanent gag? How better to fit in with the rest of the Cosmos, which is also a joke? Read your Melville.” Boyish, hairless arms spread wide to encompass everything as he tilted back his head and looked upward. “All of this, all of existence, is a gag, a trick, a hoax that our genes devised to keep us from going crazy from thinking about it too much.” Lowering his eyes and dropping his arms, he favored her with a lopsided grin.

  It was then and there that she came to the conclusion that their host was at least half mad.

  “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” he continued, reiterating an old and usually misunderstood quote. “He plays practical jokes with it. Didn’t you know? That’s what the universe is: a witticism, a one-liner with a many-googooplexed set of variations, designed to amuse its inhabitants and alleviate their boredom. Anyone who makes even a casual study of the cosmic neighborhood sees that it’s nothing but sham, pretense, and fraud pressed into the service of untrammeled hilarity. The cosmic con.” He leaned back in the soft cooling bulk of the chair. “Given that consensus I consider Wizwang, as a name, to be positively conservative.”

  To Whispr their host’s declamation was nothing more than incomprehensible rant, but Ingrid found herself intrigued despite herself. “If all of it, if the entire cosmos, is nothing more than a deception and a joke, then what are we?”

  Wizwang was clearly pleased by her interest. “Us? Isn’t it obvious? We’re the punch line. Through our activities and by our actions we reassert the truth of it every day.”

  Interesting as the ravings of the partially mad man (mad boy?) were, she and Whispr had not come all this way and expended so much effort just to wile away the day in barmy philosophical explication.

  “Did Ginnyy tell you why we need your help?”

  Sequestered deep within his womblike chair, he shook his head. Boyish locks fluttered. “She said you seemed candid and sincere, that your request would interest me, and that you could pay. You have five minutes to confirm all of those things or I release the bees.”

  Finally, Whispr thought. Something he could relate to. “You keep talking about bees. Is beekeeping a hobby or something?”

  Their host’s laserlike gaze shifted to the other Meld in the room. “Yes, but it’s not mine: it’s theirs. The bees keep me, I don’t keep them.”

  Whispr eyed the boy-Meld blankly. “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s because you don’t understand bees. Few people do. I much prefer their company to that of my fellow delusional primates.” He jerked a thumb toward the bow. “They tend to stay forward. Unlike humans, they fully understand and are in complete harmony with their place in the ongoing cosmic joke. That’s why unlike us they’re only a minor anecdote and not a punch line.”

  Flowers, Ingrid realized with a start. The drifting houseboat was covered in flowers. It was not all camouflage, then. At the risk of pushing their host farther from brilliance and deeper into madness, she voiced another query.

  “Your bees, do you talk to them?”

  “All the time,” Wizwang assured her cheerfully.

  “And—do they answer back?”

  “Depends on what the day’s buzz is.”

  She hesitated, smiled, lost the smile, ended up uncertain. “You’re joking with me again.”

  “That would mean there are jokes within jokes, doctor. Like bacteria inside cells within bodies. The bees and mes, it’s a symbiotic relationship.” He grinned at her, a childish grin that was anything but. “You really want to sit there and spend the limited time I’ve carved out for you talking about honey production?”

  More unsettled than she cared to admit, she fumbled with her shirt pocket. “I’ve got something to show you—and no, it’s not what you’re hoping to see, so you might as well stay in that chair.”

  “Tch. And just as I was about to elaborate on the specificities of my own meld.” He sniffed. “Buzzness it is, then. Show me something, and bee quick about it.”

  The cosmos might not be founded on jokes, she told herself as she drew forth the capsule containing the storage thread, but this craft and its singular landlord certainly were.

  He slipped the thread into a custom modified reader and began working on it even as she brought him up-to-date on everything she and Whispr had learned. Unable to tell if he was ignoring her or not, she contented herself with recitation until she had delivered the last bit of potentially pertinent information.

  They spent the next half hour trying to contain their impatience while their host worked. He made no comment and raised no objection when they chose to occasionally wander outside. The waterland scenery constantly changed around the slowly drifting houseboat, its position continuously monitored and rejiggered by silent subsurface thrusters commanded by the craft’s GPS.
Whenever midday’s oppressively hot and humid atmosphere began to weigh on them they would wander back downstairs and immerse themselves in the main cabin’s perfectly maintained climate.

  During one muggy jaunt around the boat’s exterior Ingrid found herself entranced by the sight of a flock of snowy egrets and roseate spoonbills commuting to and from a roosting tree. Their continuous calls and cries resounded like half a ton of tinfoil alternately being crumpled and unfurled. As she was drinking in the beauty of the avian mural, a bee hummed past her face, buzzing an arc toward the boat’s bow. Black and yellow, it looked like a perfectly ordinary honeybee. Given its compound eyes, it was impossible to tell in which direction it might have been looking. For no especial reason, she thought it might have been looking at her.

  “Doc! Ingrid!”

  Dragging her thoughts away from potentially unsettling hymenopterian possibilities, Whispr’s shout drew her back toward the belly of the boat. A look of satisfaction on his too-young face, Yabby Wizwang was waiting for her.

  “Tomuk Ginnyy’s search was even more on the mark than she thought.”

  Ingrid joined Whispr in regarding their diminutive host. “What does that mean?”

  Sliding out of his enfolding chair, their host underscored his points with a flurry of energetic, seemingly random jabs at and into the glut of three-dimensional projections that now filled the air of the cabin.

  “She found evidence of these peculiar implants that quickly vanished as soon as they came under observation.” Whirling, he indicated his main console. It was so obscured with flex-plugs and add-ons that little of the base unit could be seen. “I’ve been able to correlate that information together with what you’ve given me.” He paused for emphasis. “There aren’t dozens of these occurrences. There are hundreds. Perhaps thousands. And who knows how many more that haven’t been reported, either because those who are afflicted with one of these devices don’t wish to file a report or because they’re not even aware they’ve been so infected.”