Patrimony (6 page)

Flinx perked up slightly. “About
it
?”

“You know.” Eustabe leaned toward his host. “The nonmeat parts of meself. Me arm”—he raised the cybernetic limb in question—“and the other parts. Starts asking me all kinds of questions about them. How did I come to need the synthetics, how did they feel. How did I respond to their presence emotionally as well as physically, that sort of stuff.”

Interesting, but—not much more, Flinx felt. And hardly conclusive of anything. The kinds of questions any curious albeit admittedly tactless person might ask. Or more specifically but in no wise especially revealing of anything other than his profession—a physician, perhaps. Having nothing else planned for the next hour, anyway, he decided he might as well let Eustabe ramble.

“Go on.”

“It wasn’t just the questions. I’ve dealt with plenty of the like before, many times occasioned.” Leaning forward, Eustabe lowered his voice slightly, as if he was about to impart something significant as well as unexpected.

“What was odd about this fella was that he didn’t just ask questions with his voice. He asked them, too, with his
eyes
. The first couple of times, I didn’t pay attention much. Then it started growing creep on me. I mean, he was making me feel like a specimen in a lab, or something.”

Deep inside Flinx, something tightened ever so slightly. “Please, continue.”

Eustabe sat back in the chair, which morphed to accommodate him. “By the time I made my fifth delivery out his way, I’d had enough. So I straight-up called him on it. All the questions and the staring. Wasn’t worth the tip. I told him outright to back off. Well, he right up and apologized. Insisted he didn’t mean to offend in any way, that it wasn’t at all in his temperament. That it was just his nature to ask questions about things that interested him, and one of the things that interested him mostest was how human beings can change themselves to make themselves better.”

Flinx swallowed hard. Sensing the surge in her master’s emotions, Pip awoke and lifted her head to locate the source of the disturbance. Whatever it was, she decided, it was clearly not the harmless human seated nearby. “Better people?” Flinx asked tentatively of his guest.

“No-so,” Eustabe replied. “Better human beings. Those were his exact words.” Letting out a derisive snort, he reached for the bowl of snacks the hotel had set out on his chair’s end table. Detecting the heat emanating from his open palm, the snacks obediently leaped upward to fill it. As he munched something then moaned pleasurably, he squinted at the tall young man seated across from him. “He sufficiently interested in human changes to qualify him for your survey?”

Change. Make better
. Keywords underlying everything the members of the Meliorare Society stood for. The members—and possibly also those who, while not formal members of the organization, had freely assisted them in their work. Assisted them by contributing their own knowledge, expertise, experience—and in more than several cases, genes.

This hermetic Anayabi could be nothing more than a retired physician or decertified gengineer, or perhaps a curious biologist with a hobbyist’s interest in general eugenics. “What does this Anayabi look like?” Flinx could not keep himself from asking. “Skin color, eye color, body type, approximate age…hair color?”

Eustabe’s face screwed up slightly. “That all relevant to your survey?”

Though he was much younger than his guest, Flinx had in his comparatively short lifetime seen a good deal more. This experience informed his brisk response. “Does it matter to you if it is?”

The older man sat motionless for a moment. Then he nodded understandingly. Any additional words or queries would have been superfluous. “Couple centimeters taller than me. Average build, pretty solid for someone his age. Living away out where he does, I imagine he gets some serious exercise. Or uses a good toner. Skin color about like yours.” Flinx’s heart skipped a beat. An unjustifiable reaction, perhaps, but an irrepressible one. “Didn’t notice the color of his eyes. Black hair, cut real short. He and I are about the same length of sentient existence, I’d guess.”

Eustabe’s description made the subject sound as if he was also the appropriate age. “Any accent?” Flinx remembered to maintain the illusion that this was a proper scientific interview by feigning interest in the operation of his communit, which continued to record the interview.

“Unadulterated Gestalt, insofar as I could tell. If not native, then someone who’s lived here a long while. Long enough to sprinkle his chat with Tlel terms. That’s as clear a mark of a long-termer as you can find.”

Would his father give himself away as a possible collaborator of the Meliorares by showing such explicit interest in the adaptability and improvement of another human being? On the other hand, who on Gestalt would have reason to suspect that such questions might have their origin in such an illegitimate history? This Anayabi’s questioning and studying of someone like Eustabe might be perceived locally as nothing more than the tactlessness Eustabe himself had initially felt it to be. Harmless, if tasteless, chatter between one of hundreds of recluse settlers and a deliveryman. To ascribe to it anything of greater significance one would have to look at it from an entirely different perspective.

The perspective, he knew, of one all too familiar with the Meliorares and their work.

Though she was unable to locate the source of it, Pip fluttered her pleated wings as she shared her master’s increasing excitement. This Eustabe was presenting him with a long shot, Flinx knew. An extreme long shot. Almost as great a long shot, albeit on a much reduced scale of physical values, as relocating the perambulating Tar-Aiym weapons platform. His lips pressed against each other. If he could take off across a sizable section of the Arm in search of the latter, he could damn well spend another day or two checking out the former. More than one long shot in his past had proven worth the pursuing. Clarity Held, for example.

“Young Mr. Mastiff, sir?”

“What?” Dragging himself back from contemplation of several unrelated curvilinear forms, Flinx remembered that he was supposed to be conducting a formal interview for an unidentified employer. “Yes, this Anayabi, uh, fella of yours certainly sounds like he might fit the profile of the kind of folks we want to include in our survey. Do you happen to have any additional information on him?”

Eustabe shook his head. “I just made my scheduled deliveries, that’s all. I never had a hundredth the interest in him-wise that he did in me. You can try researching him through the Shell, but it’s my experience that folks who like that much physical privacy take care to shield their personals as well. If you go looking, I don’t think you’ll much find.” He smiled broadly. “If he can fit into your survey, then I expect your bonus will fit into my account.”

Setting a secure, private link between their respective communits, both men worked in silence. While Flinx transferred the specified bonus credit to Eustabe’s personal account, his guest provided Flinx with what little additional information his personal sybfile contained on the hermetic Anayabi. The mostly speculative peripherals did not interest Flinx half so much as the coordinates of the settler’s residence.

A quick check showed that the locale in question lay at the extreme limit of a standard skimmer’s range. Its very remoteness was a good sign, though pre-arrival research had indicated how seriously many of Gestalt’s iconoclastic artists, writers, and self-proclaimed philosophers valued and protected their privacy and isolation. So, too, Flinx knew, would anyone who had once had professional intercourse with the Meliorares. Anyone with any common sense, that is.

He had to force himself not to utilize his own communit to link to the Shell, but to wait until he could once more access a public terminal to research the cryptic Gestaltian resident named Anayabi. He was at once disappointed and pleased to discover that Eustabe had been correct. There was nothing in the public records beyond the most basic listing to be found on anyone by that name. Only a single, terse, uninformative identification string through which Mr. Anayabi could be reached via the Shell. Nor did inputting the coordinates Eustabe had supplied produce any information beyond a location on a topological abstract. There was no description of the inhabitant of said location or his occupation; no mention of any family or category of abode. Like so many of his fellow settlers, the secretive Anayabi had elected to disclose nothing about himself beyond what was necessary to identify and record him as resident on the planet.

Was this notable lack of information simply typical of Gestaltian reclusiveness, Flinx pondered restively, or just possibly indicative of a man with something to hide?

As it turned out, it would take him at least one additional day to find out.

The headache that woke him before sunrise the following morning defeated his every effort to moderate the pain. The medications he always carried with him, the precisely programmed neural stimulator he wrapped around his head—nothing worked. He spent the morning, then the afternoon, then the evening lying in bed, alternately medicated to a stupor and uncomfortably asleep, as wasted as the day itself.

As always during such excruciating episodes, a fretful Pip watched over him. Though she had witnessed her master in the throes of cerebral agony many times before, she suffered through such repetitive episodes with as much concern as she had when he had first experienced them as a child. By the time both the pain in his brain and the side effects incurred from his efforts to mute it had diminished sufficiently for him to function normally again, night had fallen, along with any hope of accomplishing anything of significance in the small remnant of what had been a thoroughly dissipated day.

Even though he awoke the next morning feeling physically drained but otherwise all right, he held off proceeding until he was reasonably sure his head was not about to launch from his neck. Such punishing events would not drive him from Gestalt, and they would not deter him from his goal. Though it was hardly a reassurance, he knew he could die from a cerebral hemorrhage just as easily on Earth or Moth or New Riviera as he could on Gestalt. History and experience had taught him that no medical treatment extant could alleviate his condition.

However crippling his headaches became, he was not leaving Gestalt until he had exhausted every possibility attendant on the dying Cocarol’s words. Though he would resume by investigating the lead Rosso Eustabe had given him, it by no means represented the only prospect. Anayabi was not the only eccentric living in isolation on this world. Further digging might well turn up others.

The skimmer that arrived at the hotel in response to his requisition was not new, but it looked perfectly serviceable. He could have called forth his own transport, bringing it into town from its docking bay in the shuttle, but such a display of obvious independent wealth might have occasioned unnecessary and unwanted comment. No youthful, midrange fieldworker for an offworld company would be likely to have access to such an extravagance. Instead, it would be expected that he would have to hire the necessary vehicle locally. So that was what he had done.

Preliminary research had also suggested that it would be good form, as well as socially proper, for him to engage a native escort. He did not need a guide, of course. Once the coordinates Eustabe had supplied had been entered into its AI, the skimmer would navigate its own route to the described destination. While Flinx would have preferred making the journey on his own with only Pip for company, his extensive travels had demonstrated on more than one occasion not only how important it was to adhere to local customs, but how frequently they tended to prove unexpectedly useful as well.

The rented skimmer was not as fast as his own, nor as straightforward in its construction and controls, but it was built with an eye toward the terrain and climate where it was deployed. The familiar transparent plexalloy shield was heavier than usual and double-strength, both to protect against the weather and to further insulate passengers from it. A purely utilitarian vehicle, the unstylish craft was intended to convey people and cargo from coordinate A to coordinate B efficiently and without lugging any false pretensions along with it. Squat and unlovely, it would have drawn no admiring gazes on any developed world. Faster, flashier models were also available from the rental company, all of which Flinx spurned. As always, the less attention he drew to himself, the better he liked it.

Though indigenous escorts were available for hire in Tlossene itself, the agency that had rented him the skimmer suggested he contribute to the human-Tlel economy by engaging one from any of several outlying towns. With nothing to recommend a particular village over another, he logically chose the one that lay along the route his skimmer was going to follow anyway.

With the rented craft stocked with the limited supplies he would need for the journey, he performed a perfunctory routine check of its functions, made sure its internal vorec was properly keyed to his voice, set a bowl of treats on the floor for an eager Pip, and, with the minidrag munching away, directed the skimmer to lift off from the roof of the rental facility (one of the few nondomed structures in Tlossene) and head northwest to the town of Sluuvaneh. Ten minutes into the flight, assured that the craft was performing efficiently, he allowed himself to relax and spoon his way through one of the self-contained, self-heating meals stocked in the vehicle’s stores.

The country through which he was soon traveling was as beautiful and pristine as it was alien. Once beyond the last suburb of Tlossene, the semi-urbanized landscape quickly gave way to what a human would have described as unbroken boreal forest—albeit one that was twisted, angular, and all too blue. Gentle hillsides gave way to more rugged slopes cut by streams that were alternately rushing and raging. Gestalt’s denser atmosphere did nothing to inhibit the wild white water below. Given the planet’s modest and widely dispersed population, both human and native, he was not surprised by the absence of roadways. Transport by skimmer and aircraft negated the need for investment in such impractical and expensive infrastructure.