Authors: Alan Dean Foster
Peering close he could see that the meld component his partner was carefully removing was an exquisite piece of work. Navahopi craftsmanship, perhaps. Or if it was an import, maybe Russian or Israelistinian. When one revelation after another came to light their excitement and expectations increased proportionately. As Jiminy’s work progressed, however, Whispr found his early enthusiasm giving way in his half stomach to a slow curdling of his dinner. It was becoming increasingly clear that what the Cricket was ampuscating was no ordinary meld accessory. This fertilized the rising suspicion that the evening’s prey might be no ordinary tourist.
Maybe sufficiently unordinary that others might come looking for him.
When the manifold processes of triple-R (Repair, Replace, and Regeneration) had first become cheap and widely available, people had opted for the best exterior matches to their truborn selves. It was only later, when flaunting one’s Meldness had become not only socially acceptable but
trendy, that such additional cosmetic expense had proven itself unnecessary. The prevailing sentiment became the same as that espoused by purchasers of costly private vehicles or fine jewelry. If you could afford an expensive bodily accessory, why not show it off? What was the difference between a tattoo and a blue you? So the titanium weave and carbonic fibers of the dead man’s prosthetic hand glimmered in the dim light that infused the alley unencumbered by the ancestral wistfulness of human skin.
It was work as fine and precise as Whispr had ever seen. The bonding of metal and carbon fiber to wrist bone, tendons, and muscles was seamless. It was impossible to tell where organics ceased and modifications commenced. In addition to permitting basic grasping, each finger had been further customized to perform a different task, from airscribing to communications. The hand of the dead man had been turned into a veritable five-digited portable office.
Jiminy was all but cackling to himself as he strove to finish detaching the piece from its owner. “Swart-breath, this is terrific stuff! Must’ve cost tens of thousands to compile and append. Swallower will give us six months subsist for it.” He leaned into his work. A surgically equipped Meld or even a Natural would have been finished by now, but the necessary additional installs would have conflicted with Jiminy’s chosen meldself. Anyway, he didn’t have the inborn brainjuice to be a medmeld. He was better at running. And killing. As was Whispr.
The difference between them was that Whispr knew it. He’d always been aware of his mental limitations. Maybe that was why he had chosen a meld that rendered him even more inconspicuous than most. Jiminy was an audacious, even impudent hunter. Whispr was shy.
And wary. As Cricket labored to finish the job, his slender companion glanced more and more frequently at the street. No cops showed themselves, no guides or handlers sought their waylaid subject. For an improv hunt it had gone very well.
The sweat that coursed down Whispr’s rapier-thin body did not arise from unease. The Carolina coast was sufficient inspiration for the perspiration. Anymore, it was hot and tropical all the time, no different climatologically from the east coast of central Brazil. In the old days, it was said, fall and winter had been cool, occasionally even chilly. Such weather was gone with the Change. Savannah was as tropical as Salvador.
Maybe, Whispr mused, he would have his sweat glands removed one day. He knew those who’d had it done. But the resultant requisite panting that was required to compensate for the meld was unattractive, and inspired too many inescapable jokes of the canine persuasion.
“I wonder what he did, this guy,” he found himself muttering aloud.
Jiminy replied without looking up from his work. “Some kind of scribe, maybe. Or accountant. He sure didn’t get by on his physical attributes.” He grunted slightly as he struggled to dissolve remaining connective tissue without damaging the linkages to the prosthetic. “Visiting from New York, or London. Hope he had the chance to enjoy some good Southern cooking before we made his acquaintance. There!”
The hand came off cleanly in Jiminy’s fingers. There was only a little blood. The Cricket was no surgeon, but he took pride in his work. Whispr made an effort to suppress his natural melancholy. He tried to envision the gleam that would come into Swallower’s eyes when he set all four of them—two natural and two melds—on the dismembered body part. For Whispr and the Cricket, he told himself with the slightest of grins, money was at hand.
It was as his companion was stowing their five-fingered prize in his scruffy backpack that Whispr noticed the thread.
It caught his eye only because the indirect light in the alley made it stand out slightly from those surrounding it and because he had been kneeling over the body of the dead man long enough for the cadaverish topography to become familiar. Had he passed the man in the street, had he stopped to converse with him, it never would have drawn Whispr’s notice. Time, light, and circumstance conspired to reveal it.
Leaning close over the body’s motionless chest, he drew a mag from one of his pockets. Slipped over his right eye, it automatically adjusted to his vision. Gently squeezing or releasing the muscles around the ocular orbit increased or reduced the magnification.
His interest had not been misplaced. Beneath the lens he could just make out the minuscule hinges that held the top and bottom of the thread in place inside the dead man’s breast pocket.
“Let me have your tweezers.” Without taking his eye off the pocket, he extended a hand toward his partner.
Jiminy gazed edgily toward the busy street as he fumbled for the requested
tool. When he was sitting down, the kneecaps of his elongated legs rose higher than his head, making him look more like his arthropodal namesake than ever.
“Here—what’d you find? Concealed credit stick?”
“Naw—I don’t know what it is. Sewn inside the pocket. Maybe it’s a storage device.” As the perfectly miniaturized hinges yielded to the pointed tips of the tweezers the top end of the thread came free. “Leastwise, one end’s got a connector. Tiny, but I can see it.”
Leaning toward Whispr as far as his monstrous lower limbs would allow, Jiminy sounded dubious. “Just looks like a piece of thread to me. Don’t ident what it’s made of, but that doesn’t mean anything. Looks like metal, but might be something else. Pretty slick piece of work, whatever it is.”
Whispr nodded as he carefully slid the excised thread into an empty storage packet. Lifting his right leg he drew a finger across the side of his shoe. Reading his vitals it unlocked and slid aside to reveal a small waterproof compartment. Carefully inserting the packet into the opening, he then snapped the sole back in place.
“I don’t recognize the material either, but small as it is the connector looks standard. All we need is a reader.”
Knees aimed forward, Jiminy lurched to his feet. “Probably full of family pictures, maybe an address book: nothing out of the ordinary. No subsist, that’s sure.”
“Yo so?” Normally Whispr would defer to his more intellectually gifted associate in such matters, but not this time. “If that’s all that’s on it, then why go to so much trouble and expense to hide it? Why not just keep it in the wallet?”
Jiminy hesitated, then nodded approvingly. “Good point. I’m with you on sticking it in a reader.” He glanced down one more time at the dead man. The ampuscated was not bleeding. “We’re done here.” He slung his pack over his back. “Let’s go play money tag with the Swallower.”
No one looked in their direction, much less confronted them, as they hissed out of the public parking structure on Jiminy’s two-wheeled scoot. Electrically powered like every other private vehicle on the city streets, the front end had been customized to accommodate its owner’s triple-length melded legs. Turning south out of the tourist area, Jiminy eased the scoot
into a lane reserved for two-wheeled vehicles, set the automateds, and let his fingers relax on the U-shaped guide wheel as the road integrals took control of their direction and speed.
Relaxing in the padded passenger seat behind him, Whispr let his gaze drift away from the backpack containing the decoupled hand and to the city lights flashing past. As always at such moments, he enjoyed squeezing his eyes nearly shut to morph the glow into swathes of black-framed rainbow. Most of metropolitan Savannah’s development had been inland, to the west. Walking stilts, float lots, and other advanced hydrologic technology had allowed some expansion north and south along the coast, but the costs were prohibitive compared to moving inland to higher, dryer ground.
Steady acceleration soon had them out past the suburbs. They had entered the realm of floating towns, mobile villages, and the tropical vastness that had reclaimed the shallow land from what was left of inhabited Florida all the way up to the Chesapeake Bay. Isolated larger settlements utilizing the same climate-sensitive, flexible dike systems that protected Old D.C. formed oases of below-sea-level dry land that was scattered among the reeds, jungle, and powerfully resurgent mangrove forests. Eastward of permanent urban cores, massive hurricane barriers lay flat against the water, ready to be raised at the first sign of alarm from the weather service.
Whispr knew that the season was predicted to be comparatively mild, with no more than two dozen major storms expected to strike the mainland. Though not a 3M (modified Meld marsher), he rather looked forward to hurricanes. This because despite alerted residents taking the usual traditional precautions there was always destruction, which meant salable goods and material would be available for salvage.
Stopping for a celebratory early supper at a popular seafood restaurant, he and Jiminy encountered a busload of visiting Martians. Despite thickened black skin designed to absorb the sun’s feeble rays, specially melded corneas that protected their bulging eyes from Mars’s harsh UV light, greatly expanded chests required to accommodate four instead of two lungs, the respiratory reducing masks they wore (a Martian would drown in Earth’s far denser atmosphere), and the other biogen mods necessary to allow a human to survive on the surface of the Red Planet, their appearance was no more outlandish than that of half a hundred terrestrial Melds.
Had they been visiting Titanites, now, Jiminy and Whispr might have stared. Titan’s melded natives were a rare sight on Earth because of the cost of traveling from their distant moon. But Martians—the two men paid them hardly any attention.
Besides, they were watching for cops.
Their waitress was on the upside of thirty, half blond and half redhead (straight down the middle), and four-armed. Looking at her, it was impossible to tell which were her born arms and which the subsequent biogens. Multiple limbs were a common meld useful in numerous fields besides waitressing, though all multiarms tended to be regarded by the populace at large as potential pickpockets and often treated accordingly. Sue-Ann (so said her nametag) was only interested in handling plates of fried catfish, fried shrimp, fried clams, and fried chicken, with fried okra on the side. If a customer was so inclined and sufficiently hungry they could also order their food served on a suitably flavored edible plate. Fried, of course.
Though they had not yet made the sale the two thieves felt confident in treating themselves. Whispr slipped onto a natural chair while his companion plonked himself down on a floor cushion. Though their table had been fashioned to resemble one made from an old ship’s hatch cover, it was capable of the usual multiplicity of adjustments necessary to accommodate the needs of dozens of different Melds. Jiminy was able to lower the half facing him down to chest level. The food itself was excellent and cheap, and no one in the country restaurant so much as glanced in their direction.
Equipped with four arms like the waitress, the Meld mixologist held court behind a bar that had been built up of slabs of welded metal cut from ancient hydrocarbon-powered vehicles. A real antique, Whispr thought as he studied it. Something that belonged in a museum—or in the back of Swallower’s shop, where advertised via the ugweb it would bring substantial subsist.
A brace of local oystermen hauled in. They didn’t flaunt their melds. According to the law, harvesting of oysters in the sloughs and bays could only be done the old-fashioned way, by hand and from small boats. One burly local had the three small fingers of his left hand transformed into a shell opener. A modest meld to be sure, but not one Whispr would want to have to confront in a fight.
The garrulous oystermen were interested in drink, not fighting. Chatting among themselves they sauntered past the Martians and spread out in front of the bar, a sunburned tide of braggadocio, boots, and body odor.
“Getting crowded.” Wiping his lips, Jiminy tossed the napkin onto his (inedible) plate, jacked himself up on his elongated legs, turned, and in two hops was at the door. He waited on Whispr. But then, he was always waiting on someone.
Thunder rumbled out to sea as they sped down the coast. Looking to his left from the rear seat of the covered scoot, Whispr could see flashes of lightning dancing beneath the moon. He hadn’t had time to check the latest weather report (he and Jiminy had been busy killing someone) and couldn’t tell if the storm was coming inland or crawling along a low pressure path northward. He desired the former. He liked the rain even more than he did hurricanes, though its arrival invariably triggered the usual jokes from bystanders about being so thin that he could stand between the raindrops.
Decelerating down an offramp Jiminy reassumed manual control of all the scoot’s functions as the highway’s integrals relinquished control. Here out in the labyrinth of canals, natural drainage channels, sloughs, patches of dense forest, and surviving high ground, traffic shrank to near nothing. Raised above the swamp and water on pylons of honeycomb foam, the side slip was barely wide enough for the scoot and far too narrow to accommodate a car. Its slenderness was not a problem for the isolated commuters and fisherfolk who lived in this delta since most commuted to the city via hydroskim. Greater Savannah’s waterways were always more forgiving than the fixed coast roads, and never closed for repair. Off in the distance and illuminated by the moon a big six-masted container ship was slowly advancing landward, on course for Savannah port.