Authors: Alan Dean Foster
“I never met a woman who didn’t feel she was fat. Unless she’d bought into a meld like mine. Even then, you sometimes hear it.” He turned to her, his tone carefully neutral so that she would not think he was trying anything. That lesson had been learned. “Thirty kilos or three hundred, it doesn’t matter. You all think you’re fat.”
“
You’re
the one who underwent an extreme slenderizing meld,” she shot back accusingly.
He kept his attention on the road ahead even though the roadster’s autopilot was locked. Steering, braking, and acceleration were controlled by the sensor strips embedded in the pavement. Here along the Atlantic coast such automated control was critical to preventing accidents from blocking the one major north-south roadway. Braced and reinforced to withstand the most powerful hurricanes, the vital transportation link was elevated high above the waters that lapped beneath. Where towns such as Gifford, Jupiter, and Lake Worth had once stood, porpoises now frolicked while swarms of protected sharks prowled among drowned homes and businesses.
“True, but in my case it had nothing to do with vanity. It was a decision based wholly on practicalities and necessity.”
“Which, as you have already said, you decline to elaborate upon.”
He looked over at her, taking his ease as he let the road drive the car. He only paid occasional attention to the roadway in case a police vehicle happened to put in an appearance. Now approaching the outskirts of Miavana, they had encountered only normal patrols.
“Just like I’ll continue to do so, so you might as well save your breath.”
Turning away from him and lowering her gaze, she caught sight of herself in the right-side mirror.
Fat
, she thought glumly. Having to endure an intentionally inflicted poor self-image while attempting to unravel the secrets of the thread was not a downside she had foreseen in making the hasty flight from home. She was half tempted to call off the whole increasingly bizarre business and return to the comforts of predictable daily
routine and her cozy codo. But only half tempted. The other half would not rest until she found out what, if anything, was contained on the storage thread of extraordinary composition.
“You’re sure you know people here who can help us find out what we want to know?”
Whispr nodded. “Like me, they tend not to hang around in any one place for too long. But they leave trails, hints, traces, and allusions. I’ll find them. I’ll find them, and you’ll pay them.”
“I’m starting to wonder if that’s a fair division of responsibility,” she replied coolly.
“Too late to wonder, doc. We’re here.”
Verbally, musically, and physically, the roadster signaled that it was returning control of the vehicle from pavement to driver. When the changeover occurred Whispr took command smoothly, taking the second turnoff as he guided the rented car inland away from the coast. Off to their left could be seen the slowly disintegrating towers, most of them residential, of old Miami. With their lower floors submerged beneath the rising waters they had long ago been abandoned to the unsympathetic tides of the Atlantic. Home now only to birds, hydrophilic animals, and a number of transient humans, the primitive steel and concrete of which the buildings had been constructed was crumbling bit by bit into the warm and persistent salt water.
The disintegrating debris formed an excellent foundation for spreading mangroves and new coral. Contented fishermen plied their trade among the architectural wreckage. Shuttled out from the city, boatloads of air-conditioned tourists gawked at the collapsing structures much as their Antarctic counterparts gazed upon calving glaciers. Alligators, caimans, and American and Orinoco crocodiles sunned themselves on decaying slabs of prehistoric retirement dreams.
Ingrid had never been to Miavana. Able to afford more expensive vacations, her brief periods of downtime had taken her to the more exotic and distant parts of the Caribbean. She had never traveled farther than Curacao, had not yet been to Europe. It was not that she was particularly a stay-at-home. “No time,” was the simple explanation she gave to friends who inquired. Like so many other nearby tourist locations, Miavana too had been skipped over. Until now.
Except, she reminded herself, she was not on vacation.
While periodically inundated throughout its history by hurricanes and the sinkage of land brought on by the pumping of too much groundwater, parts of the old city had once rested on actual semidry ground. Or so she had read. Now “the Venice of North America” existed solely on stilts and pilings driven deep into bedrock as the city kept reinventing and raising itself to stay ahead of the rising sea level. Except for a few irreplaceable monuments like the Doge’s Palace and St. Marks, the original Venice was of course long gone. It was now a destination only for enthralled scuba divers and a home only to those who had undergone full gill melds.
Throughout all the changes Miavana had retained its historical predilection for pastel hues. Leaving the rental roadster at an automated drop lot, Ingrid and Whispr joined a dozen commuters aboard a mechanized shuttle heading into the city proper. The sun was hot and the air clammy but inside the air-conditioned transport it was comfortable and cool.
“Where are we going?” she asked her companion.
His reply was not what she had been anticipating.
“We’re going to see a doctor,” he told her, plainly relishing her reaction.
“To get these temporaries removed?” She indicated her puffy cheeks and temporarily resculpted nose.
“That wouldn’t be smart. I know about the thread, but you’re one up on me, doc. I may look useless and act dumb, or act useless and look dumb, but I don’t miss much. One thing I do have is a good memory. You tried to access the thread, with no luck. Same for your unfortunate co-doc. So I’ve been thinking that maybe we should try a different approach.”
The shuttle slowed into port to unload a quartet of bored-looking commuters clad in business shorts, shirts, and protective hats. “What kind of ‘different approach?’ ” she asked warily.
“Well, if we can’t figure out what’s on the thread, maybe we can learn more about its composition. I’m thinking in particular about the piece of the same stuff you said you got out of the head of that girl you worked on. You said that it disappeared soon after you started trying to research it. That it was ‘entangled,’ or something.”
Ingrid nodded. “That’s right.”
Leaning close, Whispr whispered intently, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were more of such things floating around? Other nanodevices
made out of the same stuff? Find some of them and we might learn something about the thread’s origins, if not its purpose.”
“Yes.” Her heart thumped. “Yes, that would make sense, Whispr. Provided the device and the thread really are related, as their similar composition seems to indicate. But how can we do that safely? If I were to put out a general inquiry among the medical community, word would likely get back not only to the police but to the owners of the thread. They’d find out that somebody is looking into—into whatever it’s all about.”
He smiled as the shuttle pulled away from the dock. “The medical community I move among is different from the medical community you’re talking about. Among the ‘practitioners’ I know, nobody shares info unless they get paid upfront.” His swagger abruptly collapsed into embarrassment. “I haven’t got any money to pay them.”
She sighed tiredly. His confession was hardly unexpected. “We’re supposed to complement each other, remember? You find somebody who knows something about either the thread or the implant that I extracted, and I’ll compensate them for whatever they can tell us.” She let her gaze roam the stilt-mounted towers and sweeping art-deco revival architecture that rose above the canals and lagoons the shuttle was traversing. “This is my vacation money down the drain anyway.”
Whispr was silent for a while before venturing unexpectedly, “I guess if you’re really interested in science—I mean really interested—it can get in the way of real life.”
She had to smile as they disembarked at the next shuttle stop. “Whispr, for someone interested in science, it
is
a way of life.”
He nodded as he led the way across the dock toward the nearest building’s climate-controlled access corridor. Off to their right a trio of two-meter-long white caiman were sunning themselves on the edge of the shuttle dock. Looking like a pair of undertakers preparing a corpse for embalming, a couple of lugubrious jabiru storks were pecking apart the remnants of some office worker’s fastfood lunch. Repositioning his backpack against his thin shoulders, Whispr slowed so she could catch up to him.
“If science is a way of life, give me hard liquor,” he told her decisively.
Whether quip or comment, she chose to ignore his assumption as they entered the building. The characterless corridor led into the depths of a nondescript ten-story commercial edifice. The poverty of the building’s clientele was defined by the structure’s lack of windows. Fewer windows
meant no views of the water outside but lower aircon bills. Walking along beside her guide, Ingrid was not displeased.
“This doesn’t look too bad. Is this where we’re going to try and meet up with some of these contacts you’ve heard about?”
He chuckled. Even laughter, she reflected, was squeezed from his lips like exhaust from an old engine: breathy, muted, and sometimes difficult to clearly comprehend.
“There should be a rental office in the back where we can pick up a personal watercraft cheap and without having to present any ident except the security deposit and down payment. Keeping no records means no records that can be traced.” He indicated their discreetly severe surroundings. “We’ll have to do some hunting. The people we’ve come here to try and find won’t be found at a commercial address or hanging around a major downtown shopping area.
“For them, this is paradise.”
T
HE SMALL ELECTRIC RUNABOUT
they rented could seat two only, with barely enough room behind the pair of ejectable, floatable bucket seats for their modest luggage. Though a good swimmer and comfortable in the water, Ingrid found the restricted dimensions of the rental watercraft more than a little off-putting. She was acutely conscious of the fact that decades of global warming had allowed not only crocodilians to move north from South America but also a troubling assortment of dangerous snakes, poisonous insects, and carnivorous fish. The two-person runabout looked hardly big enough to resist the attentions of a middle-aged anaconda.
Whispr seemed comfortable enough in it, however. At least with him doing all the driving she could relax a little and enjoy their surroundings.
After spending the night in a small hotel they started off bright and early the following morning. Less than an hour had passed before they began to leave the city and its flotilla of waterborne commuters behind.
They were heading inland—wending their way into the swampy, semi-protected morass of steaming muck and swamp that had once been central Florida. The mix of Everglades, rain forest, and intrusive seawater now extended all the way across what remained of the peninsula to the island citadel of Fort Myers. Anyone in search of contiguous solid ground had to travel north until they hit the heavily reinforced Orlando-Tampa seawall.
Within the lush tangle of riotous greenery lay impenetrable mangrove jungle, kudzu dead zones, pockets of dry land long since colonized by invasive plant species from farther south, stilt towns that on a far smaller scale struggled to replicate the architecture and structural engineering of the city the two visitors were leaving behind, vast stretches of protected parkland and nature reserves, the isolated glitterflash of Seminole gambling islands, and the increasingly isolated suburbs of Miavana itself. It was to one of the most distant of the latter that a confident Whispr was now steering the nearly silent watercraft they had rented.
Another hour of watching little but greenery race past moved an increasingly restless Ingrid to ask, “Are we still in the city?”
“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.