Authors: Alan Dean Foster
By now a good portion of the bar’s population was engaged in ritual battle, motivated by increasingly angry words and fueled by various distillations of grains and tubers, not to mention a soupçon of exceedingly powerful synthetics. Naturals scuffled with each other and with Melds, and vice versa. An increasingly anxious Ingrid saw no evidence of any Natural-Meld sociocultural war here. Though on ample display, the loathing and dislike being exhibited was entirely egalitarian. Naturals bashed Naturals and Melds clobbered Melds with equal enthusiasm.
“This way!” Painfully aware that a superior intellect was as useful in
dealing with a conflagration of drunks as a bucket of magnesium powder was in putting out a kitchen fire, a concerned Wizwang hurried to lead his visitors clear of the escalating conflict. Hugging the railing that separated bar from swamp the three of them worked their way around the edge of the overwater platform, striving to make it to the exit before any of them could be caught up in the increasingly bloody wrangle.
Having chosen an inopportune moment to attend to a personal matter, the bar’s bouncer finally appeared in the entrance whose succor Ingrid, Whispr, and their host sought. In fact, he did not merely appear in the entrance—he occupied it. The initial attraction of heavy mass-muscle melds had faded as soon as it was realized that the caloric intake and exercise needed to maintain them required more dedication than most people were willing to contribute. However, the big muscle meld was still sought after by those for whom it represented a professional as opposed to merely a cosmetic enhancement.
Advancing with a menacing scowl while trying not to step on those who had fallen or been knocked down, the Fillie Gumbo’s long-haired bouncer began separating combatants by picking them up, pulling them apart, and tossing them aside. Since he stood over two meters tall and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter ton, none of the Naturals or Melds presently engaged in physical disagreement saw fit to contest the bouncer’s progressive deconstruction of the circumstances in which they found themselves. Cuts and bruises were overlooked and insults forgotten as the bar’s enforcer wearily plowed his way through the swiftly disintegrating skirmish. As near as Ingrid could tell, he never hit a single participant.
While rapidly dissipating, though, the widespread clash had not quite concluded. With her fascinated attention focused on the bouncer, she failed to see one of the participants stumbling in her direction. Fortunately the traditional fisherman Meld’s left hand, whose fingers had been maniped into a series of four reels, was not mounting any hooks. Melded to mute the glare off water, his maniped eyes were glazed. Adapted for waterproofing, the skin of his legs that was exposed beneath his ragged-hemmed shorts scraped roughly against her. Seeking safety from the potentially dangerous drunk a jumpy Wizwang darted behind an overturned table. Whispr did not.
“Hey, fack off, squint-face!” Despite a notable disparity in mass, her
slender companion unhesitatingly inserted himself between her and the weaving, oncoming local.
Lashing out as he spun around, the latter struck at Whispr with his reel hand. The blow hit home. Seeing his opponent still standing, the drunk looked surprised until he remembered that he wasn’t wearing any of his work hooks. Even so, the bare-reeled swipe was edgy enough to rip through the bottom half of Whispr’s thin tropical shirt and into the flesh beneath. He staggered from the blow. Astonishing herself, an infuriated Ingrid picked up a bottle and swung at their attacker. The wild swing connected with the fisherman’s nose, itself middling melded the better to allow its owner to cope with having to labor all day in high heat and humidity.
Blood flowed. She gasped. Not at the gush of blood, a sight with which she was intimately familiar, but at the realization that she had initiated it. All her adult life she had worked to stop such outpourings.
“Dear me, doctor,” a voice called out. “I didn’t realize that you, of all people, had also bought a ticket to this backwater travesty of primate interaction.” Having edged his way around the rapidly subsiding fight, Wizwang was beckoning to her from his latest place of concealment near the Fillie Gumbo’s entrance.
Regaining control of her actions if not her emotions, Ingrid resumed her jerky stop-start flight in his direction. As they retreated Whispr continued to position himself between her and the remaining brawlers. Though admirable, his incongruous chivalry proved unnecessary. The last of the fighters was either down, had given up, or like one overwhelmed Meld seeking to escape the attentions of the determined bouncer, had leaped over the railing to land with a percussive splash in the dark water below.
Safely outside the bar Wizwang hurried them past buildings that alternated between hopeful and ramshackle.
“My transport’s right over here. I’ll run you around the island and back to the boatel.” He glanced over at a panting, wide-eyed Ingrid. “Safer than trying to walk. The town streets are well lit, but so are too many of its citizens.”
“Thanks,” she responded gratefully. Her attention shifted to her other companion, who continued to remain alert for any further trouble. “Thanks to you too, Whispr, for …” Her words trailed away as she caught sight of something plastered against his skin where his lean flank had been
exposed by the flailing fisherman. Her lips parted and her eyes widened slightly as she recognized it.
“That’s a zoe.” Their eyes met awkwardly and he quickly looked away. His obvious discomfiture heightened her suspicion. Then she remembered something brushing up against her when, at Tomuk Ginnyy’s request, she had examined the insistent Inuit for a nano implant.
“You …” She stammered as she stared at Whispr. “You’ve been
wearing
me!”
From the time the ungainly, quiet Meld had first entered her Savannah office, this was by far the most outwardly uncomfortable she had seen him look.
“I—I couldn’t help myself, doc. Ingrid.” The look on his face was pathetic, his tone rife with heartbreak. “You know I’m attracted to you. Have been since when you first treated me. I know I can’t—I know you don’t want …” His voice trailed away into wretchedness, his halting words like pieces of shattered glass being dumped into a big-city gutter.
Torn between outrage and pity she struggled with a response as they stepped down into the quietly chuckling Wizwang’s small green-sided runabout. Their host’s unconcealed amusement rendered the situation even more embarrassing.
“But a
zoe
, Whispr.…” She stared at him. “That’s, that’s just so—
rude
.”
Utterly miserable, he said nothing and seated himself as far away from her as the little commuter watercraft would permit. She was unreservedly grateful that for once Wizwang elected to close his eyes and especially his mouth to the obvious, resisting what must for him have been an overpowering urge to offer mocking comment. Wordlessly he guided the small boat around the island and back to their boatel’s dock.
Though she knew full well what a zoe was she had never before been subjected to one. Leastwise, not to her knowledge. While perfectly legal, the deployment of a zoe implied consent on the part of the subject. What Whispr had done was akin to a kind of theft. Acting without permission, he had lifted an assortment of intimacies from her and placed them on his person.
Originally developed for use by emergency medical response teams, on contact a zoe strip took the measure of numerous components of the individual against which it had been swiped. It was the high-tech, biologically
sensitive, full-body equivalent of a tongue swab. The contaminants thus acquired could be analyzed in a lab or, if the activated zoe was then pressed against another person, used to transfer all manner of useful compounds from a healthy person to one who was ill. The degree of absorption, acquisition, and delivery depended on the strength of the zoe.
From the one that had been brushed against Ingrid, Whispr had acquired certain antibodies, pheromones, and other chemicals, including a tiny but measurable dose of estrogen and its related compounds. None were obtained in dosages strong enough to change him physically. The jolts he received from wearing the zoe were strictly emotional and mental; a kind of chemical pornography. Or so the act was viewed by those against whom it was employed without consent. As for the formerly unaware subject of the attention, Ingrid had made her feelings known.
She said nothing else. There was nothing to add. Reaching down, a disconsolate Whispr picked at one end of the adhesive strip until he had peeled enough of it off his skin for his fingers to get a grip on. Slowly, deliberately, and no doubt reluctantly, he pulled it off and tossed it over the side of the boat. In the absence of current it lingered there, floating on the surface like a discarded exclamation point emphasizing the gap that still lay between them. She was relieved when their host nudged his watercraft up against the small dock and she was finally able to disembark.
They ate apart that night. Morning brought an uncomfortable breakfast accelerated by hasty words. By the time they were back in their own rented craft and speeding through the waterlands toward Yabby Wizwang’s floating residence they were speaking to one another again. But the camaraderie that had begun to develop in the course of their journey south from Savannah had receded like the tide that lapped against the surrounding islands and pockets of vegetation. They were not quite formal with one another, but anything resembling a closer friendship had been set aside.
Smartly, Whispr did not push matters. The doctor felt wronged and made no attempt to hide it. There was nothing more he could think of to do beyond the verbal and physical abasement he had already performed that would better show the depths of his confusion and contrition. He would just have to wait it out, hoping that like a bad cold her anger and resentment would fade away.
In any case there was no more time this morning for further recrimination. Wizwang’s jungle-covered houseboat loomed ahead and Whispr
began to moderate their approach. As soon as their craft adhered itself to the floating bit of rainforest Ingrid stepped up onto the bow without waiting for him to lend a helping hand. A few bees swarmed curiously around her before heading off on their morning rounds. Looking on, Whispr amused himself by thinking that they were checking her out.
He had never held any interest in insects except for ways to avoid them. Instead, his attention was drawn to a second, battered, nondescript waterlands runabout that was fastened to the stern alongside their host’s own personal commuter transport. Did Wizwang have two such craft and they had simply missed seeing the other in the course of their earlier visit—or was the unknown individual who espoused mutual interest in such things as MSMH and enigmatic storage threads already here?
Then, as his gaze wandered over the dark water, he spotted the alligator lying motionless alongside the new craft and knew the answer. It was not the hulking crocodilian itself that offered the revelation but rather the small yet efficient vidup situated atop its head and between its eyes.
The individual with whom Wizwang had so carefully nurtured contact was already chatting with Ingrid when Whispr descended to join them in the main cabin of the houseboat. He grinned at the newcomer.
“Gator.”
“Sleep me with saurishians if it isn’t Whispr-man!” The reptilian figure responded to Whispr’s terse greeting with the astonishing toothy smile the other Meld remembered so well. Wizwang was plainly as startled as Ingrid by the instant rapport between the two men. Her lower jaw dropped while the eyes of the faux ten-year-old widened in disbelief.
“You two
know
each other?” Wizwang made an effort to recoup his poise. “I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised. There cannot be very many people who are aware of the existence of these implants, the storage thread, or the remarkable material out of which they appear to have been fashioned.”
Leaving a gaping Ingrid in his wake Gator walked over to Whispr and took the other man’s hand in his scaly fingers. Whispr eyed him guardedly.
“I thought you’d be dead, or in jail. I saw you get shot.”
“It was a near thing.” The Alligator Man tapped leathery fingers against his shirt-covered side. “My melded skin helped. Tough stuff. I did just get away. I did my best to get you to safety but until now I had no idea how you
had fared. Glad to see you made it out all right. What brings you to the waterlands?”
Whispr nodded toward their host. “You already know or you wouldn’t be here. Information. Trying to find out more about the storage thread I brought to you.”
“The contents of which our diminutive but knowledgeable friend here hasn’t been able to crack, either. Or so he’s informed me. When he told me he had been in contact with others who were familiar with the same supposedly unfeasible material I had no idea it might be you.” Looking back, he gazed appreciatively at Ingrid. “You’ve moved up in the world since our initial meeting, Whispr-man. How long have you two been …?”
Her tone frosty, Ingrid interrupted. “We have not been ‘anything,’ Mr.… Gator. I am Dr. Ingrid Seastrom.…”
“ ‘Doctor.’ ” Where eyebrows would have been, the narrow horizontal scutes above Gator’s eyes rose slightly.
“… to whom Whispr came for treatment of his injuries. He subsequently offered me the opportunity to try and read the thread in the hope that it might contain information he might use to obtain money with which to pay me for the services I had performed. I’d had a previous encounter with an inexplicable cerebral implant apparently manufactured of the same improbable material as the thread. Naturally, encountering another object fashioned of the same impossible material piqued my interest. From a purely scientific standpoint, of course.”
“Of course,” observed Gator, politely noncommittal.
“We subsequently agreed to see if we could unlock the mystery of both the thread and the material of which it had been fashioned by pooling our resources and working together.” Her eyes flicked to Whispr. “We bring different skills to the inquiry.”