He had no better luck with the media in Oceana or Samerica. Exhausted physically, emotionally, and financially, he finally conceded the unlikelihood of convincing anyone other than the usual conspiracy nuts of the truth of his tale. Taking what remained of his gem money he bought a small house in a northern suburb of Manaus on the bank of the Rio Negro. Though even hotter and more humid than Savannah, the landscape and climate were familiar enough that he felt at home. Freed from the need to riffle to support himself, he settled into a life of subdued comfort; not rich but able to buy what he needed if not always what he wished.
Beyond his porch, pink dolphins cavorted. Maniped botos towed water-skiing tourists up and down the great tributary while magified harpy eagles guided unsteady parasailers over the protected canopy forest that still dominated the far shore. Generating turbines moored deep in the river pumped out power as well as accompanying sonorities that were reprogrammed every week lest the tourists grow bored with repetitive water music that was not by Handel.
As the years passed his slender frame shrank in upon itself until age and sun left him resembling a walking stick of beef jerky. Whenever the opportunity arose he would tell his tale to whoever would listen; tourists, children, fellow seniors, workmen—anyone who would tolerate the bizarre ramblings of an old Meld. The hundreds, the thousands of messages he sent to media worldwide were treated with universal disdain. Eventually he published the information himself, putting it on the Box for anyone to peruse. Only fools and swindlers responded; the former to expound their own absurd theories, the latter to try to wrest from the crazy old Meld whatever subsist they could scam.
The few who commented kindly were notably young and oddly sympathetic. From these he recoiled in increasing horror.
Surrounded by the beauty not only of the Brazilian Amazon but Brazilian women, he thought less and less of Dr. Ingrid Seastrom of Greater Savannah. More time fled, more years passed. Decrepitude, even for one who could afford rejuvenating manips, began to press down on him with its inevitable weight. Then one day he had a visitor.
Recalling the presence from previous encounters, he remembered Death as being taller.
Still stocky, still devoid of expression, but moving with a finesse that belied his age, Napun Molé stood on the porch facing the owner of the little house. Whispr’s first thought was to slam the door in the assassin’s face and make a break for the back room where he kept a small but still functional spray pistol. He had purchased the weapon a number of years ago because of his failing eyesight. It would fire only a few times, but upon discharge the oversized shells would immediately fragment to cover most if not all of a single room. He bought it because it did not have to be aimed.
But he knew he wasn’t as fast as he used to be, and judging from his looks the even older Molé would be faster still. Whispr could not have outquicked the hired company killer back in the Little Karoo and doubtless he could not outquick him now. He resigned himself. It was not as if he had died young or lived an uninteresting life. Besides, he was tired of looking over his shoulder every time he left the house to go to the market or stroll the riverfront boardwalk. Tired of always searching faces for signs of mind control, or alien eyes, or hidden purposes.
So he shrugged and stepped back.
“Go on. Get it over with. I’m pretty much finished anyway.” He straightened as much as his narrow aged back would allow. “All I ask is that you make it quick.”
Molé shook his head. “Can’t do that. She has too much she wants to say.”
The taller Meld blinked. “ ‘Say’? ‘She’?” He came forward until he could lean out the door. Molé did not try to stop him. Instead, the assassin moved aside.
“Bad memories of our previous encounters linger like a wart that refuses to heal. I would very much like to kill you. Instead I was charged with the task of merely locating you again. It was not easy.” Molé almost, but not quite, smiled. “You are very efficient at covering your tracks.”
“You’re not here to kill me?”
“Regrettably, no. Just to find you. I do what I am paid to do. Personal longing never enters into this work. Although just this once …” His voice trailed away and he sniffed. “A contract is a contract.” Turning to his right, he gestured.
From behind a guava tree a second figure appeared. Whispr sucked in his breath as she mounted the stairs to his porch.
Dr. Ingrid Seastrom did not look as if she had aged at all. She looked, in fact, exactly as she had on the day he had hurried to her office in hopes of getting police traktacs removed from his back.
“You look …” Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Molé had turned away from them and was gazing out across the river. “Come inside.”
He closed the door firmly behind them and locked it. She smiled and shook her head.
“There’s no need for that, Whispr. Molé is as firmly welded to his assignment as an anchor to its ship. He won’t bother us.”
“So you work with him now?” Though he tried to suppress it he could not quite keep the old cynicism from frothing to the fore.
“No.” She frowned. “I don’t involve myself with that aspect of the Maturation. If it even exists anymore. My work strictly involves, um, installation.”
“Mind control.” He slumped down in a chair woven from plantation liana.
She sighed. “It’s nothing like that, Whispr, but you should already know that. There’s no point in rehashing old arguments.”
The fingers of his right hand pressing against the angular side of his face, he stared up at her. “Why are you here—doc? To have a last laugh at my expense? Because you were right. Nobody believes me when I try to tell them about Nerens and what’s going on there. I’m just a crazy old man. Living this long is something I never thought I’d do—especially after hooking up with you all those years ago. So why not leave me alone? Why not just let me die in peace?” He could not keep from staring at her. “You look amazing. Advanced alien maniping?” She pursed her lips and nodded. “Huh. Sold your soul for thirty pieces of silver melding.”
She rolled her eyes. “I work out of Rome now. I had to leave Savannah years ago before people started noticing that I wasn’t aging properly, the usual youth melds notwithstanding. I could keep fooling my patients, but not my professional colleagues. It’s all right. I always wanted to live and work someplace like Rome.” She moved closer and he unwillingly drank in her perfume. “I’m here to make you an offer.”
“Look at me,” he muttered dourly. “I’m all aquiver with excitement.”
She smiled anew. “Same old Whispr. Listen to me, Archibald Kowalski: you’re one of the few humans privileged to have seen the heart of the Maturation. You’ve seen ship, space, visitors. Friends.” She held up a hand when he started to protest. “You’re suffering from advanced melditis and other diseases of aging. Alien biosurge technology can cure you. Make you youthful again. It’s not immortality, but it’ll do until that comes along. Some aliens die at forty. Others live for hundreds of years. There is only so much even they can do with cell manipulation and prosthetic melds. But if you come back to the Namib with me you’ll live far longer than you will here, and in better health. I’ve persuaded the visitors. There are things you can do to help.”
He stared hard at her out of failing eyes. “That’s assuming I want to help.”
She nodded her understanding. “You’re still suspicious. Do you follow the news? Haven’t you noticed that over the past years there are fewer riots around the world? Fewer serious confrontations? More cooperation. More hope? The changes are slow and incremental, but they’re real, Whispr. The aliens are changing us, and for the better. Each year there are more young people who are a little less afraid of each other. Each year there are more who advance to positions of power, who accept appointments to jobs where they can make a difference. They don’t know that they’re doing so, of course. They have no notion that their chemical balance has been altered or that their perception of the world aro
und them has shifted a tiny bit more away from the primitive.” She stopped to let him digest what she had said.
“Isn’t that an improvement? Isn’t that something worth striving toward? Even if it needs a little bit of a kick-start from off-world?”
He sat in the chair and brooded. Outside, a flock of scarlet macaws made its screeching way upriver, trending in the general direction of Colombia. Which way was he trending? He had nothing to look forward to except further gradual creaky decline and eventual death. No friends, no family, and he was nearly out of subsist. He couldn’t even riffle anymore. People would laugh at his clumsy efforts if he tried.
On the other hand, if he went with Ingrid and cooperated with what she called the “Maturation,” would he be betraying his own species? Or helping to advance it? There was only one way to find out. Reaching out, he extended a hand.
“What the hell, mind-muffin. I might even learn something.”
Taking his hand, she helped his frail frame out of the chair and with the same melded strength embraced him tightly. Spindly arms tentatively wrapped themselves around her.
That in itself, he decided on the spot, was worth giving in.
For Bill Skrzyniarz,
with thanks for proving Shakespeare wrong
BY ALAN DEAN FOSTER
The Black Hole
Cachalot
Dark Star
The Metrognome and Other Stories
Midworld
No Crystal Tears
Sentenced to Prism
Star Wars®: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Star Trek® Logs One-Ten
Voyage to the City of the Dead
… Who Needs Enemies?
With Friends Like These …
Mad Amos
The Howling Stones
Parallelites
Star Wars®: The Approaching Storm
Impossible Places
Exceptions to Reality
THE ICERIGGER TRILOGY
Icerigger
Mission to Moulokin
The Deluge Drivers
THE ADVENTURES OF FLINX OF THE COMMONWEALTH
For Love of Mother-Not
The Tar-Aiyam Krang
Orphan Star
The End of Matter
Bloodhype
Flinx in Flux
Mid-Flinx
Reunion
Flinx’s Folly
Sliding Scales
Running from the Deity
Trouble Magnet
Patrimony
Flinx Transcendent
Quofum
THE DAMNED
Book One: A Call to Arms
Book Two: The False Mirror
Book Three: The Spoils of War
THE FOUNDING OF THE COMMONWEALTH
Phylogenesis
Dirge
Diuturnity’s Dawn
THE TAKEN TRILOGY
Lost and Found
The Light-Years Beneath My Feet
The Candle of Distant Earth
THE TIPPING POINT TRILOGY
The Human Blend
Body, Inc.
The Sum of Her Parts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN DEAN FOSTER has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, Western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip & Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films including Transformers, Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels and media projects.
www.alandeanfoster.com
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