The Human Blend

by Alan Dean Foster

  But not necessarily less effective.

  A range of hardy, salt-tolerant trees rose from the swamp. Choosing the densest grove, Whispr forced himself into its center. The nearly dry land from which they sprang beckoned to traditional North American water moccasins, copperheads, and coral snakes, not to mention dangerous intertidal immigrants from much farther south like the occasional anaconda. At the moment, serpents were the least of his worries.

  Finding a suitable groove in the trunk of a stately old oak, he half closed his eyes and set in motion a pair of melds that were wholly internalized. Half physical adjustment, half mental, when activated in combination they allowed him to dramatically moderate his heart rate. So much so that within moments his blood flow had been considerably slowed. Responding, his body restricted and concentrated the flow to the most important organs. One result was that unless it flew right over the top of him a police scanner would be hard-pressed to identify his greatly reduced heat signature as that of a human being.

  Sure enough, the searcher drone passed well off to the left without pausing to focus in his direction. A running man, or even one standing and breathing hard, would immediately have drawn the attention of the drone’s sensors. Concealed within the protective fold of his oak, Whispr did not.

  Nevertheless, he remained where and as he was until the scanner had vanished in the direction of the western horizon. Reviving himself and restoring the full flow of blood to his body, he noticed a faint glow in the scanner’s wake. Having nothing to do with the police search that was obviously in full swing, the faint light heralded the approaching dawn.

  Breaking from the cover of the trees he resumed his muddy slog cityward. While his slender shape would allow him to hide behind pylons as well as trees, daylight would make locating him easier. Only by losing himself in a crowd could he be confident of throwing off the search.

  How badly did they want him? If it was deemed serious, if the authorities were really determined, they could get a court order requisitioning copies of Swallower’s in-house security recordings. These would show his visitors clearly and from every angle. Once his face and form were flashed into every police file, Whispr knew he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without being scanned and identified by one of the hundreds of ubiquitous security pickups speckled throughout the state.

  To protect his continued obscurity what he really needed was a new face—or at the very least, a serious adjustment. Ideally, suitable anonymity called for a full-scale remeld. That much work would require money beyond subsist, of which he had little. As fond as he had become of his slim, flexible body, if it would keep him out of a Reducation Center he would gladly pay to pack on a few dozen melded kilos. He was far more attached to his freedom than to his shape.

  Along with having no money, he had nothing to sell. Leastwise, nothing that would pay for even the comparatively simple meld he needed. What he did have was a solid if unremarkable reputation in certain illicit quarters of the Savannah area, and excellent credit therein. Unlike Jiminy and other acquaintances, Whispr rarely bought anything he could not afford. His wants being simple, he had never been in debt.

  Now was the time to call those credits and cash in on that reputation. Added weight, a few basic facial manips, maybe a custom add-on or two would change his appearance more than enough to baffle the police. Of course, they were used to lawbreakers on the run changing their appearances. The eternal striving of the pursued to disguise themselves from their pursuers had stimulated comparable advances in criminology and police forensics. But if he could just acquire a few simple manips, Whispr was confident he could evade the notice of the authorities.

  After all, he told himself as he plugged onward through the swamp, it wasn’t as if he and Jiminy had stolen the hand of a president or a popular entertainer. Their prey might have been an important businessman, or at most a visiting dignitary taking in the tourist sights of Old Town. Surely nothing more.

  He was more interested than ever to see what was on that storage thread, though.

  But first he had to elude the police pursuit, then arrange for a quick manip and meld. Any mysteries contained on the thread would have to wait.

  As he splashed and fought his way through the reed beds and increasingly frequent patches of damp forest he wondered if there were any amphibs tracking him. A full amphibian meld, involving the addition of gills but the retention of lungs, was much more expensive and difficult to install than a simple lung-gill replacement. Usually, hydrophilic citizens opted for the latter and a round-the-clock underwater lifestyle. More complex amphib melds were reserved for the rich, or for full-time supervisors of the huge fish and shellfish farms permanently emplaced along the entire east coast.

  Because of their location amid the slowly but steadily rising waters of the Atlantic, low-lying cities like Savannah often had an amphib or two on retainer, if not a full staff like New York or Boston. There used to be whole squads of them working farther south in old Miami. But old Miami was no more, a badly sited conurbation lost to history and the rising waters that had inundated much of the Florida peninsula.

  He couldn’t recall reading or hearing anything about an amphib cop being part of Savannah’s police department, and the water in which he found himself was too shallow to permit a gill Meld to move about comfortably. Most likely, the police would rely on their scanners to track him down. Having already avoided one, there was a good chance no others were in his immediate vicinity. He had an opening now, certainly.

  As he slogged onward he wondered how Jiminy was doing. When next they met, an angry Whispr would have a few choice words for his leggy friend. Abandoning him like that. Why, it would serve him right if the cops picked him up and took him in for interrogation.

  Something stung his right leg. He flinched but kept moving. Farther inland and higher up in the warm waters of the Savannah or the Ogeechee Rivers there was always the chance of encountering piranha. In their vicinity he would still be okay so long as he refrained from splashing around too much. The bite he had just incurred might have come from one of the nastier river bugs that had migrated north along with their larger tropical cousins the snakes and birds. What he really feared was the candiru, though cases involving that horrific little parasitic fish were still largely confined to the more seriously flooded Deep South.

  He was feeling pretty good about his prospects until he saw the jaguar.

  3

  Just the nose.

  Fixing it wouldn’t require a meld. Not even a formal manip. Half the professionals in her tower were qualified to do the work. Rajeev would probably do it for free. Any man who could do a full limb graft (bone, cfiber, organotitanium—your choice of materials and colors, easy financing, no interest for six months) could certainly shorten a nose. For more than a year now his interest in her had encompassed all regions below the nose with an eye toward performing a procedure less complex but just as personal as a meld. They had gone out several times. He was good company, as were several of the other doctors and surgeons who had offices in the same tower. Ingrid preferred him to many of her colleagues because he was less inclined to talk business on a date. If only he could somehow resist the urge to talk cricket. Compared to the favored game of his ancestral homeland, the nuances of infectious diagnosis were a simple matter to explain.

  She knew she was natural-prettier than the average physician. What had been a burden in residency had carried over into private practice. There were prospective patients who hesitated to place themselves and their illnesses in the hands of a doctor who was more attractive than the majority of the population. Especially one who was a Natural. Some male patients tended to be either too reluctant or too eager to submit to examination. Age would take care of both problems, she knew. But for now it remained an ongoing concern. Patient unease, however, tended to diminish as her reputation grew.

  Despite the opinion of friends that she leave her nose alone, she was still tempted. She was aware of the importance of imperfection.
Nowadays, when anyone could be perfect, perfection was impossible to define. And perfection was the least of it. Pay the appropriate license fee and you could undergo a full cosmetic meld that would leave you looking like anyone you wished. After an initial flood of Marilyn Monroes, Sophia Lorens, Clark Gables, Belmondos, Rais, Washingtons, and others, the popular trend in purely cosmetic melding (for those who could afford it) had shifted to historical figures. That fad too had soon waned. It was all very well and good to look like the Berlin bust of Nefertiti—until four of them showed up at the same melding-out party.

  As the skills of gengineers and surgeons had improved exponentially, cosmetic manips had given way to practical ones. One of the first casualties of the new, more advanced procedures had been traditional sports. To be a three-hundred-kilo lineman was fine on the football field, but rendered the majority of one’s daily life uncomfortable as well as difficult. What was the point in undergoing a meld to be two meters tall when the next meld raised the average height of basketball centers to three meters? You could dunk, but you couldn’t enter most buildings. Or buy clothes, or ride the bulk of public transport. As for tolerating any flight on an aircraft that lasted longer than ten minutes …

  Gradually, inevitably, composite melds became more job specific. Slender elongated fingers for everyone from assemblers to pianists. Night vision for those whose occupations were nocturnal. A decorous layer of sculpted blubber for the Antarctic colonists. Ear enhancements for musicians and voicebox manips for singers. For professional drivers it became possible to actually give them eyes in the backs of their heads, though laying out the schematics of the requisite neural processors was much more time-consuming and expensive than installing the additional orbs themselves. For the first time, workers in the worldwide sex industry were able to—enough to say that the variety and kinds of melds were limited only by the imagination of those requesting such modifications and the skills of the surgeons installing them.

  Then there were the truly extreme melds. Those that were required to turn Homo terrestrialis into beings capable of surviving on Mars. Or even more remarkably, on Titan. Radically manipulated humans, but human still.

  Leaning slightly forward, Ingrid Seastrom once more contemplated her thirty-ish visage in the bathroom mirror. Though it continued to bother her she decided that for a while longer, at least, she would leave her nose alone.

  As she prepared to leave for work she spared a last quick glance out the picture window of her eighty-fifth-floor codo. The view encompassed the tourist district of Old Town and in the distance the waters that rolled in off the Atlantic’s continental slope. She preferred it to the panoramas on the other side of the building, no matter how romantic Rajeev insisted the sunsets were when viewed from his domicile.

  The elevator took her down past the consultation medical suites that occupied floors fourteen through ten. The six ground floors of the tower were occupied by two domain hospitals, one specializing in cardio and the other in neuromuscular. Between them and far below the building’s private residences was a single commercial floor (grocery, electronics, and more) and occupying the last two levels, the Great South Savannah Meld Center. Rajeev worked there while Ingrid’s shared facilities were on the eleventh floor. Their paths crossed more often in one of the building’s restaurants or its grocery store than they did in any of the manifold medical facilities.

  As she stepped out of the elevator and headed down the familiar hallway she passed colleagues and patients in equal number. Both groupings comprised Naturals and Melds. One might operate on the other, and vice versa. As in any successful medical practice Ingrid’s patients included both. What made her stand out from the vast majority of her colleagues and what had brought her practice a certain notoriety was a unique characteristic that had nothing to do with belonging to either social group.

  Dr. Ingrid Seastrom made house calls.

  Disregarding the remarkable advances medical science and gengineering had made over the past centuries, one executive patient had described this inimitable aspect of Dr. Seastrom’s practice as “true science fiction.” Never having actually encountered or heard of the ancient medical custom in person, she had first come across it when reading several novels set in an earlier, simpler time. Intrigued, she had proceeded to research the concept, only to discover that it still survived as a therapeutic relic in a few scattered locations around the planet. Resurrecting it for a couple of afternoons out of her workweek had done wonders for her practice.

  Thursday afternoon was one of the two she had set aside for engaging in the ancient medicinal enterprise. Some of the visits she made were pro bono; her way of fulfilling her share of the mandatory national medical service. Leaving her corner of the shared offices, she took the lift down to the first subterranean garage level. Like everything else in Greater Savannah it was tightly sealed against the eventual inevitable intrusion of the ever-rising Atlantic.

  Able to afford more than a scoot, her personal vehicle had four wheels. The built-to-order back end contained a complete portable medical facility, touted by its manufacturer as the “hospital in a trunk.” It was not quite that, but Ingrid could do in the field what most twentieth-century medical facilities required the contents of entire buildings to accomplish.

  Powered by a single battery slab her car could not achieve a high rate of speed, but it was more than adequate for traveling around the metropolitan area and taking her as far as the outlying suburbs. A good deal of the Carolinas and Georgia was still rural, especially those districts that impinged on national or international nature preserves, and many of their denizens could not afford to come into Savannah or Jacksonville for advanced medical care. It was while working among the poorest of her clients that she felt the greatest satisfaction. The government covered basic medical needs, but beyond that patients were on their own.

  Among the worst cases she saw were those involving botched melds.

  As a Natural, she was not expected to be sympathetic. All melds were elective, and many Naturals felt that those who chose to undergo such procedures could hardly expect understanding from their fellow citizens should adverse consequences result. That she was at all times empathetic always impressed her clients, be they highly paid businessmen or low income specialty farmers and fisherfolk.

  The afternoon was unexceptional, featuring a ten-minute pause to let one of the almost-daily equatorial downpours burn itself out over the city. She had read that there was a time in the past when such heavy tropical rains had been far less frequent in the southeastern states. But there had also been a time when Old Savannah, like Old Nawlins, had actually sat on dry ground instead of having to be raised up on stilts. Having grown up in such surroundings she felt perfectly comfortable among them, of course. Ancient history was full of surprising revelations.

  As the characteristically sultry afternoon wore on and she dispensed the usual much appreciated advice, recommendations, medications, injections, and minor meld repairs, her curiosity was stirred only twice. Once by an ill Natural sixteen-year-old boy who the instrumentation in the rear of her car diagnosed as suffering from dengue-h fever. She treated him and advised his concerned parents to bring him into the city for a checkup and possible isolation treatment. The second case involved a would-be professional model living in an expensive floating coastal codo whose melded left leg was showing signs of degradation of gengineered calcium sponge. An injection temporarily relieved the young woman’s discomfort and Ingrid advised her to seek a consultation with the original surgeon, with an eye toward a possible remeld. This advice was not received enthusiastically.

  The sun was on its way down and she was already contemplating dinner options when she parked in front of the house in the woods.

  It fronted a private forestry concern. Behind the house hectares of rocket pine thrust bright green needles toward the recently rain-swept sky. Gengineered to provide two harvestable crops a year on poor soil, rocket pine had replaced peanuts and tobacco as a ready cash
crop throughout many of the southern states. While the advent of electronic readers had replaced the need for newsprint throughout the world, no one had yet come up with an electronic substitute for paper towels or toilet paper. Additionally, private forests supplied incidental habitat for a far greater diversity of fauna than other farms while simultaneously serving as excellent buffers for nature and wildlife preserves.

  Runoff from the recent sticky downpour was still trickling into holding ponds and tanks as Ingrid got out of the car. With her medogic tucked under one arm she strode toward the front entrance, tiptoeing around the occasional puddle. Dinner was very much on her mind.

  The worried woman who met her obviously had other concerns.

  “I can’t believe anyone does this,” she murmured gratefully as she invited the doctor inside. Her comment was typical of the reaction Ingrid received on no less than ninety-nine percent of her house calls. “Thank you for coming on such short notice.” Turning, she led the doctor deeper into the spotless residence.

  “You’re welcome.” Ingrid never said “It’s my job.” If she did, the flow of gratitude tended never to cease and interfered with her work.

  A slidestair carried them to a second floor. The view out a flex window shifted continuously from one end of the property to the other. A few steps down an interior hallway and the mother halted briefly, waiting on a door to open.

  “It’s our daughter, Cara,” she whispered nervously. “She didn’t want us to call you. She doesn’t want to see a doctor. I think she’s embarrassed.”