The Human Blend (29 page)

“Look at her. She’s not the type to waste time rescanning the obvious. That doesn’t mean she’s going to find anything. But I can tell that she’s
looking. Looking hard. Looking serious. And there’s something else that recommends her.”

An increasingly intrigued Ingrid looked on as multiple data projections began to appear both in front of and behind their host’s station. “What else?”

“She hasn’t set a price on whatever she might find. That’s a sure sign of someone who’s secure in their abilities. If she didn’t think she could teach us a something or two she would have asked for a fat credit transfer up front.”

The expanding cloud of projections that continued to fill the room were as eclectic as the dwelling itself. Pink, pale blue, dark yellow—in appearance and content they favored the pastel as much as the obscure. Cartographic renditions in three dimensions shouldered aside slowly rotating images that were snippets of planet. Arcane chemical formulae vied for place of prominence with exploded schematics. Names accompanied portraits of Naturals and Melds that were individually framed with their own curriculum vitae. Little of it made any sense to the small audience consisting of an entranced Ingrid and a befuddled Whispr.

As time passed and they continued to look on, the froth of ever-changing projections began to condense. Portraits merged with reports, chemical analyses with designs, and geography with geology as rumor was reduced to speculation in a kinetic kitchen of cautionary collation.

Surely such a grand miscellany of information brought together from such a diversity of sources, Ingrid thought as the multitude of projections continued their compaction,
must
add up to something more than nothing.

Anxious to find out, Whispr took a step toward the woman hunched over the main console. “Don’t hold back on us, Ginnyy. What’ve you found out?”

The cheerful cartoon of a woman swiveled around to face them. “Found out? I’ve found out that I want nothing to do with what you two are trying to find out. You keep poking an inquisitive stick into a deep dark hole and you better be prepared for whatever comes crawling out. Maybe a gopher. Maybe a big snake. Maybe a swarm of Isula that will nibble you down to nothing from the toes up. Me—I like my feet, even if I do take a size forty-eight triple N and gots no toes.” She raised her left leg and wiggled the flattened, oversized appendage in which it terminated.

Whispr fidgeted. “We’re not interested in your feet, Ginnyy.”

Her head snapped around to face him. “No? You should be, stick-man, because they’re what happens when you pay too cheap for somebody to remeld an earlier meld. You end up with shoddy work, like me. You end up with the unexpected.” A short, thick arm waved through a couple of the nearest enduring projections. They broke apart like sugared smoke and quickly recoalesced in the wake of the dissipating gesture.

“Unexpected like this, for example.” Rising from the chair she walked into the midst of the colorful hovering projections and proceeded to single out one seemingly unrelated floating quirk after another.

“Here’s an inconsequential fragment of news about a fifteen-year-old boy in Kiev who coughs up a bunch of junk among which the attending physician finds this strange little object that he can’t identify. He puts it in a storage vial, seals it, and when he gets back to his lab to examine it further he finds it’s not there no more. An inexplicable disappearance, he calls it.” Taking a step backward, she entered another complaisant projection.

“More than a hop and a skip from Kiev we find something similar reported from the Shanghai Urban Ring. Subject is a sixteen-year-old gymnast. Here’s another, from the Gulf of Arabia. Lots more seemingly unrelated medical nonsense from Trincomalee, another from Seattle, two from Nairobi, a comparative plague of half a dozen reported from South Lima.” With a wave of a hand and a voiced command, the hazy images vanished back into the closely linked instrumentation that had given birth to them.

“Different countries, different continents. Male and female subjects. Some healthy, some not. All apparently unharmed by the actual devices, but none of the reports can state for certain because as soon as the devices’ discoverers move to examine them more closely, they’re not there anymore. Some of the doctors and other discoverers doubt that they ever were. Rather than report the impossible many of them account for what they’ve seen by explaining it as some kind of physiological mirage.” She was staring intently at the silent, listening Ingrid.

“But you don’t think they’re mirages. Do you, Ms. Thoughtmuch?”

Shaking her head slowly, Ingrid opened a sealed pocket and brought out the capsule. When the Inuit reached for it, the doctor shook her head
again and refused to hand it over. Their host was reduced to squinting at the tiny cylinder resting in her visitor’s palm.

“What is it?”

“Some kind of storage thread—we think,” Ingrid told her. “We haven’t been able to find a reader capable of accessing the contents, and it appears to be made of the same unlikely material as the implant I removed and that you just researched for us. If they’re all made of the same material, then somewhere there exists an engineering and manufacturing concern that’s figured out how to do the metallurgically impossible. Not to mention having developed a method for covering up whatever it is that they’re doing by employing quantum entanglement.” Repocketing the capsule, she gestured at the center of the room where the rapidly clearing air had recently been occupied by diverse projections of questionable content.

“Not only do we want to know who is behind all this, we want to know how they do it, and why.”

Ginnyy nodded sagely. “So would I, after having skimmed the information I just called forth. Except that I’m not going to go into it any further. Because I did manage to find at least three similarities in every recorded instance.” She paused for effect. “Every one of those now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t little gizmos, irrespective of locality, health, gender, ethnicity, or anything else, was removed from a Meld. Not one of them was extracted from a Natural. And all of them were young. The oldest for whom I could find a report was nineteen. The youngest was twelve.”

Whispr’s voice was pitched lower than usual. “You said you found three similarities. What was the other one?”

Tomuk Ginnyy’s lips tightened. “Every single young person who’d had one of these mysterious disappearing objects removed from their bodies had previously undergone a botched Meld that later had to be fixed. Without exception.”

Listening to the Inuit, absorbing her words, Ingrid was immediately put in mind of Cara Jane Gibson and her slipshod, bungled cosmetic meld.

“So what we’ve got is a clear connection between the nanodevices, bad meld work, and young adults.”

Ginnyy nodded. “Unless additional research turns up something contrarian, like non-Melds who show the implant or older adults who still retain it.”

“But what’s it do?” a mystified Whispr wondered aloud. “What are they for, these tiny machines that disappear if anyone tries to study them?”

“I certainly don’t know.” The Inuit switched her attention to him. “I don’t think I want to know. To me a combination of bad melds, unauthorized cerebral implants, and elaborate secrecy screams stay away, don’t touch, keep off the lawn. You two want to pursue this further”—she gestured in the direction of the shirt pocket where Ingrid had deposited the thread-holding capsule—“you need to talk to someone else. I’m just a small-time scanner and I can already smell that this is beyond me. Any additional follow-up calls for someone with more skill and more guts than I have.” She turned back to her console. “You need to talk to Yabby Wizwang.”

The visitors exchanged a glance. It was an ident neither of them recognized. Had they encountered the name previously they were unlikely to have forgotten it. Any instinctive reaction Whispr might have had he deftly repressed. New to the underworld to which he had introduced her, a less tactful Ingrid could not keep herself from grinning.

“You’re kidding,” she heard herself saying.

Tomuk Ginnyy did not smile back. “If you want, I’ll set it up. Yabby’s work doesn’t come cheap, but he’s the best. Compared to him, I’m just your local small-town directory service. Yabby, he’s true global. But before I initiate contact for you, I’ve got three requirements.”

Anticipating what one of the three might be, Ingrid was already reaching for her wallet. “Name them.”

“One, you pay me what you owe for my work today. Two”—she shifted her attention to Whispr—“if you find out what the hell all this is about, what’s behind it, and what’s going on, you share the information with me. But discreetly. I’ll set up a secure two-way contact for us. I’m intrigued, but I’m an old lady and I don’t want any trouble.”

“And three?” Ingrid pressed their host.

Some of the boisterous self-confidence seeped out of Tomuk Ginnyy. “You run a checkup on me, Mizdoc.” For a second time she held up one of her oversized feet. “I’ve got my own substandard slipshod meld. Maybe I’m no kid anymore, but I was once. For all I know I’m walking around right now with one of these teeny little cryptics in my own skull.”

“Based on the information you pulled together and just showed to us,” Ingrid reminded her gently, “you really are a bit too old to fit the indicated demographic.”

“I don’t give a narwhal’s bunghole—I want you to check me out.”

Repressing a smile Ingrid proceeded to do so, as thoroughly and effectively as she could without the appropriate medical gear. If Whispr could not assist directly, he did at least make a show of concern. And while he was showing concern, he also managed to swipe the activated, blank zoe strip he had purchased from the swamp strider across the back of the doctor’s bare right leg just beneath the hem of her shorts. Scarcely sensing the fleeting, featherlight touch, Ingrid Seastrom put the ephemeral contact down to a passing bug and ignored it as she continued her examination of their host.

The houseboat didn’t look like much. The confusion of tropical flowers and emerald-green bushes crowding the top of the single-story, flat-bottomed craft might hide sensitive antennae, or they might be nothing more than decoration. The ropes and vines falling down its sides and trailing in the tepid water might comprise part of a larger disguised pickup and broadcast array, or they might be used only to tie the boat up at isolated moorings or wharfs. Nothing about the sizable but sluggish-looking craft suggested that it was home and place of business of the individual whom Tomuk Ginnyy insisted was better qualified than anyone else in the waterlands, legit or illicit, to probe the mystery of vanishing cerebral implants from young adults. Or to try to penetrate the secrets of an incomprehensible storage thread whose composition verged on alchemy.

More than anything else, Ingrid thought as Whispr steered their rented watercraft toward the unanchored, unlovely boat’s starboard side, the exterior of their slowly drifting destination hinted at an owner/occupant who was slovenly and unkempt in his personal if not his professional habits. Its appearance certainly jibed with the doubtlessly made-up surname Wizwang.

Still, Ingrid reminded herself, it was unlikely Ginnyy had taken her money only to set up an appointment with an itinerant trapper or fisherman. There being no time to confirm from other sources the purported skills of the prober they were about to meet, they would have to render any such judgment themselves. She and Whispr could only hope the residents of the waterlands were not having a little fun at the visitors’ expense. She was tired, hot, sweaty, and still unable to get the last images of the badly beaten Rudolf Sverdlosk out of her mind.

As their boat’s bow clamp-locked on to that of the larger craft a high-pitched voice piped up from somewhere unseen. “Are you the two travelers Tomuk Ginnyy said she was sending to me? Because if you’re not, leave now before I release the bees.”

Bees?
a bemused Ingrid thought. Had their morning appointment in the middle of the swampy waterlands been made with a distinguished dissident prober or an amateur apiarist? Following Whispr out of their boat, she found herself standing on narrow decking bedecked with moss, mushrooms, and other fungi. She wondered if all the dense sprouting was intended as decoration or camouflage.

Maybe both
, she told herself as she followed her lean companion into a nearby opening in the windowless side of the boat. Seen from a distance, whether at the surface or from a satellite, the vegetation-covered craft would more than anything else look like an island of floating vegetation.

A welcome blast of cool air greeted them as they stepped through the climate curtain. The temperature on the other side was perfect; nothing like Tomuk Ginnyy’s arctic ambiance. Ingrid relaxed a little. Their host might be cautious, eccentric, and a celebrated hermit, but he was also human.

Eccentric, she soon learned, did not begin to describe Yabby Wizwang.

The shirt and shorts-clad boy who greeted them looked to be about ten. Curly of hair, amber of eye, slender of form, his suntanned skin smooth and unblemished, he rose and came toward them from where he had been sitting in a wooden chair whose butt-bowl had been scooped out of a single cypress stump. Ingrid smiled at the unexpected presence. Though never having practiced as a pediatrician, she had occasionally dealt with children and their inevitable afflictions. Putting her hands on her knees, she bent over to smile at him.

“Hello. We’ve come to see—I’m guessing maybe it’s your father?”

“My father’s been dead for sixty years, but if you don’t mind the sight and smell of advanced decomposition I expect I could arrange for you to make his acquaintance.” Though eye level with her chest, the boy was staring at her lower body. “Tomuk said you were a physician. For a Natural, you’ve got nice legs.”

“Excuse me?” she stammered in confusion.

“In due time and as necessary.” The boy turned and beckoned. “Come with me and we’ll get started. I usually allow up to five minutes for dim-witted gaping, but there are a number of things I want to get done today besides accommodating you, so you’ll just have to get in your quota of obtuse oculations while we work.”