It was midafternoon and crushingly humid when he stumbled into the isolated fishing outpost.
Dirty white, mussel-encrusted pylons supporting multiple nets speckled with electronic ministunners identified the dwelling as the home of a fisherman. Though licenses to work the broad stretches of the coastal preserves were heavily regulated, individuals or families lucky enough to have obtained one could make a good living fishing within their designated boundaries since large commercial operations were banned inshore. The majority of catches ended up in the restaurants and markets of Greater Savannah. Any excess was vacuumed up by the insatiable market of the Atlanta Conurbation.
Utilizing whatever posts, pilings, trees, and brush presented itself, a cautious Whispr slowly worked his way closer to the buildings. The cuts on his upper back throbbed. He could only hope some of the more exotic parasites to be found in the preserve had not already wormed their insidious way into the open wounds.
Outward appearances suggested that the unpretentious venture was doing well, though not making its owner rich. Fronting the water behind the wall of drying nets was a boathouse fashioned of premolded permeable foam sections painted green and brown to blend in with the preserve surroundings. A lack of sharp corners combined with deep-earth anchors kept it from being blown into the next state by the repetitious hurricanes that now afflicted this part of the Atlantic coast. The boathouse was connected by raised catwalks to a processing shed and, farther on, to a residence. Sprawling over several uplifted platforms the house looked as if rooms had been added on one at a time, one year at a time. More profits, more rooms, Whispr knew.
A pair of electric jetboats were visible bobbing inside the boathouse. Two adjacent slips were empty, suggesting that the owner/operators might be, unsurprisingly, out fishing. Whispr licked his lips. If he could get one of the idle craft started it would save him days of stumbling through the remainder of the preserve. It would also allow him to avoid the risk of trying to hitch a ride into town. Once your image was out and about, hitching became a risky proposition. Prior to picking up someone standing on the side of the road with their thumb out, a driver could run a hitchhiker’s image through his car or scoot’s information system as easily and efficiently as any police vehicle. “Borrowing” a private watercraft would be much safer.
Carefully working his way through the water with only his head above the surface he edged closer and closer to the boathouse. Once he thought he might have heard voices coming from the vicinity of the residence and he hurriedly ducked down behind a clump of enormous Victoria regina water lilies. No one appeared, however, and after a couple of minutes with only his eyes and top of his head visible he resumed his stealthy approach.
As he had surmised from his first glimpse the boathouse was deserted. Here in the middle of the nature reserve tidal current was almost imperceptible. The two docked craft sat almost motionless in the water. Trying to make as little noise as possible he used one of the dangling fishing nets to pull himself out of the water. Though it weighed next to nothing, even a melded strong man could not have torn the nephilia net. It held Whispr’s weight easily.
It felt good to be out of the water. Both of the jetboats should have standard ignitions. Out here in the middle of the reserve he doubted, he hoped, that there would be any reason to secure them with a code or password. With luck they would be fully charged and ready to go out fishing on short notice—or deliver him to dockside Savannah. Seeing nothing to differentiate between the two craft he stepped gingerly down into the nearest. While scrutinizing the embedded instrument panel his tired eyes happened to fall on a choice slice of Heaven.
An integral part of the hull’s shot-molded foam interior, the food compartment contained a couple of apples, several nutrition bars, tropical chocolate, and bottles of water and fruit drink. Since the compartment’s heat/cool circuit was off the latter were not chilled. A famished Whispr would not have cared had they been visibly polluted. Ripping off seals he drained first one fruit drink and then another. A bar of chocolate was followed at a more leisurely rate of consumption by a mixed berry nutrition bar. Moistening on contact with air, it was the equal of the finest meal Whispr had ever enjoyed.
“You! Whatch’u think you doin’ there?”
Crumbs of bar fell from his fingers as Whispr stumbled forward and jabbed frantically at the ignition switch. It buzzed once and the water behind the boat frothed as the noise of the engine rose to a soft hum. As he grabbed the wheel he looked back to see a middle-aged woman with three breasts and double-length melded fingers rushing toward him. She might have had the additional gland added for cosmetic purposes, or perhaps to help raise a brood, since she was being accompanied by a quartet of youngsters who ranged in age from ten into their teens.
“Git out of that boat!” As she gave vent to her outrage one of the older teens raised a tubular device and pointed it in Whispr’s direction. At the same moment, he gunned the engine.
Snapping free of the several catches that had kept it attached to the enclosed dock the compact, wide-beamed craft shot out of the boathouse just as the teenage girl let fire with the instrument she had been aiming. Ejected under high pressure, droplets of liquid fish stunner covered him, the boat, and the surrounding slough. Fortunately he only received a diluted dose. Had he taken the full brunt of the discharge it would have short-circuited every nerve in his body. As it was the charged fluid caused him to slump over the wheel. Calibrated primarily for bass and perch, the stunner that missed him and landed in the water immediately brought a hundred or so paralyzed fish floating to the surface. Had the goo penetrated any of the boat’s instrumentation it might have temporarily shorted it out as well. Fortunately the most sensitive electronics were either inherently waterproof or appropriately sealed.
Adulterated as it was, the electric liquid left him barely able to function. In Whispr’s case, barely was good enough. All he had to do was keep the boat on course until the incapacitating tingling left his body. It felt as if every extremity from his toes to his hair had “gone to sleep.” He fought hard against the lingering effects because he fully expected the angry fisher woman and her litter to come after their stolen craft. As soon as sufficient feeling returned to his arms and hands he found some tools and took a moment to smash the boat’s automated emergency locator beacon.
For once, however, he had caught a break. No chase materialized. Perhaps the family was unsure about the nature and capabilities of their boat thief. Maybe they believed that as a thief brazen enough to work in broad daylight he was armed. Or maybe their other craft was unseaworthy, or its power pack was discharged. Whatever the reason, by the time he found himself in the city’s outer, stilt-mounted suburbs, there was still no sign of pursuit. He did not heave a sigh of relief—it would have flexed the aching skin on his ragged back—but he was considerably eased in mind.
The sooner he could ditch the craft the better. Surely by now the family would have provided the police with a description of the thief and the stolen boat. Would it be accurate enough to allow the authorities to match the description with the images taken by Swallower’s security apparatus or any personal details Jiminy might give them?
He had no way of knowing that while the gentle ministrations of the Savannah police might indeed inspire Swallower to heights of ready compliance, his erstwhile partner and companion Cricket had long since passed beyond the conversational plane.
In olden times a thief might have waited until nightfall to abandon stolen transport. With the installation of automated metropolitan security monitors that could see as well in the dark as during the day, nighttime had ceased to be as much of a criminal’s friend. Whispr knew he would have a better chance of avoiding attention by losing himself among a typical workday crowd full of Naturals and other Melds than if he waited until after sunset when considerably fewer people were on the streets. He was not concerned about being singled out because of his particular meld. He was far from being the only representative of the artif
icially slenderized walking the streets of Greater Savannah.
After cleaning himself up as best he could with the gear that was available on the boat he pulled into one of numerous public riverfront piers and docked in a public parking slip. He took care to make it look as if the boat was properly clamped in place. Then he set the timer so that the catches on the hull would disengage in twenty minutes. If his good fortune held, the boat would slip free to drift downriver with the slight current, hopefully to be run over by a big cargo vessel or float out to sea. He could not chance just pushing it away from the dock because some good Samaritan might see it drift clear and intervene to alert its oblivious “owner.”
No one followed him from the pier and it was only a block to the nearest of the city’s silent, automated public transport lines. As he stepped on board, one or two fellow passengers glanced briefly in his direction, then looked away. While far from being coiffed and attired to shoot a cover spread for a fashion zine, he was less grubby than any number of the hundreds of bumelds who haunted every large conurbation. Without drawing attention to himself he did his best to hide his face as well as his body from the transport’s internal security pickups.
As protective measures both he and Jiminy had always utilized false addresses on all their official (and unofficial) idents. Aware of the delinquent nature of the individual they were looking for, the police would know or suspect as much. But it should still take them some time to locate his actual residence. Just to make sure and to exercise commonsense precaution, Whispr spent half the night working his way closer to his apartment. At no time did he encounter any evidence of either straightforward or surreptitious police presence in his neighborhood.
After confirming his ident the automated concierge let him in. The entrance to his apartment was nearly as constricted as the hallway. The four rooms he called home, however, were surprisingly large. More than adequate, actually. Their spaciousness reflected the success of his and Jiminy’s diversely disreputable nocturnal excursions. The apartment was well furnished, familiar, and comfortable. He was going to miss it.
He could not stay, of course. The police could arrive at any moment. Nonetheless, having gambled on their sluggishness this long he decided he could wait until morning to abandon his residence. After hours and hours of slogging his way through the wildlife preserves south of the city he desperately needed some cooked food and sound sleep. He would, he could, leave tomorrow.
As was typical among those who shared his vocation there was virtually nothing in the restful apartment complex that was not rented or purchased secondhand. Nothing, in other words, that he could not leave behind without a second thought. Setting the stove to cook as much food as it would hold, he settled down to wait the ten minutes until dinner would be ready. For the next couple of months he would live on the streets with occasional forays to safe, cheap apartments. As soon as the ruckus surrounding the tourist they had killed calmed down he would begin to look for another semipermanent place to live.
But as he found out the following day, as far as his immediate future was concerned, things were anything but calming down.
5
When he left the apartment for good the following morning, the backpack he was wearing was wider than he was. Autostabilization kept the spine spanner from flopping loosely against his back. Before bidding the apartment a last reluctant farewell he had taken care to eat a full meal and to shower and depilate thoroughly. The excessive attention to personal hygiene carried practical as well as aesthetic implications. With the police looking for him the last thing he needed was to attract the attention of his fellow city-dwellers through unusual body odor or distasteful appearance.
A glance skyward hinted that it might not rain at all today, though given what had happened to the climate over the past couple of hundred years any weather prediction made more than twenty-four hours in advance had to be taken with a grain of salt water.
The kind of qwikmeld he needed could be had at any of several dozen facilities scattered throughout the urban area. Clean, efficient, and reasonably priced by dint of intense competition, any one of them would be glad to fulfill his humble requests. Unfortunately they would also as a matter of course and due to legal requirements note his presence and the procedures performed. They would also record a potentially incriminating dollop of additional information, none of which he had either the desire or intention to release. Forced to opt between cleanliness, efficiency, and fair pricing on the one hand or maintaining his anonymity on the other, he needed barely a minute to make his choice.
He went to see Barracuda.
Though burdened with an unfortunate name for a melder, Barracuda Chaukutri had not let his moniker stand in the way of devoting himself to the motto by which he ran his business, which was “Any Meld, Anytime, Anywhere.” He was operating out of his third mobile surgery, the previous two having been separately confiscated by the authorities following incidents in which his semilegal melds had turned out less copacetic than some of their recipients had intended. This was most especially true of one who under Chaukutri’s fuddled ministrations had expired messily and somewhat noisily. Having somehow escaped sanction, much less incarceration, for that bungled bit of organ collapse, ’Cuda Chaukutri was for the third time once again back in business.
Suitably subtle inquiries led Whispr to a bus-size mobile food operation that was currently parked to the south of a major construction project. One of several mobile kitchens that slaved to sate the appetites of the site’s workers, it specialized in Indian-American food. It also provided excellent cover for Chaukutri’s true vocation. The small kitchen took up far less of the vehicle’s interior than appearances suggested. In addition to performing surreptitious melds Chaukutri also served up some mean pakoras. While his wife made naan up front her husband remade people in back.
The melder’s reaction upon greeting his sinuous visitor was less than what Whispr had hoped.
“You—go, go on, get away!” Peering nervously out the rear service door of the industrial vehicle, the jumpy Chaukutri looked in all directions.
Whispr slipped forward past the shorter man. “Look, ’Cuda, I know I’m a little hot right now but …”
“Hot? Hot!” The outer door hummed as it slammed shut behind the skinny visitor. It was reinforced and armored against forcible intrusion. Not the sort of vehicular entryway one would expect to find in a mobile kitchen. “You are not hot, my friend. You are incendiary! You are combustible!” He grabbed Whispr by one arm. “Get out of my place before proximity to you burns up all of us!”
Whispr looked down at the excitable little man. As a marginally competent if unlicensed melder Chaukutri could have had himself melded to stand taller. He did not do so because in a surgeon slightness of stature, especially in the hands and fingers, was a positive benefit. That did not mean he had shunned productive manip entirely. Greatly enhancing the melder’s already exceptional natural dexterity, each of his fingers possessed an extra pair of joints as well as terminating in a specialized and artfully concealed surgical tool.
As a comparatively unremarkable bit of melding they did not even draw Whispr’s attention. The fact that Chaukutri had fourteen fingers instead of sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty slimmer, smaller digits spoke to a desire not to stray unnecessarily far from the natural. Those who did notice the enhancements and commented on them were told that the extra equipment was intended to assist their owner in his work as a chef. This was accepted because the instruments employed by a surgeon and a cook were not all that different.
Swinging his backpack around in front of him Whispr dug into its depths and fumbled with the contents. The card he flashed at his fretful host glistened as its unique, embedded, irreproducible identification matrix caught the vehicle’s interior light.
As Whispr expected, Chaukutri’s anxiety gave way to a rapidly escalating surge of greed. “That’s a Hain Ltd. card. Stolen?”
“No.” As always, Whispr’s sarcasm was gently put.
“I acquired it with my hedge fund profits. What do you care about—its load, or its origin?”
Reaching out, the melder took the card and examined it closely, turning it over and over between his fingers as he did so. “Can I—scan it?”
His visitor had to laugh. “If you don’t, then you’re not the ’Cuda Chaukutri I know. You’re an imitation, and a bad one at that.”
“Wait here.”
Whispr watched as his reenergized host headed toward the front of the vehicle. He was uneasy letting Chaukutri and the card out of his sight, but the meld-maker had a reputation of sorts to maintain. He was an artist, not a thief.
On the other hand, it was evident from the semihysterical manner of his greeting that he knew his visitor was wanted seriously by the authorities and that there was probably a substantial reward attached to the slender fugitive.
Whispr tried not to let the extent of his relief show when a smiling Chaukutri returned and handed the card back to his guest. “I suppose in the end money always triumphs caution.”
“If it didn’t,” Whispr replied, “you wouldn’t still be standing here and I wouldn’t be talking to you. Both of us would be solid, upstanding citizens.”
When the mutual laughter this image invoked finally subsided, the biosurge wiped at his eyes. “All right, all right. You know, my wife keeps saying we should forgo all this and move back to Nagpur.”
“Why don’t you?” Whispr’s query was not in the least inhibited by the fact that he had no idea where Nagpur was.
“Because I’d have to live in Nagpur. With my wife.” Chaukutri looked at his watch. “This is all very jolly, but my feeling is that we are both of us in a hurry. What is it you want done?”
“What are my options today?”
Chaukutri turned and beckoned. “Come. Let us go shopping.”