The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [0]
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
The Human Blend is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Thranx, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Foster, Alan Dean.
The human blend / Alan Dean Foster.
p. cm. — (The tipping point trilogy; v. 1)
eISBN: 978-0-345-52305-1
1. Regeneration (Biology)—Fiction. 2. Thieves—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.O756H86 2010
813′.54—dc22
2010015541
www.delreybooks.com
v3.1
For Allen Grodsky and Bill Skrzyniarz,
who prove that Shakespeare was wrong
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
About the Author
1
“Let’s riffle the dead man.” Jiminy scowled at the newly won corpse and hopped to it.
Viewed up close, the freshly demised Meld wasn’t much of a prize—but then, Jiminy Cricket wasn’t much of a thief. Neither was his occasional mudbud Whispr. As Jiminy slipped the still-warm barker back inside his shirt, the two men bent over the motionless middle-aged Meld who’d had the unluck to be singled out as prey. Whispr was relieved the man had finally stopped gasping. In the deceptive calm of the Savannah alley where they had dragged the lumpy body, the dead man’s penultimate air suckling had grown progressively more disconcerting. Now it, and he, were stilled.
Jiminy had not been certain the barker would work as intended. With a slapjob barker you never did know. It was supposed to identify anyone, Meld or Natural, who was burdened with a fib, pump, adjunct, pacemaker, flexstent, or just about any other variety of artificial heart or heart accessory—and at the push of a button, stop it. A barker meted out murder most subtle. More important to the wielder, it imposed death quietly. Once the barker’s short-range scanner had picked the pedestrian out of a late-evening crowd, Whispr and Jiminy had trailed him until the opportunity to stop his heart from a distance and riffle the resulting corpse had presented itself.
Victim and murderers alike were Melds. Jiminy’s legs had been lengthened, modified, and enhanced with nanocarbonic prosthetics that allowed him to cover distances equivalent to obsolete Olympic long jump records in a single bound. Immensely useful for fleeing from pursuers. Awkward if you wanted to buy off-the-rack trousers. Each of his bone-grafted, elongated thighbones was twice the length of those belonging to a Natural of the same height. The