The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [101]
“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.
14
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