The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [102]
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.”
Whispr could only stare speechlessly. Yabby Wizwang was the most perfect Meld he had ever seen.
When he pointed that out to his companion, Ingrid at first refused to believe it.
“How can you tell?” she whispered as she waited for him to catch up to her. “He looks exactly like a Natural child.”
“That’s the beauty of it.” As a lifelong Meld himself Whispr did not try to hide his admiration for the culmination of innumerable surgical intercessions that their host represented. “Maniping someone to look like a Meld is nothing. Doing a Meld that perfectly mimics a Natural requires not just money but real skill.” He nodded at the childish figure that was leading them deeper into the bowels of the foliage-draped craft. “Whatever surgeon or group of biosurges did this were artists as much as doctors.”
Ingrid was still reluctant to countenance her companion’s conclusions. “I have to ask,” she blurted in the direction of their host, regardless of how the query might be taken, “but how old are you?”
The boy looked back over his shoulder. “Seventy-four next month, Legs. And just so you should know, there’s one part of me that hasn’t been maniped. You’ve got at least an hour to guess which it is.”
Definitely not ten years old, she swore then and there. But why invest what must have been an enormous amount of time, money, and suffering—for this? To look like a child permanently? In the course of her studies and her career she had encountered hundreds of Melds, but never one like this. There was no suggestion, at least not yet, that their host fancied himself Peter Pan or some other notable child character from literature or the arts. Why then go through everything that must have been required in order to achieve this particular, peculiar, intentionally stunting Meld? She had to ask that, too, and also about the origin of his outré moniker.
They descended a stairway that soon opened into a room below the waterline. It was so packed with electronics there was barely enough room for its idiosyncratic owner and a couple of visitors. Wizwang settled himself into an ambient chair whose internally cooled padding folded affectionately around his limbs. There being no other furniture in the room his guests could choose between sitting on the floor or remaining standing. Whispr opted for the latter. Conscious of their host’s unsettlingly childlike eyes wandering over her from