The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [111]
“You …” She stammered as she stared at Whispr. “You’ve been wearing me!”
From the time the ungainly, quiet Meld had first entered her Savannah office, this was by far the most outwardly uncomfortable she had seen him look.
“I—I couldn’t help myself, doc. Ingrid.” The look on his face was pathetic, his tone rife with heartbreak. “You know I’m attracted to you. Have been since when you first treated me. I know I can’t—I know you don’t want …” His voice trailed away into wretchedness, his halting words like pieces of shattered glass being dumped into a big-city gutter.
Torn between outrage and pity she struggled with a response as they stepped down into the quietly chuckling Wizwang’s small green-sided runabout. Their host’s unconcealed amusement rendered the situation even more embarrassing.
“But a zoe, Whispr.…” She stared at him. “That’s, that’s just so—rude.”
Utterly miserable, he said nothing and seated himself as far away from her as the little commuter watercraft would permit. She was unreservedly grateful that for once Wizwang elected to close his eyes and especially his mouth to the obvious, resisting what must for him have been an overpowering urge to offer mocking comment. Wordlessly he guided the small boat around the island and back to their boatel’s dock.
Though she knew full well what a zoe was she had never before been subjected to one. Leastwise, not to her knowledge. While perfectly legal, the deployment of a zoe implied consent on the part of the subject. What Whispr had done was akin to a kind of theft. Acting without permission, he had lifted an assortment of intimacies from her and placed them on his person.
Originally developed for use by emergency medical response teams, on contact a zoe strip took the measure of numerous components of the individual against which it had been swiped. It was the high-tech, biologically sensitive, full-body equivalent of a tongue swab. The contaminants thus acquired could be analyzed in a lab or, if the activated zoe was then pressed against another person, used to transfer all manner of useful compounds from a healthy person to one who was ill. The degree of absorption, acquisition, and delivery depended on the strength of the zoe.
From the one that had been brushed against Ingrid, Whispr had acquired certain antibodies, pheromones, and other chemicals, including a tiny but measurable dose of estrogen and its related compounds. None were obtained in dosages strong enough to change him physically. The jolts he received from wearing the zoe were strictly emotional and mental; a kind of chemical pornography. Or so the act was viewed by those against whom it was employed without consent. As for the formerly unaware subject of the attention, Ingrid had made her feelings known.
She said nothing else. There was nothing to add. Reaching down, a disconsolate Whispr picked at one end of the adhesive strip until he had peeled enough of it off his skin for his fingers to get a grip on. Slowly, deliberately, and no doubt reluctantly, he pulled it off and tossed it over the side of the boat. In the absence of current it lingered there, floating on the surface like a discarded exclamation point emphasizing the gap that still lay between them. She was relieved when their host nudged his watercraft up against the small dock and she was finally able to disembark.
They ate apart that night. Morning brought an uncomfortable breakfast accelerated by hasty words. By the time they were back in their own rented craft and speeding through the waterlands toward Yabby Wizwang’s floating residence they were speaking to one another again. But the camaraderie that had begun to develop in the course of their journey south from Savannah had receded like the tide that lapped against the surrounding islands and pockets of vegetation. They were not quite formal with one another, but anything resembling a closer friendship had been set aside.