The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [30]
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