The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [31]
The melder’s reaction upon greeting his sinuous visitor was less than what Whispr had hoped.
“You—go, go on, get away!” Peering nervously out the rear service door of the industrial vehicle, the jumpy Chaukutri looked in all directions.
Whispr slipped forward past the shorter man. “Look, ’Cuda, I know I’m a little hot right now but …”
“Hot? Hot!” The outer door hummed as it slammed shut behind the skinny visitor. It was reinforced and armored against forcible intrusion. Not the sort of vehicular entryway one would expect to find in a mobile kitchen. “You are not hot, my friend. You are incendiary! You are combustible!” He grabbed Whispr by one arm. “Get out of my place before proximity to you burns up all of us!”
Whispr looked down at the excitable little man. As a marginally competent if unlicensed melder Chaukutri could have had himself melded to stand taller. He did not do so because in a surgeon slightness of stature, especially in the hands and fingers, was a positive benefit. That did not mean he had shunned productive manip entirely. Greatly enhancing the melder’s already exceptional natural dexterity, each of his fingers possessed an extra pair of joints as well as terminating in a specialized and artfully concealed surgical tool.
As a comparatively unremarkable bit of melding they did not even draw Whispr’s attention. The fact that Chaukutri had fourteen fingers instead of sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty slimmer, smaller digits spoke to a desire not to stray unnecessarily far from the natural. Those who did notice the enhancements and commented on them were told that the extra equipment was intended to assist their owner in his work as a chef. This was accepted because the instruments employed by a surgeon and a cook were not all that different.
Swinging his backpack around in front of him Whispr dug into its depths and fumbled with the contents. The card he flashed at his fretful host glistened as its unique, embedded, irreproducible identification matrix caught the vehicle’s interior light.
As Whispr expected, Chaukutri’s anxiety gave way to a rapidly escalating surge of greed. “That’s a Hain Ltd. card. Stolen?”
“No.” As always, Whispr’s sarcasm was gently put. “I acquired it with my hedge fund profits. What do you care about—its load, or its origin?”
Reaching out, the melder took the card and examined it closely, turning it over and over between his fingers as he did so. “Can I—scan it?”
His visitor had to laugh. “If you don’t, then you’re not the ’Cuda Chaukutri I know. You’re an imitation, and a bad one at that.”
“Wait here.”
Whispr watched as his reenergized host headed toward the front of the vehicle. He was uneasy letting Chaukutri and the card out of his sight, but the meld-maker had a reputation of sorts to maintain. He was an artist, not a thief.
On the other hand, it was evident from the semihysterical manner of his greeting that he knew his visitor was wanted seriously by the authorities and that there was probably a substantial reward attached to the slender fugitive.
Whispr tried not to let the extent of his relief show when a smiling Chaukutri returned and handed the card back to his guest. “I suppose in the end money always triumphs caution.”
“If it didn’t,” Whispr replied, “you wouldn’t still be standing here and I wouldn’t be talking to you. Both of us would be solid, upstanding citizens.”
When the mutual laughter this image invoked finally subsided, the biosurge wiped at his eyes. “All right, all right. You know, my wife keeps saying we should forgo all this and move back to Nagpur.”
“Why don’t you?” Whispr’s query was not in the least inhibited by the fact that he had no idea where Nagpur was.
“Because I’d have to live in Nagpur. With my wife.” Chaukutri looked