The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [4]
Leaning toward Whispr as far as his monstrous lower limbs would allow, Jiminy sounded dubious. “Just looks like a piece of thread to me. Don’t ident what it’s made of, but that doesn’t mean anything. Looks like metal, but might be something else. Pretty slick piece of work, whatever it is.”
Whispr nodded as he carefully slid the excised thread into an empty storage packet. Lifting his right leg he drew a finger across the side of his shoe. Reading his vitals it unlocked and slid aside to reveal a small waterproof compartment. Carefully inserting the packet into the opening, he then snapped the sole back in place.
“I don’t recognize the material either, but small as it is the connector looks standard. All we need is a reader.”
Knees aimed forward, Jiminy lurched to his feet. “Probably full of family pictures, maybe an address book: nothing out of the ordinary. No subsist, that’s sure.”
“Yo so?” Normally Whispr would defer to his more intellectually gifted associate in such matters, but not this time. “If that’s all that’s on it, then why go to so much trouble and expense to hide it? Why not just keep it in the wallet?”
Jiminy hesitated, then nodded approvingly. “Good point. I’m with you on sticking it in a reader.” He glanced down one more time at the dead man. The ampuscated was not bleeding. “We’re done here.” He slung his pack over his back. “Let’s go play money tag with the Swallower.”
No one looked in their direction, much less confronted them, as they hissed out of the public parking structure on Jiminy’s two-wheeled scoot. Electrically powered like every other private vehicle on the city streets, the front end had been customized to accommodate its owner’s triple-length melded legs. Turning south out of the tourist area, Jiminy eased the scoot into a lane reserved for two-wheeled vehicles, set the automateds, and let his fingers relax on the U-shaped guide wheel as the road integrals took control of their direction and speed.
Relaxing in the padded passenger seat behind him, Whispr let his gaze drift away from the backpack containing the decoupled hand and to the city lights flashing past. As always at such moments, he enjoyed squeezing his eyes nearly shut to morph the glow into swathes of black-framed rainbow. Most of metropolitan Savannah’s development had been inland, to the west. Walking stilts, float lots, and other advanced hydrologic technology had allowed some expansion north and south along the coast, but the costs were prohibitive compared to moving inland to higher, dryer ground.
Steady acceleration soon had them out past the suburbs. They had entered the realm of floating towns, mobile villages, and the tropical vastness that had reclaimed the shallow land from what was left of inhabited Florida all the way up to the Chesapeake Bay. Isolated larger settlements utilizing the same climate-sensitive, flexible dike systems that protected Old D.C. formed oases of below-sea-level dry land that was scattered among the reeds, jungle, and powerfully resurgent mangrove forests. Eastward of permanent urban cores, massive hurricane barriers lay flat against the water, ready to be raised at the first sign of alarm from the weather service.
Whispr knew that the season was predicted to be comparatively mild, with no more than two dozen major storms expected to strike the mainland. Though not a 3M (modified Meld marsher), he rather looked forward to hurricanes. This because despite alerted residents taking the usual traditional precautions there was always destruction, which meant salable goods and material would be available for salvage.
Stopping for a celebratory early supper at a popular seafood restaurant, he and Jiminy encountered a busload of visiting Martians. Despite thickened black skin designed to absorb the sun’s feeble rays, specially melded corneas that protected their bulging eyes from Mars’s harsh UV light, greatly expanded chests required to accommodate four instead of two lungs, the respiratory reducing masks they wore (a Martian would drown in Earth