The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [53]
To anyone familiar with such an intrusion the size, color, and shape of the entry wounds shouted the distinctive signature of traktacs. Only the police and the military had the authorization to utilize and the inclination to use such specialized stalking ammunition. It would therefore be presumed by anyone asked to treat such an injury that the patient was wanted by one official institution or another, else such devices would not have been inflicted on the patient. Whether they chose to treat the wounds or not, any legitimate physician was required to report such a request. It therefore behooved the increasingly uncomfortable Whispr to seek immediate relief from one who was not legitimate. This led him to seek out a mobilemed he knew well.
When he wasn’t playing the blues through the straight-line sax that had been melded from an additional radius, an operation that had left him with three instead of two major bones in his left forearm, Cyrene Pope (everyone who knew him called him Righteous) performed the work of a wandering physician. He did this only with what he could carry on, or as a part of, his profoundly melded person. Whereas in earlier times as eclectic a personality as Righteous Pope might have collected tattoos or metallic body modifications, such iconoclasts now accumulated a highly personalized diversity of melds. The musician-medic boasted so many he barely looked human.
Beneath his chin, a radical throat meld had produced an organic speaker. Linking to his melded forearm, it allowed him to amplify his music without the aid of mechanical supplements. While the fingers of his sax-arm remained perfectly functional, those of his other hand featured medic melds that allowed him to perform all manner of on-the-spot minor surgeries and bodily repairs. Attached to his lower ribs, his bloated flanks featured compartments holding medical supplies that could be accessed by rolling back flaps of self-adhering skin. In addition to the various skills he had mastered, Righteous was a walking dispensary. Very useful for treating someone injured on the spot, or who wished to avoid certified medical treatment. Licensed treatment was better, safer, and guaranteed by the government, but it was also intrusive. A fair segment of Righteous’s clientele preferred his makeshift surgeries to having to report cause and location.
Whispr found him on the riverfront plying both his music and his medicine beneath the old bluff warehouses. While some of the blocky structures could trace their noble commercial ancestries all the way back to the eighteenth century, they were all antique shops and restaurants now. Thoroughly gentrified, as were their patrons. That didn’t keep people from stopping to listen to Righteous’s music, or seeking treatment from him for scrapes and bruises, or furtively purchasing from his internal body stock the occasional semilegal recreational pharmaceutical.
Whispr waited beneath a sprawling shade tree on the faux stone riverwalk until Righteous concluded his business with a well-dressed young couple. As soon as the Naturals continued on their way, hand and drugs in hand, he hurried forward.
“Don I know you, mon-man?” Unlike many who chose to maintain at least one natural eye, both of Pope’s were full melds. One to aid in his medical work, the other simply to gleam large and bright while shining forth a gold-tinged beam of its own. To a devotee of cosmetic melds, appearance was every