The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [56]
Around him people of all sizes, shapes, colors, and melds wandered at leisure or with purpose in mind. Melded construction workers with huge muscles and oversized hands were repairing a length of rubberized boulevard. An impossibly long-limbed street vendor was hawking fast food from a cart whose clever design resembled a miniature nineteenth-century paddle-wheel riverboat. The solar-driven paddle wheel powered the cart’s cooker, refrigeration, and insistently flashing lights.
Many of the residents here were Naturals, but they did not comprise the majority of strollers. Not at this time of morning. Most of the casual walkers were teens. Able to attend soc in either the morning or the afternoon and do their academics at home, they were free to enjoy the rest of the sunny, humid day on their off time. In contrast to the workers they were made up of an equal number of Naturals and Melds.
It had struck Whispr on more than one occasion that each year the population seemed to consist of fewer Naturals and more Melds. That was the impression he held, anyway, however unscientific his own personal sampling might be. Certainly it looked that way when one encountered groups of perambulating preadults. All hung together, of course, Naturals and Melds mixing as freely among their age groups as did adults. In the first years of readily accessible and affordable melding there had been some unspoken segregation, but that kind of social shun had long since been relegated to the past. Nowadays boys and girls, androgynies and Melds, socialized without giving the interaction a second thought.
He found himself musing on beauty. “Natural” was in itself a kind of beauty to be admired. Adept and diverse as it was, melding could only advance beauty so far. Restricted to modification of the purely physical, it could do nothing to beautify an individual’s inner self. There was as yet no meld for personality, for a sense of humor, for wit or for compassion. Or for love, he told himself.
Invent that one and become the richest person on Earth.
Home to two hospitals, a fully accredited meld center, and medical offices as well as shops and dwellings, the main entrance to the tower he now found himself standing before boasted three levels of security. Not as extensive as one would encounter at a government building, but daunting nonetheless. He tried to put a hint of jauntiness in his step, to act as if he belonged. Very soon now he was going to learn the efficacy of Chaukutri’s melds and see if they were sufficient to fool general public security. Given the exceptional speed and ferocious nature of the official pursuit that he and the late Jiminy had attracted, he had no doubt that the likeness of his premeld self now occupied a prominent place in every security and alert file in southeastern Namerica.
Singly or in couples or in small groups, residents, workers, and visitors were passing through building Security in both directions. Whispr tried not to make eye contact, did his best to avoid drawing any casual glances in his direction, and struggled to blend in with the crowd. This was made easier because his melds were not radical, especially when compared to some that were being discharged from the tower’s hospital facilities. One way or another, in a hurry or taking their time, every one of the building’s occupants or visitors had a destination in mind that likely did not cause them to all but quiver in a rictus of anxiety. That unsettled state of mind was reserved, Whispr was certain, solely for him. The deeper into the structure he progressed, the more he was certain he could not go through