The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [74]
As he ate and relaxed, his host ignored him. Seated at her home station Ingrid recited a steady stream of vorec commands to speed-whip through readouts and dimensional projections faster than he would have been able to read one. Occasionally he would look up from the ambient entertainment and its cone of constrained sound to peer across the room at her. Above her station he caught glimpses of rapidly merging sentences underlying swiftly flowing imagery. Multisyllabic expressions, technical terms, incomprehensible lexi accompanied diagrams and schematics as alien to his experience as the construction plans for spacecraft.
Leaving the entertainment projector running, he stepped beyond the boundaries of its focused sights and sounds and wandered across the room until he was standing behind her. A glance showed that the capsule containing the inscrutable thread lay on the small desk near her right arm. He could easily have grabbed, whirled, and fled from the codo. He did not. Instead, he waved at the colorful scientific projections and readouts.
“What is all this?”
She spoke without looking up. “We don’t know what’s on the thread, but unless my inlab’s gone completely haywire we do know what it’s made of. I’m trying to find out what company or government might have made a recent breakthrough in metallurgical research or the relevant high-pressure physics or both that would enable them to manufacture something like this.”
He nodded to himself. What she was presently doing he could not do. Not only was he unable to comprehend the information that was being mustered, he did not have the background, the knowledge, or the wherewithal to call it up in the first place.
As he stood and watched, his attention slowly shifted from the gush of incomprehensible data to the technical sorceress who was summoning it forth. She was wearing a loose-fitting one-piece lounger of some pale yellow airfleece material. Her new blond haircut was short and severe (the time and resources Naturals devoted to physically manipulating follicles never ceased to dumbfound Melds). What was visible of her body beneath the airfleece was anything but severe. He wondered why she wasn’t partnered. He did not know her well enough to ask. So instead of asking, he leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the back of her neck, his lips just brushing the short hairs there.
She whirled as if she had been shot. Her expression was such a clashing jumble of surprise, terror, and uncertainty that he almost burst out laughing.
“Don’t …! What do you think you’re doing?”
For once he did not need an interpreter for her words. “I kissed you.”
“I know what you did.” She had backed as far away from him as the chair at the box station allowed. “Why did you do it?”
Simultaneously smart and stupid, he told himself. Typical of her kind.
“To see how you would respond. Did you like it?”
She wiped furiously at the back of her neck, as if someone had spilled hot soup on her skin. “No, I didn’t like it, Whispr. And if you do anything like it again, if you even look like you’re going to do something like it again, our business relationship will be terminated forthwith!”
His expression excessively somber, he nodded slowly, gently mocking her without words. “Okay. Got it. I regard myself as suitably chastised. If you’re so outraged, how come you didn’t hit out at me?”
“I’m sitting down. I can’t reach you.” She started to get up. “If you’ll just stay there, I’ll rectify the oversight.”
Raising his hands defensively, he backed away. “All right, all right. Take it easy, mind-muffin. I promise I won’t touch you again.” He nodded in the direction of the thread. “Where I’ve come up from, money trumps sex every time.”
“Sex?” She found herself sputtering. The idea that this slow-witted vagrant, this street-scum, this stick-insect of a Meldman would even