The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [88]
THE OBJECT OF THE SAVANNAH police department’s interested but not as yet overly anxious search had spent some very early morning hours changing her hairstyle and hue, eye color, and adding enough collagen and osseoputty to completely if temporarily alter her appearance. Trying her best to look and act like a typical tourist, she leaned back into the passenger seat of the silent electric roadster. A lightweight, wide-brimmed hat shielded her face while employing a patented heat transfer system to cool her head. There was no need for sunglasses. The color-shifting contacts she had placed over her eyes earlier in the day offered ample UV protection. They would also change tint every few hours, running the currently trendy optical gamut from dark purple to light amber.
“I feel fat,” Ingrid Seastrom grumbled for somewhere between the hundredth and two hundredth time as her left hand felt gingerly of the still tender skin around her artificially expanded cheeks.
“It wouldn’t matter.”
She looked over at the driver. Unfolded behind the controls, Whispr looked less alien and more normal than usual. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“I never met a woman who didn’t feel she was fat. Unless she’d bought into a meld like mine. Even then, you sometimes hear it.” He turned to her, his tone carefully neutral so that she would not think he was trying anything. That lesson had been learned. “Thirty kilos or three hundred, it doesn’t matter. You all think you’re fat.”
“You’re the one who underwent an extreme slenderizing meld,” she shot back accusingly.
He kept his attention on the road ahead even though the roadster’s autopilot was locked. Steering, braking, and acceleration were controlled by the sensor strips embedded in the pavement. Here along the Atlantic coast such automated control was critical to preventing accidents from blocking the one major north-south roadway. Braced and reinforced to withstand the most powerful hurricanes, the vital transportation link was elevated high above the waters that lapped beneath. Where towns such as Gifford, Jupiter, and Lake Worth had once stood, porpoises now frolicked while swarms of protected sharks prowled among drowned homes and businesses.
“True, but in my case it had nothing to do with vanity. It was a decision based wholly on practicalities and necessity.”
“Which, as you have already said, you decline to elaborate upon.”
He looked over at her, taking his ease as he let the road drive the car. He only paid occasional attention to the roadway in case a police vehicle happened to put in an appearance. Now approaching the outskirts of Miavana, they had encountered only normal patrols.
“Just like I’ll continue to do so, so you might as well save your breath.”
Turning away from him and lowering her gaze, she caught sight of herself in the right-side mirror. Fat, she thought glumly. Having to endure an intentionally inflicted poor self-image while attempting to unravel the secrets of the thread was not a downside she had foreseen in making the hasty flight from home. She was half tempted to call off the whole increasingly bizarre business and return to the comforts of predictable daily routine and her cozy codo. But only half tempted. The other half would not rest until she found out what, if anything, was contained on the storage thread of extraordinary composition.
“You’re sure you know people here who can help us find out what we want to know?”
Whispr nodded. “Like me, they tend not to hang around in any one place for too long. But they leave trails, hints, traces, and allusions. I’ll find them. I’ll find them, and you’ll pay them.”
“I’m starting to wonder if that’s a fair division of responsibility,” she replied coolly.
“Too late to wonder, doc. We’re here.”
Verbally, musically, and physically, the roadster signaled that it was returning control of the vehicle from pavement to driver. When the changeover occurred Whispr took command smoothly, taking the second turnoff as he guided the rented car inland away from the coast. Off to their