The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [90]
He smiled as the shuttle pulled away from the dock. “The medical community I move among is different from the medical community you’re talking about. Among the ‘practitioners’ I know, nobody shares info unless they get paid upfront.” His swagger abruptly collapsed into embarrassment. “I haven’t got any money to pay them.”
She sighed tiredly. His confession was hardly unexpected. “We’re supposed to complement each other, remember? You find somebody who knows something about either the thread or the implant that I extracted, and I’ll compensate them for whatever they can tell us.” She let her gaze roam the stilt-mounted towers and sweeping art-deco revival architecture that rose above the canals and lagoons the shuttle was traversing. “This is my vacation money down the drain anyway.”
Whispr was silent for a while before venturing unexpectedly, “I guess if you’re really interested in science—I mean really interested—it can get in the way of real life.”
She had to smile as they disembarked at the next shuttle stop. “Whispr, for someone interested in science, it is a way of life.”
He nodded as he led the way across the dock toward the nearest building’s climate-controlled access corridor. Off to their right a trio of two-meter-long white caiman were sunning themselves on the edge of the shuttle dock. Looking like a pair of undertakers preparing a corpse for embalming, a couple of lugubrious jabiru storks were pecking apart the remnants of some office worker’s fastfood lunch. Repositioning his backpack against his thin shoulders, Whispr slowed so she could catch up to him.
“If science is a way of life, give me hard liquor,” he told her decisively.
Whether quip or comment, she chose to ignore his assumption as they entered the building. The characterless corridor led into the depths of a nondescript ten-story commercial edifice. The poverty of the building’s clientele was defined by the structure’s lack of windows. Fewer windows meant no views of the water outside but lower aircon bills. Walking along beside her guide, Ingrid was not displeased.
“This doesn’t look too bad. Is this where we’re going to try and meet up with some of these contacts you’ve heard about?”
He chuckled. Even laughter, she reflected, was squeezed from his lips like exhaust from an old engine: breathy, muted, and sometimes difficult to clearly comprehend.
“There should be a rental office in the back where we can pick up a personal watercraft cheap and without having to present any ident except the security deposit and down payment. Keeping no records means no records that can be traced.” He indicated their discreetly severe surroundings. “We’ll have to do some hunting. The people we’ve come here to try and find won’t be found at a commercial address or hanging around a major downtown shopping area.
“For them, this is paradise.”
THE SMALL ELECTRIC RUNABOUT they rented could seat two only, with barely enough room behind the pair of ejectable, floatable bucket seats for their modest luggage. Though a good swimmer and comfortable in the water, Ingrid found the restricted dimensions of the rental watercraft more than a little off-putting. She was acutely conscious of the fact that decades of global warming had allowed not only crocodilians to move north from South America but also a troubling assortment of dangerous snakes, poisonous insects, and carnivorous fish. The two-person runabout looked hardly big enough to resist the attentions of a middle-aged anaconda.
Whispr seemed comfortable enough in it, however. At least with him doing all the driving she could relax a little and enjoy their surroundings.
After spending the night in a small hotel they started off bright and early the following morning. Less than an hour had passed before they began to leave the city and its flotilla of waterborne commuters behind.
They were heading