The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [92]
As Whispr guided their boat into an empty berth at a public dock she found herself growing increasingly doubtful of their prospects. Macmock hardly looked like a hotbed of cutting-edge technology, medical or otherwise.
“You really think we have a chance to find out anything useful here?”
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have brought us.” Extending a slender but strong arm he helped her out of the watercraft and up onto the dock. Having acknowledged and recorded the rental’s ident, the dock’s automated steward was demanding advance payment for berthing privileges. Ingrid paid, using the new card she had picked up in order to maintain anonymity during the journey. Providing additional security an appropriately complex tailing algorithm would disperse the details of the transaction once it had been processed, thereby preventing anyone from tracing it back to the source. Shouldering their packs, they headed into town.
As they walked, they passed a number of working fishermen making preparations to take their special shallow-draft boats out into the vast Florida waterways. Several trappers were layering legally taken caiman and croc skins onto a preservation pallet. A small refrigerated cargo craft was loading cases of frozen, locally butchered capybara cutlets.
Passing swiftly overhead, a singular shadow caused her to glance upward. It had been cast by a patrolling raptor the size of a small pilotless drone aircraft. Noting the direction of her stare, Whispr shielded his eyes with a hand as he squinted at the sky.
“Harpy eagle. I’ve heard they do well in Florida since finding their way up here a couple of decades ago. Lots to eat. Must be hell on the local poodle fanciers.”
Every day she spent away from Savannah and in Whispr’s company was another day Ingrid realized how divorced her life had become from the comfortable world she had made for herself. “Are they dangerous?”
“To humans?” Whispr turned thoughtful. “Not that I’ve heard. Though if I had a kid younger than three I wouldn’t let it go crawling around outside with one of those killer canaries circling overhead. Just to be on the safe side.”
They turned down a main pedestrian walkway. It was flanked on either side by scoot paths. Since stepping off their rented watercraft she had seen nothing bigger than a two-person scoot. South of the Tampa-Orlando seawall there were no surface vehicles because there was virtually no surface left. For a long time now everything in South Florida from people to cargo had moved by water. It was a region where outside the artificial comfort zone provided by climate conditioning, everything moved slowly, in time to the rhythms of warm water and warmer air. What in a cooler clime would have been described as sluggish in the saturated tropics was regarded as only sensible.
Their present surroundings were all very colorful and atmospheric, she thought to herself. What they were not, was encouraging. She wiped sweat from her forehead.
“I’ll say it again, Whispr: this place doesn’t exactly strike me as being on the cutting edge of medtech development. Whatever metals they favor here, I don’t see MSMH being among them.”
He did not sound discouraged. “And as with any folk, Natural or Meld, who eke out a living on the knife edge of what’s barely legal, I’m sure there are more than a few townsfolk who’d be pleased to hear you say that. Sometimes, doc, anonymity is the best fertilizer.”
Making their way along the walkway’s edge, she stumbled over something firm and rubbery. A glance downward revealed a small brown corpse upon which a colorful assortment of tropical flies were enthusiastically banqueting. Where another visitor might have made a face or gone queasy she did not. As a physician she was comfortable with a vast variety of blood and guts. But neither did the sight inspire a gleeful chuckle.
Whispr spared the small swollen corpse a look.