The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [94]
“In the meantime, as far as anybody is concerned we’re just tourists.”
“Okay.” Waving her key over the receiver on the front of the door she was rewarded by a soft click as it opened. “While you’re scoping out the town and dropping your inquiries I’ll be touristing my in-room facilities. Get back to me when you’ve learned something or you’re ready to eat.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You desire my company for lunch?”
“Don’t let it go to your head—or anyplace else,” she warned him. “I just hate eating alone. I have to do too much of it.”
As he turned to retrace the path to the lobby he left a thin smile in his wake. “Nice to know that at least I rank one step above ‘alone.’ ”
IF ONLY HE COULD THINK of a way to prolong this trip for as long as possible, Whispr mused as he followed an elevated walkway deeper into the older part of Macmock. Traveling around the country with a woman who was both more intelligent and more attractive than himself, having her pay for everything, was about as pleasant a set of circumstances in which he had found himself in quite some time. Eventually, of course, she would figure out that he was stringing her along. At that point she’d probably throw a little lady-doctor hissy fit and ditch him. That likely blowup would rouse no tears from him. He had spent most of his life being abandoned; first by family, lately by friends.
Until the inevitable confrontation he would enjoy the sights, the weather, the opportunities, the comfortable paid-for lodgings, and the good food. There was only one problem with the otherwise entirely agreeable scenario. It nagged at him like a cactus thorn that had broken off beneath his skin and begun to fester.
She trusted him.
No question about it. Oh, maybe she didn’t trust him enough to share a room with him, but she was essentially trusting him with her life. After all, there was nothing to prevent him from turning her over to those who would hold her for ransom, or to the government or private individuals who so ferociously sought recovery of the thread. So what if he didn’t learn what was on the thread or the details of its (according to her) unusual manufacture? He could pocket whatever reward or payment was offered for its recovery and vanish back into the familiar underworld of Greater Savannah. He could take any of those options. Except for one thing.
She trusted him.
Why this should nag at him like an allergic reaction to optistash he did not know. They were not old friends. She was not even a friend of an old friend—just someone whose professional services had been recommended to him. He owed Dr. Ingrid Seastrom nothing. As she had informed him, the minor extraction she had performed for him had been carried out pro bono. Okay—deactivating the traktacs, that had been a windfall bonus. Sure, he had promised to pay her for the work, but if he didn’t and just walked away from her, what was she going to do? Call the cops and explain that he owed her for illegally deactivating their tracking devices?
Trust, trust, trust—why did it plague him so? It wasn’t as if his conscience was any bigger than any of the rest of him. No doubt what he needed to make sense of it all was a morality meld. Except, to the best of his knowledge there was no such thing. Which meant that he was stuck with his own inescapable ethical recriminations.
Maybe it was the fact that no one of Ingrid Seastrom’s social standing had ever trusted him before.
You’re an idiot, he told himself. Why not just admit that you’re in love with her, or at least in lust? You know that isn’t going anywhere, and you know she’ll continue to reject you, yet you keep hoping. You keep fooling yourself. On the other hand, wasn’t that what love was all about? Self-deception, blinding oneself to one’s own fallacies and follies? You know that love is nothing but foolishness and self-delusion held in stasis.
Which,