The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [99]
The expanding cloud of projections that continued to fill the room were as eclectic as the dwelling itself. Pink, pale blue, dark yellow—in appearance and content they favored the pastel as much as the obscure. Cartographic renditions in three dimensions shouldered aside slowly rotating images that were snippets of planet. Arcane chemical formulae vied for place of prominence with exploded schematics. Names accompanied portraits of Naturals and Melds that were individually framed with their own curriculum vitae. Little of it made any sense to the small audience consisting of an entranced Ingrid and a befuddled Whispr.
As time passed and they continued to look on, the froth of ever-changing projections began to condense. Portraits merged with reports, chemical analyses with designs, and geography with geology as rumor was reduced to speculation in a kinetic kitchen of cautionary collation.
Surely such a grand miscellany of information brought together from such a diversity of sources, Ingrid thought as the multitude of projections continued their compaction, must add up to something more than nothing.
Anxious to find out, Whispr took a step toward the woman hunched over the main console. “Don’t hold back on us, Ginnyy. What’ve you found out?”
The cheerful cartoon of a woman swiveled around to face them. “Found out? I’ve found out that I want nothing to do with what you two are trying to find out. You keep poking an inquisitive stick into a deep dark hole and you better be prepared for whatever comes crawling out. Maybe a gopher. Maybe a big snake. Maybe a swarm of Isula that will nibble you down to nothing from the toes up. Me—I like my feet, even if I do take a size forty-eight triple N and gots no toes.” She raised her left leg and wiggled the flattened, oversized appendage in which it terminated.
Whispr fidgeted. “We’re not interested in your feet, Ginnyy.”
Her head snapped around to face him. “No? You should be, stick-man, because they’re what happens when you pay too cheap for somebody to remeld an earlier meld. You end up with shoddy work, like me. You end up with the unexpected.” A short, thick arm waved through a couple of the nearest enduring projections. They broke apart like sugared smoke and quickly recoalesced in the wake of the dissipating gesture.
“Unexpected like this, for example.” Rising from the chair she walked into the midst of the colorful hovering projections and proceeded to single out one seemingly unrelated floating quirk after another.
“Here’s an inconsequential fragment of news about a fifteen-year-old boy in Kiev who coughs up a bunch of junk among which the attending physician finds this strange little object that he can’t identify. He puts it in a storage vial, seals it, and when he gets back to his lab to examine it further he finds it’s not there no more. An inexplicable disappearance, he calls it.” Taking a step backward, she entered another complaisant projection.
“More than a hop and a skip from Kiev we find something similar reported from the Shanghai Urban Ring. Subject is a sixteen-year-old gymnast. Here’s another, from the Gulf of Arabia. Lots more seemingly unrelated medical nonsense from Trincomalee, another from Seattle, two from Nairobi, a comparative plague of half a dozen reported from South Lima.” With a wave of a hand and a voiced command, the hazy images vanished back into the closely linked instrumentation that had given birth to them.
“Different countries, different continents. Male and female subjects. Some healthy, some not. All apparently unharmed by the actual devices, but none of the reports can state for certain because as soon as the devices’ discoverers move to examine them more closely, they’re not there anymore. Some of the doctors and other discoverers doubt that they ever were. Rather than report the impossible many of them account for what they’ve seen by explaining it as some kind of physiological mirage.” She was staring intently at the silent, listening Ingrid.
“But you don’t think they’re mirages.