Alan Dean Foster - The Human Blend

The Black Hole

Cachalot

Dark Star

The Metrognome and Other Stories

Midworld

No Crystal Tears

Sentenced to Prism

Star Wars: Splinter of the Minds Eye

Star Trek Logs One-Ten

Voyage to the City of the Dead

Who Needs Enemies?

With Friends Like These

Mad Amos

The Howling Stones

Parallelites

Star Wars: The Approaching Storm

Impossible Places

Exceptions to Reality

THE ICERIGGER TRILOGY

Icerigger

Mission to Moulokin

The Deluge Drivers

THE ADVENTURES OF FLINX OF THE COMMONWEALTH

For Love of Mother-Not

The Tar-Aiyam Krang

Orphan Star

The End of Matter

Bloodhype

Flinx in Flux

Mid-Flinx

Reunion

Flinxs Folly

Sliding Scales

Running From the Deity

Trouble Magnet

Patrimony

Flinx Transcendent

Quofum

THE DAMNED

Book One: A Call to Arms

Book Two: The False Mirror

Book Three: The Spoils of War

THE FOUNDING OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Phylogenesis

Dirge

Diuturnitys Dawn

THE TAKEN TRILOGY

Lost and Found

The Light-Years Beneath My Feet

The Candle of Distant Earth

THE TIPPING POINT TRILOGY

The Human Blend

The Human Blend is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Thranx, Inc.

Excerpt from Body, Inc. copyright 2011 by Alan Dean Foster

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D EL R EY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Body, Inc. by Alan Dean Foster. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foster, Alan Dean.
The human blend / Alan Dean Foster.
p. cm. (The tipping point trilogy; v. 1)
eISBN: 978-0-345-52305-1
1. Regeneration (Biology)Fiction. 2. ThievesFiction. I. Title.
PS3556.O756H86 2010
813.54dc22
2010015541

www.delreybooks.com

v3.1_r1

For Allen Grodsky and Bill Skrzyniarz,
who prove that Shakespeare was wrong

Lets riffle the dead man. Jiminy scowled at the newly won corpse and hopped to it.

Viewed up close, the freshly demised Meld wasnt much of a prizebut then, Jiminy Cricket wasnt much of a thief. Neither was his occasional mudbud Whispr. As Jiminy slipped the still-warm barker back inside his shirt, the two men bent over the motionless middle-aged Meld whod had the unluck to be singled out as prey. Whispr was relieved the man had finally stopped gasping. In the deceptive calm of the Savannah alley where they had dragged the lumpy body, the dead mans penultimate air suckling had grown progressively more disconcerting. Now it, and he, were stilled.

Jiminy had not been certain the barker would work as intended. With a slapjob barker you never did know. It was supposed to identify anyone, Meld or Natural, who was burdened with a fib, pump, adjunct, pacemaker, flexstent, or just about any other variety of artificial heart or heart accessoryand at the push of a button, stop it. A barker meted out murder most subtle. More important to the wielder, it imposed death quietly. Once the barkers short-range scanner had picked the pedestrian out of a late-evening crowd, Whispr and Jiminy had trailed him until the opportunity to stop his heart from a distance and riffle the resulting corpse had presented itself.

Victim and murderers alike were Melds. Jiminys legs had been lengthened, modified, and enhanced with nanocarbonic prosthetics that allowed him to cover distances equivalent to obsolete Olympic long jump records in a single bound. Immensely useful for fleeing from pursuers. Awkward if you wanted to buy off-the-rack trousers. Each of his bone-grafted, elongated thighbones was twice the length of those belonging to a Natural of the same height. The high-strength fast-twitch muscle fibers with their bonded protein inserts that wrapped around his leg bones were three times normal thickness while the accompanying tendons had been fashioned from synthetic spider silk.

These melded legs had struck Jiminy with the casually bestowed nickname he had gone ahead and adopted as his own. Ostensibly he was a legitimate messenger, able to leap easily from platform to platform and street to catwalk across the multitude of canals and waterways that now crisscrossed Old Savannah. In actuality, they allowed him to elude all but the most persistent hunter. Evening to early morning was when he practiced his real profession. Was when he made his money resolute. Diurnal messenger boy was his mask, moonlight the chisel that chipped it away.

Unlike his friend who had acceded to a naming by acclimation, Whispr had chosen his own Meld name. His validated moniker was Archibald Kowalski. Everyone in his family had been bigin his family big serving as polite synonym for obese. Growing up an obese kid was bad. Growing up poor and obese was bad squared. So when the appointed legal hour of adolescence arrived when Archie could choose to stay natural or undergo his first legal meld, he chose to becomeslim. Not naturally slim which he could perhaps have accomplished with diet or even unpretentious traditional surgery, but unnaturally slim. Meld-slim.

Set beside the grand majority of complex meld surgeries, his was comparatively simple. They removed half his stomach and the majority of his intestines. In their place were inserted a fuel cell-powered post-digestive NEM (nutrient extractor and maximizer) that drew its energy from the fortified liquids he drank. It was complemented by a compact prefood processor. Nothing custom was requiredall were straight off-the-line components. They had to be. Even with the first-meld loan he took out to pay for them he couldnt afford anything fancier.

Since then, with the money he and Jiminy had aggrandized through their after-hours activities, Archie had been able to add more personalized bioganic components to the humeld that was himself. A carbo squeezer, muscle assists, and most significantly a full course of bone aeration treatments. The result was that while he stood nearly six feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds, he was according to all tests and measures perfectly healthy, from his heart rate to his skin color. A bonus accruing from his chosen meld was that his cholesterol and triglyceride levels were lower than a mudpuppys pooper. He and his whip-thin silhouette were nothing exceptional. Not when compared to the average Meldfar less when set beside one who was exceedingly customized.

He could slip through spaces between buildings where the police could not follow and enter openings too tight or narrow for more intelligent but less willowy thieves. Due to his everlastingly abridged weight he walked in a permanent hush. This practice of making airfalls instead of footfalls had led to him choosing the Meld name Whispr. But unlike Jiminy he had not had it wholly transliterated to his national ident. The census still knew him as Archibald Kowalski. Only friends and fences were acquainted with him as Whispr.