Patrimony by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page B

of any age over the necessary minimum of forty. Flinx felt that he was likely to have more luck looking for distinctive, revealing social traits than for specific physical characteristics that might be nothing more than coincidence.
    Nevertheless, whenever any male who fell within the appropriate age parameters cropped up on his initial list, he felt compelled to run at least one cursory check of that individual’s history. Men who chose to live alone also came in for particular scrutiny, as did those companies that maintained even the most peripheral involvement with gengineering or other types of biological research. While it struck him as unlikely that his father would be so foolish or disdainful of his past as to become openly involved with such enterprises, rigor and possibility demanded that they still be investigated.
    His ability to tunnel the Shell helped immensely. Hundreds of years ago, the search process would have taken forever, or rendered insufficiently specific replies. Most of the searches he ran, though not all, were perfectly legal. Those privacy shields he encountered he brushed aside. Gestalt’s Shell and germane technology were not primitive, but neither were they particularly sophisticated. As days passed and he worked his way through sybfile after sybfile, he reflected on how much, and yet how little, his life had changed.
    Look at all the progress I’ve made since Mother Mastiff took me under her wing, he thought as he sat and worked at the public terminal in the administration building. Why, I’ve advanced all the way from stealing things to stealing information. And so far not very encouraging information, at that.
    Once, on the third day of searching, he thought he was seriously on to something. Paid in advance, a local investigator—even a world as minor as Gestalt had need for such services, it appeared—circumspectly provided him with a list of artisans who had dropped out of and no longer belonged to any formal planetary aesthetic associations. Some of the documented iconoclasts doubtless objected to association policy, some to the need to belong, and some had abandoned the organizations out of sheer irascibility.
    Scrutinizing this registry of creative malcontents, Flinx found a number whose personal information was privacy-guarded. Brushing aside these protections, he came across one composer who not only was the appropriate age but also physically resembled him in several respects. Furthermore, and most intriguingly, Sadako Basrayan was not a native Gestaltian but had emigrated from Earth itself some twenty years earlier.
    Flinx could hardly restrain himself. Even the
Teacher,
contacted through his communit, allowed as how its owner might just possibly have stumbled onto a lead that held a shade more promise than fantasy. Ostensibly to discuss the musical accompaniment to an opera he was writing, Flinx managed to arrange a meeting with the reclusive Mr. Basrayan. Once assured by his guest that the colorful minidrag accompanying him was only reflecting her master’s excitement when she rose from his shoulder to buzz the living room, the relieved composer readily if unknowingly complied with Flinx’s needs. Basrayan did this not by suggesting music that caused his younger visitor’s imagination to take flight, but by sporting a great deal of hair. Though it was black and not red, Flinx was not discouraged. He only needed one such strand, which he surreptitiously co-opted halfway through the visit from a chair the composer had been occupying.
    Running any DNA sequence was a simple enough process. Not wishing to take the time to return the sample to the
Teacher,
an excited Flinx utilized a self-service analytical facility in Tlossene. The service would extract the musical Mr. Basrayan’s genetic code and compare it with a sample of Flinx’s own.
    The following day he accepted the service’s hard copy with hands that did not shake. But his face was flushed. Initial excitement and high