The Human Blend by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

bulk of public transport. As for tolerating any flight on an aircraft that lasted longer than ten minutes …
    Gradually, inevitably, composite melds became more job specific. Slender elongated fingers for everyone from assemblers to pianists. Night vision for those whose occupations were nocturnal. A decorous layer of sculpted blubber for the Antarctic colonists. Ear enhancements for musicians and voicebox manips for singers. For professional drivers it became possible to actually give them eyes in the backs of their heads, though laying out the schematics of the requisite neural processors was much more time-consuming and expensive than installing the additional orbs themselves. For the first time, workers in the worldwide sex industry were able to—enough to say that the variety and kinds of melds were limited onlyby the imagination of those requesting such modifications and the skills of the surgeons installing them.
    Then there were the truly extreme melds. Those that were required to turn
Homo terrestrialis
into beings capable of surviving on Mars. Or even more remarkably, on Titan. Radically manipulated humans, but human still.
    Leaning slightly forward, Ingrid Seastrom once more contemplated her thirty-ish visage in the bathroom mirror. Though it continued to bother her she decided that for a while longer, at least, she would leave her nose alone.
    As she prepared to leave for work she spared a last quick glance out the picture window of her eighty-fifth-floor codo. The view encompassed the tourist district of Old Town and in the distance the waters that rolled in off the Atlantic’s continental slope. She preferred it to the panoramas on the other side of the building, no matter how romantic Rajeev insisted the sunsets were when viewed from his domicile.
    The elevator took her down past the consultation medical suites that occupied floors fourteen through ten. The six ground floors of the tower were occupied by two domain hospitals, one specializing in cardio and the other in neuromuscular. Between them and far below the building’s private residences was a single commercial floor (grocery, electronics, and more) and occupying the last two levels, the Great South Savannah Meld Center. Rajeev worked there while Ingrid’s shared facilities were on the eleventh floor. Their paths crossed more often in one of the building’s restaurants or its grocery store than they did in any of the manifold medical facilities.
    As she stepped out of the elevator and headed down the familiar hallway she passed colleagues and patients in equal number. Both groupings comprised Naturals and Melds. One might operate on the other, and vice versa. As in any successful medical practice Ingrid’s patients included both. What made her stand out from the vast majority of her colleagues and what had brought her practice a certain notoriety was a unique characteristic that had nothing to do with belonging to either social group.
    Dr. Ingrid Seastrom made house calls.
    Disregarding the remarkable advances medical science and gengineering had made over the past centuries, one executive patient had described this inimitable aspect of Dr. Seastrom’s practice as “true science fiction.”Never having actually encountered or heard of the ancient medical custom in person, she had first come across it when reading several novels set in an earlier, simpler time. Intrigued, she had proceeded to research the concept, only to discover that it still survived as a therapeutic relic in a few scattered locations around the planet. Resurrecting it for a couple of afternoons out of her workweek had done wonders for her practice.
    Thursday afternoon was one of the two she had set aside for engaging in the ancient medicinal enterprise. Some of the visits she made were pro bono; her way of fulfilling her share of the mandatory national medical service. Leaving her corner of the shared offices, she took the lift down to the first subterranean garage level.