Chasm City
“What have my eyes got to do with it?”
“Don’t you think there’s something wrong with them?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying hard not to sound sullen. “But maybe you’re right. Maybe the Mixmasters can tell me something. Are they confidential?”
“As confidential as anyone around here.”
“Great. That really reassures me.”
The nearest parlour was one of the holographically fronted booths we had already passed on our way in, overlooking a tranquil pool filled with gape-mouthed koi. Inside, it made Dominika’s tent seem spacious. The male attendant wore a relatively sober tunic in ash-grey, offset only by the sigil of the Mixmasters below his shoulder: a pair of outstretched hands spanned by a cat’s cradle of DNA. He was sitting behind a floating console shaped like a boomerang, above which various molecular projections were rotating and pulsing, their bright primary colours evoking nursery toys. His gauntleted hands were dancing above the molecules, orchestrating complex cascades of fission and recombination. I was certain that he had noticed us as soon as we entered the booth, but he made no show of it and continued his manipulations for another minute or so before deigning to acknowledge our presence.
“I presume I may be of assistance.”
Chanterelle took the lead. “My friend wants his eyes examined.”
“Does he now.” The Mixmaster canted aside his console, producing an eyepiece from his tunic. He leaned closer to me, nose wrinkling in what was probably justified distaste at my smell. He squinted through the eyepiece, scrutinising both my eyes, so that the vast lens seemed to fill half the room. “What about his eyes?” he asked, bored.
On the way to the booth we’d rehearsed a story. “I was a fool,” I said. “I wanted eyes like my partner’s. But I couldn’t afford Mixmaster services. I was in orbit and—”
“What were you doing in orbit if you couldn’t afford our prices?”
“Getting myself scanned, of course. It doesn’t come cheap; not if you want a good provider who’ll keep you properly backed up.”
“Oh.” It was an effective end to that line of enquiry. The Mixmasters were ideologically opposed to the whole idea of neural scanning, arguing that the soul could only be maintained biologically, not by capturing it in some machine.
The attendant shook his head, as if I had betrayed some solemn promise.
“Then you were indeed foolish. But you know that already. What happened?”
“There were Black Geneticists in the carousel; bloodcutters, offering much the same services as the Mixmasters, but at a much lower cost. Since the work I sought didn’t involve large-scale anatomical reconstruction, I thought the risk was worth it.”
“And of course now you come crawling to us.”
I offered him my best apologetic grin, placating myself by imagining the several interesting and painful ways in which I could have killed him, there and then, without breaking into a sweat.
“It’s several weeks since I returned from the carousel,” I said. “And nothing’s happened to my eyes. They still look the same. I want to know if the bloodcutters did anything other than fleece me.”
“It’ll cost you. I’ve a good mind to charge you extra just because you were stupid enough to go to bloodcutters.” Then, barely perceptibly, his tone softened. “Still, perhaps you’ve already learnt your lesson. I suppose it depends on whether I find any changes.”
I did not particularly enjoy much of what followed. I had to lie on a couch, more intricate and antiseptic than the one in Dominika’s, then wait while the Mixmaster immobilised my head using a padded frame. A machine lowered down above my eyes, extending a hair-fine filament which quivered slightly, like a whisker. The probe wandered over my eyes, mapping them with stuttering pulses of blue laser light. Then—very quickly, so that it felt more like a single sting of cold—the whisker dropped into my eye, snatched tissue, retracted, moved to another site and re-entered, perhaps a dozen times, on each occasion sampling a different depth of the interior. But it all happened so swiftly that before my blink reflex had initiated, the machine had done its work and moved to the other eye.
“That’s enough,” the Mixmaster said. “Should be able to tell what the bloodcutters did to you, if they did anything—and why it isn’t taking. A few weeks, you said?”
I nodded.
“Perhaps it’s too soon to rule out success.” I had the feeling he was talking to himself more than us. “Some of their therapies are actually rather sophisticated, but only those which they’ve stolen in their entirety from us. Of course they cut all the safety margins and use outdated sequences.”
He lowered himself into his seat again, folding down the console, which immediately threw up a display too cryptic to make any sense to me: all shifting histograms and complex boxes full of scrolling alphanumerics. A huge eyeball popped into reality, half a metre in diameter, like a disembodied sketch from one of da Vinci’s notebooks. The Mixmaster made sweeping movements with his gauntlets and chunks of the eyeball detached like slices of cake, exposing deeper strata.
“There are changes,” he said, after kneading his chin for several minutes and burrowing deeper into the hovering eye. “Profound genetic changes—but there are none of the usual signatures of Mixmaster work.”
“Signatures?”
“Copyright information, encoded into redundant base pairs. The bloodcutters probably didn’t steal their sequences from us in this case, or else there’d be residual traces of Mixmaster design.” He shook his head emphatically. “No; this work never originated on Yellowstone. It’s fairly sophisticated, but . . .”
I pulled myself from the couch, wiping a tear of irritation from my cheek. “But what?”
“It’s almost certainly not what you asked for.”
Well, I knew that much had to be the case, since I had never asked for anything in the first place. But I made appropriate noises of surprise and annoyance, knowing the Mix master would enjoy my shock at having been duped by the bloodcutters.
“I know the kind of homeobox mutations you need for a cat’s-eye pupil, and I’m not seeing major changes in any of the right chromosomal regions. But I am seeing changes elsewhere, in the parts which oughtn’t to have been edited at all.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Not immediately, no. It doesn’t help that the sequences are fragmentary in most chains. The specific DNA changes are normally inserted by a retrovirus, one which would be engineered by us—or bloodcutters—and programmed to effect the right mutations for the desired transformation. In your case,” he continued, “the virus doesn’t seem to have copied itself very efficiently. There are very few intact strands where the changes are expressed fully. It’s inefficient, and it might explain why the changes haven’t begun to affect the gross structure of your eye. But it’s also nothing I’ve seen before. If this is really bloodcutter work, it might mean that they’re using techniques we don’t know anything about.”
“This isn’t good, is it?”
“At least when they stole their techniques from us, there was some guarantee they’d work, or wouldn’t be actively dangerous.” He shrugged. “Now, I’m afraid, there’s no such guarantee. I imagine you’re already beginning to regret that visit. But it’s rather too late for regrets.”
“Thanks for your sympathy. I presume if you can map these changes, you can also undo them?”
“That’ll be much harder than making them in the first place. But it could be done, at a cost.”
“You don’t surprise me.”
“Will you be requiring our services, then?”
I moved towards the door, letting Chanterelle walk ahead of me. “I’ll be sure to let you know, believe me.”
I was unsure how she expected me to act after the examination, whether she imagined that the Mixmaster’s enquiries would jog my memory, and that I would suddenly realise just what it was that was wrong with my eyes and how they had ended up like that? Maybe she had. And—j
ust maybe—so had I, clinging to the idea that the nature of my eyes was something I had temporarily forgotten, a long-delayed aspect of the revival amnesia.
But nothing like that happened.
I was none the wiser, but even more unsettled, because I knew that something was really happening, and I could no longer dismiss how my eyes seemed to glow in my face. There had to be more to it than that. Since arriving in Chasm City, I had been growing steadily more aware of a faculty I had never known before: I could see in the dark, when other people needed image-intensifying goggles or infrared overlays. I had noticed it for the first time—without really consciously recognising it—when I had entered the ruined building and looked upwards to see the staircase which had led me to safety, and to Zebra. There should not have been enough light for me to see what I had seen, but of course I had more than my share of other things to worry about. Later, after the cable-car had crashed into Lorant’s kitchen, the same thing had happened. I had crawled from the wrecked vehicle and seen the pig and his wife long before they saw me—even though I was the only one not looking through night-goggles. And again, too doped on adrenalin to reflect on the matter, I’d let it pass, although by then it was not quite so easy to put out of mind.
Now, though, I knew that there was some deep genetic shift taking place in my eyes, and that nothing which had happened before had been my imagination. Perhaps the changes were already complete, irrespective of the degree of genetic fragmentation which the Mixmaster had observed.
“Whatever he told you,” Chanterelle said, “it wasn’t what you wanted to hear, was it?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. You were there; you heard every word he said.”
“I thought maybe some of it would make sense to you.”
“That was my hope, but none of it did.”
We ambled back to the open area where the teahouse was, my mind running like an unchecked flywheel. Someone had tampered with my eyes on the genetic level, reprogramming them to grow in an alien manner. Could it have been initiated by the Haussmann virus? Perhaps—but what did seeing in the dark have to do with Sky? Sky hated the dark; feared it totally.
But he couldn’t see in it.
The change could not have happened since I had arrived on Yellowstone, unless Dominika had done it when I was having the implant removed. I had been conscious, but sufficiently disoriented that she might have been able to do it. But that didn’t fit. I had experienced the night-vision before that.
What about Waverly?
It was possible, especially from the chronological aspect. I’d been unconscious in the Canopy while Waverly installed the implant. That would have allowed only a few hours between administration of the genetic treatment and the onset of physical changes in the eye. Given that the changes could be thought of as a kind of controlled growth, it seemed nowhere near long enough, but maybe it was, given that only a relatively small area of cells was affected, rather than a major organ or large region of the anatomy. And suddenly I saw that it was at least possible from the point of view of motivation. Waverly had been working for both sides, and he had tipped off Zebra about me, giving me a sporting chance of making it alive through the game. Was it also possible that he had opted to give me another advantage, that of night-vision?
It was possible, yes. It was even comforting.
But nothing I was ready to believe in.
“You wanted to look at Methuselah,” Chanterelle said, pointing towards the large metal-framed tank I had seen earlier. “Well, now’s your chance.”
“Methuselah?”
“You’ll see.”
I pushed my way through the throng of people rimming the tank. Actually, it was not necessary to do much pushing. People tended to get out of my way before I even made eye contact, pulling the same look of nasal insult that I had seen on the face of the Mixmaster. I sympathised with them.
“Methuselah’s a fish,” Chanterelle said, joining me against the smoky-green glass. “A very big and very old one. The oldest, actually.”
“How old?”
“No one knows, except that he’s at least as old as the Amerikano era. That makes him comfortably older than any organism alive on this planet, with the possible exception of a few bacterial cultures.”
The huge and bloated koi, unspeakably ancient, filled the tank like a basking sea-cow. His eye, as large as a plate, observed us with a complete lack of sentience; as if we were looking into a slightly tarnished mirror. Whitish cataracts spanned the eye like chains of islands on a slate-grey sea. His scales were pale and almost entirely colourless, and the distended bulk of his body was marred by odd protrusions and lacunae of diseased flesh. His gills opened and closed with a slowness that suggested it was only the stirring of the currents in the tank that animated the fish.
“How come Methuselah didn’t die like the other koi?”
“Maybe they remade his heart for him, or gave him other hearts, or a mechanical one. Or maybe he just doesn’t need to use it very much. I understand it’s very cold in there. The water’s nearly freezing, so they put something in his blood to keep it liquid. His metabolism is about as slow as it can get without stopping altogether.” Chanterelle touched the glass, her fingers leaving a frosty imprint against the chill. “He’s worshipped, though. The old venerate him. They think that by communing with him—by touching his glass—they ensure their own longevity.”
“What about you, Chanterelle?”
She nodded. “I did once, Tanner. But like everything, it’s just a phase you grow out of.”
I gazed into that mirrorlike eye again, wondering what Methuselah had seen in all his years, and whether any of that data had percolated down to whatever passed for memory in a bloated old fish. I had read somewhere that goldfish had exceptionally short spans of recall; that they were incapable of remembering something for more than a few seconds.
I was sick of eyes for one day; even the unknowing, uncomprehending eyes of an immortal and venerated koi. So my gaze wandered momentarily down, beneath the sagging curve of Methuselah’s jaw, to the wavering bottle-green gloom which was the other side of the tank, where a dozen or so faces were crowded against the glass.
And saw Reivich.
It was impossible, but there he was; standing almost exactly opposite me on the other side of the tank, his face registering supreme calm, as if lost in the contemplation of the ancient animal between us. Methuselah stirred a fin—a movement indescribably languid—and the current caused the face of Reivich to swirl and distort. When the water calmed, I dared to imagine that what I would see would be only one of the locals who possessed the same set of genes for bland aristocratic handsomeness.
But when the water settled, I was still looking at Reivich.
He hadn’t seen me; though we were standing opposite each other, his gaze hadn’t yet intersected mine. I averted mine, while still holding him in peripheral vision, then reached in my pocket for the ice-slug gun, almost shocked to find that it was still there. I flicked off the safety.
Reivich still stood there, unreacting.
He was very close. Despite what I had said to Chanterelle earlier in the evening, I felt reasonably sure I could put a slug through him now, without removing the gun from the concealment of my coat. If I fired three slugs I could even allow for the distortion caused by the intervening water; bracketing my angle of fire. Would the slugs leave the gun with sufficient muzzle velocity to pass through two sheets of armoured glass and the water in between them? I couldn’t guess, and maybe it was academic anyway. From the angle at which I’d need to fire to take out Reivich, there was something else in the way.
I couldn’t simply kill Methuselah . . . could I?
Of course I could. It was just a question of pulling the trigger and putting the giant koi out of whatever extremely simplistic mental state it was currently in, certainly nothing sophisticated enough to be termed misery, I was sure. It would be a crime no more heinous than damaging some prized work of art.
&n
bsp; The unseeing silver bowl of Methuselah’s eye drew my gaze.
There was no way I could do it.
“Damn,” I said.
“What is it?” Chanterelle said, almost blocking me as I pulled away from the side of the glass, reversing into the press of jostlers behind me, rubbernecking to get a glimpse of the fabled fish.
“Someone I just saw. On the other side of Methuselah.” I had the gun half out of the pocket now; it would only take an inadvertent glimpse for someone to see what I was about to do.
“Tanner, are you insane?”
“Very probably several kinds of insane,” I said. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything. I’m perfectly happy with my current delusional system.” And then—approximating a leisured stroll—I started to walk around to the other side of the tank, the perspiration from my palm dampening the metal of the gun. I eased it fractionally from my pocket, hoping that the gesture looked casual, like someone extracting a cigar case, but freezing before the action was complete, as if something else had snared their attention.
I turned the corner.
Reivich was gone.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“You were going to kill someone,” Chanterelle said as her cable-car brachiated home, swinging through the lantern-bedecked brain coral growth of the Canopy with the Mulch hung below, dark except for a dappling of scattered fires.
“What?”
“You had your gun half out of your pocket like you meant to use it. Not the way you showed it to me—not as a threat—but like you weren’t going to say a word before you squeezed the trigger. Like you were just going to walk up, put a bullet through someone and walk away.”